I don't either but that was not the point of my post...
Indeed, I did not mean to imply that it was.
I also agree self righteous Jews let the name be forgotten for their traditions including that the name was too sacred to use. Jesus knew the name certainly, he would be making it known
This is an interesting argument, although we do see that there were still some good Jews alive even when Christ was born, for example, St. Symeon, and we also see a desire, which motivated people to be baptized in the Jordan by St. John the Baptist and Forerunner, and which also drove the later conversion of the majority of the Jews to those churches which are now Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, the Church of the East, and sui juris Eastern Catholic, so that only a minority of the Pharisees continued practicing what had become Rabinnical Judaism, after the conversion of most of the Ethiopians to Christianity in the early fourth century,.*
Rabinnical Judaism in turn changed dramatically, first with the codification of the Oral Torah into the Mishnah following the dissolution of the Sanhedrin brought about by the devastation inflicted on Jerusalem following the failed Bar Kochba rebellion, and the forced removal of the Jews from its precincts and from much of the Holy Land. Further changes would follow the compilation of the Mishnah commentaries into the Talmud (there are actually two Talmuds, but the one compiled in Seleucia-Cstesiphon is the only complete Talmud and is much more influential than the other Talmud compiled in Jerusalem, which by the time of the Talmudic sages once more had a Jewish population. And still more change would follow the publication of the Zohar and the emergence of Kabbalah, a form of mysticism which became extremely pervasive throughout Judaism, except among the Karaite Jews, who had broken away from the Rabbinical Jews in the sixth century AD, rejecting the authority of the Rabbis and the Mishnah in favor of the interpretation of the Torah and the other books of the Tanakh, which we call the Old Testament, according to a logical method known as the Kalaam. Some people call the Karaites the inventors of Sola Scripture, but this is not really the case, since while there is a certain freedom of thought in Karaite Judaism, particularly when it comes to observing the Torah, where a more rational approach is used (versus the highly restrictive approach favored by Rabinnical Jews of the Orthodox, and to a lesser extent, Masorti, Conservative and Neolog Jews, and to a still lesser extent by Reform Jews and Reconstructionist Jews), Karaite Jews still have a traditional, prevailing interpretation of the Old Testament, and make use of a Siddur, a liturgical prayer book, similiar in content to the orthodox Rabinnical Siddur, and also the Defter, which is the equivalent used by the Samaritans (I am blessed to have an exceedingly rare Englsih language translation of the Defter).
The Siddurim predate Christianity at least in terms of their content - the modern form of Jewish prayer appears to have begun to emerge with St. Ezra the Priest and St. Nehemiah the prophet, and developed into a system of three daily prayers, which developed into the Christian prayers of Matins, Vespers and Compline; and with lessons from the Torah conducted with great solemnity, followed by a related lesson from elsewhere in the Old Testament, called the haftarah. Some of these Torah/haftarah pairings were preserved in the ancient East Syriac liturgical tradition of Christianity, which follows them with what became the norm, an epistle lesson and a corresponding lesson from the Gospel Book, which is treated with reverence analogous to that shown by the Jews for the Torah scrolls. The Old Testament lessons are retained, and depending on the liturgical rite, are either read at the main service (which has a Jewish analogue in an additional prayer said on Sabbath and on certain feast days), which usually involves the celebration of the Eucharist in traditional churches, which is in turn a successor to the animal sacrifices of Second Temple Judaism and Ethiopian Judaism (indeed the Beta Israel continue these sacrifices to this day), or at Vespers the night before, and serve to show how the Old Testament is in fact Christological prophecy.
Aside from the basic thrice daily pattern, which we see in early Christian books of church order such as the Didache, which commended as a minimum prayer rule saying the Lord’s Prayer three times a day, and fasting on Wednesdays and Fridays (which Eastern Christians still do, and John Wesley tried to revive this practice in the West, by encouraging Methodists to fast and to pray the Anglican office known as the Litany on those days, ideally in church), additional hours were also added, not so much intentionally, but as a result of the reconciliation of the practices of Christian hermits and monks with the laity, and the different schedules kept from when Christianity was illegal, which required saying Vespers after dusk, and Compline at midnight, and Matins before dawn, and from the hypothetical ideal times, so the result being we also have the Midnight Office, with three Nocturns, which displaced Compline to earlier at night, and offices of Lauds after sunrise, and Prime at the first hour after Sunrise, and Terce (roughly 9 AM), Sext (noon) and Noone (3 PM), which correspond to the arrest, crucifixion and death of our Lord, God and Savior Jesus Christ respectively. In practice, these are usually grouped together in various ways, and are sometimes said at times other than what one might expect, for example, on Maundy Thursday and Holy Saturday, the Eastern Orthodox serve a Vesperal Divine Liturgy in the morning, which combines Vespers with the Divine Liturgy, and Matins happens in the evening, so the Orthodox equivalent of the Tenebrae Service on Maundy Thursday, known as the Twelve Gospels Service, is Matins for Great and Holy Friday.
This liturgical excursus, I have posted largely for the benefit of my friend
@tampasteve , who recently talked about the Didache with me in another thread, and my new friend
@Grip Docility ; for the benefit of his edification I have included much more additional detail in this reply than was strictly speaking necessary, as he is discerning a vocation and one area of formation is learning about ecclesiastical history, and a crucial part of that was touched on by the interesting replies of my friends
@Yeshua HaDerekh and
@FredVB. I will also perhaps add this to my ChristianForums blog at some point (someone ought to suggest to the XenFora developers whose software powers this and other forums that they add some integration so that members can directly export forum posts into their personal blogs).
Footnotes:
*This blessed event happened around the same time as the blessed conversion of the Georgians (in 301 AD, the city state of Edessa converted to Christianity, followed in 306 by the Kingdom of Armenia, followed in 314 by the Baptism of St. Constantine (which would eventually lead, during the reign of Emperor St. Theodosius I, to Christianity becoming the state religion of the Roman Empire, around the time he smashed the altar of the goddess Victory in the Senate and banned paganism, but not before a long period of Arian** tyranny beginning with St. Constantine’s son Constantius), and this was followed a few years later by the conversion of the Kingdom of Kart’velli, the largest and most powerful of the tribes that comprised the nation that would become known as Georgia after its patron saint, St. George the Martyr, who was a soldier in the Roman Army who openly converted to Christianity and received the crown of martyrdom, and who thus figuratively slew the dragon of Paganism (the word dragon actually means devil in several languages including Romanian, which is why I find the recent enthusiasm for dragons in fantasy such as The Game of Thrones to be … disturbing).
And at the same time that happened, most of the Ethiopians became Christian after King Enzana, the Negus of the Kingdom of Axum, the largest and most powerful of the Abyssinian kingdoms, whose subjects had practiced Judaism since the conversion of the Queen of Sheba, whose son was the result of her affair with King Solomon, but some Ethiopians had been Christian since the first century as is recorded in the Book of Acts. And like with Georgia, this mass conversion started with the conversion of the rulers of the most powerful kingdom - in the case of Georgia, the evangelism was the work of the Armenian princess St. Nino (in Georgian; in Armenian and other more conventional languages her name is Nina, but Georgian has a vowel shift affecting feminine words). So in the case of Georgia, their conversion resulted from the prior conversion of the Kingdom of Armenia, and a member of the Armenian nobility having the courage to evangelize to the rulers of her country’s powerful and dangerous northern neighbor. A similiar pattern would occur with the spread of Christianity among the Slavs culiminating in the conversion of St. Vladimir and the baptism of the Kievan Rus people, who are the major ancestors of the modern day Russians, Ukrainians and Byelorussians.
** Arianism is the denial of the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Holy Trinity, by insisting that our Lord, God and Savior Jesus Christ was not God, of one essence with the Father, by whom all things are made, who became man for our salvation, as the Gospel of John ch. 1 v. 1-18 explain, and which is reiterated elsewhere in the New Testament and the Creed, but instead by declaring that He was a creature, and that there was a time when He was not, which is inherently heretical - indeed Arianism is the common thread linking a number of heretical cults that have splintered off Christianity over the years, some forming their own distinct religions, such as Islam, and others lingering on the fringes, for example, Mormonism, the J/Ws, and the Unitarian Universalists, to name just three of the more notorious offenders.
At any rate, the Arian tyranny resulted when St. Constantine’s son Constantius was corrupted by the Arian bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia, by the latter heretic persuading him to accede to the Arian cult as he acceded to the curule chair hitherto occupied by his father Emperor St. Constantine I, and so it was that upon the death of his father, Emperor Constantius initiated a massive persecution of Christian hierarchs who refused to deny the deity of Christ, a persecution on a scale not seen since the reign of Diocletian, which ended only with Julian “the Apostate”, who persecuted Arians and Christians equally in favor of his Neo-Platonist Paganism; his successor Valens largely stopped the persecutions, but was still an Arianism and Arianism remained the closest thing to a state religion of Rome until Emperor Theodosius came to power, reigning primarily from Constantinople, and also formally dividing the Eastern and Western empires, an event which precipitated the rapid decline of the Western Empire during the lifetime of St. Augustine of Hippo, prompting him to write The City of God, but which probably saved the Byzantine Empire. And unfortunately Arius had evangelized the Gothic tribes who subsequently invaded and oppressed the Christians of the Western Empire, and many of the Visigoths in North Africa later converted to Islam, and conducted a genocide which exterminated all the Christians of the countries now known as Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco.
