Main news for 30 December 2022

Judging by Jesus' words, the persecutions experienced by the church of Smyrna were connected with conflict and even confrontation between this church and the local synagogue. Here we have before us a fairly typical situation, one can think, of a transitional period. Indeed, most biblical scholars today tend to consider that the Book of Revelation was written either in the late 80s or in the 90s of the first century, already after the catastrophe of A.D. 70, which put an end to Jerusalem and the Temple, and to Jewish history itself in its former quality. Formerly the Church, like the Synagogue, was part of the large Yahwistic community.

Jews looked at the Church as a messianic movement within the Synagogue, a movement not entirely traditional, perhaps in the opinion of some not even having the right to exist in such a form, but still as an undoubtedly Yahwistic and even Jewish movement despite all its, as many thought, unorthodoxy. Now, however, after A.D. 70, the situation changed substantially. The Yahwistic community, the community united by the Temple and the sacrifices, ceased to exist together with its main sanctuary.

The Synagogue had to seek other forms of its existence and self-definition, spiritual, religious, and doctrinal. Now unanimity was required on questions that had earlier been considered secondary and open to differing opinions. Besides, now the conservative core of the Synagogue began to look with suspicion on every messianic movement, especially one that appealed not only to Jews.

A very serious fundamental rupture, previously impossible, was ripening between the Church and the Synagogue. Of course, it took shape definitively and was understood much later, but by the end of the first century its outlines had already appeared quite clearly. Formerly Christians were insiders for Jews; now they were becoming outsiders to them, and it was precisely this attitude toward them as outsiders, not the conflict and not even the persecution in themselves, that shocked many Christians.

What does it mean that the Synagogue pushes away the Church? Has the people of God split in two? And the Savior Himself answers this question: the people of God has not split in two; it is being torn in two by those who are ready to consider Christians outsiders, who want to get rid of them in an effort to preserve the supposed purity of this very people, purity as they themselves understand it. Such persecutions, such rejection, are not God's work but the devil's, and Jesus calls things by their proper names with complete clarity.