NOTES for Act 4:23-31

The reaction of the Jerusalem Christian community to the conflict between the apostles and the temple leadership is very interesting and revealing. No one, as we see, doubted that this conflict was a continuation of another conflict, the conflict of the Savior Himself with the religious leaders of the Synagogue and the same temple leadership, which brought Him to the cross. What Jesus had told them was coming true: they, His followers, would be persecuted by their own people. The simplest thing would have been to interpret this conflict as religious, as a conflict between the emerging Christian religion and Judaism. But on closer examination the picture changes somewhat.

First, the conflict occurred over the question of sacred names, more precisely, over whether the name of Jesus could be considered sacred in the same way that, for example, the name Yahweh was considered sacred. This is a question of spiritual practice, of spiritual life, not of religion as such. One decision or another about it could not have had much influence on strictly religious life, except that Christians might have introduced among themselves the practice of invoking the name of Jesus in prayer. But overall it would have changed the life of the Synagogue very little and would most likely have been noticeable only to the Christians themselves.

Nor was this conflict religious in another sense. The fact is that Christians were not aiming at all to create some separate religious tradition: the first and second, and perhaps even third, generations were fully satisfied with Judaism in religious terms. Christians did have their own synagogues, but they were practically no different from all the others. Only the Christians' breaking of bread differed from the strictly Jewish one: they always performed it while invoking the name of Jesus.

Early Christianity was not a religion at all. It was a community of people striving to meet Christ and attain the Kingdom. And this was connected with the essence of the conflict between the apostles and the temple leadership, which defended precisely religion, traditional religious institutions, while itself representing the chief one among them. It was a conflict of the Kingdom and its inhabitants with religion, its rules, and its institutions as such, not a conflict between two religions.

And this conflict did not end with the destruction of the Temple in AD 70, because religious institutions did not disappear with it. On the contrary, Christianity itself in its history gave rise to many Christian religions and religious institutions. Perhaps that is why the Savior's words about the inevitability of persecution by one's own people remain relevant for all time: the Kingdom is greater than any religion, and the inhabitants of the Kingdom will always be strangers among their own people for those who limit themselves to religious boundaries.