Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

the authority
     of the “mother assembly” in Jerusalem, until the day it was burned to the ground.
    There was another, more practical advantage to centering the movement in Jerusalem.
     The yearly cycle of festivals and feasts brought thousands of Jews from across the
     empire directly to them. And unlike the Jews living in Jerusalem, who seem to have
     easily dismissed Jesus’s followers as uninformed at best, heretical at worst, the
     Diaspora Jews, who lived far from the sacred city and beyond the reach of the Temple,
     proved far more susceptible to the disciples’ message.
    As small minorities living in large cosmopolitan centers like Antioch and Alexandria,
     these Diaspora Jews had become deeply acculturated to both Roman society and Greek
     ideas. Surrounded by a host of different races and religions, they tended to be more
     open to questioning Jewish beliefs and practices, even when it came to such basic
     matters as circumcision and dietary restrictions. Unlike their brethren in the Holy
     Land, Diaspora Jews spoke Greek, not Aramaic: Greek was the language of their thought
     processes, the language of their worship. They experienced the scriptures not in the
     original Hebrew but in a Greek translation (the Septuagint), which offered new and
     originative ways of expressing their faith, allowing them to more easily harmonize
     traditional biblical cosmology with Greek philosophy. Consider the Jewish scriptures
     that came out of the Diaspora. Books such as
The Wisdom of Solomon
, which anthropomorphizes Wisdom as a woman to be sought above all else, and
Jesus Son of Sirach
(commonly referred to as
The Book of Ecclesiasticus
) read more like Greek philosophical tracts than like Semitic scriptures.
    It is not surprising, therefore, that Diaspora Jews were morereceptive to the innovative interpretation of the scriptures being offered by Jesus’s
     followers. In fact, it did not take long for these Greek-speaking Jews to outnumber
     the original Aramaic-speaking followers of Jesus in Jerusalem. According to the book
     of Acts, the community was divided into two separate and distinct camps: the “Hebrews,”
     the term used by Acts to refer to the Jerusalem-based believers under the leadership
     of James and the apostles, and the “Hellenists,” those Jews who came from the Diaspora
     and who spoke Greek as their primary language (Acts 6:1).
    It was not just language that separated the Hebrews from the Hellenists. The Hebrews
     were primarily peasants, farmers, and fishermen—transplants in Jerusalem from the
     Judean and Galilean countryside. The Hellenists were more sophisticated and urbane,
     better educated, and certainly wealthier, as evidenced by their ability to travel
     hundreds of kilometers to make pilgrimage at the Temple. It was, however, the division
     in language that would ultimately prove decisive in differentiating the two communities.
     The Hellenists, who worshipped Jesus in Greek, relied on a language that provided
     a vastly different set of symbols and metaphors than did either Aramaic or Hebrew.
     The difference in language gradually led to differences in doctrine, as the Hellenists
     began to meld their Greek-inspired worldviews with the Hebrews’ already idiosyncratic
     reading of the Jewish scriptures.
    When conflict broke out between the two communities over the equal distribution of
     communal resources, the apostles designated seven leaders among the Hellenists to
     see to their own needs. Known as “the Seven,” these leaders are listed in the book
     of Acts as Philip, Prochorus, Nicanor, Timon, Parmenas, Nicolaus (a Gentile convert
     from Antioch), and, of course, Stephen, whose death at the hands of an angry mob would
     make permanent the division between the Hebrews and Hellenists.
    A wave of persecution followed Stephen’s death. The religious authorities, who until
     then seemed to have grudgingly tolerated the presence of Jesus’s followers in Jerusalem,
     were incensed byStephen’s shockingly heretical words. It was bad enough to call a crucified peasant
     messiah; it was unforgivably blasphemous to call him God. In response, the authorities
     systematically expelled the Hellenists from Jerusalem, an act that, interestingly,
     did not seem to have been greatly opposed by the Hebrews. Indeed, the fact that the
     Jerusalem assembly continued to thrive under the shadow of the Temple for decades
     after Stephen’s death indicates that the Hebrews remained