02x18 - What Happened to the JC Bunch?

[bunniefuu]

What does it all mean?

Christianity... churches!

Judaism... the synagogue!

Today the distinctions are easy to make.

The practices, rituals and teachings of each faith

are markedly different.

It's very easy to tell a Christian from a Jew,

a priest from a rabbi usually...

and let's face it Christians and Jews,

religiously speaking don't really mix it up that much.

But if you could go back in time right here in Jerusalem,

years ago and meet the followers of Jesus...

who were they and what did they believe?

[SIMCHA] Now here's a story...

I'm on a quest to find evidence

of the early Jesus movement.

They followed Jesus as a rabbi

and adhered to the laws of Moses,

which means they circumcised, ate Kosher,

and respected Saturday as the Sabbath.

So really the first followers of Jesus were Jewish

and that's why scholars have called them Judeo-Christians.

But most scholars believe that some years

after Jesus' crucifixion

this Jewish-Christian movement disappeared.

So I've gone deep inside the Galilee

to find out what happened to them.

We're on the shores of the Sea of Galilee.

This is an appropriate place to talk about the Jesus movement,

the people who first started following Jesus.

Who are these people?

I mean, we tend to think of them as Christians.

And what's their story?

The early followers of Jesus were Jews.

So one of the questions we will always ask:

what happens to the Jewish movement that Jesus initiated?

What does happen?

Well, I don't know that we can ever say.

Jesus leaves this area and he heads south.

Why? To go to Jerusalem.

Why? To celebrate Passover as a good Jew.

He doesn't return. He is crucified.

And perhaps his followers that were Jewish

had gospels and traditions that are now lost

because this area was conquered just a few decades after Jesus

by the future emperors of Rome.

So what are these people all along here who believed

that he made God present in their life,

what are they thinking? I would like to know.

I often urge us to think about pre-cross Christology.

Now, what does that mean? Prior to the cross,

there were people here who believed he was the Messiah.

They believed he was the one sent into the world.

There's a man from the north, a Galilean,

gathering people around him.

Moses has lready called him King of the Jews!

For he may be the Messiah we've all been praying for!

[SIMCHA]Traditional Jews believe in the coming of a Messiah.

"Messiah" literally means "the anointed",

referencing the holy oil used by prophets to anoint kings.

My aligance goes with the sword.

[SIMCHA] The Messiah's job is to gather the Jews

back into the Land of Israel and usher in an era

of independence and peace.

No small task in the days of Jesus,

a w*r-torn time of great persecution

and Roman occupation.

To even be considered for the job,

a Messiah must be a descendant of King David,

the God-chosen second king of Israel.

And according to the gospels

Jesus could certainly make that claim.

The earliest followers of Jesus

would have regarded him as Messiah,

not the son of God, but a man

descended from a king chosen by God.

The Messiah's powers originate with King David.

This, tradition tells us, is the tomb of King David.

This is the reputed sarcophagus.

And the Rabbi of Mt. Zion knows

all about the mysterious messianic powers

in this king's bloodline.

So you believe that King David is buried here.

A hundred percent.

Why do you believe that?

'Cause some of the texts we have prove that that's so.

Mostly, though, practically, that if you pray here,

your prayers are answered.

And that's the biggest proof as it could be.

When you pray here and you pray to the Jewish God

and King David, your prayers are answered.

I'm taking a more practical approach than

"your prayers are answered, therefore it's proven.

What proof do you have?

But we don't have to prove anything here.

This is a place of prayer, which you experience

come here and pray, it will work.

I'll give you an example. Try it yourself.

Come here. Put your hands here.

Pray to God, God of the Jews to help you

and ask Hashem, and you'll see it works.

If it works, it works.

You can't say it doesn't work.

Maybe the ratings. If I ask for good ratings for my show.

Good ratings. Yeah. I'll give you a blessing.

Come on. You put your feet together.

Bend your knees.

Are we going to dance?

No. You'll just a prayer, little prayer.

Put your hands like this.

Bend your knees a little bit. Humble.

Humble. Humble. Bend your head like that.

And you ask, Hashem! Help me!

Say, "Hashem, help me!"

Hashem, help me.

Again. Hashem, help me!

Hashem, help me.

What's your name?

Simcha...

My mother, Eda.

Eda, yes. Ask for one thing and see if it works,

and then you'll come back and say it works,

and you'll know this is the place.

Did it.

Okay. Give me a kiss.

Okay. Can I get another kiss?

Very nice. Be well.

Be well. -My pleasure.

Wow. I feel I'm glowing.

I feel glowing. Feel like a light bulb.

[SIMCHA] That may have been a taste

of the spiritual power in King David.

The same power the early Jesus movement

believed ran through the veins of their leader,

their Messiah, Jesus.

And now that I'm all charged up with messianic mojo

from this sacred site,

I can meet with Professor James Tabor

who knows a lot about this place,

when it comes to Jesus and his early followers.

Okay, we are going to go upstairs, over David's tomb.

There's the building for David's tomb.

We are going to go right up there.

The upper room of a first-century guesthouse.

[SIMCHA] It just so happens, Tabor tells me,

that approximately , years ago,

just upstairs from the supposed tomb of David,

Jesus sat down to one of the most famous dinners in history.

[SIMCHA] I'm on the top of Mount Zion,

in the Church of St. Mary,

in a room directly over the reputed tomb of King David

because James Tabor tells me this was once

a champion chowder-house for the Judeo Christians.

So this is where the Last Supper happened.

This space. Right.

This space. The Judeo-Christians are here.

Why?

Because Jesus is staying up on the Mount of Olives

all week with Martha, Mary and Lazarus, his friends,

and Mary Magdalene is with them, and all the apostles.

They were probably wall-to-wall

because they were so crowded.

But for Passover he wanted to get away.

Okay. Let me see if I get it.

We know from the Gospels that Jesus

needed a place to be with his disciples

during the Passover season. He made arrangements.

Two-storey house in the city of Jerusalem.

So, if this is the spot, what happened here?

The Last Supper and then later,

after Jesus dies they gather here,

and they begin having these experiences that he is risen.

Now, he appears to them once in the upper room.

Right here.

Right here. They had the door locked,

and they're sitting and probably eating, sitting around.

And suddenly Jesus appeared among them.

So that's the Thomas thing, you know, where he goes,

"My Lord and my God," and that would be in this room.

Doubting Thomas?

Yeah.

Where he puts his finger in the wounds?

Yeah, that would be this room.

Here?

This space. -This space.

[SIMCHA] So After Jesus' crucifixion

'this space became headquarters

for the continuing Jesus movement.

The Gospels tell us that James, Jesus' brother,

took over the leadership and for the next years

he was able to use this place as the first HQ

for the Jesus Movement.

Tradition says right here, this is the spot.

Late, late tradition.

Now, that doesn't mean this is the rock?

No, because this was destroyed in .

[SIMCHA] The occupying Romans

suppressed the great Jewish revolt in the year

by utterly destroying Jerusalem and burning the holy Temple.

Tabor says we're now looking at a rebuilt structure

from Crusader times, around CE.

So it was rebuilt.

In the Crusader period.

Right. So it's-

See the architecture? It's Crusader.

It's very beautiful, though.

[SIMCHA] Long before the Crusaders built this,

Tabor says the Judeo-Christians returned

to the rubble of Jerusalem.

According to a theory put forth by Tabor's late friend

and fellow archaeologist, Bargil Pixner,

at the end of the st century, the Judeo-Christians

reused stones from the ruined buildings

and on this site of the Last Supper,

they built the first Jesus Movement synagogue.

Now look right here.

This was Pixner's argument:

you can basically see the perimeters

of a rectangular building.

[SIMCHA] The archaeology substantiates the theory.

At the base of the walls, we can see building stones

that archaeologists date to before CE.

These are Herodian stones in situ.

This is King Herod the Great's stones.

From the time of Herod the Great.

Do you see how this kind of jags up,

and you've got the kind of modern stones.

After the destruction in , you would have seen a jagged,

you know, tooth-like kind of broken,

and then it's all rebuilt.

Wait a minute. So you're saying that this is an actual stone

that supported the Last Supper room.

That's what Pixner argued, yeah.

He was utterly convinced that.

Well, I'm getting utterly convinced.

[SIMCHA] The history of the architecture on this site

is remarkable.

Each succeeding church incorporated

the sacred Judeo-Christian synagogue.

If we look at the structural footprints,

starting with the Crusader Church of St Mary,

we discover that the original synagogue,

built with this Herodian stone, was used

as a cornerstone for all the structures that followed it.

Moving years back in time

here's the Hagia Sion church built with the synagogue

as an extension, then called the Church of the Apostles.

And years before that the Church of the Apostles

was part of the octagonal memorial church

built by Emperor Theodosius

who made Christianity the official religion

of the Roman Empire.

And years before that, the building would have been

known simply as the synagogue for the followers of Jesus.

And, Pixner believed, this stone supported the building

James used as the Movement's HQ.

So this is the Vatican before the Vatican.

This is the Jerusalem Church right here.

Think of it. The whole family, James,

all Jesus' brothers, Mary Magdalene,

she would have been here many times.

Picture it crowded, bustle, and people are talking,

and meetings are being held,

correspondence being written, dispatches.

They're directing an international movement.

James probably spends quite a bit of his time praying

in the Temple. They said his knees were like a camel.

But he's also an administrator

directing an international movement

As you're saying this, it actually makes me sad.

It's funny, 'cause you brought it to life for me.

I suddenly see them all here.

They're eating. It's ground zero.

It's the spot. They're going to change the world.

They believe the messiah has come.

I think I know what you're going to say.

Everything, and this is it.

And, actually, at the end of the day

they were written out of history.

They're written out of history and they disappear.

Sad. -Yeah.

[SIMCHA] But why was the early Jesus movement

written out of history? Why did they disappear?

[SIMCHA] This is the Sea of Galilee

in Jesus' old neighborhood.

And I'm on the shores of the ancient city of Migdal

with Professor Charlesworth to find out what happened

to the original Jesus movement

after the crucifixion of their leader.

In , this area is destroyed and b*rned.

Yatafa is taken by Vespasian.

Gamla over here is eventually taken

by Vespasian and Titus.

Right here at Migdal, a whole generation,

perhaps two generations were wiped out.

People are dying. Rome is conquering the area.

These people, they have an oral tradition.

When they die, memory dies with them,

oral traditions go with them.

Let's assume that they did write some things down,

but the area is being b*rned.

The world has been destroyed just a few decades after Jesus.

[SIMCHA] That world was destroyed for all Jews.

And yet the traditional Jewish faith survives to today.

To understand why the Judeao-Christians dissapeared,

we need to take some attention

away from Roman persecution

and look at other very real pressures.

These people are going to have a struggle.

They are Jews, but they're having trouble

with the high priest, the power base of Jerusalem.

They are being resisted by the Sadducees.

[SIMCHA] It was the Sadducees,

the Jewish sect controlling the Temple in Jerusalem,

who collaborated with the Romans

against Jesus and his movement.

And although they may not have wanted him k*lled,

they most certainly wanted Jesus out of the way.

This is beyond endurance!

We just stand by and see him overthrow the authority

of the priest?

He should be taken!

[SIMCHA] His movement represented

a thr*at to their power,

a destabilizing force in a delicate balance

between limited Jewish freedom and total Roman rule.

-We can no longer endure a man who calls himself

King of Isreal less the Romans take away

both our places and our nation.

[SIMCHA] They called him a pretender to the Davidic throne.

In their attempts to vilify Jesus in the eyes of the Romans,

things went further than perhaps were planned,

with horrific results.

The disciples are afraid. Why are they afraid?

That they will be crucified.

We have the story in John

where they're gathered in a room

and they're shaking out of fear for the Jews.

Bad translation.

It is "yoo-DA-yo", which means Judean, Judean leaders.

Here are Jews afraid of Judean leaders.

[SIMCHA] And even their most accepting Jewish brethren

would have had difficulties associating

with the Jesus followers.

It's just that people are going to think

it's very peculiar, that's all.

[SIMCHA] They would have regarded the movement

as having picked the wrong guy.

Especially after Jesus' crucifixion,

they would have considered him a false messiah.

If those men had succeded,

the whole history of Isreal might have been changed.

But they did not succeed.

[SIMCHA] He simply didn't finish the job.

He did not bring peace or the land back to the Jews.

And so there was a growing tension

between traditional Jews and the Judeo-Christians.

The idea of tensions between diverse movements

in Judaism is not that difficult to grasp

especially when we have such a ripe example

in present day Jerusalem.

I'm at the headquarters in Jerusalem

of the Lubavitcher movement.

If you haven't heard of it, it's a powerful movement

among Judaism today. It began in New York

around the Lubavitcher rebbe,

and people said he was Messiah.

And then something terrible happened, he d*ed,

and once he d*ed some people said,

well, he couldn't have been messiah, he d*ed.

Other people said he's still alive.

The people in there believe that he's alive.

Look over here, it says messiah loves you,

and you see some people don't love that

and they kind of poked his eyes out

because it's very controversial to talk about a messiah

that seems to be dead, but is actually alive.

Does that sound familiar?

It sounds like if you want to learn

about the ancient birth of Christianity,

all you have to do is hang out with these guys.

Maybe what's happening today right here

is paralleling what happened then.

Let's go.

[SIMCHA] These guys know how to dance!

But they dance to a slightly different tune

than your ordinary Jew.

And that's just like the Judeo-Christians years ago,

because the Lubavitchers are a devoted sect of Judaism,

they believe in the sacred Torah,

the instructions passed from God down to Moses,

and they have their head rabbi, or rebbe,

who they believe is messiah.

And this is where things can get complicated.

I just have a question.

For me it's a little bit confusing.

I mean the Rebbe...obviously he's great.

But he d*ed...

No.

Ok, that's the confusing part.

We're not wasting our time here...

Of course we have to know that the rebbe is a prophet.

Ok, prophet is one thing, but a messiah is another thing.

OK just a sec... according to the Torah

a prophet can never be wrong.

Everybody should believe whatever he says.

Now as a prophet he says that he will be alive forever.

So, he made a mistake.

No, no. A prophet can't be mistaken.

That's why I said it is very important

to understand before that he is a prophet.

He is a prophet, he says he is the messiah

and he says he will live forever.

Now to get all of these ideas, how it can be?

How it can be according to the Torah...

how it can be according to the reality that we see...

That's...you have the books.

This is something that should be learned.

I have given you a short answer,

but there is a very long answer to learn about it this.

[SIMCHA] But I have learned something.

The Lubavitchers believe

that their rebbe went away for a while

and quite simply has not revealed himself... yet.

When he chooses to do so,

they say we will truly be in the messiah days.

And that means...

This is the first generation, our generation...

going to be without evil.

So, we're gonna see the end of evil?

Yeah.

Shabbat Shalom. -Shabbat Shalom.

[SIMCHA] It is this messianic belief

that makes it difficult to be a Lubavitcher

in the land of mainstream Judaism...

just as it was for a Judeo Christian years ago.

This man has poisioned your mind

with his crazy rantings...

[SIMCHA] The followers of Jesus

were now forced to ask a question:

"Can a dead messiah still be a messiah?"

Over time some followers began to answer the question

by suggesting that Jesus was divine.

But for James, the brother of Jesus,

that was going "off message"

James was now the head of the Jerusalem church.

His group regarded Jesus as a mortal, human,

messianic prophet but not as divine.

The followers of James were called Ebionites, poor ones,

and when they weren't running things

from the Judeo Christian HQ, new evidence shows

they just might have written some of their thoughts down

and left them in this cave.

[SIMCHA] This is Qumran...

where the Dead Sea scrolls were discovered.

Practically the only known surviving copies

of Biblical documents transcribed before CE.

I'm here with Professor Eisenman

who tells me that the literature uncovered here

is the key to understanding the early Jesus movement

and what happened to it.

You are looking across into the most important cave found,

cave four. That is the library cave.

There were literally tens of thousands of fragments

found in that cave, just piled up in a huge, unruly manner.

So out of that cave behind you came literature

that gives us a glimpse into...

Time capsule. Into that past.

And we can actually see the Jesus movement.

That puts the lie too much of the material

that we think is authentic today.

And we can see them as they were.

Yes. And it's quite...I don't say it's beautiful,

but they're righteous. They're very imaginative.

They're apocalyptic.

They don't believe in turning the other cheek.

They don't love their enemy.

They do curse people and things like that.

They wish a final apocalyptic judgment on all the people

who are destroying Palestine, the Israelites,

and all the people around them.

This is a huge movement in Judaism.

We have a name for it: the Essenes.

[SIMCHA] Eisenman tells me that in in this cave,

they discovered the writings of the Essenes,

a messianic movement that believed

in a great apocalyptic w*r

before the days of peace.

He's challenging many scholars' interpretations

of this literature because he believes

that some of the Essenes and James' Ebionites

were one and the same.

The proof, he says, can be found

on the year-old parchment.

There is a leader in the Dead Sea Scrolls

called the Just One or the Righteous One.

We know that every time in the Qumran caves

that you see the words Just One or the Righteous One,

the interpretation is the righteous teacher.

Do you believe the Teacher of Righteousness is James?

Yes.

Why do you think that?

What do you mean why?

Why?

[SIMCHA] To hear the answer to that question,

to the see the evidence Professor Eisenman claims

proves James and his followers

wrote some of the Dead Sea Scrolls...

Look at this. Come on Simcha.

[SIMCHA] ...and to find out what happened

to the J.C. bunch after their time here at Qumran,

you'll just have to tune in next time

on the Naked Archaeologist.

Oh Sababa.

You like any of this stuff?

I like it a lot.

It's good stuff.