Everything in this series began in the temple courts — the believers were there daily. In this part the temple is destroyed, and nothing about the shape of the faith is quite the same afterward.

The revolt

Judea had been simmering for decades under heavy-handed Roman government. In A.D. 66 it boiled over into open revolt, and for a short time the rebels held Jerusalem. Rome sent Vespasian with an army, and the campaign ground through the countryside for three years. When Vespasian became emperor, his son Titus took over the siege of the city.

Most of what we know comes from Josephus, a Jewish commander who surrendered early and wrote the history afterward for a Roman audience. His account is detailed and probably exaggerated in places, and it is still the fullest we have.

The siege

The city was crowded with pilgrims when the siege closed around it, and the factions inside fought each other while the Romans built their walls outside. The famine that followed was severe beyond description. In August of A.D. 70 the temple burned. Titus paraded the golden lampstand and the table through Rome in his triumph, and you can still see them carved on the Arch of Titus.

The last holdout was Masada, a fortress on a rock above the Dead Sea, which fell in A.D. 73 or 74 after the Romans built a ramp up the cliff. Josephus says the defenders took their own lives rather than be captured.

What it meant

The temple was where sacrifice happened. When it went, the sacrificial system that had run since Sinai stopped — and it has never resumed. Judaism survived by becoming what it had already been growing toward: a faith of synagogue, text and teaching rather than altar and priest.

For the church the effects were quieter and just as deep. Jerusalem had been the mother church and the final court of appeal since Pentecost; after 70 the centre of gravity moved out to Antioch, Ephesus, Rome. The Jewish and Gentile halves of the movement, held together with such difficulty at the Council, drifted apart as the Jewish half lost its home base. Within a generation a church that began as a movement inside Judaism looked, from the outside, like a separate religion.

And the argument of Hebrews — written to people tempted to go back to the sacrifices, insisting that Christ’s sacrifice was final and the rest was shadow — was read very differently after the smoke cleared.

According to tradition, the believers in Jerusalem left before the siege closed, having been warned, and settled at Pella across the Jordan. Eusebius reports it in the fourth century; some historians accept it and others think it a later explanation. It is a reasonable tradition, not a documented fact.

The apostles

The men who had walked with Jesus were dying through these same years, mostly in places far from home — Andrew in Greece, Thomas in India, Bartholomew in Armenia, Matthew in Ethiopia, and so on through the list. Every one of those accounts comes from later church tradition rather than Scripture, and they vary between sources.

What is not in doubt is the general fact underneath them: these men went a very long way from Galilee, and most of them did not die comfortably at home. Whatever they thought they had seen at that empty tomb, they did not stop saying it when it cost them.

By about A.D. 80, one of them was still alive. That is the last part.