18. Краткий обзор гонений на христиан от иудеев. Падение иудеев

The Jewish leaders, out of malice and envy of the Lord the Savior, decided to crucify Him, could not leave His disciples alone. Their persecution of the apostles began as soon as their preaching began to spread. But at the beginning this persecution was stopped by the prudence of one of the most respected teachers of the law - Gamaliel and the struggle of the Sadducee and Pharisee parties. Then the conversion to faith of one of its most powerful persecutors, Saul, and the cramped position of the Sanhedrin, in view of Roman rule, which was still indifferent to Christianity, contributed to the weakening and even cessation of open persecution of Christians by Jews. The grandson of the lawless Herod, who beat the Bethlehem babies, Herod Agrippa, through intrigues before the Roman government, restored the power of the king in Palestine for some time and, wanting to win over the Jews, again raised a cruel persecution against the Church, killed the Apostle James Zebedee and imprisoned the Apostle Peter, but the severe disease (from subcutaneous worms) of this wicked stopped along with his life and the persecution he raised. After the death of Herod Agrippa, Judea was still subordinate to the Roman procurators, and the Jews, despite all their hatred of Christians, could not do much harm to them. We see an example of the impotent malice of the Jews in the history of the trial of the Apostle Paul; the high priest Ananus could also take advantage of only a break in Roman power to kill the Apostle James, the brother of the Lord. Finally, the measure of God's long-suffering was fulfilled: in the year 67, the disastrous war between the Jews and the Romans began, and the Jews, as a separate people, fell. The fall of the Jews is important in the history of the Church: 1) Here the prophecies of Moses, Daniel and other prophets and the words of the Lord Jesus Christ were fulfilled, Who predicted that Jerusalem would be surrounded by enemies and that in the place of the church there would not be left one stone upon another. 2) In the destruction of Jerusalem and the church, the very end (in fact) of the Old Testament was accomplished; Now the Jews no longer have a church, do not make sacrifices, and their faith does not lead to salvation. 3) The fall of the Jews has a special relationship to the final fate of the whole world. The Lord Jesus Christ in his prediction connected the destruction of Jerusalem with the destruction of the world that would follow at the end of the centuries, so that the first is, as it were, an image of the latter (Matthew 24). Particular extraordinary phenomena foreshadowed a disastrous catastrophe for the Jews. Once at night, for about an hour, a light similar to daylight was visible in the church; on Easter, the copper eastern gates of the church, which were opened with difficulty by twenty people, opened by themselves; On the feast of Pentecost, an extraordinary noise was heard in the church, as if from the footsteps of a multitude of people moving away, and a voice was clearly heard: “Let’s leave here.” For a whole year, a comet in the shape of a sword appeared over Jerusalem; in addition, crowds of fighting horsemen on war chariots were visible in the clouds. Four years before the war, a Jew named Jesus, as if inspired from above, began to cry out as he walked through the city: “Woe to Jerusalem, the church,” and continued his ominous predictions for seven years. Finally, he cried out: “Woe to me too!” - and at that very moment he was killed by a stone thrown by someone from the Roman camp. The causes of the Jewish war were: the extreme hatred of the Jews towards the Romans and the cruelty of the Roman procurators towards the Jews. Considering themselves a chosen people, the seed of Abraham, the Jews could not come to terms with the idea of ​​​​subjection to the pagans. Among them a special party of zealots, or zealots, was formed, who considered the fight against the Romans the task of life. The Roman procurators, for their part, treated the Jews cruelly, oppressed them with taxes, and unnecessarily offended their religious feelings. Pilate and the last two procurators, Albinus and Gessius Florus, were especially hated by the Jews. Added to all this were intense expectations of the Messiah. The Jews were convinced that the Messiah would instantly appear in the church to the aid of His chosen people. According to the historian of the Jewish war Josephus, some fatal force was drawing the people to their destruction, and he sees God’s predestination in this. Having conceived an uprising against the Romans, the Jews surrounded the fortress where the Roman garrison was located, and when, tormented by hunger, the Roman soldiers surrendered to the Jews, then, despite the promise of safety, everyone was treacherously cut off by them. For this dishonorable act, many Jews were beaten in Caesarea and Alexandria. The Jews, in turn, broke into the Syrian border towns and robbed the inhabitants. Then the Roman proconsul Cestius Gallus, who lived in Antioch, moved to Palestine to suppress the uprising, and had already approached Jerusalem, but, having suffered a slight defeat and feared by many enemies, unexpectedly for the Jews he retreated from the city. The Jews were extremely proud of their success and indulged in their favorite dreams of dominion over the world; and the Christians, remembering the command of the Lord, at the sight of the abomination of desolation in the church (Matthew 24:15-20), took advantage of the freedom of exit and withdrew for the most part to the Trans-Jordanian city of Pella. Emperor Nero, having heard about the resistance of the Jews to Kestia, sent his best commander Vespasian with a large army to Palestine. Vespasian quickly conquered Galilee and approached Jerusalem. At this time, Nero died, then in one year three emperors were replaced, and the Syrian troops proclaimed their commander emperor. Then Vespasian hurried to Rome and entrusted the further conduct of the siege to his son Titus. This commander, knowing that an extremely large number of Jews (more than 2 million) had gathered in Jerusalem on the occasion of the Passover holiday, and wanting to stop the supply of food supplies to Jerusalem, surrounded the entire city with a wall, so that it was impossible to either leave or penetrate there. Terrible disasters began in Jerusalem: food supplies were soon destroyed, and such a terrible famine occurred that one mother, tormented by hunger, stabbed and ate her newborn child. Diseases developed, people died in such numbers that there was no one and nowhere to bury them. More than 150 thousand corpses were thrown out of just one of the city gates. Many of the Jews fled out of the city straight into the hands of the enemy, and they were crucified on crosses. More than 500 crosses stood around the city with crucified Jews, and, apparently, their insane spell was fulfilled: “His blood (the Lord the Savior) be on us and on our children.” Finally there was not enough wood for the crosses. Then Titus ordered to receive the fugitives and give them food; but, exhausted by hunger, the Jews rushed to bread with such greed that they died from satiety. After a long siege and useless negotiations on surrender, Titus ordered an attack, ordering the soldiers to protect the church, which was considered a miracle of art. After terrible efforts, the city was taken, but the church was not saved. An accidentally thrown brand set the building on fire (August 10, 70 AD). Jerusalem was destroyed. In memory of its former greatness, only part of the western wall and three towers were left from the city. Titus was amazed to see what strongholds he managed to take and destroy, and did not accept the usual popular congratulations on the occasion of his victory, recognizing himself as an instrument of God’s wrath. The fate of the Jews who survived the fall of their hometown was terrible. About 12 thousand people died of starvation in the first time after the capture of the city, before Titus could make any orders regarding the survivors. The main rebels were executed. 700 of the most handsome young men were chosen to grace the winner's triumph upon entering Rome. Many Jews were exiled to work in the mines and sold into slavery in the markets of Asia, Africa and Europe. These are some of the predictions of the prophet Moses, in which over a period of fifteen hundred years he depicted with amazing accuracy the misfortunes of the Jews. “Because you have not served the Lord Your God, you will serve your enemy... in hunger and thirst and nakedness and in every lack... The Lord will send a people against you from afar, from the ends of the earth: like an eagle, a people will come down whose language you do not understand, an insolent people who will not respect the old man and will not spare the young man... And they will oppress you in all your dwellings until they have destroyed the high places in all your land. and your strong walls, in which you trust... The woman who lived with you in bliss and luxury, who never set her foot on the ground, because of luxury and delicacy, will look with a merciless eye at her husband, and at her son, and at her daughter... She, with a lack of everything, will eat them, in the siege and oppression in which your enemy will afflict you... And the Lord will scatter you among all nations, from the end of the earth to the end of the earth... but even among these nations you will not rest, and there will be no rest for your feet, and the Lord will give you there a trembling heart, melting eyes and a languid soul. Your life will hang before you, and you will tremble night and day, and you will not be confident in your life. From the trembling of your heart, which will embrace you, and from what you see with your eyes, in the morning you will say: oh, if only evening had come, and in the evening you will say: oh, if only morning had come!” (Deut. 28, 47–68). After 65 years, the Jews again rebelled against the Romans under the command of the fanatic Bar-Koheb (“son of the star”) and were again pacified by the Romans. Then Emperor Hadrian ordered the complete destruction of Jerusalem and a plow march through its streets as a sign of the complete destruction of the city. A Roman colony called Aelia Capitolina was founded on the ruins of Jerusalem, and Jews were forbidden to approach it under pain of death. Only on one day (precisely August 10 - the day of the burning of the first church by Nebuchadnezzar and the second by the Romans) were they allowed, for a certain fee, to look from afar at their former capital, on the gates of which was placed an image of an animal they hated. The Jewish rabbis did not understand the terrible execution that befell the Jews. They pointed out the reason for heavenly wrath was that the Jews allegedly cared little about the fulfillment of the ritual Mosaic Law. In Tiberias, where the more important Jews withdrew after the destruction of Jerusalem, a school was formed in which this attachment to the dead letter, to ritual, without understanding its meaning, reached extreme development and found its expression in the Talmud. This direction of Jewish rabbinism further alienated the Jews from the spirit of the faith of Christ. You might be interested in: