Josephus, in Antiquities of the Jews XX,9,1 wrote that Ananus, the High Priest, assembled the Sanhedrin of the judges, and brought before them the brother of Jesus, who is called Christ, whose name was James.  The Apostle James and others were stoned for being lawbreakers.  Eusebius had called him “James the Just.”  The Jewish religious leaders accused him of being a lawbreaker.  Which laws?  Was their idea of law keeping actually conformance with Jewish religious traditions added to the law?  They had expressed  this idea to Jesus, as Mark 7:5 says: So the Pharisees and teachers of the law asked Jesus, “Why don’t your disciples live according to the tradition of the elders instead of eating their food with defiled hands?”

This attack against the leadership of the first megachurch took place a few years after Paul was persecuted.  The trend is obvious.  Accuse the Christian leaders of being breakers of the law, and condemn them as they had Jesus.  Furthermore, pressure was applied to Jewish Christians to return to the observance of the ceremonies and traditions of the Jewish religious system.

The Decline of “First Megachurch”

Consequent to the systematic persecution and pressure upon the members of the first megachurch, the passion and fervor that had characterized it declined as did attendance.  The Holy Spirit’s response was a letter that has been named the book of Hebrews.  

Written by an anonymous author, who was known to the Jewish Christians, although not a resident of Jerusalem, the letter challenges its readers and hearers to return to the recognition that Jesus Christ was much superior to the angels (Hebrews 1:4), that he is worthy of greater honor than Moses (Hebrews 3:3), that he has become the guarantor of a better covenant (Hebrews 7:22), and that unlike the priests of that day, he has a permanent priesthood (Hebrews 7:24).

Because the church members were being pressured to return to Judaism and its ceremonial practices, the writer urged:

Do not be carried away by all kinds of strange teachings. It is good for our hearts to be strengthened by grace, not by eating ceremonial foods, which is of no benefit to those who do so. We have an altar from which those who minister at the tabernacle have no right to eat (Hebrews 13:9-10).    

Along with many other admonitions to return to the faithful lives they previously lived, he urged: not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing (Hebrews 10:25).  Their attendance and participation had so declined that their status as a megachurch was in question. This letter was distributed to the predominately Jewish churches, the largest of which was the church in Jerusalem before the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple that occurred less than a decade later.

In the next Blog, we will consider why this happened and what lessons we can learn from the experience.