DeConick A.D

114
PAUL AND GNOSTIC DOGMA
having to undergo circumcision. So many God fearers joined the commune
in the first few years after Jesus’ death that they began to have problems
feeding everyone. To oversee the distribution of food and supplies to
the non-Jewish members, who did not have the same dietary restrictions
as the Jewish devotees, the disciples established a second leadership team
made up of non-Jewish converts who could handle the Gentile foodstuffs
(Acts 6:1–6).
Although the Wayfarers saw themselves as a single community, it is
clear that, within this single community, two separate communities were
forming, one Jewish and one God fearing. The God fearing members,
who were not obliged to be circumcised or to observe the Jewish law with
its dietary restrictions, began to question the effectiveness of the Jewish
law and to devalue it as the bequest of angels rather than of God himself.
They began to preach in the local synagogues that Jesus had come not
just to interpret the law of Moses properly but also to alter the Mosaic
customs. It is with this group that Paul will initially align himself, once he
enters the Christian story. But Stephen, the first Christian martyr, comes
before him.
An Ineffective Law
The message about Jesus altering the Mosaic customs caused great anxiety
among the Jewish population in Jerusalem, who were sensitive about the
constant Roman threat to their religious identity and boundaries. The
Roman colonizers had subjected them to the empire’s harsh economic
and political domination while also humiliating them as a religious people,
with the pagan idols and images that they paraded through the streets
and used to adorn newly constructed buildings. A rebellion for Jewish
independence was brewing in Jerusalem, and identity markers such as
circumcision became all the more important to the freedom fighters.
According to Luke’s account in Acts, things came to a head when one
of the God fearing Jesus devotees, Stephen, got embroiled in a debate in
the synagogue of the Freedmen about the Jewish law. Stephen told the
Jews present that Jesus of Nazareth had come to destroy the Temple and
to change the Mosaic law. Those who heard him accused him of speaking
blasphemy against Moses and dragged him before the Jewish council.