Shouldn't have led with such a howler then
So now your assertion is simply that the canon was not set in Judaism before the early Christian church began -- to what end?
Certainly the equivalent measure in Christianity, the setting of the Christian canon, did not happen for centuries more.
Also without question, "the Church" as you're thinking of it -- the comparatively modern Catholic Church, with a set canon, monks, priests, orders, a true papacy (rather than a "first among equals" pontiff,) and even the belief that Jesus' return would happen at a point in the indefinite future -- did not exist for centuries more.
If you mean to say that a comparatively inchoate collection of Christian gospels, beliefs, and practices existed in the late first century C.E. (after all, Jamnia was in 90,) fine. Jesus was, after all, crucified, sometime around 30. Those who believed in him then would of necessity style themselves the first believers; if the sect survived, it would of necessity date itself from that time, and in retrospect, those who constructed a central institution later would of necessity date it to the activities of the earliest believers.
And?
Being a reform Jew, I hold that Judaism -- like Christianity -- is still evolving today. However, to attempt to place their
origins in the same spot in history is the purest ignorance; that point in time represents a
turning point in Judaism, and an
origin point (not to say an
Origen point) in Christianity.
Your church in 90 CE encompassed a fair variety of beliefs and practices, none of which would look very "Catholic" by your present standards. It probably already included a fair representation of gnostic beliefs and thought. You could argue that the "true church" was already fighting all such influences, yet we don't even have the writings on which the "true church" was based as of the time of the Jewish canon's being set.
Similarly, very different pressures went into the recording of the Jewish canon and the Christian canon. In the first instance, it was the collection of what "mattered" among the literature of a "defeated" people. The temple lay in ruins, so the Saducees were destroyed; the zealots were obviously beaten; the apocalyptic sects (like the Essenes) were pretty much shown to be wrong. Only the Pharisees had a vision of a Judaism that survived the destruction of the Temple, and to preserve and nurture that form of Judaism, they needed to define the texts that at this point
were the faith. This was the end, once and for all, of the ancient theocracy and its successor states -- and it was the end of the temple cult. Only Torah -- learning -- and the messianic hope survived the Temple's fall.
In Christianity, the completion of the canon happened in the presence of pressure from Rome to define one of the now-sanctioned religions of Rome, alongside the cult of Sol Invictus, worship of the "older" Greco-Roman gods (e.g. Jupiter, etymologically perhaps
Zeus Pater, dropping the "Z"), Mithraism, and perhaps some others. Constantine's first Nicean Council didn't set the canon, but did attempt to unify Christianity, an end which it by no means achieved.
After Constantine, the competing Christianities laying claim to his successor's beliefs (particularly Arianism) led to a demand for an official Christianity, particularly when Christianity became the state religion of Rome in the late fourth century. In 381, Christianity became Rome's state religion. In 382, Pope Domasus I called a Council of Rome and in 383, he commissioned the Vulgate bible. Do the math. Of course, there was disagreement among the Eastern and North African churches, especially on the book of Revelation but also about other bits.
The need for a homogeneous Christianity had more to do with the state than the church, in my opinion; whereas the destruction of the Jewish state made the relatively quick identification of the Jewish canon important.
The silly exercise of dating a "church" (with very different beliefs, characteristics, and texts) to before the Jewish canon stinks of a desire to establish one church's need for authenticating "evidence" above the facts on the historic record.
PFnV
