EARLY CHRISTIAN EVIDENCE FOR BROADER JEWISH PERCEPTIONS ON TORAH AT THE END OF DAYS

This study maps earliest Christian traditions that could potentially witness to broader Jewish perceptions concerning Torah’s standing in the end of days – perceptions, echoes of which are discerned in rabbinic sources. Traditions attested in those later sources do not necessarily indicate the full-fledged end-of-days annulment of the Torah, but they often do problematize its eschatological status. They sometimes also invoke the auxiliary idea of the world’s history division into three distinctive periods: two millennia of chaos, two millennia of Torah and two millennia of the days of the Messiah. With regard to such a problematization, we observed a diversity of early Christian attitudes that respond to the perceived tension between the old times and the current messianic age. Thus, for example, whereas the Epistle to the Galatians represents a characteristic case of embracing such a background notion of the last days metamorphosis, the Gospels of Matthew and Luke exemplify an opposite polemical emphasis on the whole Torah remaining mandatory throughout the current period of the Kingdom-in-making. Our discussion strove to distinguish between idiosyncratic Jesus-centered aspects of these traditions and broader Jewish currents of belief they appear to reflect. It was consequently suggested that such a variety of New Testament evidence points to an early provenance of the fluctuations that would appear later in rabbinic literature. These fluctuations – between the “conservative doctrine” of the times of redemption as the golden opportunity to perfectly observe the Torah, and dreams of the eschatological emancipation from its yoke – may therefore be safely dated to the 1^st century CE.