The destruction of the Temple by Rome in 70 CE created a profound theological and social vacuum that both Judaism and early Christianity were forced to confront. The Temple had previously served as the anchor for a henotheistic worldview in which God was supreme but other divine beings, such as angels and the “sons of God,” existed within a structured divine hierarchy. Its destruction eliminated the rituals, sacred spaces, and cosmological framework that had made this pluralistic divine structure coherent. In response, rabbis reconstructed Judaism around a strict, indivisible monotheism, eliminating intermediaries and redefining divine plurality as heretical. This move, though coherent within their own goals, was a departure from the biblical henotheism that had characterized Second-Temple religion, and it directly confronted Jewish Christians who worshiped Jesus, framing them as heretical.
Christianity, particularly within the overlap zones where Jewish Christians and rabbinic authorities interacted, faced direct pressure from this newly hardened Jewish monotheism. Early Christian communities had to reconcile their worship of Christ with the insistence on God’s indivisible unity imposed by rabbinic critique. In response, Christian thinkers developed a stricter form of monotheism, ultimately crystallizing in Nicene Trinitarianism, which combined the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit into one essence while rejecting subordinationist frameworks found in the New Testament. This Christian development did not borrow directly from the rabbis, but it emerged as a reactive adaptation: the rabbinic strict monotheism created the social and theological conditions that made a Christian restructuring necessary. Without the rabbinic enforcement of strict monotheism, the Christian henotheistic or subordinationist framework might have persisted longer without the pressure to unify God’s essence across three hypostases.
The result is that the two heresies—rabbinic and Christian—emerged sequentially and in overlapping communities. The rabbinic heresy, in its historical departure from biblical henotheism, arose first and created the conditions for the Christian heresy, which was thus causally subordinate. Rome’s destruction of the Temple was the ultimate root cause of this sequence, as it eliminated the framework that had allowed henotheism to function, forcing both communities into a redefined, stricter monotheism. In the overlapping social spaces where these communities interacted, the two heresies confronted each other, mutually reinforcing doctrinal rigidity: the rabbis hardened monotheism to exclude divine intermediaries, while Christians hardened it in order to defend the divinity of Christ. This sequence shows that the Christian move toward strict monotheism was not coincidental but arose from the necessary reaction to the rabbinic monotheistic framework imposed in the wake of the Temple’s destruction.
Worded by AI, based on a conversation prompted by Stephen D Green
