ユダヤ人キリスト者のペラ退去の伝承とイェルサレム教会

Abstract

In the absence of any explicit statement in the New Testament or post-apostolic documents we are left much later to find our earliest and only information about the fate of the Church of Jerusalem. It has been a long-established tradition that the Jewish Christians fled from Jerusalem to Pella before the fall of the Holy City in A. D. 70. Evidence of this tradition dates back to the fourth century. when it first appears in the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius of Caesarea, which is repeated with some variations, in the following century by Epiphanius.Recently Brandon has made a critical examination of this Pella-flight tradition and concluded that it was originally a second-century ‘foundation legend’, probably designed to justify the claim of the church later established in Aelia Capitolina, to be a lineal descendant of the ‘Urgeneinde’ of Jerusalem.The present writer admits that there are grave reasons for doubting the credibility of this tradition on which Brandon insists. But this conclusion does not necessarily imply that the accounts of the two Christian writers are entirely fabrications, but these may rest upon some genuine traditions of Pella having once given shelter to a body of Jewish Christians. Even Brandon does not deny such a possibility. If it is admitted, Eusebius' account of the flight may imply that it was not from Jerusalem alone that the refugees were drawn to Pella, but also from Galilee, for the land across the Jordan was traditionally a haven for those who wished to escape from troubles in Palestine.If the refugees at Pella included members both of the Church of Jerusalem and Christians from Galilee, it is not unreasonable to suppose that the two communities would be drawn closely together and differences between them be forgotten by and by in their common misfortunes. Though members of the Church of Jerusalem must be fewer than Christians from Galilee on account of more difficult conditions of the refuge, the memories of the Mother Church of Jerusalem might prevail in Eusebius and Epiphanius, by way of Hegesippus, a second-century Palestinian Christian.