Some imagine that the the first people in Jerusalem who accepted Jesus as the Messiah radically broke away from the Jews, forming a new religion. We might even picture the apostle James, brother of the Lord and first bishop of Jerusalem, wearing Byzantine Orthodox robes and serving at a Christian temple across from the synagogue. Of course, this was hardly the case. So what did the first century ecclesia in Jerusalem look like?

The early Jesus followers were primarily Jews, continuing on in their Jewish faith and practice. They would not have thought of themselves as fundamentally departing in any way from what they believed before. They still believed in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and they would have still participated in temple worship.

Fr Yuri and Fr Geoffrey discuss what these believers would have added to or complemented their synagogue and temple practice with, the relationship between gentile believers and Jews, and how the destruction of the temple and then the fall of Jerusalem drastically changed the culture of the ecclesia.