By someone’s accounting this is the day in the year 70 that Titus, son of the emperor Vespasian began his siege of Jerusalem. Spoiler alert: it would not end well for the Jewish people.
This isn’t one of those great what-if moments in history, like the death of Alexander or the sinking of the Spanish armada in a storm. What began on this day was simply a marker toward the end point of events that had been in play for quite a while. Still, it does mark events that would have two world shaking consequences.
One was the destruction of the temple and the dispersion of the Jewish people, leading directly to the establishment of rabbinic Judaism, the Judaism we all know.
The other was the end of the hegemony of the Jewish sect preserving the memory of the rabbi Jesus, and the flowing of authority to the convert communities established by Paul and his associates, whose hybridized Hellenic-Jewish Christianity would evolve into the religion we know and love…
One could speculate that without these religions forming there’d be no Islam, either.
Such great trees sprung from such small seeds…
And a pause to think of what the world might have looked like without these religions…
A sigh…
And, now off to the real world and some work to do…
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