zoliner.blogg.se

The As­syr­i­ans, Baby­lo­ni­ans, and Ro­mans all took Jew­ish cap­tives to their re­spec­tive na­tions. ‘From at least the time of the fall of Jerusalem (586 BC), and pos­si­bly even ear­lier, there were large Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ties liv­ing out­side Pales­tine’ (Bray 1996: 53). Dur­ing the in­ter-tes­ta­ment times and on­ward, Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ties dis­persed in coun­tries across the civ­i­lized world. ‘The an­cient world was char­ac­terised by con­tin­ued move­ments of peo­ples’ (De­Rid­der 1975:59). Thus the mean­ing of di­as­pora evolved to cover all the Jews who lived out­side their orig­i­nal homeland. Af­ter the de­struc­tion of Jerusalem in 70 AD, the Jews did be­come a peo­ple with­out a home. The He­brew terms for di­as­pora trans­lated in the Sep­tu­agint (LXX) “all have the sense of the process of ‘lead­ing away, de­por­ta­tion, or ex­ile, or of the state of those led away, de­ported or ex­iled'” (De Rid­der 1975:215). In Ger­many the term ‘is used of mem­bers of any re­li­gious body liv­ing as a mi­nor­ity among those of other be­liefs’ (Cross 1974:399). Ox­ford’s Con­cise Dic­tio­nary de­fines ‘di­as­pora’ as the ‘dis­per­sion of the Jews among the Gen­tiles mainly in the 8-6th Cen­tury BC’ (Moore 1997:364). The term ‘di­as­pora’ means the scat­ter­ing of the peo­ple of God (the Jews) ‘in the midst of a hos­tile en­vi­ron­ment’ (De Rid­der 1975:215). It then looks at the con­tem­po­rary Asian church’s mis­sion vi­sion and how this might cor­re­spond with the Asian Chris­t­ian Di­as­pora in Aus­tralia and how they can be­come a greater force of ‘new’ mis­sion­ar­ies in the world today. It analy­ses the Apos­tle Paul and his mis­sion­ary bands’ strat­egy of vis­it­ing the Di­as­pora syn­a­gogues as a base for their min­istry. This pa­per analy­ses the char­ac­ter­is­tics of the bib­li­cal Jew­ish Di­as­pora and the Sep­tu­agint Scrip­tures and syn­a­gogues that were im­por­tant to them.