In the Second Temple era, a ruling Jewish elite embraced a written-law rationalism that sharply contrasted with the prophetic and oral traditions of Israel. The Sadducees – temple priests, nobles and Hellenized aristocrats – rejected anything beyond the Pentateuch, denying the immortality of the soul, the resurrection of the body, and even angelic beings. Their stance was ‘sola scriptura’,
As one scholar notes, “the Sadducees and Pharisees…associated with the aristocracy and denied the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the body, because neither of these doctrines was contained in the written Torah”. In Josephus’s account the Sadducees explicitly taught that “souls die with the bodies” and observed only what the Mosaic Law prescribed. This Sadducean rationalism – a theology of the elite aristocracy – set a tone of skepticism toward spiritual “mysteries” and a strict legalism.
A related sect, the Boethusians (followers of the high-priestly family of Boethus), similarly lived in luxurious ease and mocked Pharisaic piety while denying any “world to come”. In sum, these Edomite-linked sects championed a purely this-worldly, aristocratic faith in Judaea, distancing themselves from the remnant-ethos and apocalyptic hope that characterized other Jewish movements (Pharisees, Essenes, early Jesus-followers).
Herodian Rule and the Temple
The Idumaean (Edomite) dynasty of King Herod further entrenched Hellenistic influence over Israel’s sacred culture. Herod the Great – himself of Idumaean (Edomite) stock – was a Roman client-king whose wife and inner court deliberately fused Jewish and Greco-Roman royal imagery. Josephus reports that when John Hyrcanus had earlier conquered Idumaea (identified as “the Edom of the Hebrew Bible”) all Edomites were compelled to be circumcised and adopt Jewish law.
Herod thereafter identified as Jewish, yet his dynasty (the Herodians) indulged in notoriously decadent lifestyles that alienated observant Jews. He famously replaced the native high priesthood (a Sadducean stronghold) with outsiders from Babylon and Alexandria, to placate the wider Diaspora and cement his power. Thus the Temple itself – Herod’s grand reconstruction of Solomon’s temple – became an Edomite project of imperial patronage rather than a fully independent Jewish foundation.
When the Herodian Temple was destroyed in 70 CE, only remnants like the Western Wall (shown above) remained as mute witnesses to the covenantal center that had been lost. In the Herodian period the very geography of Jerusalem and its Temple was co-opted into an imperial edifice, a trend later theology would abstract into “heavenly” or spiritual realms instead of the concrete Zion of the prophets.
Greek Philosophy & Roman Christianity
With the Christian church’s rise under Rome, these Hellenistic patterns deepened. By the 4th century Christianity had become the empire’s official religion, and Church thinkers assumed the intellectual tools of Greek philosophy. In the Latin West, St. Augustine (hippo, 4th-5th c.) exemplified this shift: though a bishop, he was “shaped by classical authors and pre-Christian philosophy,” and “Platonism in particular remained a decisive ingredient of his thought”.
He transformed key biblical images (such as Jerusalem) into abstract cities of God rather than emphasizing Israel’s land promise. Later, Medieval theology explicitly synthesized Aristotelianism: St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) “embraced several ideas put forward by Aristotle and attempted to synthesize Aristotelian philosophy with the principles of Christianity”. In this way Western Christian theology became steeped in Greek cosmology and logic.
For example, Aquinas treated the universe in Aristotelian categories of substance and form and subsumed Biblical creation into an eternal order of causes. By contrast, the ancient Hebrew cosmology (with its layered heavens, earth, and temple-footed creation) was largely discarded in favor of Platonic and Ptolemaic models. Over centuries the Book of Acts and epistolary Judaism were read through Hellenistic allegory: God’s covenant became a theological abstraction, Temple typology became ethics or liturgy, and the concrete “seed of promise” (a reference to Genesis) was reinterpreted as the ethereal Church itself.
Supersessionism and the Eclipse of Hebraic Covenant.
Throughout late antiquity and the Middle Ages the prevailing view held that the Church superseded Israel in God’s plan. As one compendium notes, “supersessionism…is the Christian doctrine that the Christian Church has superseded the Jewish people, assuming their role as God’s covenanted people”. Most Church Fathers – Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Augustine, and the Orthodox and Catholic tradition – taught that the New Covenant in Christ replaced the Mosaic covenant. In practice this meant that Old Testament promises (land, Temple, tribal priesthood) were spiritualized or claimed as fulfilled in the Church.
The “heavenly Jerusalem” was still discussed (as in Revelation), but typically as a distant, allegorical city rather than the eschatological fulfillment of Ezekiel’s vision of a Temple-centered Messiah reign. Indeed, Ezekiel’s prophecy of a rebuilt Temple uniting “the twelve tribes” in Jerusalem was gradually overshadowed by an idea of a universal, post-temple kingdom.
In short, the vivid Jewish spiritual geography (land → Temple → city → kingdom) was largely veiled in later doctrine.
Concretely, the covenantal narrative preserved by Jesus’ family and early Jewish believers was marginalized. In Acts, James the Just heads the Jerusalem church alongside Pharisees and priests who still observe Mosaic law and await a Messiah “to establish the Kingdom of God in Jerusalem”.
But by the second century such believers were reinterpreted as just a temporary “seed” until the gentile Church could grow into fullness. Augustine and others warned Christians not to “put more trust in the Jewish people than they deserved,” effectively treating Jews as converted guest stars rather than kin by blood.
Key doctrines (resurrection, judgment, messianic kingship) were reframed in Greek categories – for example, the bodily resurrection promised to Israel became a philosophical “spiritual immortality” in heaven, while the Temple’s sacrificial system was allegorized into Christ’s once-for-all sacrifice.
In these ways, the distinctive Hebraic outlook – a covenant sustained by literal descendants (“the faithful remnant”) and centered on Jerusalem – was lost under a synagogue-diminished paradigm. The Christian “City of God” became an abstract, roofless empire rather than the Jewish homeland restored.
The Results
Over time, the trajectory from Sadduceanism through Boethusianism into imperial Christian orthodoxy created a theological edifice far removed from Israel’s roots. Sadducee-derived rationalism and priestly aristocracy implanted in Judaism a suspicion of prophetic tradition and a preference for written codes. The Herodian (Edomite) reign over the Temple entangled God’s sanctuary with political power.
When Christianity absorbed Roman culture, Greek philosophy sealed the transformation: “the church replaced Israel” became a doctrinal given. In this “Edomite” framework, the Gospel’s Jewish seed—the promise to Abraham’s line, the hope of Zion, the vision of a new Jerusalem with its Temple—was recast as a primarily spiritual myth. The cosmic geography of heaven and earth taught by the Hebrew prophets was supplanted by Platonic dualism and Latin theology. Thus, many of the covenant promises preserved by Jesus’ family and early Jewish believers were obscured and redefined.
Today, modern political Zionism and its alliance with right-wing nationalist theology are not recoveries of the biblical vision, but rather extensions of the same Edomite logic—transforming the heavenly Jerusalem into a geopolitical weapon, reducing the covenant to territory and control, and bypassing the deeper call to faithfulness, repentance, and the true Seed of Promise. These ideologies, though wrapped in the language of prophecy, perpetuate the same misreading of Scripture that began with Sadducean power and was baptized in Roman triumphalism.
Just as Edomite theology reflects the distortion of covenant through Roman power and Sadducean logic, Islam—emerging from the line of Ishmael—represents another deviation from the Seed of Promise. While the Qur’an preserves echoes of biblical figures and affirms Abrahamic roots, it reframes the covenant through Ishmael rather than Isaac, grounding its theology in submission to a distant sovereignty rather than in the intimate covenantal fidelity of HaShem with Israel.
Though Islam retains a reverence for Jerusalem, the prophets, and elements of the Abrahamic tradition, it ultimately severs the covenantal line through which the Messiah came, substituting the intimate, suffering bond of the covenant with a monotheism of law, destiny, and external conquest. In this sense, Ishmaelite theology mirrors Edomite theology: both diverge from the heart of the covenant—not by denying God’s existence, but by rejecting the relational wound through which covenantal love is revealed.
One empire arose through Rome’s philosophical and imperial distortion; the other through Persia and Arabia’s call to submission and tribal destiny. Both offer systems of external control, honor, and power without the inner transformation born of sacrificial suffering and redeeming love. Yet even here, hope remains. The children of Ishmael are not forgotten in the Scriptures. God’s promise to Abraham concerning Ishmael endures (Genesis 17:20)—not through a rival covenant, but through the merciful invitation extended to all nations to return to the Seed of Promise.
That Seed is the Messiah, Son of David, whose kingship is completed through suffering—not by conquering, but by bearing the wounds of the covenant to heal the nations and lead them to the heavenly Jerusalem.
