It would seem to me that the Temple, not the Talmud, held the first (or foremost) and central point of unity in Jewish society even during the Babylonian exile: the chosen people wanted a return to Jerusalem - not for Jerusalem’s sake - but for the sake of restoring the Temple. Indeed, you were a schismatic not for starting a novel interpretation of the Law, but when you removed yourself from acknowledging the validity of, or from participating in, the Temple system/liturgy. The lamentations over the loss of the Temple recorded in the Bible were by no means completely assuaged by the emerging rabbinical or Talmudic system: the Rabbi, Synagogue or the Talmud was an imperfect substitute for the Temple, meant to retain as best as possible what the Temple provided for the people of Israel: a central point of unity that preserved them as a social and religious cohesion from generation to generation.
[13] And they set up false witnesses [against St. Stephen], who said: This man ceaseth not **to speak words against the holy place *** and the law. [14] For we have heard him say, that this Jesus of Nazareth **shall destroy this place **[the Temple], and shall change the traditions which Moses delivered unto us.
When St. Stephen was brought to court, the accusation against him was changed from being one of uttering blasphemies against God and blaspheming Moses (v.11), to threatening to destroy -in the first place- the Temple; the original accusation then also mutated (escalated) to giving the impression that St Stephen had dismissed the Law entirely and spoke of it as being evil (or something- the accusation is deliberately vague). Of the accusations, the former was more actionable, as it was considered a direct assault on the whole of Jewish society, culture and identity: to attack the Temple was to attack the people of Israel at their very heart.
In the case of Jesus, it was again not until he seemed to threaten the Temple itself that action was finally taken against him: his apparently novel interpretation of the Law and the Prophets was not considered a very real threat to Jewish culture, cohesion or identity; it was, however, his apparent threat to destroy the Temple that made him appear to be a very real threat to all Israel: all of this makes rather plain the unique role the Temple played in Jewish culture at the time.
Though I agree that it is extremely erroneous to think that modern Judaism does not posses a real logical continuity with the Judaism contemporary to Jesus or the centuries leading up to that whole period, up to the destruction of the Temple and the Council of Jamnia [sp?] ca. A.D./c.e. 90.
Perhaps you might care to tell us more about this?
You see, when I see this sort of argument, I wonder what sort of Judaism people thought existed back then. There were certainly small sects (it was a horrific time for the Jewish people, sects tend to emerge in such situations in all religions) but there were really just two, what might be described as, ‘systems’. There was the Temple (on and off in our history) with its Priests and there were synagogues with their rabbis (the entire Jewish population didn’t turn up in Jerusalem every Saturday for a quick sacrifice) - with the destruction of the Temple, the Temple ‘system’ ended but the synagogue ‘system’ continued.
Now, if I were to say to a Catholic that the Christian religion was not the same one, I’d get told that it was all a seamless development but, somehow, there’s the idea that Judaism has changed although it’s an equivalently seamless development from the Judaism experienced by most Jews at the time.
