For the people of Judea the Jordan was always more than a river. It was the line Israel crossed to enter the land, the water Elijah parted before he was taken up, the place where John washed and where the heavens opened over the teacher from Galilee. On the far side lay country that was Jewish and not quite Jewish: Perea, Gilead, the Greek cities of the Decapolis, the volcanic uplands of Bashan running north toward Damascus. It was a country of refuges. When the Way could no longer live in Jerusalem, that is where it went.
The Flight to Pella
The first historian of the church tells it briefly. Before the war, he says, the people of the church in Jerusalem were commanded by an oracle, given by revelation to the worthy among them, to leave the city and live in a town of Perea called Pella. So those who believed in Christ went out from Jerusalem, and the holy city was left, as it were, empty of holy people when judgment came upon it. The bishop of Salamis tells the same story and adds that the Nazoraeans of his own day were descended from those refugees.
Pella was a Greek city of the Decapolis, set in the foothills across the valley from Beth Shean, with a strong spring and a long memory. Some modern historians doubt the flight, and they have one good reason: the historian says Jewish rebels sacked Pella along with other Greek cities at the very start of the war. The fellowship notes that this cuts both ways. A Greek city that had just been attacked by Jewish rebels might well have welcomed Jews who had refused to join the rebellion, and who had left Jerusalem for that very reason. The gospels remember a saying of Jesus: when you see the abomination standing where it ought not, let those in Judea flee to the mountains. Someone remembered it, and fled.
The Villages of Bashan
From Pella the believers spread north and east. The bishop names Kokaba in Bashan as one of their towns. A Christian scholar of the third century says the relatives of the Lord came from the villages of Nazara and Kokaba. The names are not idle. Nazara is the branch. Kokaba means star, and the star is the other great messianic sign of the old scriptures, the star that Balaam saw coming forth out of Jacob. A family of David's line living in a village called Branch and a village called Star, keeping its genealogy and waiting: the fellowship does not know whether the names were old or were given by the settlers, but either way they were chosen by people who knew what they meant.
And Bashan lies on the road to Damascus. The Damascus Document, the rule of the Essene camps, speaks of the community's exile in the land of Damascus, where they entered a new covenant, and it reads the star of Balaam as the Interpreter of the Law who came to Damascus. Whether that Damascus was the city or a figure for the wilderness, scholars still argue. But a student cannot help noticing that the Way had followers in Damascus within a few years of the crucifixion, so many that Paul went there with letters to arrest them, and that the believers of the next centuries lived in the villages of the star on the road that leads there. The fellowship marks this as a pattern, not a proof. Patterns are where questions begin.
The Synagogues of the East
Three centuries after the flight, a learned monk who would later translate the scriptures into Latin at Bethlehem spent some years as a hermit in the desert of Chalcis, near Beroea in Syria. There he met Nazarenes. They lent him their gospel, written in Hebrew letters, and he copied it. Years later, writing to the bishop of Hippo in Africa, he described them: there exists to this day throughout the synagogues of the East a sect that is called the Minaeans, and is condemned by the Pharisees; they are commonly called Nazarenes. They believe in Christ, the Son of God, born of the virgin Mary, who suffered under Pontius Pilate and rose again, in whom we also believe. But while they wish to be both Jews and Christians, they are neither.
It is a revealing sentence. By the monk's own account, the Nazarenes of Syria believed what the church believed about Christ. Their offense was not doctrine but life: they kept the Sabbath, circumcised their sons, prayed in synagogues, and ate as Jews eat. An old Jewish encyclopedia observes that they were long regarded as irreproachable Christians, and that the bishop of Salamis was the first to call them heretics, for nothing more than keeping the Law of Moses.
The monk also preserved fragments of their commentary on Isaiah. On the prophet's words about the two houses of Israel stumbling, the Nazarenes said the two houses were the two great schools of the Pharisees, whose teachers had burdened the people with traditions. On the words the people who walked in darkness have seen a great light, they said that when Christ came, the land of Zebulun and Naphtali in Galilee was the first to be freed from the errors of the scribes, and that afterward the preaching was multiplied through the gospel of the apostle Paul to the ends of the nations. The older encyclopedias say the Nazarenes rejected Paul. Their own words, as the monk records them, honor him. They were not the enemies of the Gentile mission. They simply did not think it required them to stop being Jews.
The Curse and the Renunciation
From both sides, the walls went up. The rabbis who rebuilt Judaism after the war called Jewish heretics minim, and the great daily prayer of the synagogue came to include a petition against them. Old copies of that prayer, found among the discarded manuscripts of the same Cairo storeroom that gave back the Damascus Document, name the notzrim alongside the minim. The bishop and the monk both report that the Jews cursed the Nazarenes three times a day.
And the church, for its part, required Jews who came to it to renounce everything Jewish. A formula used at Constantinople has the convert say: I renounce all the customs and rites of the Hebrews, their unleavened bread and their lambs, their feasts and their Sabbaths, their purifications and their fasts, their new moons and their hymns and their synagogues, and the food and drink of the Hebrews; and if I am found eating with the Jews, let me be anathema. There was to be no one left who was both. The Nazarenes were the people who were both.
The Fading
A bishop of the fifth century in northern Syria is the last of the church writers to describe them, and he already confuses them with others, saying they honor Christ as a just man and read a gospel under the name of Peter. After him the Nazarenes as a people fall silent. Most were absorbed, some into the synagogue and some into the church, in the way of minorities pressed from both sides.
Echoes remain. The monk of Bethlehem himself mentions an apocryphal book of Jeremiah that a Hebrew of the Nazarene sect had shown him. A cardinal of the eleventh century still knew the name as that of a Sabbath-keeping Christian sect, and a century later a group in Lombardy kept the Sabbath and the Law and were condemned for it, whether as heirs of the Nazarenes or as people who found the same road again, no one can say. On the coast of southern India the ancient Christians who trace their faith to the apostle Thomas are called Nasrani to this day, and kept a Passover bread in their households long after the rest of the church had forgotten its Jewish table. The name outlived the people, and went everywhere they could not.
What the Fellowship Learns from Them
The Nazarenes refused to choose between Moses and Jesus, and history punished them for it. The fellowship does not think they were wrong. They kept the Law as the frame of a life and the teacher of Galilee as its center, which is roughly what the fellowship tries to do with the discipline of the desert and the gospel of the Way. If we are ever told that we are neither one thing nor the other, we will take it as a family resemblance.
And they teach the student something about faithfulness without an audience. For three hundred years, in villages no one visited, they kept the Sabbath, read their Hebrew gospel, prayed in their synagogues, and were cursed for it by the people they prayed beside. No one wrote their history. The monk of Bethlehem wrote one sentence, meant as a dismissal. The fellowship reads it as an epitaph, and a fine one. They wished to be both. Many of us still do.