RESEARCH QUESTION

Did the diaspora synagogue substitute the second temple after 70 CE as Judaean ethnocultural  hub wherein rival Pharisee think tanks would elect themselves carrier groups of two contesting narrations - each addressing the collective trauma of the temple’s fall by separately appropriating memory creation to metaphorically rebuild it in competing Jewish traditions, both in incubation during the late first century?

THEORY

My theory is that both proto-christian and proto-rabbinic thought initially gained consensus among first century Judaeans owing to a post-70 CE preoccupation with ethnocultural survival that was piloted by a collective trauma sparked by the destruction of the temple - all resulting in a veritable zeitgeist experience of covenantal discontinuity. I posit that it was thereafter the diaspora synagogue that brokered the formation of two leading models of covenantal continuity - essentially palliating the trauma by ‘metaphorically rebuilding the temple’ via contending Davidic-Messianic and Mosaic-Sinaitic models (each of which successfully ‘reconstructed’ the ancient cultic centre from within that ‘substitute’ locum sacrum at those geographical peripheries far from Ha Arez i.e. the diaspora synagogue). I postulate that the same two competing traditions originally hailed from the Pauline and Yahvnean schools respectively and that both started out as quintessentially Judaean creations jointly sourced by Pharisee thinking.

HYPOTHESIS 

The post-destruction diaspora synagogue would become a ‘substitute locum sacrum’ for the fallen temple from which a developing contest for covenantal continuity gradually gained sufficient traction to pilot a process of mutual delegitimation between the two leading Pharisee think tanks who got ‘first past the post’ in competing for ascendancy.