The Revolt That Rewrote the Church
How 135 AD Changed the Way Christians Read Scripture — and Why It Still Matters
Everyone knows what happened in 70 AD.
Almost no one talks about 135.
But if you want to understand why sincere Christians can read the same Bible and reach completely different conclusions, 135 AD is the place to start.
We Remember the Wrong Catastrophe
Even lay students of church history know the impact of the events in 70 AD. The Romans under Titus breach the walls of Jerusalem, destroy the Temple, and a nation is scattered to the winds of the earth. It is one of the most consequential events in the history of redemption. It was the judgment Christ predicted, the end of the sacrificial system, and the beginning of the long exile. Preachers speak of it. Commentaries open with it, and it deserves every word written about it.
However, 70 AD did not sever the Jewish people from the Church — at least not yet. Jewish believers in Christ still worshiped alongside their kinsmen in many communities across the ancient world, and the interpretive tradition that had always governed the reading of Scripture remained largely intact. The literal, plain-sense, text-anchored method that Jesus himself modeled and the apostles carried was the authoritative and accepted means of reading and interpreting Scripture. Even after the Temple destruction the rabbis continued the literal method. Pentecost is careful to note, however, that the misapplication of the literal method by the rabbinical schools does not indict the method itself. The fault was never in reading plainly — it was in reading without eyes opened by the Spirit. The wound of the Temple destruction was deep, but the connection to the Scriptures was held.
It is in 135 AD that the connection between Jews and Christians begins to accelerate into a complete severance. The Second Jewish Revolt — the Bar Kokhba revolt — is the defining moment in the parting of Jews and Christians, and the event that set the Church on a hermeneutical trajectory from which it has never fully recovered. We rarely talk about it. We should not stop talking about it.
Have you ever wondered why sincere, Bible-believing Christians can read the same passage and walk away with irreconcilable conclusions? The answer is older than you think.
Before we get there, consider the words of Jesus: “I have come in My Father’s name, and you do not receive Me; if another comes in his own name, him you will receive” (John 5:43). In 135 AD, that prophecy found a chilling historical fulfillment, and what followed changed everything.
132–135 AD: The Revolt That Changed Everything
In 132 AD, a man named Simon bar Kosiba led a massive uprising against Roman occupation of Judea. His followers called him Bar Kokhba — Son of the Star — a deliberate echo of Numbers 24:17: “A Star shall come out of Jacob; a Scepter shall rise out of Israel.” The messianic claim was unmistakable. Rabbi Akiva, the most influential Torah scholar of his generation, publicly endorsed bar Kosiba as the long-awaited Messiah. The revolt drew hundreds of thousands of fighters and, for a time, succeeded. For three years they held territory, minted coins, and administered a functioning state in opposition to Roman authority.
For Jewish believers, this moment was a forced declaration. Bar Kokhba demanded that his followers acknowledge him as Messiah and renounce Jesus of Nazareth. They could not.
Justin Martyr, writing within a generation of the revolt, records that bar Kokhba “gave orders that Christians alone should be led to cruel punishments, unless they would deny Jesus Christ and utter blasphemy.”1
Rome crushed the revolt with devastating and methodical force. The historian Cassius Dio records losses so catastrophic they are difficult to comprehend — hundreds of thousands killed, nearly a thousand villages destroyed. What Titus had begun in 70, Hadrian finished in 135. Jerusalem was razed and rebuilt as a Roman colony renamed Aelia Capitolina. A temple to Jupiter was erected on the Temple Mount, and Jews were banned from entering the city under penalty of death.2
Then Hadrian did something more calculated than military destruction. He renamed the land itself. “Judea” became “Syria Palaestina” — a name derived from the Philistines, Israel’s ancient enemies — specifically to erase any Jewish historical or covenantal claim to the homeland. This was not merely conquest. It was an attempt to permanently erase Jewish identity from the geography and history of the world.
The Exile of the Jewish Church
What happened to the Jerusalem church after 135 is documented by Eusebius in his Ecclesiastical History. For the first time in the history of the Christian community, a Gentile bishop — a man named Mark — was installed as the leader of the Jerusalem congregation. The unbroken line of Jewish leadership that had begun with James, the brother of Jesus, was ended. It wasn’t by theological dispute or by council decree but by Roman edict.3
Jewish believers found themselves without a community on either side. The synagogue had expelled them for refusing to follow bar Kokhba and renounce Jesus. The increasingly Gentile church viewed their Jewish counterparts as a cursed people, and punitive replacement theology was born. They were too Christian for one world and too Jewish for the other. Squeezed out of both, they took with them something the Church would not recognize it had lost for centuries: the living tradition of how Scripture had always been read.
This is not a minor footnote in church history. This is the moment the Church lost its hermeneutical inheritance — and the men who stepped into the vacuum came from a very different intellectual world.
What Was Lost: The Method of Ezra, the Apostles, and Jesus
The method that was lost did not originate with the rabbis. It originated with God’s own design for how His Word was to be handled. Nehemiah 8:8 describes Ezra’s public reading of the Law to the returned exiles: “So they read distinctly from the book, in the Law of God; and they gave the sense, and helped them to understand the reading.” Plain reading. Clear meaning. Comprehension as the goal. Dwight Pentecost, in Things to Come, established the historical weight of this moment: “It is generally agreed by all students of the history of hermeneutics that interpretation began at the time of the return of Israel from the Babylonian exile under Ezra as recorded in Nehemiah 8:1–8.” He then draws the only reasonable conclusion: “It can hardly be questioned but that Ezra’s interpretation was a literal interpretation of what had been written.”4
This was not a method invented for convenience. It was the natural posture of a people who believed God meant what He said, and it is the method Jesus used. When He opened the scroll of Isaiah in Nazareth and declared “Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing,” He was not allegorizing. He was reading the plain text and announcing its completion. When He said “Have you not read?” He was appealing to what was written — its actual words, its natural sense, its intended meaning. The apostles followed the same method. Peter’s sermon at Pentecost, Paul’s argument in Galatians, the entire book of Hebrews — all of it rests on a text-first, plain-sense, historically anchored reading of the Old Testament.
Abner Chou, in The Hermeneutics of the Biblical Writers, names this clearly: “Literal-grammatical-historical hermeneutics is not a modern formulation but how the biblical writers read the Scriptures. The Christian hermeneutic follows the prophets and apostles, and is thereby a hermeneutic of obedience.”5
Literal interpretation doesn’t mean robotically literalistic.
The method predates the Church by centuries. It runs from Ezra through the prophets, through the apostles, through the earliest Christian communities. It was not a system imposed on Scripture from outside. It was the native tongue of everyone who wrote the Bible.
What Replaced It: Alexandria, Allegory, and the Greek Mind
With Jewish teachers expelled from the centers of Christian learning and the Jerusalem church now led by Gentiles with no living connection to the Jewish interpretive tradition, the Church turned — increasingly and then institutionally — to the intellectual frameworks of Alexandria. What emerged was not simply a different method. It was a different philosophy of what Scripture was for.
The Alexandrian school, shaped by the Jewish philosopher Philo and then developed into Christian theology by Clement and Origen, operated on a Platonic assumption: the literal, surface meaning of a text was the lowest level of understanding. The real meaning — the spiritual meaning — lay beneath or behind the words, accessible only to those who knew how to look. Origen formalized this into a threefold interpretive system: somatic (literal), psychic (moral), and pneumatic (mystical). Philip Schaff summarizes Origen’s method without equivocation: “instead of simply bringing out the sense of the Bible, he puts into it all sorts of foreign ideas and irrelevant fancies.”6
This was not the invention of allegorical interpretation — allegorical tendencies existed in earlier forms. What 135 AD produced was the institutional displacement of those who had carried the text-anchored tradition within the Church. Allegory no longer had to compete on equal footing. The men who had preserved plain-sense reading were gone, and what had been one voice among many became the governing voice of the Church.
What makes this historically decisive is not simply that Origen allegorized. It is that he named what he was replacing. Frederic Farrar, in his landmark History of Interpretation, documents that Jerome — one of the most influential biblical scholars in church history —
“calls the literal interpretation ‘Jewish,’ implies that it may easily become heretical, and repeatedly says it is inferior to the ‘spiritual.’”7
Read that slowly. Jerome did not argue that the literal method was imprecise or underdeveloped. He called it Jewish — and meant it as a dismissal. The method that produced the Old Testament, that Jesus used to interpret Moses, that the apostles carried into the world — Jerome named it as something to be left behind. Something inferior. Something that belonged to another people.
That is not drift. That is a declaration, and it tells us exactly what happened after 135 AD and why.
Farrar traces the full consequence through Augustine, who “laid down the rule that the Bible must be interpreted with reference to Church Orthodoxy” and who “opened the door to arbitrary fancy” by admitting that passages written by the Holy Spirit were objectionable in their obvious sense and therefore required a mystical reading. Then Farrar delivers the verdict that should be read in every seminary in the world:
When once the principle of allegory is admitted, when once we start with the rule that whole passages and books of Scripture say one thing when they mean another, the reader is delivered bound hand and foot to the caprice of the interpreter. He can be sure of absolutely nothing except what is dictated to him by the Church, and in all ages the authority of “the Church” has been falsely claimed for the presumptuous tyranny of false prevalent opinions. In the days of Justin Martyr and of Origen Christians had been driven to allegory by an imperious necessity. It was the only means known to them by which to meet the shock which wrenched the Gospel free from the fetters of Judaism. They used it to defeat the crude literalism of fanatical heresies; or to reconcile the teachings of philosophy with the truths of the Gospel. But in the days of Augustine the method had degenerated into an artistic method of displaying ingenuity and supporting ecclesiasticism.8
Notice what Farrar acknowledges: the turn to allegory was driven, in part, by the need to “wrench the Gospel free from the fetters of Judaism.” The post-135 rupture is embedded in his own diagnosis. The method changed because the relationship changed, and once the method changed, everything downstream of it changed with it.
The Replacement That Followed
The consequences were not merely academic. When the plain sense of Scripture is subordinate to an allegorical spiritual sense, the promises made to Israel can be spiritualized into promises made to the Church. The land is no longer land — it is a symbol. The nation is no longer a nation — it is a type, now fulfilled and therefore dissolved. The Jewish people are no longer the covenant people awaiting their redemption — they have been superseded, replaced by a new Israel that renders them theologically obsolete.
This was not an inevitable conclusion — it was a choice. Once the plain sense of the text was no longer the controlling authority of interpretation, the identity of God's covenant people was no longer received from the text but reassigned by the interpreter. That theological decision was made in a Church that had already been severed from the people who carried the text-anchored tradition.
The Church did not simply change its hermeneutic. It used the new hermeneutic to replace the Jewish people in the story of God, and it then used that replacement to justify centuries of hostility toward the very people through whom the Scripture, the Messiah, and the apostolic foundation of the Church all came.
This is what happens when the method is corrupted. Wrong hermeneutics does not merely produce wrong theology. It produces wrong history and wrong treatment of real people.
Why Today’s Debates Don’t Resolve
It would be unfair — and inaccurate — to say that those on the other side of these debates reject the literal method. Most would insist they embrace it, and they would be right. That is precisely what makes this so difficult to untangle.
The problem is not the method. The problem is the foundation upon which the method stands. When the promises made to Israel have already been reassigned before the interpreter opens the text — when the land is already a symbol, the nation already a type, and the Jewish people already superseded before a single passage is examined — the literal method will produce conclusions that serve that reassignment faithfully. The exegesis is consistent. The foundation is not.
This is the long shadow of 135 AD. The hermeneutical rupture did not produce men who read carelessly. It produced men who read carefully on top of a foundation that was laid wrong. A precise, literal reading of a corrupted foundation does not correct the error. It solidifies it. Generation after generation, the conclusions harden, the tradition deepens, and the distance from the plain meaning of the text grows — not because anyone is being dishonest, but because the damage was done long before they arrived.
This is why the debates don’t resolve. The method is not the disagreement. The foundation is.
When Israel in the Old Testament can mean the Church in the New, the text becomes infinitely malleable. Any promise, any prophecy, any passage can be redirected toward a predetermined conclusion. The interpreter is no longer constrained by what the text says. He is free to discover what it “really means” — and that freedom, unchecked by the plain sense, is not illumination. It is power dressed as piety.
Those who hold the Church Fathers in reverence — and there is much to reverence — do not merely follow their interpretive footsteps. They build on their foundation, and that is the critical distinction. Paul was unambiguous: “For no other foundation can anyone lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 3:11). The foundation is not the Fathers, nor is it the tradition. When the foundation shifted after 135 AD — when the plain-sense reading of promises made to Israel was replaced by a framework that reassigned them — what was built on top of that shift, however carefully constructed, however sincerely held, however brilliantly defended, was built on the wrong footing.
Errors enshrined in tradition become nearly impossible to dislodge — not because the men are dishonest, but because to question the foundation is to question the men who laid it, and to question those men feels like questioning the faith itself.
It is not. In fact, it is the opposite. Returning to the foundation the apostles built on is not an attack on the Church; it is the most faithful thing a believer can do.
The Way Back
This is not a call to Torah observance. It is not a romanticization of Second Temple Judaism or a denial of the New Testament’s fulfillment themes. The call is simpler and more demanding than any of that.
Read Scripture the way Jesus read Scripture.
Jesus was a Jew, and He read Moses, the Prophets, and the Writings as a unified witness with a plain sense that demanded to be honored before anything else could be built on it. He did not spiritualize away the promises. He fulfilled them, and fulfillment presupposes that the original promise meant what it said. What has been dissolved into a symbol cannot be fulfilled.
Return to the foundations of Nehemiah 8:8 — reading for clarity, for the plain sense, so that people understand what was written. Ask what the text says before asking what it means without bringing any preconceived notions to the text. Ask what it meant to its original audience before asking what it means to you or through the lens of the Church Fathers. Let the passage speak before the system speaks, and be suspicious of any interpretive method that requires you to make the text mean something other than what it plainly says before the work of understanding can begin.
The revolt of 135 AD did not destroy the Church, but it introduced a darkness that has never been fully named, and therefore has never been fully addressed. The hermeneutical rupture it caused is still with us, in our pulpits, in our commentaries, in the debates that exhaust sincere people who wonder why they cannot simply agree on what the Bible says.
Behind the methods of interpretation there is a history, and behind this history is an adversary who understood that the most effective way to neutralize the Church was not to destroy it from without, but to corrupt the way it reads from within. When the method that produced the canon was labeled “Jewish” and discarded as inferior, something more than an interpretive preference was lost. A door was opened that has never been properly closed.
We were handed a better way. It is still available. The question is whether we want it badly enough to set down what replaced it.
Grace and peace.
T. Smith
Prepared Heart Ministry — preparedheart.org
This article is Part 1 of a continuing series. Part 2 — The Price of the Rewritten Church — is now available.
Tony Smith is the author of Exploring Ezra: Return, Rebuild, Restore, a 10-lesson inductive Bible study. Preview the sample lesson at preparedheart.org.
Notes
1. Justin Martyr, First Apology, XXXI, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (CCEL). “Barchochebas, the leader of the revolt of the Jews, gave orders that Christians alone should be led to cruel punishments, unless they would deny Jesus Christ and utter blasphemy.”
2. Cassius Dio, Roman History, 69.12–14. On Hadrian’s renaming: the province of Judea was redesignated Syria Palaestina following the revolt, and Jerusalem was refounded as Aelia Capitolina. Jews were formally banned from the city.
3. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, IV.6. Eusebius documents that after the revolt, “the bishop of the circumcision ceased” and a Gentile, Mark, became the first bishop of Jerusalem not of Jewish descent.
4. Dwight J. Pentecost, Things to Come (Dunham Publishing, 1958), 16.
5. Abner Chou, The Hermeneutics of the Biblical Writers: Learning to Interpret Scripture from the Prophets and Apostles (Kregel Publications, 2018), 23.
6. Philip Schaff, cited in Pentecost, Things to Come, 16. Schaff’s summary of Origen appears in his History of the Christian Church.
7. Frederic W. Farrar, History of Interpretation (Macmillan, 1886), 238. Jerome’s characterization of literal interpretation as “Jewish” and inferior to the spiritual sense appears throughout his commentaries and correspondence, and is documented by Farrar in his treatment of the Western Fathers.
8. Farrar, History of Interpretation, 238. The extended passage on Augustine and the consequences of the allegorical method appears in Farrar’s chapter on the Western Fathers. Pentecost cites this passage directly in Things to Come, 16.
Thank you. For the detailed breakdown of facts that stay hidden but are available in plain sight if we look.
How I needed to read this. I did not know this history but now I cannot 'unheard it. So many of my questions about how did it all go wrong between 'Gentile and Jew' are clearer. Now I need to re-read it with a slow prayerful, meditative heart for the truth to become even clearer and understanding to turn to useful application.
Amazing read, thank you for bringing this up, and Shalom from Jerusalem.
I just found your Substack, maybe because the algorithm noticed that I also just wrote a (much shorter) piece on the Bar Kokhba revolt. Mine focuses on the split of Judaism and Christianity, the Bar Kokhba revolt being one of the large watershed moments.
It is interesting to see that the allegorical reading you refer to also eventually reached the Rabbinic thought. Known as the "pardes" levels of interpretation, the Hebrew letters PRDS standing for Pshat, Remez, Drash, Sod. Simple, allusion, allegorical, and secret. Unlike the Christians who read the simple reading as an allegory and dismissed the direct interpretation, however, the Rabbis would rather say that the simple is true, and the allegorical is added onto it. And it was often more about finding "secrets" within the text by using numerology or taking the first letter in each word, eventually culminating in Kabbalah and occult practices. I am wondering whether this mindset might have started partly by being influenced by the Alexandrian method of interpretation.