ABSTRACT
The New Testament gives us important clues, however fragmentary, about both the form and context of the worship offered by the earliest followers of Jesus. The disciples, like Jesus himself, were observant Jews, and though at first after the crucifixion they cowered behind locked doors, their subsequent visions of the risen Lord transformed their lives (John 20:19-20). In the very last verse of Luke (24:53), after the Ascension the apostles went up ‘and were continually in the Temple blessing God’. The Temple of Jerusalem had been the centre of Jewish worship since the time of Solomon, then destroyed by Nebuchadrezzar in 587/586 BCE. It was rebuilt when the exiles returned from Babylon in 538 BCE, and extensively renewed by Herod from 20 BCE. In Acts (2:46), the three thousand who were baptized following Peter’s sermon on Pentecost, ‘day by day’ spent much time together in the Temple. And it would be reasonable to assume that it was a return to their habitual pattern of worship when, after Pentecost, ‘Peter and John were going up to the Temple at the hour of prayer, being the ninth hour’.
