Questions about Confession

[D-D-W]

I'm willing to go to 325AD, the council of Nicea.
I'll tell you why. I think 135AD is too soon.

In 135AD those that were taught by the Apostles were still alive, not all of them....

135 was the Bar Kochba revolt against Rome. Rome came down much harder than in 70 when all they destroyed was the Temple and part of Jerusalem. In 135 they removed almost all of the Jews from the entire province of Judea and renamed it Palestina after the Philistines. They also put severe restrictions and taxations on all Jews and anything that even looked remotely Jewish thru the entire empire. So the Church fathers reacted by getting rid of all things Jewish.

Also we do have to admit that the ECFs did not distance themselves first. The Christians were too different and were not desired in the synagogue.

In the 70 ad uprising, the Jewish believers took the words of the Master in Luke 21 quite literally and left the fight and hid out in the hills.

20 “But when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then recognize that her desolation is near. 21 Then those who are in Judea must flee to the mountains, and those who are in the midst of the city must leave, and those who are in the country must not enter the city;

To the non-Messianic Jews, the Messianics leaving the fight was a severe betrayal. That started to change 40 years later and Messianic Jews were starting to be welcomed back into the synagogues when Bar Kochba started his fight. When the leading Rabbi of the day, Rabbi Akiva, declared Bar Kochba the Messiah, the Messianics again (rightly) quit the fight on the grounds of being unwilling to fight for a FALSE Messiah. After the war, Akiva repented of his declaration when it turned out Kochba was a really bad person.

The reformation removed belief in the power of the Holy Spirit?
I never heard this.

No. You mis-read me. The power of the Holy Spirit was lost in the early 200s ad with the declaration that a certain man named Montanus was a heretic and his teachings were false. He was a self declared prophet and claimed nothing could be done except by a prophetic word in each situation. They had to have a prophetic utterance about what food to eat or which clothes to put on. So the Orthodox church banned ALL prophetic utterances and the rest of the Holy Spirit gifts. That was the start of the removal of the power.

I believe it was St Thomas Aquanias who later put the church in a naturalist mindset by explaining scriptural miracles as natural phenomena. THAT was the full removal of the power of the Holy Spirit. The Reformation started the church on the road to recovering that some 300 years later.