The most natural environment for a religious experience, kerygma, and doctrine of primitive Christians was undoubtedly grounded in the Jewish synagogue, bet knesset, which has been a central communal institution of Judaism.  In fact, it had been the native educational milieu for Jesus himself, who must have been enrolled in a synagogal school in his childhood and later used it for preaching in his adult life.  Even though until 70 CE Jerusalem Temple was the center of the Jewish cult, the synagogue clearly had its own particular function, serving as a local meetinghouse for study and, also, prayer.  In effect, its administrators were none other than teachers, rabbis.  When Jerusalem Temple was destroyed, the synagogue became its surrogate.  Consequently much of the liturgy and instruction of rabbinic Judaism and newly emerging Judeo-Christianity – even the times of statutory prayer and the number of services held on holidays and festivals – was framed to correspond with the rituals and rhythms of the defunct Temple cult.[1]

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[1] His first volume on early Christianity Jean Daniélou dedicated to Judeo-Christianity, A History of Early Christian Doctrine before the Council of Nicaea. The Theology of Jewish Christianity, vol. 1. Trans., edited and with a postscript by John Austin Baker and David Smith. London: Darton, Longman & Todd; Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1973. See also Daniel R. Schwartz, Studies in the Jewish Background of Christianity (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1992); Oskar Skarsaune, In the Shadow of the Temple: Jewish Influences on Early Christianity (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2002).