As I began to study both
the Scriptures and the history of Christianity with my new “Jewish eyes”[7] I did my best to concentrate solely what the Scriptures (and
history) actually said and to avoid what my seminary professors had told me they
said—not that I thought that my professors were necessarily wrong, but only that I wanted to
be sure that I was seeing in the Scriptures what their divine Author, and not my human
teachers, intended for me to see.
As a theological scientist[8] I had been trained to approach systematic theology as the
science of examining carefully what the Scriptures say and summarizing their teachings
into concise statements of “doctrine” that can then be neatly placed into the various
categories established by previous theological scientists. As with all the sciences,
theology has its own set of “rules” and pre-defined ideas that have been established, and
that provide the boundaries within which the theological scientist is expected to practice
that science. As evolution is to the biologist, there are certain assumptions that the
theological scientist is trained to simply accept without much thought. These assumptions
have been accepted for so long that they simply are no longer questioned by those in the
field.
Of course charismatic
theological scientists have a different set of “rules” than non-charismatics, liberal
theological scientists have a different set of “rules” than conservatives, Protestant
theological scientists have a different set of rules than Catholics, and the list goes on.
My formal training was “non-charismatic, conservative, evangelical, and dispensational,” and
so the “rules” of my theology naturally reflected that orientation.
As I began to take this
new (for me) approach to the Scriptures, I soon discovered what I came to believe had been a
major barrier to my understanding of what the Messianic Community actually looked like
between Messiah’s resurrection and the establishment of “Christianity” as the official
religion of the Roman Empire by Emperor Constantine (ca. 325 CE).[9] I discovered that my previous understanding of the early “Church”
and its history had affected my earlier interpretation of the B’rit Hadasha[10], and of the way Yeshua[11] intended for His Body
of Believers to live and function. I discovered that I had completely misunderstood upon
what “model” the Messianic Community was originally established by Yeshua and His
Shliachim[12], particularly Rav Sha’ul[13] who, more than any other early missionary, was responsible for
bringing the Goyim[14] into the Messianic Community.
From my formal theological training I had, I believe,
developed an understanding of the Scriptures, particularly the “New Testament” Scriptures,
that was significantly different from the way they would have most likely been understood by
their original recipients.
This point was ever so starkly brought to my attention several years ago through a piece of
Sunday school literature which came across my desk. It was written for grade school children
and produced by a leading denominational publishing house. The part which caught my eye was
a full-page drawing of Jesus. He was depicted as a boy and shown going up steps leading into
a building. Underneath the drawing was this caption: ‘Jesus was a good Christian boy who
went to church every Sunday.’ I scarcely could believe my eyes! Here were three glaring
errors in one sentence: Jesus was a Christian, not a Jew; he attended church, not synagogue;
and he went on Sunday, not the Sabbath. On seeing this I thought to myself, if this is what
is being taught in certain church schools among the young, no wonder a problem persists
today among many Christian adults. These Christians fail to grasp the Jewishness of Jesus
and the Jewish background to the New Testament writings.[15]
This little book is not
intended to be anything approaching a thorough or exhaustive treatment of the subject. It
is, however, intended to provide enough information to allow you, the reader, to begin the
process of rethinking some previous conceptions of what the early Body of Messiah might have
actually looked like.
The following are but a few of the ideas that I have had to wrestle with, and which
we will be discussing as you read on:
1. Yeshua, His Talmidim[16], and His Shliachim were all born as Jews, lived their entire
lives as Jews, and died as Torah-observant Jews.[17] What other
life-style could any of them ever even considered?
2. The only “Scriptures” that any of them knew was the
Tanakh[18], or Hebrew Bible.
3. The only form of worship that any of them knew was that of
the Temple and Synagogues.
4. Since Israel was the only people on earth to have received
revelation from the one true G-d, the only place to learn about Him was in
Israel’s Temple/ Synagogue environment.
5. From the Exodus out of Egypt up through the end of the
Second Temple Period, and even until today, non-Jews have always been welcome to participate
in Jewish religious life, as long as certain acceptable forms of behavior are observed.[19]
6. With the possible exception of Dr. Luke, all the writers of
the B’rit Hadasha were Jews.
7. Yeshua taught that the entire Tanakh speaks of Him
(Luke 24:25-27, 44-47; cp. John 1:45). Thus the Apostolic Scriptures, those letters which
His Shliachim wrote about His life and ministry and to explain His teachings that they were
commissioned to pass on—and which we have received as the B’rit Hadasha—can best be
considered as G-d-inspired midrashim (commentaries) on the Tanakh, which
enable Believers to properly understand both the Tanakh and Yeshua’s teaching as interpreted
by Ruach HaKodesh through the Shliachim.
8. Since Hebrew was the common language of Eretz Yisra'el [the
Land of Israel] in the late Second Temple Period,[20] and “Koine Greek” was assumed to be the lingua franca of all
Goyim in the then-known world, and since the Gospel was to be delivered “to the Jew first,
and also to the Greek,” the case has been made by some reputable scholars that the Apostolic
letters of the B’rit Hadasha were very probably originally written in Hebrew (the native
tongue of all the writers except perhaps Dr. Luke) for transmission to the
Jewish Messianic Believers, both in Eretz Yisra'el and in the Diaspora, and were immediately
translated into Greek for transmission to the Non-Jewish Messianic Believers. At the very
least, the early Church fathers held that the original source document for the Synoptic
Gospels was written in Hebrew by Mattityahu.[21] See Appendix B and C.
With these ideas in mind, let us now look at the history of the Body of Messiah from its
earliest beginnings and see if we can discover for ourselves just what Yeshua and the
Shliachim may have actually expected the Messianic Community to look like.
