Transcription
about 2,000 years ago, if you would have met someone who told you they believe that Jesus is the Messiah, you could have assumed that that person was Jewish. That was pretty much an assumption you could have safely made. 2,000 years ago, any person telling you that they are a believer that Jesus is the Messiah, pretty good bet that that person was a Jew. 2,000 years ago, the reason is that the movement initially, the movement that was growing up around Jesus of Nazareth himself, was an exclusively Jewish movement. Jesus instructed his followers in the book of Matthew, chapter 10, when he told them to go round and spread his message. He told them, "Go not unto the cities of the Gentiles or the Samaritans." He tells them don't go to non-Jews. He said, "I have come only for the lost sheep of the house of Israel." We see in the fifteenth chapter of Matthew that when a non-Jewish woman comes to Jesus and his followers asking for help, they send her away. And she persists and says, "You have to help me." And Jesus says to her, "It is not proper to take the bread of the children and throw it to the dogs." That's how we respond to this non-Jewish woman. So initially, we know that the Jesus Movement was an exclusively Jewish movement. And if you would have met anyone originally who said that they believed he was the Messiah, you could rest assured that person was Jewish.
However, by the end of the second century, less than 200 years later, anyone claiming to be a Christian, anyone claiming to be a follower of Jesus, you could have safely assumed that person was not Jewish. So we see that at the very beginning of the Christian movement, a very radical shift takes place in under two hundred years: the movement goes from about a hundred percent Jewish people to virtually 100 percent Gentile. And in tonight's presentation, we're going to try to examine, to analyze, to think about how this metamorphosis took place. How did this shift happen?
One of the claims that the church has made over the past several hundred years, going back at least to the Middle Ages, one of the ways the church would try to demonstrate their superiority would be to trumpet what they would call the triumph of the church. They would say to the Jewish people and to other people, "Look at the church. Look at how we have basically become the dominant religion in the world, and look at the wretched state of the Jewish people." And they would use the success of the church, the success of Christianity, as a way of proving the veracity of what they believed. The argument basically would go, "Today, two billion Christians can't be wrong."
Now we're going to begin tonight's class with a short study of a very fascinating passage from the book of Acts. If you're not familiar with the Christian Bible, it begins with the four Gospels, the four biographies of Jesus: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And they all end with the death of Jesus. The book of Acts, the next book, the fifth book, picks up the story from there. And the book of Acts really traces the history of the early Christian movement in the decades following the death of Jesus. In the fifth chapter, which we will be studying now, what happens is the Jewish court imprisons the disciples. Peter and the other followers of Jesus are thrown into prison. It's not exactly clear what the charges are; it's not exactly clear why they're in such trouble. But for some reason, the Jewish court, the Sanhedrin, is very upset with these people, throw them in the prison. And we're told that they want to really either hurt them very badly; there's even a plot to kill some of them. But we know that this trouble is brewing. There's big trouble brewing. We will pick up now in verse 34.
And the book of Acts tells us that the head of the Sanhedrin at that time was someone named Gamliel. Now Gamliel was the name of one of the heads of the Sanhedrin. We don't know if this story ever took place, but we'll be reading it tonight just for the purposes of this lecture; let's give it some credibility. And so we're told that one in the council stood up, a Pharisee, one of the Perushim, named Gamliel, a teacher of the Torah held in respect by all of the people. And he commanded them. He commanded the rabble-rousers, he commanded the people who wanted to really hurt Peter and the Apostles. He tells these people, "Put them aside. Send them out of the room. We're going to talk about these people behind your back. Send Peter and the other followers of Jesus out; we're going to talk about them for minutes." And he says, Gamliel says to these other Jewish people, he says, "Men of Israel, take heed to yourselves. Be very careful," he says, "to what you intend to do regarding these men." He's like, "Wait a second, not so fast. You want to kill him? You want to hurt them very badly? You want to beat them up? Not so fast." He says, "Be very careful in terms of what you intend to do." And he says, "For some time ago, Theudas, a person named Theudas, rose up claiming to be somebody he wasn't, claiming to be Elvis Presley, he was claiming to be the Messiah." And we know that Josephus, our historian, also speaks about a number of other people 2,000 years ago claiming to be the Messiah. So Gamliel says in this story here in the book of Acts that not long ago, this person named Theudas rose up claiming to be somebody. Another man of about four hundred joined him; he established a following of about four hundred men. But what happened? He was ultimately slain, he was killed, and all who obeyed him were scattered and came to nothing. The movement fizzled out. After this man, Theudas? Judas the Galilean? Judas the Galilean rose up in the days in the census and drew away many people after him. He also attracted a bit of a following, but he also perished, and all who followed him were scattered.
So Gamliel here is advising all the other Jews: "Let's look at this movement, this Jesus movement. And we're going to look at it in terms of our recent history." He says, "We have seen similar movements. We've seen movements of people claiming to be the Messiah, and they've attracted a bit of a following." So Gamliel said this: "We have some precedent here. Let's just basically use these other groups as an example." And he says the following. Here's the key part. He says, "And now I say to you" — this is what Gamliel says to the people in this court — "I say to you, keep away from these men. Just leave them alone. Keep away from them and let them alone. We're not going to do anything," he says, "because if this plan or this work" — meaning if this movement is of men, meaning it's not a divine movement, if it's just some kind of a human movement that someone got an idea all by himself — he says, "If this movement is of men, it will come to nothing, because just like the other movements were, these people Theudas and the Galilean, they were the Messiah, so what happened? Ultimately, their movement disappeared, it dissolved, it just evaporated, it came to nothing." So Gamliel is saying, "Let's take a wait-and-see attitude. Let's take a wait-and-see attitude. If this movement isn't really true, meaning if this Jesus is not really the Messiah, so the same thing will happen to him as it happened to the other people: the movement will disappear. But if it is of God, if this is the truth, if what these people believe is true and this Jesus is the Messiah, you cannot overthrow it, and you may even find yourself to be fighting against God." This is the advice of Gamliel.
So basically he says what he says: "Look, these people, Peter and the other apostles of Jesus, did not do anything wrong. Don't hurt them. Leave them alone. They are not guilty of anything. And in terms of their movement, we're going to take a wait-and-see attitude. If the movement is true and if Jesus really is the Messiah, then this movement is going to grow and flourish. And if it's not, and it's just some woman's fantasy, it'll disappear like the other movements."
Now you have to realize that for 2,000 years, Christians have read this passage and have felt very, very good about themselves, because Christians basically read themselves back into this story. And today they will approach us with a big smile and say, "We're still here. As a matter of fact, our movement has grown to be 2.2 billion strong. We have churches, huge churches throughout the world. The largest church in the world today has a million members; it's in South Korea. So look at this: we're a movement that started with 12 Jewish people, and now there are 2.2 billion of us, the largest religion in the world." And they say, "And that was what Gamliel told us. Gamliel, your rabbi, the head of the Sanhedrin, said that if this movement is true, you won't be able to stop it." And so they look to this story as a tremendous support.
What I like to do is look a little bit deeper into this story. Let's think for a moment: who is Gamliel talking about in the story? Who are these people he sent out of the room to speak about them behind their back? Who is Peter? Who is James? Who are the apostles of Jesus? Who were these people? Were they Sunday-observing, pork-eating, Trinitarian Baptists? Is that who they were? I mean, today's born-again evangelical Christian, right, who doesn't observe a Jewish Sabbath on Saturday and eats in any restaurant they like and believes that Jesus is God and part of the Trinity, puts themselves back in the story and assumes that the same that exists today are the same people who were the followers of Jesus and stood on trial. But let's think about that for a second. If that were the case, if the people standing in front of Gamliel were like Jimmy Swaggart, it would be like, "God will say leave them alone, they're doing nothing wrong?" What do you mean, "Leave them alone, they're doing nothing wrong?" They're Sabbath desecrators, they're pork eaters, they're idolaters, they're worshipping a human being. How could any head of the Sanhedrin be so conciliatory towards these followers of Jesus? If these followers of Jesus were just like today's Christians, any rabbi would have had a heart attack back then and said, "This movement? This is a kosher Jewish movement? These people are working on Saturday, they'll eat shellfish and even pork, and they worship this guy from Nazareth? They believe he's God that created the world? That's acceptable? That's called blasphemy, that's heresy. There are no bigger sins than that." He wouldn't have said, "Leave them alone, they're doing nothing wrong. Let's wait and see." What do you mean, "Let's wait and see?" You don't need to wait. What you have right in front of you is terribly wrong.
I would suggest — and I'll try to prove this tonight — that the people that were in this trial, the followers of Jesus, Peter and James, all these men, they were traditional Jews who observed the Torah, on Saturday kept their Sabbath, ate kosher food, and did not believe that Jesus was God and didn't worship Jesus and pray to Jesus. They did think he was the Messiah, and even though he was dead, they did believe that he would come back from the dead. That of course is a Jewish belief, that the dead will ultimately come back — not just the dead, but the Jefferson Airplane as well. Some of you should laugh at that.
So what's incredibly ironic is that this story, which so many Christians have used as a proof for the legitimacy and the truth of their religion, is actually a story that, if we really read it carefully, refutes Christianity. Because Gamliel's yardstick — what Gamliel was saying — is if this movement is not true, if this movement is false, it will disappear, it will fall apart. And that's exactly what happened, because within two hundred years, there were no more Jewish followers of Jesus who were Torah-observant Jews, who were monotheists. Within two hundred years, this movement changed 180 degrees. Within 200 years, virtually every follower of Jesus was a Gentile, was a non-Jew. None of them observe the Torah. All of them worship Jesus as God. And things went worse from there. We know that this movement ended up becoming extremely anti-Semitic, persecuting Jews for hundreds and hundreds of years, and rejected its Jewish roots so dramatically that for most of Christian history, followers of Jesus even went so far as to assume that he wasn't Jewish himself. It often comes as a great shock and news to Christians — I can't understand this, but it's true — when they find out Jesus was a Jew.
So let's try to study the sources here more carefully. The book of Matthew, chapter 5, you have in front of you. This is one of the most famous speeches made by Jesus. He says, "Think not that I have come to do away with the Torah or the prophets. Don't think that I've come to abolish the Torah or the prophets. I have not come to destroy but to fulfill." He says, "For I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, not one iota of the Torah will pass away, till all be fulfilled. Whoever therefore shall break one of the least of the commandments and teach men so, he will be called least in the kingdom of heaven. But whoever will do and teach them, he will be called great in the kingdom of heaven." This is not a commercial for antinomianism. This is not a commercial advising people to drop Torah observance. And as a result of this speech, the Baal Shem Tov, and then one of the great rabbis who lived in the middle of the 18th century, wrote that Jesus of Nazareth was a traditional Torah-observant Jew, and so were his followers.
A number of years ago, I was invited to speak at a Catholic conference, a conference of Catholics from all over the world that got together in Vancouver. Spent three days with them, and they all had two questions for me. Everyone had to ask two questions. The first question everyone asked was, "Rabbi, slow back? What's with the shaking?" They were all very, very perplexed. Flatlands shaking. And the second question was, "Rabbi, slow back? What's with these strings?" What are the strings? So I said, "If you want to know what the strings were all about, look in the Gospel of Luke, chapter 8, verse 44." And they gave me a big look. "What are you talking about? Look it up in your Bible. In the New Testament, it says that someone came to Jesus and touched the fringes of his clothing." I said, "Do you think he wore tattered clothing? Couldn't afford clothing that wasn't ripped? He wore these tzitzit." As a matter of fact, the Greek word that's used in that passage for "fringes" is the Greek word that is used in the Targum, the Aramaic translation of the Torah. Same exact word. A couple of years ago, I'm having problems with my eyes; I had to go to the emergency room at St. Mike's. And when I signed in there, they had all these questions for me: my name, my phone number, and they had a question they wanted on my religion. And I was feeling a little bit — I don't know — funny that night. I ended up not doing this, but I had a very, very big temptation to say to the person behind the desk, "You see the guy hanging up on the wall there? Same as him."
The next passage in the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 19, is an amazing interaction. Someone comes up to Jesus: "And behold, came to him and said, 'Good master, what good thing shall I do that I may have eternal life?'" What should I do to make sure I can go to heaven? Now if you ask any Christian today, they'll tell you if you want to go to heaven, one way of going to heaven: you've got to believe in Jesus. That's what it says in John chapter 3, verse 16: "God so loved the world he gave His only begotten Son, so that all who believe in Him will not perish but have eternal life." That's the Christian bottom line. You want to go to heaven? You have to believe in Jesus. Here's someone asked Jesus right to his face, "What do I have to do to make sure I go to heaven?" Jesus gives the same answer any rabbi would have given. He says, "First of all, why do you call me good? There is none good but one, and that is God. And if you want to enter into life, eternal life, keep the mitzvot, keep the commandments." You don't get more Jewish than that.
It's important for us to realize that Jesus didn't only accept what is called the written Torah, the text of the Torah. We know that Judaism is not simply based upon the words of the five books of Moses. We believe as Jews that to a written text, a written Bible, God also gave an oral Bible, an oral Torah, that went along with that. For 2,000 years, Christians have violently attacked this oral Torah, and Christians say, "We follow the laws of God, not the word of men." And the Christian accusation has always been that the Bible is from God. I once saw a bumper sticker of a Christian that said, "The Bible says so, and I believe it, that settles it." But Christians have always said that the Talmud, the oral law, was made up by Jews. We made it up. We can see from the Christian Bible that Jesus didn't only follow the written Torah; he also followed the oral Torah and accepted rabbinic authority. How do we know? There are many examples. I'll just give you two (on your sheets here). But in the book of Mark, chapter 2, and in the book of Matthew, chapter 12, is an interesting story where the rabbis questioned Jesus and asked him, "Why do your followers pick grain on the Sabbath? Why are they picking the heads of the grain on the Sabbath?" Now if Jesus only believed in the written Torah, if Jesus only thought that the five books of Moses came from God, he would have said to the rabbis, "Excuse me, what does it say in the Bible? You can't pick grain on the Sabbath? It's not said anywhere in the Bible." If he didn't believe in the oral Torah — the oral Torah amplifies the written Torah and teaches us that harvesting grain is something that we're not allowed to do — so the fact is that Jesus never questions the rabbis' concern. And he gives the rabbis a very rabbinic answer. He says, "Do you know why my students are picking grain on the Sabbath? He says, 'Don't you know the story that happened with David? When David, King David's men were very, very hungry, they were starving, there was no other food to eat, so they went into the Mishkan, into the tabernacle, and they ate from the showbread, which is not only supposed to eat.'" So Jesus's point is a point that's made in the Talmudic literature, which says in the case of pikuach nefesh, to save your life, you can violate the laws of the Torah. So he doesn't question whether or not his students are doing something wrong; he accepts the question that there is something wrong with picking grain on the Sabbath, which we would only know from the Talmud, from the oral law. And he gives them a rabbinic answer to their question.
We know that in the times of Jesus there was a whole movement of Jews who did not believe in the Talmud, in the oral Torah. Those people were called Sadducees, and because they didn't believe in the oral Torah, they were sad, you see? But what's interesting is that when Jesus tells his followers — when Jesus tells his followers who should we follow, who has authority — in the 23rd chapter of Matthew, Jesus says the following: "The scribes and the Pharisees" — the Pharisees were the teachers of the oral Torah — Jesus says, "The scribes and the Pharisees sit in the seat of Moses. Therefore," he says to his students, "everything that they teach you, you must do and you must follow." Jesus tells his disciples they have to follow everything the Pharisees teach. Now again, if he was someone who rejected the oral Torah, he would have told the students to follow the Sadducees, who rejected the oral Torah.
Some Christians have tried to say, "Okay, as long as Jesus was alive, the law was in effect, the Torah was in effect. But after Jesus died, then the law stopped, the Torah stopped." So if we look at the bottom of the page here, Luke chapter 22, this is after the crucifixion of Jesus and after he's been buried. We're told that the followers, his women followers, also came with him from Galilee, followed after and beheld the sepulcher, they held in his game where he was buried, and how his body was laid out. And they returned and prepared spices and ointments, and rested on the Sabbath day according to the commandment. So these followers of Jesus didn't say, "Okay, now that he's dead, we can just stop keeping the Torah." And we know from the other books of the Christian Bible, from the book of Acts for example, that after the death of Jesus, his followers, his Jewish followers, kept on going to the temple, were offering sacrifices in the temple. And we know that the movement that was started by Jesus, the next leader was his brother James. James led the movement for the next thirty years. And we happen to know something about James. We call him in English he's called "James the Just." In Hebrew, he would have been called "Ya'akov HaTzadik." And why would he be given that title? "Tzadik" is someone who is very intelligent, very careful in observing the Torah. So we see that the Jesus Movement here starts off as Torah-observant, and the leader after the death of Jesus is the brother James, who we know is very Torah-observant.
Now how did all this change? How did all this change so shortly after the death of Jesus? There arose someone named Paul. Paul from the city of Tarsus, a Roman city. Paul never met Jesus, will never met him in person. But Paul claimed to have received a vision of Jesus, and Paul says that Jesus gave him an assignment: he's to be not just any follower, he's to be a leader of the movement. And Paul tries to share his ideas with other Jewish people, but he was very unsuccessful in gaining Jewish converts for the movement. And so Paul, very frustrated, says in the book of Acts, chapter 13, that since the Jewish people are not accepting my message, he says, "I'm going to turn to the Gentiles." And that's what Paul does. He basically leaves Israel, and he starts traveling around Asia Minor, the cities of the ancient Greco-Roman world, and he tries to spread his message, his ideas about Jesus, to all these Gentiles.
It's significant — you should know — that after he receives this revelation, this vision of Jesus, and now he becomes a follower, he doesn't do what you would have thought someone would have done. Because again, he never met Jesus. He never spent five minutes with Jesus. But he knew that there were followers of Jesus in Jerusalem. So the smart thing to have done would have been to go to Jerusalem and meet with James and Peter and the Apostles and find out: "Okay, who was Jesus? What did he teach? What was his message? What was he all about?" Paul doesn't do that. Paul has his own ideas as to what Jesus was about, and he began spreading these ideas throughout the world. And he actually makes many converts, and this leads to the first machloket, the first dispute, the first controversy in Christian history, because the big question now — I said before, there were no Gentiles in this movement; Jesus would only teach Jews — and now Paul is bringing in all these Gentiles. So the big question is: what do we do with these non-Jews? How do these non-Jews become part of our movement? And there was a tremendous amount of advocacy. There were a number of people who were saying, "Look, if they want to join our movement, they have to get circumcised (if they're men), they've got to start keeping the Torah, they gotta convert to Judaism." I mean, if you go up to a buffet in today's Toronto and you're not Jewish and you say, "I want to be a follower of Jesus," you have to convert to Judaism first. So back then, if someone wanted to follow Jesus, they'd have to become Jewish, they'd have to convert. And this was disputed, because Paul didn't want to make these non-Jews keep all the commandments of the Torah. He didn't want to have them get circumcised. He probably was smart enough to realize this is going to put an obstacle in his success of converting many, many Gentiles, if right up front the price of admission is circumcision. That wasn't the big attraction back then.
So what happens is — the book of Acts, listen very carefully — is that this dispute is now mediated. Again, there were those who were saying, "They want to get into this movement? They got to convert, full conversion." Paul is saying, "No, they don't have to do anything." James says the following. James, again the brother of Jesus, a leader of the movement: "Since we have heard that some who went out from us have troubled you with words, unsettling your souls, saying you be circumcised and keep the commandments, keep the Torah; it seemed good to us to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things: that you abstain from things offered to idols, from blood, from things strangled, from sexual immorality." These, by the way, are most of what we call the seven Noahide laws, which are the laws that Judaism believes that non-Jews are required to keep if they're not going to convert to Judaism. And so that was the decision of the council: they don't have to convert to Judaism fully to become part of our movement; they just have to become observant Noahides; they have to follow the seven universal laws given to Adam, to Noah. "If you keep yourselves from these, you will do well." But the thing that we have to realize from this story — we call it in the Talmud, "bava mina" — what we learn from the story is that the Jesus Movement, the Jewish followers of Jesus, there was a voice that was encouraging, that was wanting the demand that these non-Jews get circumcised and convert and keep all of the commandments of the Torah. So what do we see from this story about the Jewish followers of Jesus? And again, this is a decade or so after his death. We see that of course the followers of Jesus, the Jewish followers of Jesus, were Torah-observant. Because if they themselves were not Torah-observant, they were not going to think about imposing it upon non-Jews coming into the movement. So this story is critical because you see here that about 15 years, at least, after the death of Jesus, the Jewish people who followed him, this group that was based in Jerusalem, they themselves were Torah-observant. The only question is: what are we going to do with non-Jews coming into the movement?
Now it's a good thing — and this is the critical part for tonight's talk — is that we know from the Christian Bible that Paul, again Paul is this apostle to the non-Jews, Paul faced very stiff opposition. We don't know that opposition he faced from the general Jewish community. We're not talking about opposition he got from the Jewish Federation or from the board of rabbis. We're talking about opposition that Paul got from the Jewish Christians based in Israel, the original followers of Jesus, what we call the Jerusalem church. So these Jewish followers of Jesus were at odds with Paul for several reasons. One reason was very obvious: he simply is claiming that Jesus appeared to him and that Jesus appointed him a big macher. And they say to themselves, "Why should he be an apostle? We spent three years with Jesus. We walked and talked with him every minute for three years. We know exactly what Jesus taught and what his message was. This Johnny-come-lately who never met Jesus, he's going to be on the same level as us?" So one reason they weren't so crazy about Paul was that his credentials. What are Paul's credentials? But the more important problem with Paul is that what they were hearing from Paul's mouth, the teachings of Paul, contradicted what they had heard from Jesus. And so that's what really got their goat. What really bothered the Jewish Christians, the Jewish believers in Jesus (whether the word "Christian" simply means "Messianist"), would bother these Jewish believers of Jesus was that Paul was teaching people that the Torah was no longer important.
Let's look at Acts chapter 21. Paul is told to follow, and "Paul, they are informed of you that you teach all the Jews which are among the Gentiles to forsake Moses." "Paul, we're hearing about you that you're teaching the Jewish people in the diaspora to forsake Moses." It means not to follow the laws of Moses, saying they should not circumcise their children nor observe the customs. "Paul, that's what we're hearing about you." And so what happens in this chapter is they want Paul to undergo a trial and ordeal to prove that he really is Torah-observant. They want Paul to do something to prove that you're really still one of us. And what do they do? They have Paul sponsor the sacrifices of a number of men that had become Nazirites. We know that the Nazir was someone who didn't cut their hair, they didn't drink wine, and when their period of being a Nazir was over, they had to bring a sacrifice into the temple. Interestingly, one of the sacrifices that a Nazir brought was a sin offering. We'll see why this is significant in a few minutes. "So when the seven days were almost over, the Jews which were of Asia, when they saw him (Paul) in the temple, stirred up all the people and laid hands on him, crying out, 'Men of Israel, help! This is the man that teaches all men everywhere against the people, against the Torah, and against this place. And he brought Greeks into the temple and has polluted this holy place.'" Now why would the Jews in Israel have thought that Paul was not so kosher when it came to the question of Torah observance? Why would they have thought that Paul was soft? That's an easy way of putting it, that's an understatement. Why would they have thought this? Let's just look at a few things that Paul said. You have it on your sheets here. Romans chapter 3, Paul says, "Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law." Meaning what will basically count in terms of your life is whether you have faith, whether you believe, not whether you keep the words of the Torah. Romans chapter 10, Paul says, "For Christ is the end of the Torah, the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes." Paul writes in Galatians chapter 3, he says, "Wherefore the law has become our schoolmaster." He's saying there it's like training wheels on a bicycle. You know, when you're a kid, you can't ride on two wheels, so you got training wheels. That's what Paul is saying: the Torah was our schoolmaster to bring us to the Messiah. That was the whole purpose of the Torah, was to get us to believe in the Messiah, that we may be justified by faith. But after faith has come, we are no longer under the schoolmaster. We get rid of the training wheels. Some other passages you don't have in front of you, but from the Christian Bible, either by Paul or by people that were influenced by Paul: the book of Colossians, chapter 2, it speaks about "blotting out the handwriting of ordinances that were against us." These Torah laws are against us, contrary to us. Torah is contrary to us. And Jesus nailed it to the cross. That's funny. When we read our Torah, King David writes about the Torah, the mitzvot, that they're sweeter than honey, that they're more precious than gold. But Paul writes about them: they were against us, they were contrary to us. In the second book of Corinthians, chapter 3, the Torah is referred to as a "ministry of death, engraved on stone." A ministry of death, engraved on stone. In Hebrews, chapter 8, we're taught that there was an annulling of the commandments due to the weakness and unprofitableness of them.
Now when Paul is accused here of teaching against the Torah, we know what was meant. But why would they say Paul is against "this place"? This place, the temple. So we should know that under Paul, a new concept of what the Messiah was supposed to be developed. Because if we look at the life of Jesus, Jesus basically had one message. If we look at the words of Jesus, and his rebbe (by the way, the teacher of Jesus was John the Baptizer), John the Baptizer had one message: "The kingdom of God is at hand." And if we look at the words of Jesus, that was the thing he said most often. Most often: "The kingdom of God is at hand." That's the kind of thing any Jew would have understood. Because as Jews, we know that basically the whole purpose of the Messianic age is to perfect the world under the kingship of God. We say every day in our prayers. Every Jewish prayer service ends with this declaration that the goal of history is to perfect the world under the kingship of God. Every Jewish prayer service ends by quoting the 14th chapter of the Prophet Zechariah: "Ba'om ha'hu yihyeh Hashem l'melech al kol ha'aretz; bayom ha'hu yihyeh Hashem echad u'shemo echad." One day God is going to be the king of the world, not the Romans, not the Greeks, for God. So when Jesus was saying "the kingdom of God is at hand," when he was saying 2,000 years ago, was that the ruling authorities, the Romans, who were making a travesty of this land and were persecuting our people, their day is very, very short. The Romans will be out of here soon, and soon will be the kingdom of God running this world. That's a very Jewish message. But we know that didn't happen. That Jesus died, and the kingdom of God was not initiated. There was no change in the political status quo. The world did not get any better. And so what happened among the followers of Paul was not just to say, "Okay, one day Jesus will come back and he'll bring the Messianic age." They had to come up with some reason why did Jesus die in the first place. And what the followers of Paul began to teach was that Jesus actually came as a sacrifice. He came as a sacrifice to die for the sins of the world. And it says in the Christian Bible that once Jesus came as this sacrifice, there are no other sacrifices. He is the be-all and the end-all, the once and final sacrifice. So that's why they were saying about Paul: "Paul is teaching against this place." Because Paul is saying that the Temple in Jerusalem is no longer needed; it's useless. But what do we see? That the Jewish followers of Jesus were going to the temple and were bringing sacrifices. And they wanted Paul to prove his credentials. He said, "Paul, those men over there, they are Nazirites; they're going to bring sacrifices. We want you to sponsor those sacrifices, including their sin offerings." So clearly, they didn't believe that Jesus was the once-for-all final sin sacrifice and the temple was no longer necessary.
Now, is there any other evidence that the Jesus Movement initially was Torah-observant? I just quoted you passages from the Christian Bible. And is there any evidence that there was a split between these Torah-observant followers of Jesus and Paul who came later? Let's look at Justin Martyr, who is one of the Church Fathers of the second century. In his "Dialogue with Trypho the Jew," he writes, "There are Jewish Christians who keep the Sabbath, circumcision, observation of the months, and ritual ablutions if anyone has touched anything prohibited by Moses, conduct according to the Torah." So in the second century, Justin Martyr is telling us there are Jewish followers of Jesus who are Torah-observant. He writes it like it's something strange, because in his world that wasn't the case. And we know that the heirs, the heirs to the Jerusalem church, the heirs to the followers of Jesus (who were Jewish, like James and Peter), in the second century were called either the Ebionites or the Nazarenes. And we have writings about these people. St. Irenaeus in the second century writes in his book called "Heresies" (he saw this as a heresy): "Those who were called Ebionites use the Gospel according to Matthew only, and they repudiate the Apostle Paul, maintaining that he was an apostate from the Torah." It's interesting that we have many Christian writings in the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th century which repeat the same chorus. Tertullian and Hippolytus in the 2nd century, Origen in the 3rd century, Jerome and Epiphanius in the 4th century — all testified that the Ebionites opposed Paul as a false prophet and a traitor to the Torah. So St. Irenaeus says that these Ebionites practice circumcision, they persevere in the observance of those customs which are enjoined in the Torah, and are so Judaic in their lifestyle that even they adorn Jerusalem as if it were the house of God.
But we know what happened with the Pauline church, with Paul's movement. They changed the Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday. Ultimately, we know that the church abolished the observance of the Torah. It was considered a crime for a follower of Jesus to become Torah-observant. St. Ignatius, the Bishop of Antioch at the end of the 1st century, wrote the following: he said, "It's absurd to speak of Jesus with the tongue and cherish in the mind a Judaism which has come to an end." We know that Martin Luther, the grandfather of the Protestant Reformation, was so bothered by the book of James (James again the brother of Jesus; James was one of the epistles in the Christian Bible). James was a book that was very much advocating Torah observance instead of saying, as Luther would have said, that the only thing that counts is your faith. James in the book of James writes, "Faith without works is dead." That our observance is dead. So what did Martin Luther want to do with this book of James? He wanted to rip it out of the New Testament. He called it "the strong gospel," "a straw epistle," "it's useless, it's garbage."
Let's move on. The foundation of Judaism, you all know, is monotheism. The declaration of Judaism is "Sh'ma Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad." God is one. God is unique. The one thing that the Jewish Bible says that God hates, God despises, we're told, is idolatry. Idolatry is like a spiritual form of adultery. God says he hates idolatry. And the Jewish Bible, idolatry is defined as the worship of any god that was not known to our ancestors who came out of Egypt and met God at Mount Sinai. We know that none of our ancestors at Mount Sinai heard anything about the belief in a Trinity and a God that's a Trinity. None of our ancestors at Sinai ever told any of their descendants that the God they met at Mount Sinai was a God that had human form. As a matter of fact, we read in this week's Torah portion on Shabbat, and precious by the way, it repeats twice in the same passage. It says, "Don't forget when I appeared to you at Mount Sinai, you only heard a voice; you did not see any form." I don't have any form. We saw that Jesus was pretty clear when someone tried to equate him with being God. Jesus says, "Why do you call me good? Only one is good, and that is God." In your sheets here, on Mark chapter 13, Jesus says, "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away. But of that day and hour knows no man, not even the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son himself" — he referred to himself as the Son. — "but only the Father." He didn't equate himself with God the Father. He says, "I don't know the end; only God the Father does." In the book of John, the Gospel that is the most easily interpreted as being friendly to the idea of a Trinity, it's only one of the four Gospels where you can maybe eke out the idea of a Trinity. Even in the Gospel of John, the 14th chapter, watch what happens: "You have heard how I said to you," Jesus says, "I go away and come again to you. If you love me, you would rejoice because I said I go unto the Father, for the Father is greater than I am." There's no equation between him and God the Father. In John chapter 20, Jesus says to the woman, "Touch me not, for I am not yet ascended to my Father. But go to my brethren and say to them, I ascend to my Father and to your Father, to my God and to your God." It's interesting that Jesus never claims to be God in the Christian Bible. There are, of course, a number of passages which are ambiguous and easily misunderstood. For example, in the Gospels Jesus says, "I and the Father are one." "I am the Father for one." Of course, here the word "one" is the Greek word "hen," which means really "at one." And so in the same gospel, Jesus says that "I and my apostles, my disciples, are one" as well. So in the same way, he wasn't claiming to be of one nature with the apostles; he was saying, "I am one with you, we have a relationship." He said the same thing about his relationship with God. And of course, it's always possible that some words were put into the mouth of Jesus. We don't have any proof that Jesus actually said every word in the Gospels that's reported in his name. The Gospels are written 40, 50, 60, and 70 years minimally after the death of Jesus. It's quite possible that what is quoted in his name are words that are later put into his mouth by people that might be trying to give the impression that he was making the claim of being God.
In any event, we don't have any stories in the Christian Bible, any stories where his followers worship him or pray to him. When he instructs his followers about how to pray, he says, "You want to pray? Pray the same way my skulduggery prayed when he was in second grade in PS 109 in New York City: say 'Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done.'" The Lord's Prayer, you can probably find in our literature. So that's what we have from the record of the Christian Bible.
But how about in historical documents? Irenaeus again, in the second century, in his book of heresies, writes that Cerinthus, a Jewish Christian leader around the year 100, represented Jesus as not having been born of a virgin. He was not prone to this idea that Jesus was an unusual being, but he was the son of Joseph and Mary according to the ordinary course of human generation. And he goes on to say that those who are called Ebionites, agreeing that the world was made by God, and their opinions with respect to the Lord Jesus are similar to those of Cerinthus. So again, the Ebionites did not believe that Jesus was God.
It's unlikely, by the way, that Paul would have taught that Jesus was actually God in the flesh. However, Paul probably had an elevated view of who Jesus was, maybe some special being, maybe even quasi-angelic. And because of the way that Paul spoke about Jesus, it was very, very possible that the non-Jews, the Gentiles who were Paul's students, would have misunderstood his words and have assumed that he was referring to Jesus as God. Why so? Let's read on. Like Jesus, many of the myths of the pagan god-man is of a virgin mother. In Asia Minor, Adad has his mother as the Virgin. In Syria, Dionysus' virgin mother is Palmyra. In Alexandria, Ion is born of the Virgin Kore. In Greece, Semele Isis is born of the mortal virgin Semele, who wishes to see Zeus in all his glory and is mysteriously impregnated by one of his bolts of lightning. In the ancient pagan Greek Hellenistic world, the ideas of god-men were very, very common. And so if Paul spoke about Jesus as being somewhat more than a human being, very easy for his non-Jewish disciples to assume, "Well, Jesus must be one of these god-men as well." As Winston Bowsher writes in his book "Judaism in the Christian Predicament": "The belief that Jesus was conceived by impregnation from the deity is paralleled by similar claims in other religious mythologies. In ancient Egypt, the priests proclaimed the Queen Petaish (that's her name) was the offspring of the god Amon and a mortal mother. One of the founders of Rome, Romulus, was also said to have been born of a virgin, being a child of a Vestal priestess and the god Mars." We know that many of the practices of Christianity were very, very similar to pagan practices of the ancient world. For example, the Eucharist, where you actually eat bread and drink wine which symbolizes the blood and body of the Savior. It's hard to imagine any Jew 2,000 years ago at a Passover Seder saying, "Yes, this matzo is the actual..."
Body of Jesus, and this wine I'm drinking is His blood, and that's what Catholic Church believes. The Catholic Church believes, through the miracle of transubstantiation, that the wine actually becomes the blood of Jesus and the matzah actually becomes His body. It took the Protestant Reformation to say it's only symbolic. Christmas, Easter, Halloween – these are all holidays where Christianity was very easily disposed toward co-opting the local pagan practices of the people they were trying to influence. If you're familiar with the religion today in the world called Santeria, it's a combination of Voodoo and Roman Catholicism. But when they're trying to influence the followers of Voodoo, rather than say, "You've got to get rid of your Voodoo," they say, "You can keep your Voodoo; we'll just amalgamate these Christian beliefs onto it." In Africa today, many of the Christians have incorporated, into traditional Christianity, traditional African animistic family belief systems. So this has always been the success formula of Christianity: we're going to basically conquer the world, not by saying you've got to get rid of everything you have, will somehow make a chilling out of what you have. And with Christianity finally, not only as we saw tonight, et did the emerging Christian religion through the influence of poll reject all of the most important Jewish beliefs – the unity of God, the importance of Torah observance – but the nascent Christian movement became very, very hostile to the Jewish people themselves.
We see that the Gospels escalate the enemies of Jesus from the Sadducees initially, then it becomes the Sadducees plus the scribes and the Pharisees and the high priests, and finally when you get to the book of John, it's "the Jews" generically – the Jews – these are the enemies of Jesus. We know that the passion narratives in the Christian Bible are written explicitly to shift the blame of the death of Jesus away from the Romans and onto the Jewish people. An amazing example is that every June 25th, the Ethiopian church commemorates the sainthood of Pontius Pilate, who was the procurator of Jerusalem under the row she was responsible for crucifying Jesus. He becomes a saint in the Ethiopian Church. The Jews are constantly being blamed for the death of Jesus.
Let's look at the Christian Bible: 2nd Corinthians, chapter 13 – chapter 13, verse 15: "We are not like Moses, who would put a veil over his face to keep the Israelites from gazing at it while the radiance was fading away. But their minds – the minds of the Jewish people – were blinded. For until this day the same veil remains unlifted in their reading of the Old Testament." When the Jews read their Bible, they are blinded to the truth; they have a veil that covers their eyes because the veil is taken away in Christ. But even to this day, when Moses is read, when the Book of Moses is read, a veil lies over their art. The Jewish people are spiritually blind. And this is a very popular teaching in Christianity because they've been very bothered by why the Jewish people didn't accept Jesus. How do you explain the fact that the Jewish people, who were the only people in the world 2,000 years ago who even knew what the concept of the Messiah was, they didn't believe in Jesus, and all the pagans of the world – who would never even heard the word Messiah – they became following to sign the dotted line very quickly? So why didn't the experts believe in it? So the answer of the church is, say, well, they're blinded by the devil.
In 1st Thessalonians 2, we have the following assessment of Jewish people: "The Jews who killed both the Lord Jesus and their own prophets have persecuted us, and they do not please God" – not a few Jews – "the Jews do not at least God and are contrary to all men." You want a nice fat generalization, a sweeping generalization: the Jews are not pleasing to God, the Jews are hostile to all men. Today we would call that anti-semitic. John chapter 8, for the Gospel of John – this is Jesus speaking, by the way – again, I would question whether He said this; this could have been a speech put into His mouth – but they have Jesus saying, "You are of your father the devil. You Jews are of your father the devil, and the desires of your father you want to do. He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own resources, for he is a liar and the father of it."
What's incredible is that during the Middle Ages, Jews would be accused of doing things like desecrating the host. That was the accusation that the Jewish people would break into Christian churches at night, under cover of darkness, steal the communion wafers. If you just see these old rabbis doing this: they would break into the churches, steal the kingdom wafers – not to keep them because they want greed – they would take these crackers, they would bring them back into the synagogues, they take out seal knives, and they would SiC these knives into these little communion wafers to torture Jesus over and over and over again. Again, this is the Middle Ages, when the Catholic Church believed that this piece of matzah was actually the body of Jesus, and so that the accusation of the Jews were desecrating the host was the accusation that we were taking this little piece of matzah and we were torturing it over and over and over again – that's how much we hate Jesus. But think about this for a second: in order for this not to be totally insane, they had to believe – they had to believe that we believed it was the body of Jesus, because it was just a piece of matzah. So why break into a church and stealing and stick by in the synagogue? So the whole accusation only makes sense if, in the eyes of the Christian Church, they thought that we really did believe it was Jesus and we're rejecting Him. Now who else can be so evil but the devil – to know the truth and to reject it? That's been the claim of the church all along: either we were blinded by the devil, or we must be the devil, because of the Jews know the truth and we rejected it. No one can be so evil to know the truth – you rejected as the devil.
In the second century, the Epistle of Barnabas develops what is called the idea of the Jewish people losing their covenant with God – the development of what we call replacement theology – that the church now becomes the new Israel, the Jews are basically finished in history. Justin Martyr, in his second century dialogue with Truffaut, writes the following – so on your sheets here: "The Rite of circumcision was given. Circumcision was given for what? As a sign that you should be separated from other nations and from us Christians, and that you alone should rightly suffer the things you suffer now, and that your land should be desolate and your cities burned with fire, and that foreigners should eat up the fruits before your face, and none of you go up to Jerusalem." This is the Christian movement not too long after Jesus – second century – and you can see how much they love the Jewish people here.
St. John Chrysostom in the fourth century, in his homilies against the Jews – he was known, by the way, as the greatest preacher of his day – he says: "The Jews sacrificed their children to Satan. They are worse than wild beasts. The synagogue is a brothel, den of scoundrels, a temple of demons devoted to idolatrous cults, a criminal Assembly of Jews, a place of meeting for the assassins of Christ, a house of ill Fame, a drilling of iniquity, of Gulf and abyss of perdition. The Jews have fallen into a condition lower than the vilest animal. Debauchery and drunkenness have brought them to the level of the lusty goat and the pig. I hate the Jews because they violate the Torah. I hate the synagogue because it has the law and the prophets. It is a duty of all Christians to hate the Jews." I wonder what he really thinks. We know that in the Middle Ages – this again was only in the fourth century, this is someone talking a little bit not nice – but we know that talk escalates. So by the Middle Ages, all this hate speech leads to Crusades, burning of the Talmud, forests gather ization of Jews, forcing Jews to wear distinctive clothing, forcing Jews to listen to Christian clergy give speeches in the synagogues, forced conversions of Jews, torture of Jews, murder of Jews, the Inquisition. Martin Luther writes in the 16th century: "First, their synagogues should be set on fire. Secondly, their homes should likewise be broken down and destroyed. Thirdly, they should be deprived of their prayer books and on words. Fourthly, their rabbis must prohibited under the threat of death to teach anymore. If this advice of mine does not suit you, then find a better one that you and we may be free of this insufferable devilish burden – the Jews." You can see from this very short list of examples that after 2,000 years of poisoning the minds of Christendom, we could have a Holocaust in the 20th century. With a leadership of both the Catholic Church and the Protestant churches – leadership – there were individuals who tried to save Jews, but the church leaders during the Holocaust were either collaborating with the Nazi war efforts or remained totally silent.
Let's conclude. According to the Jewish Kabbalistic teachings, the tsar teaches us that in the six hundredth year of the six thousand year, the gates of wisdom on high and the Wellsprings of lower wisdom will be opened. The Zohar predicts, already two thousand years ago, that in the middle of the nineteenth century – the year 1840, to be exact – this is going to be a revolution of knowledge in the world. That lets coincide, by the way, with both the Industrial Revolution and the Scientific Revolution. But going back to the 1800s, something new happened in the Christian world. You should realize that for most of Christian history, the individual Christian layperson was not encouraged to become a scholar. The Catholic Church actually forbade lay people from even reading the Bible. When the Bible was first translated from the vernacular into the vernacular, the Catholic Church burn the people who did the translation at the stake. One of the people was already dead; they dug up his grave and then burnt up at the stake. But starting with the 1840s, there's a revolution of openness, of thinking, of exploring, of researching in the world. And what happened starting then, but escalating now into the 20th and 21st centuries, is that Christians have become very open to studying the roots of their faith. This is a question it was not asked 400 years ago; it wasn't asked 1,400 years ago: Who really was Jesus? What are the beginnings of the Christian movement? How did things get started 2,000 years ago? These are the questions that today Christians are very, very drawn to, fascinated by, and they're studying the history of the church.
You should know that there aren't any rabbis that are going after the Christians in the world today encouraging them to do this. There's no movement of Jewish teachers and rabbis that are trying to encourage this investigation. Christians are doing this all on their own. And for the first time in history, Christians have been trying to read the Bible not simply as a tool that is used to prove the truth of their beliefs, but trying to read the Bible to see: what does the Bible actually teach? What does the Bible actually say? And I believe that this process of study, studying the Bible, of investigation, of historical investigation, will ultimately lead to the unraveling of Christianity. Because I believe that Christianity contains within it the seeds for its own destruction. Why is that? Because I believe that Christianity went far off course from its original starting point. And this is a realization that not only am I recognizing, but growing numbers of Christians in the world today are recognizing the same thing.
I can only tell you this from my personal experience, where I don't have a shingle up advertising that if you're a non-Jew and you're dissatisfied with your religion, get in touch with me. And yet I get phone calls and emails from across the world today. With the internet, people can write to me from South America, from India. I get letters from pastors, from people who have been serious Christians for twenty, thirty years, saying to me two things. Number one: "I can't believe that that person from Nazareth was God. I cannot bring myself to worship a human being." There's a recognition that something is very, very problematic with the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation, with the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. And so that's why we have today many, many books being written by serious Christians. One came out not too long ago called "The Trinity Doctrine Error: Christianity's Self-Inflicted Wound." Again, not written by rabbis, written by serious, serious Christians who, studying them on their own, have come to realize: "We should not be here. That's not what Jesus taught. That's not how a movement got started. We were not supposed to worship a human being; we're supposed to only worship God." And how I'm coming to tears sometimes when I'm being sent emails from Christians who were crying to me and you're saying, "I only want to worship Hashem; it's all I want to do." And then Christians who are realizing that the historical Christian antipathy to the Torah is just wrong.
A number of years ago, I got a call – priest here in Toronto, a priest on a cloistered monastery, not a regular priest that goes out into the community; he's on a small monastery up by Sheppard in the 401. They spend the whole day meditating and praying; that's all they do. He calls me up, he says he wants to convert to Judaism. See why? He says, "I won't tell you over the phone; you have to come here and meet with me." So I drive over to the monastery, meet with this fellow. He says to me: "You know, rabbis go back. I've been here many years, the past 15 years. One of the things we do on this monastery – we say the entire Book of Psalms every day. We read all 150 Psalms every day. Got nothing to do but rate or pray all day long; we could do it." He says to me: "I've been reading this book now every day for the last 15 years." He says to me: "Rabbi skull God – you know the longest chapter in this book?" I said, "Yes, 119th chapter." He says, "You're right." He says, "You know it's the longest chapter in the Bible? It has 176 verses." He says, "You know what the topic of this chapter is? You know what this chapter is all about? The longest chapter in all Bible – it's about the Torah. It's about the midst vote. It's about God's commandments." He's assuming you know what it says here in this chapter. It says that the most precious thing in the world – they're sweeter than honey, they were precious than gold – there's nothing more important to something we were special in the whole world than God's commandments. He says to me: "I'm reading this chapter every day for the past 15 years. I finally woke up as it theyself – if this stuff is so beautiful and so wonderful, how can I'm not doing it?" And so what do we have in the world today?
We have in the world today a tremendous interest among Christians to try to go back in time. We want to try to go back to the earliest days of the Jesus Movement, the earliest days. We want to know: what was like hanging out with Jesus? Well, they kept the Torah; they were pure monotheists. And so we see in the world today an incredible revolution of many, many different Christian groups. The Hebrew Christian movement and the Messianic Jewish woman's attic part of it. But you should know: if you go to any Jews for Jesus synagogue in the world today – what they call Messianic synagogues – at least half of the people are not Jewish. And if you want to know why they're there, one of the reasons they are there is because they feel that this Messianic Jewish congregation is much closer to the way it would have been in the times of Jesus than the local Baptist Church down the street. They're going there because they want authenticity; they want the real thing. They don't want some later Hellenistic pagan distortion of what Jesus really taught.
We have today in the world the Jewish roots movement or with called the Hebrew roots movement. We have the Christian restorationist movement. We have the effort Michael the Nazarene movement. All of these neo heavy night movements – all these movements are dozens of them, dozens of them – that are trying to turn back the clock and try to discover what was going on 2,000 years ago. The Bible ultimately tells us what will happen at the end. The Bible tells us at the end: ten people from every nation of the world libretto hold of a Jew, and they will say, "So that you – we want to follow you because we've heard that God is with you." And so my motto – these ropes already hundreds of years ago – that Christianity serves a very important purpose in this world, because it prepares the world for the ultimate truth. Maimonides wrote that the spread of Christianity – spread of Jewish ideas to the far-flung corners of the world, where pagans and Gentiles who would have never heard of the Torah, who would have never heard of the idea of a side – are finding out about these Jewish topics, these Jewish concepts, through the spread of Christianity. And so if we look at the spread of Christianity over the past 2,000 years, it's as if a giant Torah – a screw has been turning – a spring isn't turning, it's been turning and it's been turning for 2,000 years, it's been winding up and winding up and winding up as the Christian Church grew. But we know that when this spring is sprung, it's twisted at the end; it's going to spring back to its original state. And I believe that's where we're heading. I believe that more and more and more Christians are returning to the roots of their faith, which will either lead them to becoming observant than a Noah.
Noah hides the Noahide movement probably didn't exist thirty years ago. Now there are thousands and thousands of Nainoa – former Christians who want to live according to the seven universal laws that God gave the non-Jewish world to follow. This is an explosion happening because of this explosion we're talking about here tonight. And then is one nullified leader once told me: "Rabbi Scott, we lose our best kids to this kite." So many of these non-Jews is in all Heinemann's are converting to Judaism. But things are brewing, things are changing. And I believe it is a Jewish community – it's going to fall out our shoulders very soon to be able to answer the questions of these people. Because pretty soon, I assure you, your friends, your neighbors, maybe some of your relatives are going to turn to you and say, "We want to find out. We want to know. We want to know the truth. We want to know the truth." I pray that this will come very quickly in our days. We should see the coming of Messiah and the restoration of the kingdom of God. And I bless all of you that you should wonderful ambassadors for God's truth. You.