I've only given this teaching once in 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21,
22, 23, 24, 14 years.
And so I really want to get this up on YouTube.
And since you haven't heard it before, I don't think anybody has, and then I've
also added to it.
And what I'm calling this is how the church became divorced from its Hebraic
roots.
And basically that process happened between A.D.
70, when Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans, which is called the First Jewish
Revolt, and A.D.
135, which was the culmination of the...
Some call it the second... generally it's called the Second Jewish Revolt.
Some historians will call it the Third Jewish Revolt, because there was another,
a small one in there, in the interim.
But it was a revolt that the Romans had to come in with their legions and put it
down, where the Jews were trying to throw off the shackles of Roman domination over
the land of Israel, which became known as Palestine.
But at that time it was Judea and the other Roman provinces.
And so today we're going to talk a lot... there's going to be a lot of history.
I'm a history professor today, and I do have part of this up on the
website, but I have been updating this teaching, because I haven't updated it in
probably 10 years, and because I've been busy doing a lot of other things.
And so what you find on the website may not...
it's not going to be... it desperately needs to be updated.
So anyway, sit back and enjoy, I hope.
And I want to give you some history of how the church, the mainstream Christian
church, got to where it is today, by looking at how it jumped the track and
got off in other directions.
So, again, how the church became divorced from its Hebraic roots.
And I question or hesitate using the word church.
I understand that it's a... that word is a word that's from the English, goes back to
the German, Kirche, or Kirche, depending on how you... whether it's a
hard or soft ch, and either way in German.
And that goes back to Circe, which is the... one of the descendants of Zeus,
or Apollo, the sun god.
And that's where we get the word circle, which is the shape of the sun,
and circumference, and circus.
I understand the originations of these words.
I'm a word guy, and I do my research, and I do study in linguistics.
But I know... so I know some people might struggle over the word church.
For those people, we can use the word kahal, which is the Hebrew word for
congregation, or kahilot, which is the plural.
But whatever you want to call it, please hear what I have to say without
getting hung up over the terminologies, because we are... we're trying to
communicate in ways that people understand.
So I'd like to start out by saying, and I don't think this comes as much of a
surprise to a lot of people, but what is called Christianity today, what I call
mainstream Christianity, really is very dissimilar, if not outright antagonistic,
to a very large degree, to the religion of the apostles of the first century.
Now, it wouldn't be antagonistic with regard to the basic gospel message,
the message of who Yeshua, Jesus Christ, is.
But with regard to a lot of other things, it's really, on the surface at least,
antagonistic.
And I don't want to... I'm not going to turn this into a... this is not going to
be a negative rant against the church, or any of that.
So before you turn this video off, or start throwing things at your computer
screen, or whatever, I'm not going to go there.
There's plenty of other people that do that, and you can watch videos that talk
about that.
That's not the point of it.
But I needed to mention this, because over the last 2,000... almost 2,000... 1,900
years, things have evolved.
And we could also say that Judaism, the rabbinic Judaism of the land of
Israel, and of the synagogues around the world, is not the same Judaism of the 1st
century.
I mean, at that time, they had a temple, and a sacrificial system, and a
priesthood.
That was the Sadducees.
And things... they don't have that anymore.
So that religion has evolved, and changed into something that it is very different
from today, than what it was in the 1st century.
We'll talk about that a little bit.
So, what the Church teaches today, and what the Church looks like,
is very different.
There are similarities, but it largely is very different than what the Apostolic 1st
century, what we call primitive Christianity, was like in the 1st century,
based on what we read in the Book of Acts, and in the Apostolic writings.
Now, it's interesting that both Stephen and Paul... Stephen, the first martyr
after Yeshua of that period, and then the Apostle Paul...
in fact, most of the Book of Acts, about three-fourths of the... I think
about three-fourths...
there's 28 chapters in the Book of Acts, and I believe all but about seven chapters
in that book, are dealing... so about 21 chapters are dealing with either the false
accusation against the Apostle Paul, or 1st Stephen, and the false accusation
against the Apostle Paul, that it was asserted that they were changing the
Torah, and getting away from the Law of Moses.
That's why Stephen was stoned.
That's why Paul was arrested when he came back to Jerusalem.
And then he stood up in courts of law and said, no, I haven't changed this.
No, I haven't.
And he tried to tell the people that.
Not the believers, but the Jewish people.
And that's why they... he was arrested, because he was about to cause a civil
disturbance.
Not him, but because of what people believed that he was teaching against the
Temple, that is the Jews of Jerusalem.
So he was arrested, and eventually gave his life for it.
So the very thing that Paul was...
and Stephen was slanderously... was reported about him, that he came to change
the Temple, and change the laws, and the Torah, is the very thing that the
church believes about... I'm the mainstream Christian church believes that
Paul actually did.
That he actually came to change the law.
That he made... he, you know, it was nailed to the cross, and they caught a lot
of passages from Paul.
Nailed to the cross.
We're not under the law.
We're under grace now.
Done away with.
And all those passages that you've heard.
So that's the first thing I want to... the point I want to make.
So the Christian church has veered away, and literally gone off in an opposite
direction, believing what Paul came to... actually Stephen and Paul gave them their
lives for.
They believe the opposite.
And that's a whole other discussion.
I'm not... I just want to bring that out.
That happens to be the facts.
It may not be received by some people who teach these things, it is the facts when
you look at it.
In fact, can you... Dr. Joe, can you bring my pack up here?
I didn't... I thought I had all my stuff up here.
No, my pack.
It's underneath the chair.
Thank you.
There's something in here.
I got a little show and tell.
And I meant to... you know, this is how it... where is it?
It's in here somewhere.
I hope I put it in.
I guess you're just going to have to imagine.
I was certain I stuck those things in here.
I had some glasses that I was going to put on.
I got them at the drugstore.
They're silly glasses.
Oh well.
They're kid glasses, and they're rose colored.
They're like orange or pink, and then they have pink frames.
And they're just obviously... they're just goofy things.
And I was going to put those on.
Just imagine I'm wearing them.
I would say this is how a lot of people look at the Bible.
To these glasses.
These are the glasses of their church, the glasses of their denomination,
the glasses of their religious tradition.
And that's how they're viewing the Bible.
We've all done that, and we all probably still do that to one degree or another.
And we got to take these glasses off and read what the Bible really says.
And read it in its context.
Linguistic context, cultural context, and that means we got to learn what these
things...
historical context, and the context of... from the viewpoint of the writer,
what they're writing.
There's a lot to it.
And try to get back into that mentality and that... and that means you've got to
be a student of history.
You need to be a student of linguistics.
You can't just take a verse out and apply it in our 21st century, necessarily,
and expect to come up with the truth.
Okay, I'm making some broad statements there.
I wish I could elucidate.
I can't.
Otherwise, we'll never get this teaching done.
But we've got to go back.
We've got to... I like it like historical archaeologists.
We've got to, you know, in Israel or in the Middle East or a lot of places,
there's... when you find this mound of rubble called a tell, especially if it's
maybe a few thousand years old, and you've got one civilization on
another, on another, on another, each one throwing their garbage out or
being destroyed, and then they build another one, and on top of the ruins of
that one, and it goes...
and you dig down, and you might... you can go to Jerusalem, and you can dig down
through certain things and... or see where there's... I remember one place I looked
at, there was all these layers that went clear back to the time of Melchizedek and
Abraham.
And there are different walls that were built there in... it wasn't too far from
the the Pool of Shalom, Shiliach in Hebrew, as you're walking around the south
side of the Temple Mount there, between the Kidron, the Valley of Hinnom
and over toward the City of David.
Anyway, and there's all these layers, and we want to get down to the bottom
layer, back to the Book of Acts, but the Church has just gotten way off of
that.
So, this is what we want to talk about, and the period of time between AD 70 and
35, as I'm about to show you, and again, this is not a comprehensive study.
We could... there are multiple volumes and many things that could be said and
written.
I'm giving you kind of an overview, a summary, just a short history lesson of
what happened during this period of time, because it was during this period of time
is when the Church pretty much emerged, toward the middle of the second century,
a very Gentile, non-Torah situation.
And again, I'm speaking broadly.
There were many that still followed the Torah, but this is not where most of the
Church Fathers were at, if you read their writings.
So, let me just disclose this first.
We are starting from the premise that the Apostles were following Yeshua,
and they were all Torah obedient.
And so, this is our premise.
You have to understand that that's where I'm coming from.
The primitive Church, the New Testament Church, the Apostolic Church, was
primarily Jewish, at least initially.
And the Apostles, the Shelechim, the sent ones, were all adhered to the
Torah law of Moses.
But as the Church expanded throughout the missionary efforts of Paul and the other
Apostles, more and more Goyim, or Gentiles, or non-Jews, or Greeks,
were brought into the Church.
And little by little, as the Apostles died off, most of them were dead.
Well, we don't know when all of them died.
Some of them went to India and Africa.
But many of them were dead by the 60s or the 70s.
John, the Revelator, was the last one that we know of who died.
And most historians believe he died in the middle, early to mid 90s.
He was a very old man when he died.
And things were already beginning to go askew by that time.
But by the time he was dead, things really started to go down the hill quickly.
And we'll talk about that.
But we assume, we're going to take the position that the Apostles were all Torah
obedient.
There are numerous scriptures that talk about that.
And we'll talk about why some people don't believe that to be the case.
We'll touch that, tag that base very briefly.
But little by little, as the Gentiles came into the Church, they brought their pagan
traditions, and they brought their Greek philosophies.
And little by little, they brought what we might call anti-Semitic or anti-Jewish
philosophies, which then literally turned into anti-Gnomenism, or a dislike,
if not hatred, eventually, for anything Jewish, including the Torah.
Well, it's kind of interesting, because along with that came the idea of
salvation by grace.
That is not salvation by grace.
That is a true concept.
I mean, Ephesians 2, 6th grade, salvation is by grace through faith.
But they came up with the idea of salvation versus grace.
I mean, law versus grace.
Salvation is by grace, and grace is antithetical to the concept of law.
And that was a concept that was championed by a church heretic by the name of
Marcian.
And he was very influential in the middle, first, third, and middle of the second
century.
Marcian of Sinope, a city up in Asia Minor, up in modern-day Turkey.
And he spread his ideas.
He was wealthy, and he spread his ideas all over the world, or all over that area.
And eventually, he was excommunicated from the church as a heretic.
But his ideas continued to live on.
And we don't have his writings, but we can read what the church fathers
wrote against him.
Irenaeus, I believe it was Irenaeus, has a lot to say against... he wrote a
whole series of writings against Marcian.
Now, I read a bunch of Irenaeus.
I have all those writings in my library.
And interestingly, they were not primarily... and this is just kind of an
aside.
Marcian, though he championed the idea of grace versus law, he is not the one that
originated it, and he's not the one that championed it.
Look, some of the other church fathers who are considered to be orthodox,
they championed that concept.
It wasn't just Marcian.
Marcian's been given a bad rap by some in that regard.
If you go read what was written about him, the main problem that the church fathers
had with Marcian is that he had some weird ideas, and I'm not going to get into it,
but he had some weird ideas about the deity of Yeshua, and he rejected the
concept of the Godhead, and he rejected the Old Testament, and he rejected most of
the New Testament, except the writings of Paul, and I think it was the Gospel of
Luke.
I mean, he accepted simply all the writings of Paul, and I believe it was the
Gospel of Luke.
He didn't just come up with that idea.
He took it and ran with it as far as grace versus law.
But the other, and I have their quotes.
I'm not going to get into this.
I'm going to do another teaching on that one.
But many of the other ones taught that you cannot have grace and also be following
the Torah.
And that's not what the Bible teaches.
In fact, now let's get back to our talk.
That was just a little aside there.
Paul teaches this in the Book of Romans.
He says, does we, in fact, several, about three times, he says, do we make,
doesn't teach that.
He counters that concept, which was already beginning to raise its head in
Paul's time when he wrote the Book of Romans in the mid, around 56 AD or so.
He says, do we make the Torah, the law, void by grace?
God forbid, he says, about three different times.
So he is trying to come against or combat that idea that law and grace are mutually
exclusive.
And yet this is exactly what the church began to teach in the second century.
And Marcion really championed and pushed that forward.
And it has remained down to our day.
The heresy of Marcion, as well as the heresy of the early, of the church
followers that believe that, has come down to the day, to this day.
And so let me ask you this, and to prove my point, how many of you heard people
say, we're under grace, we're not under the law anymore?
Okay, a bunch of hands went up.
How many of you, how many of you, when you began to explore the Hebrew roots
and the Torah, and people say, you're going, you've fallen from grace,
and you're going under the Torah, and they're like, you know, these two
things are mutually exclusive.
How many of you encountered that?
Again, a bunch of hands go up.
So this idea, which is a heresy, which Marcion got kicked out of church
for, but he wasn't kicked out of the church primarily for that heresy,
because the church fathers taught that.
He got kicked out because he did not believe in the incarnation of Yeshua.
He did not believe in the God of the Old Testament, as we understand it,
the God of the Tanakh.
He had some weird quasi-gnostic beliefs.
That's why he was excommunicated, if you read from, based on my research.
You gotta go back and read the primary, don't just read what people write about.
I have the 10 volume set of the anti-Nicene church fathers in my library.
I read what they wrote directly, translated from the Greek, not what
somebody says that they, you know, wrote.
I like to go back to the original sources, as a good researcher should do.
Okay, so Paul was disputing that idea, and so I wanted to lay that, and so
unfortunately, we must, as we go back and try to understand what Paul was teaching,
and what was happening in the, between, you know, in the first century
and into the second century, we have to understand several things.
We have to understand the cultural context of the times, like I said before,
to understand the rise of antinomianism, or anti-Semitic, or anti-Jewish,
or anti-Torah theologies in the early, let's just say the second century church.
Now you have to understand, again, to understand the culture.
Very few people owned Bibles in those days.
I mean, in this room alone, there's probably a few hundred Bibles.
I mean, there's one under every chair, and you all have your own copies,
and some of you have them on your, you know, your iPads, and on your
computers, and you know, I don't know how many versions I have just on my smartphone
alone.
We got Bibles coming out of our ears, but in those days, very few people read.
Illiteracy was very high, and it was very expensive to have a Bible.
This is, you know, 1500 years before the printing press was invented.
They had to be hand copied, and you had to have Torah scrolls.
A Torah scroll today, a new one cost about 80 grand.
A used one, it's in relatively good condition, might be eight to twelve
thousand dollars.
I can't afford that.
Do you think people in those days could afford that, when they were mostly
peasants?
Okay, so people didn't have Bibles that they could go and read.
They relied on their teachers, Bible teachers, to teach them.
And how many of the Bible teachers had, you know, Torah, the complete Torah
scroll?
All of them.
I mean, they had a whole room full of Torah scrolls for the Tanakh, the Old
Testament.
And then they had to have all the papyri, the codexes in book form of the written
papyrus of the New Testament, of the testimony of Yeshua.
That was probably something that wasn't real common.
So you had teachers teaching about things that they maybe didn't have access to the
original sources.
And then you had people believing that they couldn't go check it out.
Or if they did have it, they couldn't read.
So do you see it would be very easy for heresies to be spread?
You got to understand the culture.
You can't, we can't look at it from our culture, where everybody can read and
everybody has a Bible.
Okay, this is very, very, so it would be very easy for false concepts to gain
traction in the minds of men through unscrupulous ignorant or misguided
teachers who had a great influence over many people.
So keep all these concepts in your mind as we go forward.
And I'm getting ready to explore what happened between 70 AD and 135.
Now let me throw another concept at you.
How many of you have heard the term Judaizer or Judaizing?
How many of you have been accused of Judaizing?
Yeah, the moment you look at, you even talk about the Sabbath or talk about not
eating swine, well you're Judaizing.
Do you realize that most people don't even know what that concept means and have no
clue about it?
And I'm giving you this information so A, you can lovingly instruct your people that
you come into contact with, and B, you can have a better understanding of it
yourself and not feel less because somebody throws this, shoots this bullet
at you.
You know this...
Look, I mean, most people in the Christian, mainstream Christian church
have a gun with about two bullets in it, maybe three.
They have the bullet of, you're going under the law.
The bullet of, you're, you are a Judaizer.
That's bullet number two.
Bullet number three is, well, Jesus fulfilled the law.
Bullet number four is, you know, we're not under grace, salvation,
under law, or under works, we're under grace.
Most of them only have one or two bullets, but they, but they'll shoot this verbal
bullet at you as if that's supposed to stop every argument that this one bullet
is supposed to just, you're supposed to shut your brain down, and, and it's
supposed to end the argument, stop the discretion, and they've just trumped you
with this one bullet that can literally just, just stop everything.
It's like the magic bullet.
You remember the magic bullet theory?
Anyway, okay, that's another thing altogether.
Anyway, it's kind of, this is the magic bullet theory in Christianity.
And, and yet, these people that use these, they're like drive-by shooters.
You, you know, they drive by and they fire their gun at you, and then they drive off,
and that's, that's just supposed to leave you just like speechless.
The problem is, they don't know what the words mean.
They don't know who said them.
They don't know where the scriptures are that even use these words.
They don't know what the context is.
But they've picked up these, these mantras, these jargons, these,
these, these words in the church they've been in, and that's all they know.
It's really very sad.
So we expect you to be good Bereans, to see if these things are so,
and to prove all things and hold fast to that which is good, and then lovingly
instruct your, your people that you, that use these things, and maybe at least
give them some, some things to think about in a loving way.
So let's take a look at this one magic bullet that people use.
It's called Judaizing.
This is a term in the mainstream church, and as, as the mainstream church
understands it today, it isn't found anywhere in the Bible, okay?
However, however, church historians and Bible teachers have applied this term
retrospectively to those in the primitive Christian church, as well as to modern
saints who advocated adherence to the Torah.
So even though that term specifically was not used in the New Testament,
but now that term has taken on a meaning at applying to people, including the
Apostle Paul, who said, I have been obedient to the Torah in the state court
of law, and I haven't violated one, a point of it.
He said that in two courts of law there when he was on trial toward the end of the
book of Acts.
And so this is, like I said, this, this is ironic that the, that the people
nowadays look at Judaizing as obeying the Torah.
When Paul advocated Torah obedience to the believers in Rome, you read the book of
Romans, he's advocating it.
Do we make the law void?
By grace, God forbid, no, we establish the law.
It is holy, just and good.
It is spiritual.
I would not have known what sin was except it were for the Torah.
We can pull lots of quotes from Romans alone.
So it's ironic that they would apply Judaizing, the modern believers in
mainstream Christianity, would apply the concept of Judaizing to people who want to
keep the Sabbath or whatever, when Paul taught himself that to the, to both Jews
and Gentiles, the Torah was a good thing.
Now this has led many, this has led to many, much confusion about the Apostle
Paul.
And, and some Bible teachers believe that he was conflicted in his beliefs,
that he was both advocating the Torah and also dissing the Torah, trying to throw it
under the bus.
Well, that doesn't make sense.
I mean, if Paul was inspired by the Holy Spirit, the Ruach HaKodesh, how could this
be that this Apostle who was taught by Yeshua himself could be speaking out of
his mouth, two sides of his mouth at the same time?
I've heard some theologians say, well, Paul, you know, started out being,
you know, a Pharisee kind of a person, and it gradually moved away from it.
Well, that's very interesting, because in the book of Romans,
he advocates the Torah.
And many people will then use the book of Galatians and pull quotes out of there,
and collages and some of these, as proof that Paul was, was, you know,
it's nailed to the cross and done away with and under the law.
And, and he'll use those passages in, for example, in Galatians and in collages,
mostly Galatians, to try to prove that Paul was, was advocating the nullification
of the abrogation of the Torah.
But what's amazing is both of those books were written in the same year,
55, 56 AD.
So this does not represent a progression in Paul's thinking.
So if we have a problem with the Apostle Paul and think that he was schizophrenic
theologically in the same year, I ask the question, is the problem with
Paul or is the problem with our understanding of what Paul said?
You know, we always like to blame other people for our misunderstandings.
We're like little children.
Well, he did it.
Now, I didn't do it.
He'll, you know, point their finger at their brother or their sister.
We were the children of Israel, all right?
We act like a bunch of children.
No, Paul was not schizophrenic.
Our understanding of Paul is what's amiss.
In fact, as most of you know, Peter says that.
Peter says that.
He says Paul was hard to, Paul was, it was difficult to understand.
He says that in 2 Peter 3, starting, I think, 15 and 16.
Paul was difficult to, you know, Paul was a legal genius.
He sat at the feet of Gamaliel for, you know, for pity's sake.
You had to memorize the Bible to do that.
You, you, you were the, you were the brightest of the bright to sit under the
grandson of Hillel, the founder of the school of Hillel.
It was two branches of the school, Shemai school of Hillel, the two branches
of pharisaism.
And Hillel is considered by, in by, in rabbinic circles, but some rabbinic
circles to be the greatest teacher of all, of all time.
The modern of, the father of modern day rabbinic Judaism or pharisaism to one
degree or another.
So, so, you know, Paul, even, even Peter said Paul was difficult to understand and
some have twisted his scriptures or twisted his writings to, to, you know,
twisted them to come up with kind of bad doctrines.
Now I will, I told you the term Judaizer is not found in the Bible, but there are
two, two terms, two words, two places where the, the, the Greek word Judaize is
found.
First, the first place is in Esther 8, 19.
You find this in the, in the Septuagint, which is the Greek, the Greek New
Testament, which was written between about 250 and 150 AD in Alexandria, Egypt.
And there you find Hebrew, Esther 8, 17, after Esther was, was, was spared and
Mordecai and all the rest of them.
And the Jews were, were allowed to seek vengeance of their enemies who wanted to
destroy them.
And there were a lot of Persians that converted to Judaism.
And the word there is Yechad, it literally means to become a Jew.
And then we see it again.
That's the Hebrew word.
And then the, the, the, I don't have the Greek word in front of me, but it'd be,
anyway, it's, it's, it's, it's the, it's the, the Greek equivalent of that
word.
And then in, in, in Paul, and Paul uses the term in Galatians 2.14, the,
the Greek, the Koine Greek form of that.
And then remember that's when Peter, Paul, Paul accused Peter of not being,
well, let's put it this way.
Most people read, remember when, when Peter wouldn't eat with the Gentiles.
And Paul says, are you become like, you know, uh, uh, uh, uh, let's see.
He says, you, you'd be, I don't have that verse in front of me either, but he says,
you're becoming like the Jews and you won't eat with the Gentiles.
I think that's a paraphrase of it.
And what it was is, look, there is no, and what most people believe today is that
Peter was, was, I mean, what's taught is Paul was telling Peter, you don't have to
follow the Torah.
That's what most people believe.
Peter was Judaizing.
And so therefore he was, he was adhering to the Torah and not, um, and,
and, and instead of condescending to the, to the, to the non-Jews by, by,
by turning away from Torah.
But that's not the issue here.
That's not the issue.
What Paul is taking Peter to task with is that the Jews would not eat with Gentiles
because of ritual impurity or ritual uncleanness.
Remember when Yeshua in John 4 got water from the Samaritan woman at the well,
and she was shocked that a Jew would even talk to her, much less let him grab,
you know, let her hand him a cup of water.
They didn't even touch them because they felt that they were impure.
And so the Jews, this, there's no place in the Bible that says in the Torah or
anywhere in the Bible says you can't eat a meal with Gentiles or you can't touch
them.
But the Pharisees wouldn't even touch Gentiles because they didn't want to get
impure, ritually impure.
And this is what, this is what Paul was accusing him of following the traditions
of the Jews, the non-biblical traditions that said you cannot eat with Gentiles.
So this was not Paul saying don't follow Torah.
He says you don't need to follow those non-biblical halakhic traditions.
And remember Yeshua took the Jews of his day to task in Matthew 15 and Mark 7 where
he says you have made of none effect the Word of God by your traditions.
Not, he's not talking about the Torah, he's talking about extra-biblical man-made
halakha or man-made dogma that are extra-biblical, not biblical.
So here again, Judaize was not a reference to Torah obedience, it was a reference to
traditions of men.
And that's what Paul was taking Peter to task for, for.
And yet, again, this is so simple and yet this has been missed and not properly
taught by Christian teachers down through the ages.
And so most of you, when you hear the term Judaize, it's made, you have been led to
believe that that term applies to anybody that comes, that follows the Torah.
And that's never what it meant.
And that's not how it's used in the Bible.
Now, we have to ask ourselves, what are the factors causing the church to
turn away from its Hebraic roots?
I mean, the apostles died, John dies, the apostle John dies toward the end of
the second century, or end of the first century, and by the second century,
and I'm going to quote to you some readings of some things from the church
fathers in a little bit, but how could they turn away so quickly?
I'm not saying they all turned away.
It was a gradual process up until the really the fourth century, up until the
Council of Nicaea, and even the Council of Laodicea in the 360s, when some of these
things were these, you know, some of these pagan traditions that like Sunday and
Easter and some of these things became dogma, became the official law within the
Proto-Catholic Church.
But this was a process.
So not everybody turned away from these things, but little by little the church
did, the Proto-Catholic Church did, and so how is this possible?
You know, this may be rather puzzling and perplexing and seem like an incredulous
thing that how could they, you know, here the apostles were Jewish and they
followed the law, and how could the early church fathers, many of them, so quickly
turn by 120, 130, certainly by the middle A.D., the middle of the second century.
How is this possible?
Well, let me ask you some questions.
How quickly did Adam and Eve turn away from Elohim's simple instruction,
thou shalt not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil?
How quickly did the children of Israel, after getting delivered out of Egypt and
going to the Red Sea and being led by the pillar of fire and Elohim thundering from
Mount Sinai and all that, and how quickly did they turn to golden calf worship?
Within 40 days.
How quickly, after Joshua's death and the book of Judges, how quickly did the
Israelites turn away from what they had known to be the truth and turn to
idolatry?
Until Elohim raised up judges and how, as long as there was a judge leading them,
they repented and came back to one degree or another.
But when the judge died, how quickly did every man return to doing that which was
right in his own eyes?
How quickly did the northern, when the northern kingdom, the ten northern tribes
broke off from Rehoboam and Jeroboam became the king of the north, king of the
northern tribes, how quickly did the northern kingdom turn to idolatry and set
up golden calf worship?
Never again to return to the true worship of Jehovah Elohim and the following of the
Torah.
That was overnight.
Look at the sad history of the southern kingdom of Yehudah.
Most of them, most of the time it was an apostasy and there would be a revival and
then they would turn back to idolatry again.
So eventually in 586 BC Elohim, they were, they were, Jerusalem and the
temple was destroyed and a large number of Judah was taken into captivity.
Seldom did the people of Elohim during the long history remain faithful to Yehovah
for more than 40 years.
Now do you see how easy it is for people to turn away from the truth?
It should not be considered a strange thing.
And consider this,
how many young people remain faithful to what their parents have taught them?
How many children walk in the spiritual footsteps of their parents?
Look at your family, look at people that you know.
The second generation generally is rebellious, doesn't think the older
generation knows anything, and doesn't want to hear what they have to say.
Any of you have teenagers?
And Dr. Joe's gone through it in his family.
It's, it breaks your heart.
Look, expand that out to societally.
The apostolic fathers, and then you have rebellious Gentile kids coming along with
the influence of the world, the flesh, and the devil.
Do you see how easy it would be?
And remember people didn't have their own Bibles, and, and they couldn't read if
they did, or most of them.
It would be very easy to go after other gods and fall away.
Not only that, people are always looking for new and novel ideas.
I mean in the Messianic movement alone, my family's been Sabbath keepers since the
early 1950s.
I never knew that there were so many permutations of the Sabbath.
I always believed in the Seventh Day Sabbath, until I came into the Messianic
movement.
And you got this kind of designer Sabbath, and that kind of designer Sabbath,
and this kind of designer calendar, and this kind of designer calendar,
and this kind of designer new moon, and this kind of that kind of designer new
moon, and this and that, and there's new ones coming up all the time.
I heard about a new one just the other day.
It goes on, and on, and on.
People like new and novel things.
New and improved.
They don't want to be like this guy over here.
They want to be special.
So they'll invent something.
If they have to be special, they'll invent it.
They'll fabricate in their own minds.
No, let's keep the truth of our fathers, and only if it doesn't line up with the
Word, toss it out and search out the truth.
But don't just come up with stuff just to be different and novel.
Of course, they think they're they're following the Bible.
Just ask them, and then ask them to show them.
Show you in the Bible where it is, and they can't show you.
Or they'll pull one verse out of the whole Bible out of context, some obscure verse,
and they'll throw out 20 other verses that are as clear as a bell.
We've seen it happen again, and again, and again.
It's very sad.
So people want new and novel things.
And additionally, again, why are the reasons that the early church went away
from its Hebrew roots?
Look, the culture around them is very strong.
We want to be like the culture.
We don't want to be rejected.
We don't want to be persecuted.
Nobody likes that.
Everybody wants to have friends.
It's easier to go along and get along.
If you can't beat them, join them.
It's an uphill battle, and you get tired of the uphill battle.
And who wants to be radically different?
Ostracization, persecution.
So that's a very powerful factor to lead people away, too.
There's the Roman H7 factor.
That's the internal thing within man, the natural rebellion.
What's Roman's H7?
I had that drilled into me when I was a kid.
I can quote it from memory.
For the carnal mind is at enmity against the laws of God, is not subject to it,
neither indeed can be.
That's why Adam and Eve went astray.
That's why the children of Israel went astray.
That's why the northern kingdom went astray, and the Jews went astray,
and the early church fathers went astray.
They got this natural rebellious carnal nature in them that doesn't want to obey
Elohim.
That's why parents' children disobey and rebel against their parents.
You can see it from little... many times from when they're little children.
They got this thing in them.
It's called the Yetzirah, the evil inclination.
You love them dearly, but they go... and they get in a tantrum, and they want...
where did that come from?
They want their own way.
That's the evil inclination, as our Jewish brothers talk about, the Yetzirah.
And it fights against the Yetzirah, the good inclination.
That's the little dueling battle between the little good angel and the little bad
angel in the cartoon strip.
Another reason that caused, like I alluded to earlier, another reason that caused the
church to veer away from the Torah and its Hebrew roots was a misunderstanding of the
Apostle Paul's writings, which were very difficult.
Look, if you struggle over the Apostle Paul, don't feel bad.
Especially in our translations of our English Bibles.
The translators, I'm sure, have done the best that they can, but they're putting on
their glasses, and they're putting it through their translation bias.
Listen, I don't know how many of you have translated from another language.
I have.
I studied French for 15 years, including a year in Switzerland at the
School of Modern French, l'Ecole de Francais Moderne, Université de Lausanne
in Switzerland.
I was, for a year, I studied, a school year, I studied French.
All in French, everything in French, so toward a bachelor's degree in French.
And we had a class where that's all we did was translating, taught by a translator.
You know, when you're sitting down, you're translating from a foreign language
into your own language, and you come up with a way, and you could translate this
one way or the other, and you got several words, which one are you going to pick?
Probably the one that agrees with your understanding.
And if you have an anti-Torah bias, you're probably going to pick a word that
agrees with that.
It's the same thing as a journalist.
I also was trained as a journalist.
I almost have a bachelor's degree in journalism.
I studied journalism in a couple universities, and was a writer for a
number of newspapers, including the Portland Oregonian for a period of time,
Oregon's largest daily newspaper.
And we were taught in journalism school about being objective.
Objectivity, we had that drilled into us.
I don't think that's taught now, and I don't think journalists do that.
But we were taught, you keep your own opinion out of it when you're reporting
the news, unless you're editorializing.
But even then, the words that you choose, you can you can slam things as different,
it's a certain way, even while being objective.
It's very easy to do.
When you know the rules and the mechanics, you see how easy it is to do.
This is the problem we have in our English translations, and it's difficult.
So Paul is easily misunderstood, like we talked about before.
And it's taken me years to understand, fully understand, some of Paul's writings.
Because the explanations I heard when I was growing up, and in the church,
and so forth, just did not fit.
And so it's taken a while.
But I finally understand, like I never have before, and I'm sure I'll learn more.
Now another factor that caused the church to leave, or pull away from its Hebrew
roots, was the gentilization of the church, and what I would call weak
spiritual leadership, to come back to pagan influences and anti-semitism within
the Roman Empire.
So as the church became more gentilized, and moved away from Jerusalem,
which was the mother church, and as persecution against the Jews rose up in
the Roman Empire, it became less popular to become, be Jewish, or even look Jewish,
or have anything to do with Jewish.
We'll talk about that in a minute.
So people just moved away.
The church moved away.
And then there are also other external factors that caused social and economic
factors, or influences, that caused the early church in the second century to move
away from its Hebrew roots.
Roman persecution, the Roman Jewish tax, social pressures from the heathen
cultures, because everything was so heathen and pagan.
Everything you did was, there was a temple in every city, and every social custom,
everything was wrapped up in heathen pagan worship.
And if you did not, you know, your business dealings, everything,
and if you did not involve yourself in those things, you probably didn't have
much of a business.
You couldn't have any involvement with the community.
You were looked upon.
You were shunned.
It was very cultic.
And so there was a lot of pressure on the part of people, believers, to conform,
just to survive.
Now, let's quickly review some events that happened between 70 AD and 135.
I don't take credit for listing these things.
These are found in Marvin Wilson's book.
Dr. Marvin Wilson is a professor and a Christian Hebraic scholar.
And he wrote a book in 1989 called Our Father Abraham, Jewish Roots of the
Christian Faith.
It's a book that I recommend.
It's a very good book.
It really gives you some good background.
He, like David Stern, and David Stern's complete Jewish Bible, and his
accompanying commentary on that, the Jewish New Testament commentary,
they come up with the wrong conclusion.
They defend the Torah, but they come up with wrong conclusions that the Torah is
not for Gentiles.
They make the Jew-Gentile distinction, which the Bible does not make,
either in the Torah or in the New Testament.
But again, these guys are pandering to the Christian church.
And, you know, unfortunately, they're wrong.
But other than that, it's really good information, good background.
And he talks about what were the wedges or the things that drove a wedge between the
church and eventually caused a separation between Christianity and Judaism.
Obviously, the big one is rejection of Messiah Yeshua.
But there are a lot of other things that took place that eventually drive the
church not only away from its Jewishness or the synagogue, but away from the Torah
and its Hebrew roots.
Okay, a little bit of history overview.
Remember in 63 B.C., so roughly about 60 some years before the birth of Yeshua,
the Romans took over Jerusalem and established a Roman rule over the land of
Israel.
In A.D.
49, so this is during the time of the early church, maybe 19 or so years after
the death of Yeshua, a dispute broke out between the Jews and the Messianic
believers in Rome.
And as a result, at that time, the Romans made no distinctions between
the Jews and the Messianics, those that were Hebrew Christians but believed in
Yeshua the Messiah.
And they expelled both groups from the city of Rome in A.D.
49.
And then in A.D.
64, Nero was the emperor at the time, and he did not distinguish Jews from
Christians either.
So even though Christians believed in Yeshua, or you want to call them
Nazarenes, or whatever term you want to call, but if they kept the Sabbath,
and wore beards, and had tzitzitz, and kept kosher, and did the biblical
feasts, in the minds of the Romans, they were still Jews.
And so this is, you maybe heard of the persecutions of Nero.
He was very, very evil.
He would apparently light Christians on fire, and use them as torches in his
gardens.
I can't even imagine, but it's believed that the Apostle Paul and Peter both were
killed during this time.
And by the time of Paul's death in Rome, in the mid-60s A.D., in Jerusalem,
the Zealots, the Zealots were a political party that wanted to see the Roman rule
over Israel overthrown.
And they were looking for just any excuse to accomplish this, if they thought they
could achieve it.
And so they rose up in around 66 A.D., and began to try to fight Rome.
Rome came in with its legions, and it was a war that lasted for several
years.
And Rome didn't quite defeat Jerusalem.
It was a very fortified city.
And Rome, the general over the armies, around 66 A.D., there was a revolt up in
Britain.
He was called out, and his armies went up to, I believe, Britain, to put down a
rebellion, uprising over there in Britain.
And at that time, in 66 A.D., the Jews experienced freedom from Rome for four
years, until roughly four years, until 70 A.D.
And during this time, the Messianic believers, the Nazarene believers,
the ones who followed Yeshua, who were Jewish, fled Jerusalem, possibly because
of Yeshua's prophecy in the Olivet Discourse, there in Matthew 24,
that when you see armies accompanying, surrounding Jerusalem, flee to the hills.
So it's possible because of that.
And they fled to Pella, which is about 60 miles north and east.
It's just across the Jordan River in modern day, I guess that would be Jordan.
Is that correct?
I think so, yeah.
And that's where they lived.
They fled there.
And now this, and then in 70 A.D., the Romans came back under General Titus,
and they very quickly, within several months, destroyed the city of Jerusalem,
destroyed and burned the temple, and killed like a million Jews or
something.
I mean, they just literally just ransacked and destroyed the place.
And they continued to do mopping up operations for the next three years,
and just literally subdued the land under the iron boot of Rome.
And this, the believers all were in Pella, and the Jews that were left there in
Jerusalem, the few that survived and weren't taken as slaves, had a great great
anger against the Christians, because they felt that the believers, the followers of
Yeshua, abandoned them and were traitors.
And instead of staying there and taking a stand and fighting, and possibly with
their help, because there might have been hundreds of thousands of believers,
based on what reference we see in the book of Acts, it mentions tens of thousands,
there might have been more than that.
There were a lot of believers in Jerusalem and in at that time.
And so it was believed that if they had stayed, they might have been able,
with that added manpower, to defeat the Romans.
And so this caused angst and division and animosity by the Jews, non-believing Jews
against the believing Jews.
So this began to drive a wedge between the Jews and the non-believing Jews,
or the traditional Jews, and the Messianics.
And then about the same time, I think it was Yochanan Ben Zaki, the Jewish scholar,
he was kind of the head Jewish leader at the time.
When Jerusalem was destroyed, they had no more temple.
So he got permission from the Romans to move their headquarters, the headquarters
of Rabbinic Judaism, or what became Rabbinic Judaism, the Pharisee branch of
it, over to Yavna, which was over toward the coast.
And they established the academy there in Yavna.
And there they reinvented Judaism, because now we had a Judaism that did not
have the temple, did not have a sacrificial system, did not have a priest
system.
And that's when the Siddur and a lot of these things came into being.
They had to reinvent the Jewish religion, so that it's more or less what we have
today, to one degree or another, plus a lot of additional traditions.
And in the process, because of this angst against Christian believers, or Messianic
believers, they included... because at this time there were many believers that
still went to the synagogue.
And we see this happening in Paul's day.
There are probably 20, 30 references in the New Testament to Messianic believers
going to the synagogue, into the temple.
And the Messianics were looked at as just a branch or a sect of normative Judaism.
But because of this division between the Messianics, because of what happened in AD
70, and them fleeing to Pella, the folks at Yavna came up with what's
called the birkat ha-menim, the curse of the heretics.
And they incorporated this blessing or curse, and it's really a malediction,
not a benediction, into the daily... I think it was the morning, I think it's in
the morning, I haven't done my... I haven't looked at that in a while,
but in the morning prayers.
So it basically put a curse on anybody that said it.
So if you went to the synagogue, and it put a curse on the heretics,
and basically the Messianics.
So if you went, if you were a Messianic, and you went into the synagogue,
and you got your prayer book open, or by then you would have had it
memorized.
I don't think they had prayer books, but they had it memorized, just like we
know a lot of liturgy, and we can say it by memory, those of you that have been
around this movement for a while.
And like a Shaman, and a lot of things, they came across this statement.
And if you were a believer in Yeshua, and you said it, you'd be putting,
you'd be cursing yourself for believing in Yeshua.
And this was a way for the rabbinic Jews to weed out the followers of Yeshua.
Because the followers of Yeshua would stop, would be silent at that moment,
and not say that.
And people would know that they were a, that they were a follower of Yeshua,
and they would be kicked out.
So this drove a further wedge between, separating between Messianic believers,
and the, and the, and the normative Judaism.
And then, as the gospel was preached, more and more, and more and more Gentiles
were converted, the balance and power of influence within the early church began to
shift from a Jewish epicenter to a more Gentile epicenter.
Let me give you an example.
You can read Eusebius, who wrote, well, he was a historian up at,
there on the coast of Israel, the northern city, what, what, Caesarea, no,
that wouldn't have been it, whatever, whatever city that was, there was a big
library there.
He was a librarian, and he wrote his famous book called Ecclesiastical History.
And he wrote, he lived in the time of Constantine.
He was born about 260 AD, and lived up into the 330s, or something like,
or 320s, I don't know when he died, but in that era.
And in his Ecclesiastical History, he mentions that the first, I believe,
15 bishops of Rome were, I mean of Jerusalem, were Jewish and followed the
Torah.
So that was all the way up to 135 AD.
They were Jewish and followed the Torah.
So Jerusalem was like, the Jerusalem church remained faithful and firm,
all the way up to the second Jewish revolt of 133 to 135 AD, the Bar Kokhba revolt.
Now, what happened at the Bar Kokhba, Bar Kokhba was a Jewish, very charismatic
individual that rose up, and he was claimed by Akiba, a Jewish sage,
to be the Messiah.
And they went against the Romans, tried to defeat the Romans, and of course
the Romans came in and just literally obliterated them, killed them all.
And of course, the Nazarene, or the Christians, couldn't join up with them,
because they would be advocating a false Messiah.
And so, it forced the believers to take a stand against Bar Kokhba and normative
Judaism, because he wasn't the Messiah.
And he died, which proved he wasn't the Messiah.
And so, anyway, after the Romans defeated Bar Kokhba, Akiba, and all those guys,
they literally came in and leveled Jerusalem, even more than they had in 70
AD.
Literally leveled the walls, leveled everything.
They built a temple to Jupiter on the Temple Mount, and they also forbade the
Jews from coming anywhere near, within only 10 or 15 miles of Jerusalem,
or they would be killed.
And then they put Gentiles in there, in Jerusalem, and renamed it Aelia
Capitolina, and renamed the area around that area, known as Judea and that area as
Palestine.
That's where the term Palestine came from.
That is a term of derision.
It was a term of mockery that the Romans imposed on the Jews by naming Palestine
after their ancient and perennial enemy, the Philistines.
That's where the term Palestine comes from.
It comes from the Philistines.
Okay?
And so, that's why I don't like to use the term Palestine.
And so, the people up in Pella, the Christians, were not a part of the
book Bar Kokhba Revolt, or whatever, but because they appeared to be Jewish,
could not come into Jerusalem.
So they named over them a bishop by the name of Marcus, who was a Gentile.
Let's put it this way, one branch, there was a branch of the Pella believers
that did that.
Another branch didn't believe that.
And they became, well some, according to Edward Gibbon in his Rise and Fall of the
Roman, or Fall and Decline of the Roman Empire, he says that they became the
Ebionites.
I don't know.
There's a lot of discussion about who the Ebionites were.
That's a whole other discussion.
And there was different groups of the Ebionites.
Some of them were more Gnostic.
Some of them might have been more Nazarene.
Who knows?
I don't know.
I mean, there's different...
Eusebius talks about those guys too.
So, who knows?
I wasn't there.
But what I'm trying to say is that even this group of people in Pella that fled
Rome 60 or so years earlier, some of them Gentilized, named a Gentile bishop,
who then was able to get them into Rome, because...
if they would forsake some of their Hebraic Torah ways, and the Romans then
saw that they weren't Jewish, and they were allowed to come into Jerusalem.
Okay, what I'm trying to say is there were all kinds of influences going on to drive
a wedge and to separate... cause a separation of the church from its
pro-Torah Hebrew roots.
And then if we take a quick look at between the 2nd and the 4th centuries,
so moving now past the Bar Kokhba revolt of 135 AD, we see that the Romans
continued their persecutions of Jews throughout the empire.
And this, out of expediency, expedient self-preservation, this forced the
Christians to distance themselves from the Jews, so they would not look like Jews,
they wouldn't eat the same things as Jews, worship on the same days as Jews,
so they wouldn't be persecuted and killed and taxed.
There was a Jewish tax.
The Jewish tax, where if you were Jewish, you were taxed extra.
So there was a lot of factors going on that only the very strongest, the most
faithful, could remain faithful to the Sabbath and the feasts and the dietary
laws and these things that were overly Jewish.
Now, in conclusion, I want to take a quick review of some of the writings of the
anti-Nicene Church Fathers.
Now, anti, it's not A-N-T-I, it's anti, A-N-T-E, as in before.
The Council of Nicaea.
The Council of Nicaea was the first, I think it was the first church council
that Constantine called together after he became a so-called Christian.
He was still a pagan, but he was maybe the first ecumenist.
And anyway, he called this council in roughly 325 AD.
And so this is the writings of the Church Fathers before that time.
So that would be the 200s and up into the first part of the fourth century into up
to about 325 or before the Council of Nicaea.
So I'm just going to kind of go through a couple things here.
In AD 130, okay, these are some doctrines that began to creep into the Christian
Church that were not in, that are not in the Bible and were not part of the Jewish
background.
Number one, the idea that the human soul is immortal.
We find this in the Epistle of Methodist to Dionysius in AD 130.
Around AD 155, the first apology of just and martyr.
And in Aerenas against Heresies in 180, he mentions it a couple times in Book 2
and Book 5.
Now there were, at the same time, there were some Irenaeus who wrote earlier
than this in about 120, 130, as well as I believe Polycarp.
They called that a doctrine from hell or a false doctrine.
So there was differences of opinion on this among the early Church Fathers.
But anyway, that's an idea that came in.
Teachings against the Sabbath and the Biblical Feasts in AD 130.
Remember, this is like, what, not even 40 years after the death of John the Apostle.
Again, in the Epistle of Methodist to Dionysius, the author calls the Sabbath
and Biblical Feasts utterly ridiculous and unworthy of notice, end quote.
That is in Chapter 4 of that short book.
And then in AD 130, the Epistle of Barnabas, Chapter 2, also in Chapter 14,
the author says that the Sabbath and weekly Sabbath and Biblical Feasts are
abolished.
Also, we see in early part of the 2nd century, in the Epistle of Ignatius to the
Philippians, Chapter 14.
Now the observance of the Sabbath.
The people didn't, and changing, that changing to Sunday.
If you read Bacchiacchi's book, Samuel Bacchiacchi's from Sabbath to
Sunday, and there's others that have written about that, but he's probably the
best known scholar on that subject.
And you'll see that Sabbath, getting changed from Sabbath to Sunday,
seventh day Sabbath to Sunday, was a gradual process.
It took several hundred years.
They didn't, the church didn't just all change over to it overtly.
I believe, I think Bacchiacchi makes a statement, or actually he's quoting a
Christian historian, who I think was named Socrates, it's not the Greek philosopher,
but one from the 3rd or 4th century, that says that it started in Rome and
Alexandria, which happened to be the two most liberal cities, if you know anything
about Alexandria, in Rome.
It started there and it began, and they were very influential.
They were a place of learning.
And it spread from there, little by little.
And again, because of Jewish persecution, that, you know, it became less favorable
to meet on the Sabbath, on the seventh day Sabbath, and to meet on the day that
Jehovah, or that Yeshua resurrected.
He actually didn't resurrect on the daylight portion of Sunday.
It would have been at sundown, maybe going into, I mean, at the very
first part of the day, if our understanding is correct.
But anyway, that's when they chose to worship, and it was convenient to do so,
because to avoid Roman persecution, and they had a good reason.
Well, it's not a good biblical reason, but in their own minds, they had a reason.
So here we see the epistle of Ignatius to the Magnesians.
The author says to keep the Sabbath on Sunday, chapter 9.
The epistle of Ignatius to the Turalians, about the same time, chapter 9,
he says that.
Epistle of Barnabas, 130 AD, chapter 14, he says that.
And then around circa AD 155, the first apology of Justin Martyr, chapter 67.
And I've looked, these are all references that I have found and checked myself,
in my own.
These aren't, I don't just quote other people off the internet.
I go and check them for myself, to make sure they're good references.
Because many times, things you read on the internet, they're bad references,
or they're erroneous, or they're misquotes.
I think reputation and proper attribution, and getting your footnotes right,
is very important.
Because otherwise, it makes you look like a fool.
You don't know what you're doing.
So I've checked all these out myself.
This is all based on my own primary research.
Okay, teachings against the Torah.
Epistle of Ignatius, this would again be about 120, 130 AD.
The author declares, if anyone preached the Jewish law, listen not to him.
Again, also he says similar things in the epistle of Ignatius to the Magnesians,
in chapter 10.
And then in circa AD 155, the first apology of Justin Martyr, chapter 47.
The author states that out of weak-mindedness, he uses that term,
some Christians observe the mosaic law.
Sabbath and feast days observance are optional, but not encouraged.
Okay, that's my summation of what he wrote.
And then, we see the rise of anti-Torah, anti-Semitic theology.
There was at first the rise of what we might call the de-Judaization of the
church, and eventually that led into replacement theology, and eventually into
outright anti-Semitism.
In Irenaeus and against heresies, book four, chapter 16.4, the author
declares that the Decalogue was not cancelled by the new covenant,
but the statutes and judgments of Torah were a bondage to the Israelites,
and are no longer binding on Christians.
Now, I don't know how he can... so they believed in the Decalogue, or the Ten
Commandments, of course not the Sabbath, but... so this was the idea.
Here's the idea that, well, we follow the Ten Commandments, but not the rest of the
Torah.
And they don't even realize that the Ten Commandments are the cornerstone of the
Torah, the foundation of the Torah, and all the other laws, all the other 603
laws or so, branch out of the Ten Commandments.
Every one of them, you can bring them back back to a fundamental principle in the
Decalogue.
Now, teachings against the biblical dietary laws and unclean meats.
Again, the first part of the 2nd century AD, the Epistle of Ignatius to the
Philadelphians, chapter 6, the author states that one who adheres to the
biblical dietary laws quote, has the apostate dragon dwelling within him,
end quote.
That's how they felt about... that's how this guy, at least, felt about the Torah.
It was a doctrine of a demon, because it was Jewish.
It's very sad.
Easter celebration established as a Christian holiday.
That was in 150 AD.
And I have references.
The date of Easter was then established.
That idea, that was called the Court of Discipline Controversy, and that was
established in the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD and made official, where we would
not do Passover or Passover anymore.
We're going to do Easter the first, whatever it is, Sunday after the Spring
Equinox or whatever it was.
And then by the 4th century, Sunday became officially the day of worship in place of
the Sabbath by legal enactment of emperor concentrating.
And we find that in the History of the Christian Church, volume 3, page 378 by
Philip Schaff.
That's about an eight volume set.
And also Kenneth Scott Lauderet, in his History of Christianity,
volume 1, page 93, says the same thing.
Christmas was not established as a Christian holiday until 354 AD,
after the death of Constantine.
So you can't lay that one on Constantine.
He gets a lot of, probably his son, I think his son ruled after him.
He had several sons that ruled after him.
Now, in conclusion, in conclusion, and this really is in conclusion,
it'll take about...
Listen, look, look, I can do it like I heard one preacher do.
This is a good one.
I heard him do it.
Can you guys give me five more minutes?
Please, anybody, give me five more minutes.
If you want me to be done, give me five more minutes, raise your hands.
Okay, 5, 10, 15, 20, okay, great.
About 30 minutes, we'll go.
And you go on for another 30 minutes.
I've never pulled that one on you guys before, I'm afraid to.
You already know that I probably don't keep my promises when I say I'm almost
done.
But that's okay, I am almost done here.
So the de-Judaizing of the early church fathers, you know, this is heavy,
this is heavy stuff.
We gotta, you know, I'm not really a stand-up, I'm a real stand-up guy.
I mean, anybody knows me, I'm really serious, because we're like, we're living
in the end times, and Yeshua's coming back, and I really feel like we've got to
get ourselves ready.
But you know, at the same time, and I mean, that really is my heart
passion, but at the same time, we gotta laugh along the way.
And I have to remind myself of this.
We have to laugh, we have to smile, we have to not take ourselves too
seriously, we have to have a little bit of comic relief, and I'm not a really a good
comedian.
But I find that when I get in the under the anointing and in the flow of the Holy
Spirit, sometimes funny things just come out, and I can't tell a joke to make it
funny, but sometimes if I just do it in the flow of things, I get people to laugh,
you know, once in a while, and so it's good to do that.
So hallelujah, I'm glad I made you laugh.
So let's wrap this up.
Now we talked about the de-Judaizing influences, or the de-Judaizing of,
by many of the early church fathers, and that de-Judaizing eventually led into
rank anti-Semitism.
It's very sad.
Let me quote you a few quotes here.
Ignatius, the Bishop of Antioch, from 98 to 117 AD, and then in about 130
or so, he wrote in the Epistle to the Magnesians, chapter 8, "...if we still
live according," and I'm quoting here, "...if we still live according to Jewish
law and the circumstances of the flesh, we deny that we have received grace." So
here we see the grace versus law juxtaposition, or thesis and antithesis.
Another quote, "...let us therefore no longer keep the Sabbath after the Jewish
manner, but let every one of you keep the Sabbath after a spiritual manner.
After the observance of the Sabbath, let every friend of Christ keep the Lord's
Day," that's Sunday, "...as a festival, the Resurrection Day, the Queen and the
Chief of all days of the week." Chapter 9.
Chapter 10, again, this is the Epistle to the Magnesians, "...it is absurd to speak
of Jesus Christ with the tongue, and to cherish in the mind a Judaism which
has now come to an end.
For where there is Christianity, there cannot be Judaism." So he's talking
about the Torah and all the things that they did.
The laws of Moses, or the Torah that came from Yehovah.
The Epistle of Matthates to Dionysus, Chapter 4, written about AD 130,
and I quote, "...but as to their
scrupulosity concerning meats, and their superstition as respects the
Sabbath, and their boasting about circumcision, and their fancies about
fasting, and the new moons, which are utterly ridiculous and unworthy of
notice." Chapter 4.
Another quote by Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch.
Maybe I already quoted this one.
It's the Epistle to the Philadelphians.
No, I don't think I did.
"...but anyone preach the Jewish law unto you, listen not unto him." Chapter 6.
Another one by Bishop Ignatius, Epistle to the Philippians, written around
AD 130 or so.
"...if anyone celebrate the Passover along with the Jews, or receives the emblems of
their feasts, he is a partaker of those that killed the Lord and his apostles." I
guess he never heard of the idea that by our sins we all killed him.
Anyway, and then Justin Martyr wrote this between AD 130 and AD 161.
Justin claims that the scriptures no longer belong to the Jews, but to the
Christians, thus asserting anti-Semitic replacement theology.
Chapter 29.
I'm sure we could pull out many, many more quotes, but I'm going to leave
you with this one from Constantine.
Now, Constantine is the one that made... he lived in the 4th century.
He's the one that convened the Council of Nicaea.
He's the big bad guy that everybody likes to... all the Hebrew roots people like to
say he is the guy that put in all these anti-Torah laws.
No, he isn't.
This stuff was cooking in the simmering... simmering in the pot 150 years or 200
years before the time of Constantine.
He was just a good ecumenical politician.
Look, he hated the Jews because they cost him money, because they were constantly
revolting.
And he hated the Jews.
And he saw, you know, the Christians were already moving away from the Jews,
so he just helped the process out by saying, we're not going to do anything
Jewish.
So, you know, get that out of your mind.
And we're going to formulate laws.
We're going to put in...
we're going to legalize the things you are guys are already doing.
And we're going to make it the law of the Roman Empire.
And that's what he did.
He said, and he said, we're going to have nothing to do with the Jews.
And you guys are going to help me to enforce this because that would be
politically expedient for him.
He didn't care about the truth.
He was a sun god worshiper.
But this is... he wrote a letter.
We find this in Eusebius' Ecclesiastical History.
There's a letter in the appendix of the book I have, where Constantine writes a
letter to the bishops.
And in this letter, he calls the Jews polluted wretches.
Let us have nothing in common with the most hostile rabble of the Jews.
Let us withdraw ourselves from that most odious fellowship.
Have no fellowship with the lies of the Jews.
He called them the vilest of mankind.
So this is where this all led to.
And eventually you come down to the Catholic Church's inquisitions,
the persecution of the Jews, to Martin Luther calling them swine, and you know,
all of this.
That was in the 1500s.
It's very sad.
And I hate to leave this on a sour note, but that's the facts of history.
We reject these anti-Semitic theologies.
We summarily reject the anti-Torah beliefs of the Christian Church.
We reject the anti-Torah concepts of the early church fathers.
Look, I'm not here to judge them.
I'm just reading you what they said.
They will answer for what they have done.
Look, they did good things too.
They kept the message of the gospel.
They kept the Bible.
That is the New Testament.
Despite all of its translation issues, they kept these things for us.
And they spread the basic message of the gospel over the world.
And I will, well, actually we'll leave this on an up note.
And the Christian Church, even though, even though they say that the law was done
away with, and mark this carefully, and I stand in opposition to other
messianic Hebrew roots Torah teachers who are out there, who are bashing the
Christian Church, who say that they are anti-Torah.
I'd like to qualify that.
You are wrong.
Yes, I understand that they say that the law was done away with.
The law was nailed to the cross, and they're wrong.
And then Paul had these teachings that separate us from the Torah.
But when you go through all 613 commandments of the Torah between the
books of Genesis and Deuteronomy, and with a little counter, and you count
each one that the Christians are still doing.
Even though they say, I'm talking about a good, Bible-believing, solid Christian,
who's really trying to follow the Bible.
Look, they don't worship idols.
They worship the God of the Bible.
They don't take His name in vain.
They don't, they honor their parents.
They don't lie.
They don't steal.
They don't commit adultery.
They don't covet.
They do 9 of the 10 commandments.
They just have a problem with the Sabbath.
If you do the math, and I have, I've done the statistics myself,
of the 613, a good, I'm not talking about a nominal Christian, I'm talking about a
good, solid Christian.
They are doing 66, well no, what is it?
They are doing 25% of the Torah, of the 613 Torah commandments.
And the very best Torah-observant messianic Hebrew roots, Nazarene,
whatever label you want to, is only doing 66%.
Because there are a bunch of them we can't do.
Because they apply to the tabernacle of Moses, the Levitical priesthood,
the sacrificial system, and things that have been fulfilled in Yeshua.
So if you remove that roughly one-third that we can't do, or some of them men
can't do because they apply to women, women can't do because they apply to men,
or if you're a farmer you can't do, or if you're not a farmer, you know,
it doesn't apply to you.
But anyway, of those ones, if you, you know, your family, you were a farmer,
and you were a husband, you had a man, a woman in your family, and you were doing
everything you possibly could, and you remove those ones that apply to
the temple, or sacrificial system, the priesthood, all of that, the
sacrificial, all the rites and ceremonies that we can't do, and we don't have to do,
because we read the book of Hebrews, then that means that, let's say,
the very best messianic Hebrew roots, Torah-obedient person is doing 100%,
guess what?
Your average Christian out there, I'm not average, but you're really solid
Christian, and I don't, I don't remember the exact statistics.
I have them written down somewhere, I think, in one of my Bibles.
They're doing about two-thirds of the Torah.
The main ones that they have a problem with is what they eat, what their holidays
are, and what day they worship on and rest.
Those are the three biggies, and there's some little ones too, but those are the
biggies.
So what I want to tell you, people, those of you that have come back to your
Hebrew roots, and are trying to follow Torah, be merciful and gracious to the
Christians.
Those are really trying to live up to the light of the truth that they have,
and are trying to work their way out of doctrines of men, just like you had to
when you came out of these doctrines of men, by which the Word of God has been
made of none effect, and you didn't come out overnight.
It took you a little bit of time.
So be gracious to them.
And to those who are watching this video, who are still in the Christian church,
and aren't sure about being Torah obedient, you're already 66 percent there.
Just, or roughly, I don't remember the exact, just go to the next level,
and come out of false teachings and doctrines of men, and just start keeping
the Sabbath, the biblical feasts, the dietary.
If you're a man, put on a beard, put on some tzitzitz, and a few other
things, and just come to the next level in your spiritual walk.
And let's all proceed and go hand in hand into the kingdom of Elohim together,
as followers of our great Rabbi, Yeshua, Jesus, the Messiah.
Amen.
Hallelujah.
Seek the Lord while He may be found.
Call upon His name.
He is near, He is near, He is near.
Yeshua Hashem be'ir matzoh, kerabu, yotoh, karoh, karoh.
Yasuv rashad dar'oh, yishavei machshevotav, yashavei lat'mshev,
ki'ar be'iz la'ot.
Yeshua Hashem be'ir matzoh, kerabu, yotoh, karoh, karoh.
Seek the Lord while He may be found.
Call upon His name.
He is near, He is near, He is near.
Yeshua Hashem be'ir matzoh, kerabu, yotoh, karoh, karoh.
Yashavei machshev, ki'ar be'iz lat'mshev, ki'ar be'iz lat'mshev.
Yeshua Hashem be 'ir matzoh, kerabu, yotoh, karoh, karoh.