Yeah, that's fine.
And as a matter of fact, do you guys have audio for that too?
Oh, yes.
All of your teaching is going to be recorded.
The subject of today's presentation is who were the original followers of Yeshua and
what did the apostles themselves believe and teach?
So, as we go through this, we're probably going to hear some things that we,
needless to say, were not taught in Sunday school about the doctrines of the
apostles.
And some of this stuff may be difficult to really understand and absorb because it
is, in some respects, radically different.
And so don't think that I'm giving this presentation to anybody and saying,
this is the lifestyle you have to adopt and this is what you have to do to be
saved.
I know a lot of people kind of get that feeling like just talking about some of
this stuff, and we recognize and we realize what it was that Yeshua actually
taught his apostles.
It can give you that feeling like, okay, well, this person is kind of judging
me for bringing this stuff out.
So I just want to right here up front to say, look, we're not saying that you have
to do this.
We're just, this is a historical fact.
This is the historical references and record that we have.
So I would invite anyone to go back and look at the source documents and see what
these historians that lived in the 2nd and 3rd centuries, what they say about the
apostles that lived in the 1st century.
Because that's about as far back as we can possibly get.
So, in early Christianity, we had some divisions that sprang up pretty much right
away.
We had the group known as the Nazarenes.
Scholars refer to these people as the Jewish Christian groups.
They were the groups that kept the same faith and the same understanding that
Yeshua taught to his apostles.
They went by several different names.
We'll go over them in just a moment.
But for now, we will refer to them as the Nazarenes or the Jewish Christians.
Another, the first major, I guess you could call it a heresy, would be the
Gnostics.
They sprang up in the end of the 1st century, beginning of the 2nd century.
And then, of course, you had the Christian or the Gentile church.
Which would be the Gentile converts that followed after the teachings of Paul.
And that, of course, became the Orthodox church.
The Gentile church, as they like to call themselves.
That's what would be the third major division.
So, why were there so many divisions?
Why did they spring up early in the faith?
It was despite the fact that Yeshua lived, died, and resurrected as a Jew,
his Jewishness has been all but lost.
It's probably due to the overwhelming number of Gentile converts that soon
outnumbered the number of Nazarenes.
Now, there was also another major event that caused the original Jerusalem
assembly to lose authority, and that was the destruction of Jerusalem itself.
After the death of Yeshua, about 40 years later, the temple and Jerusalem was
destroyed.
The remnants of the Jerusalem assembly fled from Jerusalem across the Jordan and
they settled at Pella in the land of Damascus.
It was across the Jordan.
So, that would have become the seat of what was known as Jewish Christianity at
that point.
Meanwhile, Paul, of course, was taking his message west and he wound up in Rome.
And that's how he came up with the Roman church.
And eventually Christianity came to the point that it regarded any denomination
that held obedience to the Torah given by Moses as a heresy.
And that in itself is even true today.
If you go to a Christian website and you type in, you know, heresies and you Google
what exactly the Christian church declares to be a heresy, one of the defining
characteristics is any group that believes in Yeshua, or as they call him Jesus,
and continues to keep the Torah.
So, again, Yeshua and all of his disciples were Jews.
Now, we should probably put a disclaimer there that Judaism in the first century
was not the same as Judaism today.
In the first century in Judea, there were three primary groups of Jewish
faith.
There was, of course, we're familiar from the New Testament, the Sadducees and the
Pharisees.
The Sadducees were the group that was primarily in control of the temple.
The Pharisees held more of a political power over the region.
Of course, the region was in the control of the Herods.
The Herods themselves actually appointed the high priests.
And they had been doing that since the first century B.C.
So, a lot of these high priests that you see mentioned in the first century were
not even descendants of Levi.
Many were not even Hebrews.
They were appointed by Herod.
They basically brought their way into that position.
It became almost a position of royalty, similar to the way our Senate and Congress
is today.
We have a lot of people who have, you know, their fathers were senators,
now they're senators, and their children are training to be senators.
So, it really created this subclass of a
portion of the political establishment in Judea.
So, just like today, you have a political establishment that controls the
conversation of the nation, it's the same way within Judea.
It had this political elite at the top, which included the temple and the
Pharisees, the religious leaders that held sway over the people.
And quite often, the people themselves had a very different view of what they
believed to be right and wrong.
In addition to these two groups, the Pharisees and the Sadducees,
you also had the group which we talk about a lot here, and that is the Essenes.
And so, the Essenes were kind of, during the first century, were more or
less an anti-establishment group.
They were also associated with a subgroup within their movement known as the Zealots
or the Saqqari.
Josephus himself, he mentions the Zealots as his fourth theology, and he associates
them with the third theology, which he mentions, which is the Essenes.
So, you had this almost like two different groups of Essenes.
One believed in the violent overthrow of what they believed to be an apostasy in
the temple, and then you had the other group, which was the more peaceful Essenes
that more or less kept to themselves.
And I believe it was out of this movement, the Essene movement was where we had
Yeshua and his disciples kind of came on the scene.
Yeshua, he was loyal to the Torah, but his views of the Torah were radical to
the establishment.
He taught simple living, nonviolence, not a new religion.
He taught a different lifestyle, a different way of serving the Creator.
He revealed the Father as a personal Creator, accessible to all who call upon
His name, whereas the religious establishment was more interested in
presenting the Elohim of Israel as someone that required a priest to access.
And so you go to the temple in order to present an offering to Yehua instead of,
as Yeshua described, going to your prayer closet and meet with him yourself,
personally.
History has not been kind to the original Nazarenes.
You had Paul portray them as narrow-minded legalists, to the point that many people,
when they read the writings of Paul, they think that there was this extreme
reactionary group within the Jerusalem assembly and that they were in opposition
to Paul.
However, when you get into history and you begin to study what the Essenes and the
Nazarenes, what they believed, it's not long before you come to the
understanding that the group that Paul was in opposition to was not just a
reactionary faction within the original Jerusalem assembly, but it was the
Jerusalem assembly itself.
The church condemned them as heretics.
We had modern scholars, even today, largely ignore the Nazarenes.
They ignore what they call the Jewish Christian groups.
The larger Gentile church drove out their teachings and the core of Yeshua's message
was lost in the process.
Even today, I've read books before by men like James Nabor and he believes,
at least what I can gather from his books, he believes that after Yeshua resurrected,
that he came and had a totally different theology and he tried to teach that to his
apostles and they couldn't understand it, so Yeshua had to go to Paul.
Well, that view itself...
gives an extremely lack of foresight to Yeshua.
As does this other belief that you hear a lot in the church, which is that Paul
understood Yeshua better than the apostles did.
Again, that in itself is a lack of foresight by our Messiah.
If the Messiah is who he claims to be, if Paul was the one that was going to
understand his message better than anyone else, why didn't he go up to Antioch and
get Paul instead of going up to the Sea of Galilee and finding his other apostles?
So, let's talk about what the Nazarenes believed about Yeshua.
Personally, it wasn't even until I came into the Hebrew Breakroots Movement that I
ever heard of the Nazarenes.
I was raised in the church.
I was actually educated and went to...
my grade school was a parochial school with the Catholic Church, so I was
essentially indoctrinated fully in church but they never once mentioned this group
called the Nazarenes.
And so, coming into the Breakroots Movement, I heard about the Nazarenes,
but no one ever or very few people actually go back and read their writings,
read what they saw, what they believed, and look at what they actually taught.
The image of the Nazarenes that were taught in the Hebrew Breakroots Movement
is pretty much just that they were like what we call the modern-day Messianic
Jews.
They were Orthodox Jews who believed in Yeshua, and that's who the Nazarenes were.
But I believe that if we go to actual history and look at the testimonies we
have, we'll see that it's actually quite different than what we would think of
today in the Hebrew Breakroots Movement as this Messianic Judaism.
First of all, they saw Yeshua as the true prophet, the Navimet, who would come to
lead them back to the original eternal Torah.
And again, I say that with qualifications there, the original eternal Torah.
And we'll get to that in a minute.
Yeshua taught that this included simple living and nonviolence against others.
I don't believe that his nonviolence included allowing yourself to be made a
victim, but at the same time you were not to go out and seek after violence and this
violent overthrow of the temple that the Zealots were preaching.
I think Yeshua was... a lot of his apostles actually appeared to be members
of this Zealot party.
And I think that what he was doing is he was trying to show them a more peaceful
way to come about a resolution.
But when he talks about nonviolence, I don't believe that that includes the
beliefs of the Amish where they'll let you actually assault them and they won't try
to defend themselves.
I think that we are told to defend ourselves.
In fact, in the Dedeke, which is written by the twelve apostles, it actually tells
you that your belt is not to be without a sword and that you are to use it to defend
your life.
So, if anyone tells you that Yeshua taught you need to be a victim, you can show them
the Dedeke, which actually refutes that.
The original Yeshua movement sought to keep the Torah in a more stringent way
than the Orthodox Judaism of its day.
Which is... that's actually pretty much the exact opposite of what we're taught in
the church, right?
That the Orthodox Jews were being too stringent, and so therefore Yeshua came to
tell them to kind of lighten up and eat pig and keep Sunday church.
But if you read the... especially the Sermon on the Mount, if you read what
Yeshua is saying, he's actually teaching a more stringent view of the Torah.
You've heard it said, do not commit adultery, but I tell you not to even look
at a woman with lust in your heart.
That's a more stringent view than what the Orthodox of this day were teaching.
So, after the death of Yeshua, you had this rise of Gnosticism.
And scholars differ on what exactly constitutes Gnosticism.
It usually involves the belief that the Elohim of the Jews and the Elohim of
Yeshua were two different gods.
They saw the world itself as evil, and the creation was the result of the
interference of either an evil or an incompetent god.
So they didn't believe that the supreme king of the universe created the creation,
that it was actually a lesser being who was either evil or incompetent.
The most famous Gnostic was Marcion.
Now, Marcion was the first to create a canon of Scripture of the New Testament.
His canon consisted of... he used a version of Luke's Gospel that was shorter
than the one we have now.
And Paul's letters, ten of Paul's letters were the other part of the canon.
And that was what the Marcion church believed and taught from.
And in fact, Paul's letters were made popular because of Marcionism.
Basically, the church of Marcion at one time, it got up to the level of power that
it threatened even the Orthodox Christian establishment.
And it was pretty much a battle of life and death for the church there to root out
Marcionism before it took over the entire church.
In the process, when Marcionism was finally defeated, the people who were
followers of the Marcion religion, they came into the church and they brought
with them Paul's letters.
And so we have this quote from Gerd Luderman that says, without Marcion there
would have been no New Testament, and without this heretic no letters of
Paul.
So what's the difference between Gnosticism and the Nazarenes?
Well, Marcion taught that Paul was a hero who was the only apostle who understood
Yeshua.
Where have we heard that before?
The Nazarenes detested Paul and believed that he was an apostate.
The Nazarenes also believed that Yahuwah was the Elohim of Yeshua.
So they didn't believe that the Creator was different than the Elohim that was the
Father of Yeshua.
The Nazarenes believed that it was the same Elohim in the Old Testament and the
New Testament.
They also believed that Yeshua came to turn the people back to the original Torah
which had been given by Moses, but was corrupted over time by those who
came after.
So earlier when I said that they believed that Yeshua was there to turn them back to
the original eternal Torah that's what I meant.
They had a belief in the Nazarene movement that the Torah had been corrupted over
time.
You might ask yourself, why can't we just read the New Testament and see what the
original faith of the Nazarenes was?
Well, the reason is because the writings themselves are not so much historical
records as they are advocacies for different audiences within the Christian
community.
So there is evidence, there is indication that some things have been added to the
New Testament specifically to lead people to a certain direction.
It of course leaves out viewpoints of certain early ancient Gospels and again,
I think it's the subject of extensive editing and modification.
In the book The Lost Religion of Jesus by Keith Akers he says that on the basis of
the Bible, some Christians are pacifists while others support war.
Some support capital punishment, others oppose it.
Some accept alcohol while others do not.
Some allow divorce, some allow divorce only in cases of adultery, and some do not
allow divorce at all, and so on.
Each viewpoint can cite its favorite verses or interpretations from the
Scripture.
And John Dominic Crossan, the author of several books about Yeshua, point out that
we can construct almost any picture of Yeshua we want by selecting the right
text.
And Yeshua can be shown to be for or against legal observance, for or against
apocalyptic expectation, for or against Gentile mission, for or against temple
worship, for or against titular claim, and for or against political revolt,
and so on.
And Peter himself says in the Nazarene Acts that the Scripture has been corrupted
to a point that you can use the Scripture to derive pretty much any viewpoint that
you want.
And so we see that a lot in modern religion.
People will have a theology and they go through the Scripture and they search out
the verses that support their theology and they skip the ones that don't.
So how can we get to the understanding of what scholars have been on this quest for
what they call the historical Jesus?
So if we can't count on the New Testament to always give us the unbiased truth,
then how are we going to find this answer?
And so I propose that we use one criteria.
And the criteria is, does any particular theory of the historical Yeshua make sense
in light of what we know about the historical Nazarene scenes or the
teachings of the Apostles?
Because if we can go with the understanding that the Apostles believed
and taught what Yeshua believed and taught, then we should be able to define
the historical Yeshua by looking at what the Apostles believed.
So what do we know about the Nazarenes?
Most of what we know about the Nazarenes comes from the writings of church fathers
who called the Nazarenes heretical and wrote about them for the purpose of
attacking them.
We also have two writings of Clement of Rome, the Recognitions and the Homilies.
The Recognitions, of course, in this group we usually refer to them as the Nazarene
Acts.
We've got historical writings of men like Josephus and Philo, and we have some of
the Dead Sea Scrolls which appear to be written by the Nazarenes.
So, first of all, let's define some terms.
So what are these groups called?
These, quote, Jewish Christian groups went by names such as the Nazarenes,
the Ebionites, I believe that they were included in the Essenes.
There was also a group called the Edessenes, the Ossenenes or the Doers,
the Nazarenes, the Nazoreans, and the Circumcision Party by the Christian
historians and heresiologists.
So if you notice, a lot of these names sound really kind of identical almost,
and that's probably due to transliteration between different languages.
Like, you know, the Nazarenes, the Nazareans, the Nazareans, they are
very similar.
The Edessenes, the Essenes, the Ossenenes, you know, again you have these names that
are very similar.
There also appears to be connections to the first century Zealot group known as
the Sicarii, and you can see that in the New Testament.
You know, you have like Judas Iscariot.
Some scholars believe that Iscariot is actually a corruption of Sicarii.
And then we also have the, you know, Apostles with cognaments like the Sons of
Thunder, which is a Zealot term.
And, you know, Simon in the New Testament, I believe it's in Matthew, his name is
translated as Simon the Canaanite.
But, you know, the word that's translated as Canaanite is actually the Hebrew word
for Zealot.
So he was actually Simon the Zealot.
And in the Dead Sea Scrolls, now the Dead Sea Scrolls, the group that wrote the Dead
Sea Scrolls, they refer to themselves as the Sons of Sedok, or Sons of
Righteousness, the Way, Sons of Light, the Poor, or the Ebionim, and the Meek.
And so you can of course compare these to what Yeshua and his Apostles called
themselves in the New Testament.
They use the same terminology to refer to themselves.
Now, I mentioned the Circumcision Party was the actual Jerusalem Assembly itself.
And so, you know, many people, if you studied church history at all,
you probably at one point read Eusebius' Ecclesiastical History.
Well, in Book 4, Chapters 5 and 6 of Ecclesiastical History, Eusebius says that
the chronology of the bishops of Jerusalem, their whole church consisted of
believing Hebrews who continued from the days of the Apostles into the siege which
took place in the reign of Adrian.
The bishops of the Circumcision ceased at this time.
So you can see that he is referring to the bishops of the Circumcision as the bishops
of Jerusalem.
It is proper to give here a list of their names from the beginning.
And he starts off, he says, first there was James, the so-called brother of the
Lord.
The second, Simeon, that's Simeon Barcleopas.
The third was Justice, and so forth.
And he says, these are the bishops of Jerusalem that lived between the age of
the Apostles and the time referred to, all of them belonging to the Circumcision.
And thus, when the city had been emptied and the Jewish nation had suffered the
total destruction of its ancient inhabitants, it was colonized by a
different race, meaning that the church in Jerusalem, after the destruction of
Jerusalem, there was a church set up in Jerusalem, but it was a Gentile church.
It was no longer the church of the Circumcision, as Eusebius calls it.
He says that and as the church there was now composed of Gentiles, the first one to
assume the government of it after the bishops of the Circumcision was Marcus.
So, Eusebius, in his ecclesiastical history, he tells you pretty plainly that
the bishops of the Circumcision and the bishops of the Jerusalem Assembly were the
same people.
So, when you read the New Testament, it speaks about the party of the
Circumcision.
That is not a reactionary group within the Jerusalem Assembly.
That is the Jerusalem Assembly itself.
Okay, so the Nazarenes themselves are portrayed in a negative light in the
Scriptures.
In Acts 11-2, Peter is confronted by the Circumcision party for eating with
Gentiles.
In Acts chapter 15, there's a lengthy account started by what they call
believing Pharisees, insisting that the Gentile believers must be circumcised.
In Acts 21-20, James tells Paul that there are many believers in Jerusalem who are
zealous for the Torah and then he sends Paul to the temple to make a sacrifice.
Galatians 1-2 relates several disputes between Paul and the Apostles.
The final dispute ends with a bitter disagreement between Paul and Peter,
a dispute in which James, Peter, Barnabas, and all others present oppose
Paul.
And that's something that people miss when they read that account.
We're reading the account from Paul's point of view.
And so Paul makes out like he's the one that won the argument, but we miss the
point where he says, everybody turned against me.
Well, if everybody turned against one person, then who was it that really got
rebuked?
Was it really Paul rebuking Peter?
I think it might have been the other way around.
You know, we're not told the other side of the story.
All we know is that Peter at first was eating with the Gentiles and then he
withdrew when other people showed up from Jerusalem.
I think there's a good possibility that Peter was sitting with these Gentiles
thinking that they were converts and that they were already baptized and that they
were keeping the Torah and then he learned later after the fact that they were not
and that they were being taught something different by Paul.
And we can read in the Nazarene Acts, Peter actually talks about table
fellowship and he says that if you're keeping table fellowship with someone
who's not converted you're opening yourself up.
If that person has an evil spirit, then you're opening yourself up to that.
So, you know, there are reasons to be suspicious about the way the Nazarenes are
portrayed in the New Testament, especially in the book of Acts.
In Acts 16.3, Paul obediently circumcises Timothy, but in Galatians he indignantly
refuses to yield to what he calls false brethren to circumcise Titus.
And there's a question about whether Titus and Timothy were the same person.
It's basically the same name in two different languages.
One of them is, I think, Greek and the other is Latin.
But Titus and Timothy, I mean, it's the same name.
It's just two different versions from two different languages.
In Acts 15.2, Paul is sent by the church to meet the apostles in Jerusalem,
but in Galatians 2.2, Paul says that he went there because of revelation and he
wasn't sent there by men.
So there's this discrepancy between Acts and Galatians.
And in all his letters, Paul rejects the idea that it's necessary to keep the
Torah, yet in Acts he goes to the temple to make a sacrifice.
So from Paul's letters, now from his letters, we know that he has three...
well, he has opponents.
From Paul's letters, we know that he has opponents.
And his opponents, from what we can tell, they're loyal to the Torah.
They're associated with James, the brother of Yeshua.
You know, every time that Paul has a problem with somebody, it's usually after
somebody shows up from James and there's a disagreement.
They deny Paul the right to be called an apostle.
And they are ethical vegetarians.
So what do we know about the Nazarenes from history?
We know that they're loyal to the Torah.
They were associated with James, the brother of Yeshua.
They denied Paul the right to be called an apostle.
And they were ethical vegetarians.
All four of these bullet points are the same as the group that Paul was dealing
with.
So it's clear from the book of Galatians that Paul's opponents were not just a
reactionary group within the early assembly, but actually included the
leadership within the movement.
James, Peter, John, among others.
So, you know, back to the Ebionites or the Nazarenes themselves.
Our knowledge of them comes from three different sources.
The Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis.
It's written around 380 common era.
It was a heresiology, basically.
So, Epiphanius, he was a Palestinian bishop of the church.
He set about to document all these heresies that disagreed with the Orthodox
church, and he put them in a collection he called the Panarion, which is the medicine
chest.
And so he called it that because the medicine chest gave you a cure for every
kind of heresy imaginable.
And he wrote extensively about the Ebionites.
I believe the Ebionites were one of the Jewish Christian groups.
They were associated with the Nazarenes.
And it's actually difficult to tell whether the Ebionites were not the
Nazarenes themselves.
It appears to be just two different names for the same group.
We also have information in the Recognitions of Clement, which we also
call the Nazarene Acts, and in the Clementine Homily.
So both of these documents give us indications that they are actually
Ebionite slash Nazarene documents written by the assembly when they were in Pella.
So the Ebionite beliefs.
They believe that Yeshua was the true prophet the Nabi Ahmed who Moses foretold
would be sent due to the people's reluctance to hear the voice of Yahuwah.
They get this doctrine from Deuteronomy 18.15
where Moses says, So they believe that Yeshua was this prophet predicted by
Moses.
The prophet like unto Moses.
Again, this is not a controversial doctrine.
I think the church itself believes this also.
They also believe that Yahuwah desired a simple lifestyle for his followers.
The name Ebion itself means the poor ones in Hebrew.
So the Ebionites trace their poverty back to the days of the followers of Yeshua
when they held all their property in common.
That's in Acts 4.32-35.
Now, Epiphanius in the Panarion he has the opportunity to actually interview
Ebionites.
He speaks about talking to them directly and he asks them why they call themselves
the poor and they tell him quite plainly that they were the descendants of the
assembly in Acts 4 that laid their possessions at the foot of the apostles.
So there is a direct connection with the apostles.
In the received text in Matthew 19.16 we have this episode where the rich young
ruler comes to Yeshua and he says, Good teacher, what good shall I do to have
everlasting life?
And Yeshua says to him, why do you call me good?
No one is good except one Elohim.
But if you wish to enter into life, guard the commandments.
He then said to him, which?
And Yeshua said, You shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery,
you shall not steal, you shall not bear false witness, respect your father and
your mother, you shall love your neighbor as yourself.
The young man then said to Yeshua, all these things I have washed over from
my youth what else do I lack?
And Yeshua said to him, if you wish to be perfect go and sell what you have and give
to the poor, the Ebionites and then you will have treasure in heaven and then come
and follow me.
Now there is a gospel, a lost gospel called the gospel according to the Hebrews
and we don't have it the entire gospel any longer but all we have is quotes by
historians that speak about what the gospel of the Hebrews said.
This was probably the original version of Matthew and in this one quote from origin
on Matthew 19, 16 he says that it continues and it says, But the rich man
began to scratch his head and it pleased him not and the master said to him,
How can you say that I have fulfilled the Torah and the prophets?
For it stands written in the Torah, Love your neighbor as yourself and behold
many of your brothers, the sons of Abraham, are begrimed with dirt and die of
hunger and your house is full of many good things but nothing at all comes forth from
it to them.
And he turned and said to Simon his disciple who was sitting by him,
Simon Bar-Jonah it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a
rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.
So there you have the rest of the story.
Why did he say that about the rich man passing through the eye of the needle?
It's because if you're rich and you see other people suffering and dying and
starving and you're not giving your wealth to them, you're not keeping the
commandment that says to love your neighbor as yourself.
So again, it's not that Yeshua was doing away with the Torah.
He was teaching a more stringent version of keeping the Torah in all the references
we can find.
Another Abionite belief they believe that Yeshua condemned the animal sacrifices.
Again, another quote from the Gospel according to the Hebrews.
It says, Yeshua is quoted as saying by Epiphanius that I came to abolish
sacrifices and unless you cease from sacrificing, my anger shall not cease from
you.
So the Nazarenes believed that one of the doctrines or the purposes of the true
prophet was to put an end to the animal sacrifices.
Now, this is kind of an unusual and controversial belief because the Torah
that we have, the first five books of Moses, they actually say that you are to
sacrifice.
It's the commandment that's put forth by Elohim.
You know, many of you have probably read this book, Who Wrote the Bible?
It's one of the books that we recommend and that we talk about in the Vero Yihad.
This book is something that's taught by pretty much any first-year seminary
student reads this book.
If you're going to a Bible college, at some point you're going to be given a
class on this book.
And what this book is, there's a belief well, there's a theory, we'll call it a
theory, that the Torah and much of the Scripture was originally four separate
documents.
And that at some point, probably in the Babylonian captivity, these documents were
all combined.
There's a what they call a J document, which refers to the Creator as Yahweh or
Yahuwah, Yod-Heh-Vav-Heh.
There's an E document that always refers to Him as Elohim.
There is a D document, which is the Deuteronomy document that was primarily
the book of Deuteronomy, and it's got other insertions throughout the
Scriptures.
And the last part was the P document.
And the P document is what they call the priestly document, and it's the one that
has all the sacrifices and the instructions for the temple.
Well, in the Nazarene Acts of the Apostles, Yeshua actually addresses this
issue about the sacrifices not being part of the original Torah, and everything,
just about every criticism that Peter brings forth that says that the Torah has
been tampered with, it all relates back to what the scholars call the P document.
So, you know, we've got this modern doctrine that came forth about a hundred
years ago where they realized that the Torah was made up of these four separate
documents, and then Peter's saying that part of what's written in the Torah was
not there originally, and everything that Peter says, it relates back to this P
document.
So, it's almost like it actually kind of confirms what Peter says in the Nazarene
Acts.
You know, he knew something 2,000 years ago that we just figured out a hundred
years ago.
The Abionites also believe that Yeshua taught his followers vegetarianism.
Epiphanius describes the Abionites as vegetarians, and when he questioned one of
the Abionites about vegetarianism, he simply told him that Christ revealed it
to me.
In the Recognitions and Homilies, vegetarianism is strongly connected to the
rejection of animal sacrifices and is required of all the followers of Yeshua.
Now, we've got also other references from these historians that speak about the
apostles not eating meat.
We've got one from Epiphanius, The Proof of the Gospel, Book 3,
Chapter 5, that says,
That's a reference to the Abionites again, the poor.
Excessive purity,
that again comes back to this Abionite belief that the apostles were daily
immersers, or daily baptizers.
We've also got Epiphanius mentions that James did not eat meat.
In the Nazarene Acts, Peter says that he doesn't eat meat.
There's a number of different quotations where different people are saying that the
apostles did not eat meat.
The Abionites believe that Yehuah had one Torah for everyone.
They believe that the distinction between Jew and Gentile had been abolished for
believers, and that they should all follow the universal and eternal Torah.
You can find that in Homilies, Book 8, Chapter 10.
And it's as revealed to Moses, the Torah as revealed to Moses,
which is mentioned in Recognitions, Book 1, Chapter 35.
So in this respect, the Abionites were similar to traditional Jews who sought to
convert everyone to their understanding of Judaism.
They just had a different understanding about what the Torah required.
Okay, the question is do I believe that we should not eat meat?
From all the evidence I've gathered, the apostles did not eat meat.
I quit eating meat, but as far as...
it's like I said at the beginning, I'm not telling anyone that they need to
follow anything that I'm saying.
I can give you references to all the documents that I've read that indicate
that the apostles did not eat meat, but I really think it's an individual
decision.
From what I've read and from what I understand, I believe that the original
doctrine of the apostles was that believers were not supposed to eat meat,
but again, that's the decision for you to make yourself.
The question was about the bread and the fish.
We have that reference in the Scripture where he gave fish, and then there's also
in the book of Luke, it says that Yeshua, after his resurrection, ate fish.
Again, that comes back to what I was saying before about can we...
is it possible that some of this was inserted, that there were changes made?
If the original gospel was the gospel according to the Hebrews, and according to
the people who believed the gospel according to the Hebrews, Yeshua did not
eat meat, that would be the sort of thing that I would think may have been an
alteration made to the gospels.
Now, Yeshua himself later refers back to that when he's speaking to apostles about
the leaven of the Pharisees, and he doesn't mention the fish.
He goes, you know, don't you remember when I fed the multitude with these loaves,
but he never mentions the fish.
And there is several references outside of Scripture where you'll have people like
church fathers refer back to that story, these early 1st and 2nd century church
fathers, and they refer back to it and mention the bread, but they don't mention
the fish.
So, again, I'm not trying to tell you what to believe.
I'm not trying to tell you you need to give up meat today.
I'm just saying maybe this is something that you might want to look at.
This is something that you're convicted of.
If I'm talking about this, and you have this feeling like maybe I need to look at
that, then that might be the Holy Spirit telling you to research it.
That's what happened with me.
The first time I read it, I was like, no, that's just crazy.
Well, we don't eat meat at my Passover.
Well, where's the temple at to go and sacrifice the lamb?
...
And honestly, I mean, with regard to that, I understand, but then again, that could
also come back to what the Nazarenes say that they believe was that Yahuwah never
ordained sacrifices.
So if He didn't ordain the other sacrifices, then would it not be possible
that actually slaughtering the lamb was not part of the...
that that was an addition?
I don't know.
But there is...
I've got another presentation that I've been working on which actually goes into
there's quite a bit of text from the prophets in the received version of
Scripture where Yahuwah says that He never ordained sacrifices.
That comes from Jeremiah, from Isaiah, Hosea, Amos, they all in fact,
I think it's in Jeremiah, He says, look, I never commanded sacrifices.
So it's not just something that the Ebionites believed, it was something that
you could go all the way back to the prophets that are in the Scriptures,
that are in the actual King James version of the Bible that says that He never
ordained sacrifices.
In the Temple Scroll.
Right.
Okay, and there are several different reasons that are given.
In the recognitions, like the recognitions and homilies, they're basically two
different versions of the same book.
It would be like comparing the book of Matthew and the book of Mark.
It's two different versions of the same story, but there's things in Mark that's
not in Matthew, there's things in Matthew not in Mark, and even though it's the same
narrative there's differences between the two.
It's the same way with the recognitions and homilies.
There are two different versions of very similar narratives.
In the recognitions, it's said that Moses gave them the commandment for sacrifices
because the people had sacrificing so ingrained in them from their time in Egypt
that he couldn't get that rooted out of them.
So what he did was he allowed them to sacrifice, but only to Yahuwah,
with the understanding at a later time this prophet was going to come that was
going to turn them away from sacrifices.
But now the recognitions gives you a very different story.
It says that Moses never commanded sacrifices, and that it was the people
coming after Moses that corrupted it.
So if Moses ordained sacrifices with the understanding that Yeshua was to do away
with it, that would actually fit with what the temple scroll says.
But again, I'm just I'm putting the information out there.
It's not my opinion that these people said this.
I'm just telling you what was said, and then it's for you.
If it's something that strikes your heart that maybe I need to look at, you have the
opportunity after the boot camp to go out and get some of these books on Amazon,
read them yourself, and get a more thorough understanding of it.
I don't want anyone to change their lifestyle or their beliefs or their
understanding because I made a presentation about something.
Now we're talking about the Ammonite beliefs.
They believe that the Torah had been corrupted with false text.
I'd already touched on that.
Of course this is a controversial belief, heretical to both Orthodox Judaism and
Christianity.
They believe that the Tanakh had been corrupted by additions to the Torah.
These corruptions included animal sacrifices and anything that painted
Yahuwah in a negative light.
I gave a teaching a couple of Shabbats back where we were talking about how the
Scripture says that Yahuwah created evil.
That's one of the examples that Peter brought forth and says that Yahuwah did
not create evil.
First of all, evil is not anything.
Evil is like darkness being an absence of light.
Darkness itself is not anything.
What we see as evil is a removal of good.
So you remove good, the default position of the world itself is evil.
The light comes in, dispels the evil in the same way Yahuwah comes in,
dispels the evil.
Keep in saying that that itself, to say that Yahuwah created evil,
that was an example he used as a false text.
In fact, in the Nazarene Acts he says stuff like that is put in there to convict
those of us that truly love Yahuwah because we'll read that and we won't even
be able to... it'll be so far removed from what we understand about the Creator that
it even hurts us to hear that.
I've heard that from people who are just like I can't believe that the Creator
would create evil and it's fulfilling literally what Kepha says.
People who truly love him and you hear an evil accusation that he created evil,
it's supposed to convict your heart and to make you think there's no way that can be
true.
They believe that acts of violence and aggression is forbidden.
The Nazarene recognition is once...
chapter 71, it says when they were attacked by Paul and the temple the
Nazarenes did not defend themselves with violence and later, in book 3,
chapter 42, Peter shares his opinion or his opposition to war.
Now in the Tedache, chapter 16, verse 1, which of course is written by the
apostles themselves, it says that we're commanded to arm ourselves for protection.
So it's likely that they did not defend themselves in the temple because they were
in the house of Elohim and they didn't want to shed blood inside the temple or it
could possibly have been a Sabbath.
It's something you see in the Maccabees where they would believe that they
shouldn't even defend themselves against attack if it was on the Sabbath.
So it's difficult to really tell what the reason was in the Nazarene Acts why they
didn't defend themselves.
They believed that Messiah had already appeared many times.
The Ebionites felt that Yeshua's life was neither the first nor the last appearance
of the Messiah.
According to Epiphanius, the Ebionites believed the Messiah was Adam and appeared
as Adam to the patriarchs.
Now this is one thing that Epiphanius does.
He's writing about the Ebionites as if they're heretics.
So he'll take their beliefs and kind of skew their theology enough to make it
sound unappealing and crazy.
But then when you actually read the recognitions and you see what they
believe, it's really not that far from what a lot of Christian groups believe.
They believe that Yeshua, that when it says that the angel of Yehua appeared to
Moses in the pillar of fire, that that was Yeshua.
Which I think that's what a lot of Messianic believers believe, is that that
was actually Yeshua that led them out of Egypt.
They also believe that it was Yeshua that appeared to Abraham before the destruction
of Sodom and Gomorrah and had lunch with Abraham.
They believe that that was Yeshua.
And so that in itself, this doctrine which we call the primal Adam, that's actually
very similar to what most Messianic and Christian people believe today.
They believe that it was Yeshua that was walking in the garden in the cool of the
day.
So Epiphanius makes it sound like they had this outrageous belief, but then when you
actually read the Nazarene Acts and hear it from their own words, it doesn't sound
like something that many of us already believe anyway.
And of course they also believe that Messiah actually itself referred to
Yeshua, but it can also refer to any anointed one.
So like in the Recognitions, Book 1, Chapter 43, it implies that when we all
live righteously, we can all become a Messiah, like a type of shadow of the
Messiah himself.
And in fact, Hippolytus, when he's writing about the Ammonites, he plainly states
that they believe that.
So one of the names that we hear about that was given to the Messiah was the
Standing One.
So in the Recognitions, Simon Magus is claiming to be the Standing One,
and Kepha tells us that's another name for the Messiah.
Now in not only the Nazarene writings, but even in the Torah itself, you have
these statements keep coming up where this person stood up.
And so like, it speaks about James standing on the pinnacle of the temple and
declaring that Yeshua was the Messiah right before they killed him.
Well, when it mentions that one of these men, one of these holy ones, stood up and
performed an act of righteousness, that in itself, they're basically saying,
kind of reading between the lines, that this person is acting as that type
and shadow of Messiah by standing up.
I can give you an example from the Torah.
When Moses is fleeing from Pharaoh, and he's at the well, and he sees Zipporah
come up, and then these shepherds come, and they're harassing Zipporah and her
sisters, and Moses defends them.
It doesn't say that Moses defended them.
It says that Moses stood up and then defended the women.
So you even see this doctrine of the standing one all the way back in the
Torah.
When Israel, when Jacob Israel, when he was on his deathbed, and his
grandsons Ephraim and Manasseh come in, and he's going to bless Ephraim and
Manasseh, you know, he's on his deathbed so he can't stand up, so the Torah says he
straightened up and then blessed the men.
And once he straightened up, his name changed from Jacob to Israel, and the text
refers to him as Israel.
It's all this doctrine which has largely been lost today of the standing one,
the standing one doctrine.
And so you'll see that even in the New Testament, it'll mention that the apostles
stood up, or Yeshua was standing.
And it's all referring back to this kind of between the lines saying that this is
this Nazarene belief that we can all be a type and shadow of Messiah when we do acts
of righteousness.
They believe that... and I'm almost done, I've got maybe seven or eight more slides.
They believe that immersion was important for salvation.
The Abinites believed that immersion, or baptism, replaced animal sacrifices.
Sometimes immersion is referred to as a one-time event, and other times it's a
daily ritual like prayer.
They believe that there was only one Elohim.
It's completely different than the beliefs of Marcion.
They were strict monotheists who denied the doctrine of the Trinity.
For the Abinites, Yeshua was the true prophet, the Messiah, the messenger of
Yahuwah, but not equal to Yahuwah.
In the Recognitions, Yeshua is preexistent, the Son of Elohim,
through whom creation took place.
They believe that Paul was an apostate from the Torah.
In the first book of the Recognitions, we're told another version of the attack
on the believers in the temple by the congregation of the freemen, which is
written about in Acts chapter 6.
But in this version, Paul is who is called our enemy.
He's not name by name, he's just referred to as the enemy.
It's not only simply a bystander as he is in the book of Acts, but he is rather the
actual leader of the attack who attacks and attempts to kill James.
And not only is there never any mention of Paul's conversion in the Recognitions and
Homilies, but virtually all the views debated against by Peter are identical to
the doctrine taught by Paul.
Here I have a quote from Epiphanius, it says,
They say that he was a Tarsian, which he admits himself does not deny,
and they suppose that he was of Greek parentage, taking the occasion of this
from the same passage, because of his frank statement, I am a man of Tarsus,
a citizen of no mean city.
They claim that he was a Greek, the son of a Greek mother, a Greek father,
that he had gone up to Jerusalem, stayed there for a while, desired to marry
the daughter of the high priest, and therefore became a proselytite,
and had been circumcised, but since he still could not marry that sort of girl,
he became angry, and wrote against circumcision, and against the Sabbath,
and the legislation.
So that's from Panarion, chapter 16, verses 8 and 9.
The most notable difference between the beliefs held by the Nazarene, the
Evianites versus Christianity, Hebrew roots, and Messianic Judaism,
is the difference in the way the Torah is viewed.
Not only is obedience to the Torah very important for salvation, the Evianites
believe Yeshua taught a more strict observance of Torah, and this stands in
stark contrast to Paul, who views Torah obedience as unnecessary or even harmful.
For the Nazarenes, it was not enough to help the poor, you had to become poor.
You didn't just have to abstain from murder, you had to abstain from killing.
They did not interpret the Torah through the lens of Rabbinic Judaism, they
interpreted the Torah through the eyes of the person who gave the Torah to Moses,
who was Yeshua.
We have more information about the Evianites than any other Jewish Christian
group.
In their earliest writings, the Evianites are mentioned more than any other groups,
and the differences in their doctrines often is unclear.
Epiphanius states, for instance, that many of these groups were of the same
school, that's what he said, the same school, and were vegetarian, kept the
Torah, and rejected the animal sacrifices.
Based on the descriptions of Epiphanius and the statements made by Jerome and
Theodoret, the Nazarenes and Evianites are the same group.
When attempting to uncover what Yeshua taught his apostles, the best source of
information is the records we have on the doctrines of the Nazarene Israelites.
So, again, if you're wanting more information, this book is excellent,
The Lost Religion of Jesus, Simple Living and Nonviolence in Early Christianity by
Keith Akers.
He goes into a lot of the same research that I brought up.
We have this other book, of course, by Robert Eisenman, The Dead Sea Scrolls
and the First Christians.
It's kind of a much smaller version of James, the brother of Jesus, and the New
Testament Code.
They're both thousand-page books.
This is, I think, 500 pages, no, 400 pages, and part of it is his
translations of some of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
So, it's a much easier read than James, the brother of Jesus.
Of course, you've got the New Testament Code, also, that you can read for more
information.
The Panarion of Epiphanius of Solomus, Book 1, you can buy that on Amazon,
or you can find that free online.
Just Google Epiphanius Panarion.
You can find plenty of PDFs if you want to read what he says about not just the
Ebionites, but the Nazarenes, the Nazarenes, the Essenes, all that
information is in there if you want more information about these, you know,
what he calls these heresies.
And there's a lot of other good information in there.
I mean, Epiphanius, he talks about the Nicolaitans.
You know, we hear that in the Book of Revelation, and people have theories about
what it is.
Well, you know, Epiphanius, he lived in the Middle East.
I mean, he knew what the Nicolaitans were, so if you want to know what they are,
you know, get a copy of his book and you can read about them.
And then, of course, there's Jackson Snyder's book, The Nazarene Acts of the
Apostles.
If you're listening to this on YouTube, I'll put a link in the description where
you can download that for free and listen to it.
And thank you.
That concludes my presentation.
Thank you.