“Christianity is merely a continuation of Judaism, not a replacement of it.”
The following is from a book I just recently read. It comes from the second chapter of a book written by D. Thomas Lancaster titled Restoration – Returning the Torah of God to the Disciples of Jesus. I was originally going to write a similar essay on the History of Christianity, Judaism, and the Torah but he does a better job of telling it than I ever could. I highly recommend this book to anyone that is remotely interested in understanding the Torah from a Messianic perspective. I wish I would have read this book in my early studies of discovering the Jewish Roots of the faith; it would have made my journey much easier.
I broke up this chapter into several sections because of its length. It was too much for one post and I didn’t want it to discourage anyone from reading it because of its length. I hope and pray that you will read it in its entirety and perhaps begin to discover your Roots of the Faith.
OUR JOURNEY AWAY FROM TORAH
THE GOSPEL IN EXILE
The Jewish people have lived in exile since the age of the Apostles. So has the Gospel.
Like the Jewish people, the Gospel began in the land of Israel. Like the Jewish people, the Gospel spread out into every nation during times of great persecution. Like the Jewish people, the Gospel now resides among the nations of the Diaspora. It is as if the Gospel is in exile because, like the Jewish people, it has been removed from its context and disconnected from its point of origin. We Gentile Christians have in some ways misunderstood and misapplied the Gospel because we have been ignorant of the Jewish origin and Torah context of the Gospel.
These years of exile have been productive for both the Jewish people and the Gospel. Like the Jewish people in exile, the Gospel has flourished. Like the Jewish people in exile, it has entered every nation and every culture on the globe. Like the Jewish people in exile, the Gospel has impacted the entire world.
But the time in nigh for the exile to come to an end.
Moses foresaw a time of restoration. He foresaw a time when the people of Israel would return from exile and turn back to the commandments of God. “And you shall again obey the Lord, and observe all His commandments which I command you today.” (Deuteronomy 30:8) One component of that restoration is certainly a return to the Gospel of Messiah. Now, at the culmination of the ages, Jews are returning to the land. They are returning to the Torah. In a similar way, they are retuning to the Gospel, and the Gospel itself is returning from exile. New Testament scholars are returning the Gospel to its Torah context and reconnecting it with its Jewish origins. Let me explain what I mean.
In the days of the Apostles, Christianity was not yet a separate religion from Judaism. An honest reading of the New Testament from a biblical-Jewish perspective makes it clear that the first-century church never thought of herself as separate and excluded from Judaism. Rather, she considered herself as part of the whole of Israel. She never imagined herself as replacing Judaism. She might have conceived of herself as a reform within Judaism, but not as a separate entity.
The writings of the Apostles assume the believers to be a sect within the larger religion of Judaism. Jesus was actually a Jewish teacher of Torah. His Hebrew name–that is, His real name–was Yeshua. He kept the Torah, taught the Torah, and lived by the Torah. He taught His disciples to keep the Torah in imitation of Him. He argued with the teacher of other sects of Judaism. He denounced the Sadducees, rebuked the Pharisees and brought correction to errant teachings, but he did not institute a new religion, nor did He cancel the Torah. Instead, He sought to bring restoration to the ancient faith of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. He diligently sought after the lost sheep of Israel – those who had turned away from Torah. He affirmed the word of Moses and brought clarification regarding the proper observance of God’s Law. His followers, the Apostles and the believers, also remained within the parameters of normative, first-century Jewish expression. They met daily in the Temple. They congregated in synagogues. They proclaimed the Scriptures of Israel. They kept the biblical festivals, the Sabbaths, the dietary laws and the whole of Torah as best they were able.
When non-Jews began to enter the faith through the ministry of Paul of Tarsus, they too congregated in synagogues and embraced the standards of biblical Judaism. They understood themselves to be “grafted in”[1] to Israel and made citizens of the larger “commonwealth of Israel.”[2] They were allowed certain dispensations. Ritual conversion through circumcision was not required of them. Neither were they required to forsake their ethnic identity and ‘become Jewish.’ Yet their faith was the faith of Israel, placed in the Messiah of Israel, and they henceforth practiced the religion of Israel. But things were changing.
The inclusion of Gentiles in the big tent of Judaism was unpopular. Jewish authorities in local synagogues pressured the non-Jews to undergo formal conversion. So did many of the Jewish believers. In his epistles, Paul argued vociferously for the right of non-Jewish to be recognized as “fellow heirs’ with Israel. [3]
At the end of the book of Acts, we see a picture of the Yeshua movement still in the cradle of Judaism, still a sect within it. It is about the year 65 AD, Paul was a prisoner in the city of Rome and ministering to the believers there. Within two years, Paul went to meet the Master when Nero the Emperor had him beheaded. Nero began an open persecution against the believers, blaming them for the burning of Rome. A short time later, Peter too found martyrdom in Rome when Nero had him crucified. Nero then added to his infamy by launching a massive military campaign against the Jewish state. He sent the dreaded Tenth Legion, under the famous General Vespasian, to put down the revolt in Judea. Suddenly, Jews were regarded as enemies of the state.
After Nero died and Vespasian was made emperor, Vespasian’s son Titus carried on the war by bringing the Roman army against Jerusalem. Our brothers and sisters in Jerusalem heeded the words of the Master. He had forewarned them, saying:
When you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then recognize that her desolation is near. Then those who are in Judea must flee to the mountains, and those who are in the midst of the city must leave, and those who are in the country must not enter the city; because these are days of vengeance, so that all things which are written will be fulfilled. (Luke 21:20-22)
The armies came and the believers fled. The Roman legions destroyed the city of Jerusalem and burned the Temple. The Jewish believers in Judea and Jerusalem either fled east across the Jordan River or were carried off into captivity and sold as slaves along with their countrymen. In one sense, the Gospel went into exile with them, scattered among the nations.
SEPARATING FROM JUDASIM
The Jewish War gave rise to the politics of anti-Semitism. Imagine a Gentile believer living in the Roman colony of Philippi, attending a Jewish worship service on the Jewish day of worship and keeping Jewish rituals when suddenly his nation goes to war with the Jews. Previously he might have been known simply as ‘Tony the Believer’ from Philippi. Subsequent to the revolt his neighbors began to refer to him as ‘Tony the Jew lover, enemy of the state’ from Philippi, or even just ‘Tony the Jew’.
Emperor Vespasian followed up the Jewish War by imposing a heavy, punitive annual tax upon all Jewish households in the empire. He determined Jewish households as those who worshipped after the Jewish manner. With the addition of the Fiscus Judaicus tax, Gentiles believers had financial, political and cultural incentives to distance themselves from Judaism.[4]
Shortly after the Jewish War and the destruction of Jerusalem, synagogues throughout the world introduced a new benediction in the daily liturgies that was actually a curse on believers in Yeshua and other heretics.[5] The synagogue authorities expelled worshippers who would not pray the curse. Thus the believers found themselves expelled from the Jewish assembly. The Master had foreseen this. He warned His disciples that “they will make you outcasts from the synagogue.” (John 16:2)
The Gentile pagans resented the non-Jews because they were essentially Jewish. The Jewish authorities resented them because they were believers. Excommunication from the synagogue was deeply offensive and created sharp animosity toward Jews (even among Jewish believers), who were already none too popular throughout the empire. What is worse, the expulsion left believers with no place to assemble on the Sabbath, or to assemble at all.
Years went by as the church, now largely dominated by Gentiles, struggled to identify herself. Heresies and persecutions plagued her throughout those formative years. Around the turn of the century, the new emperor, Domitian, the son of Vespasian, afraid of anther Jewish revolt, unleashed a series of new persecution against the believers – again because of their Jewish association…
Put yourself in the sandals of the average non-Jewish believer. On the one hand, the synagogue has thrown you and your family out because you are offensive to Judaism. On the other hand you are seeing your friends and family imprisoned, even tortured and killed, because they are being identified with the Jewish religion. You are guilty by association with a religion that doesn’t want you association with them.
THE SECOND CENTURY
By the time the second century began, anti-Jewish sentiment was so high in the church (especially the Roman church) that most non-Jews no longer wanted to be identified with Jews at all. The first-century believers were long dead and gone. A new generation had been raised to view Jews and even Jewishness as the antithesis of Christianity. It is not unlike the bitter hostility many Protestants hold for Catholics. It fills some deep psychological need to define oneself against something. Unfortunately, that ‘something’ is often one’s parents, which is what Catholics were to Protestants – and what Judaism was to Christianity.
Theologically, the church leaders decided that the Christian church had replaced the Jews as the true Israel of God. They decided that they were now the true people of God, and that Jews were consigned to damnation and everlasting cursedness from God.
The new generation (second century) was the generation that lived through the Second Jewish Revolt. In the third decade of the second century, the Jews of Judea revolted against Rome again, this time during the days of the pagan Emperor Hadrain. They banded together under the leadership of the rebel warrior Shimon Bar Kokba. Rabbi Akiva declared him to be messiah. All of Bar Kokba’s men were told that they must swear allegiance to his messiahship, even proving their allegiance by maiming themselves for him. Their refusal to declare Bar Kokba as the Messiah surely alienated the last Jewish believers among the Jews of Israel. It was the last break between the believers and Judaism.
Of course, Bar Koba was not the messiah. Rome quickly crushed his rebellion. Jerusalem was again destroyed, and the Jews again faced imperial persecution. The Talmud calls it the Age of the Great Persecution. In those days, Emperor Hadrain made laws declaring it illegal to keep the Sabbath, to ordain rabbis and to practice Judaism. Believers could be arrested for keeping the laws of Torah. Those who did were arrested and martyred along with the faithful among the Jewish people. Rome made no distinction between Jews and believers in the Jewish faith. To survive, it became necessary for believers to further disassociate from Judaism. Unfortunately, Paul’s compiled letters, when read outside their original context, provided ample justification for that disassociation. The emerging Christian movement read Paul’s arguments for the inclusion of Gentiles in the Kingdom backward to imply the exclusion of Torah.
A look ahead at the next installment:
- THE CHUCH FATHERS
- RESURRECTION SUNDAY
- CONSTANTINE AND NICEA
Works Cited
1 Romans 11:17
2 Ephesians 1:12-13
3 Ephesians 3:6
4 O’Quinn, Chris “Fiscus Judaicus,” Bikurel Tzion, #72, p 28.
5 b.Berachot 28b-29a.
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