The History of Christianity’s journey away from Torah Pt. 3

“Restore us to You, O LORD, that we may be restored; Renew our days as of old.” Laminations 5:21

This will be the final post of D. Thomas Lancaster’s book Restoration: Returning the Torah of God to the Disciples of Jesus in his chapter called “Our Journey away from Torah”. For the sake of being honest and accurate, it was brought to my attention that in part 2 the Ignatius quote was taken not from Ignatius, but actually from a corruption of one of his letters, Pseudo-Ignatius. From what I can understand, in Ignatius’s letter to the Magnesians, he was not prohibiting other believers from keeping the Sabbath per se, just warning them not to do it in the same manner as the Jews that he knew of.

In part 2, Lancaster left off of how the Roman authority in the Middle Ages had a tight grip on the people by not allowing them to read the Scriptures for themselves and how the church was violent towards to Jewish people. In the last section we will see the influence the reformation and the Holocaust contributed to the Hebrew Roots movement.

OUR JOURNEY AWAY FROM TORAH

THE REFORMATION

Almost 500 years ago, the return form exile began. I want to take you back there for a moment. Imagine yourself in Germany, a German Christian, in the year 1517. When you attended church, you go in to a beautiful building with high stone spires and vaulted ceilings, stained glass and marble, candlelit masses, monks chanting in Latin, a priest to hear your confession, another priest to sing the mass, incense and votives, Mary, the baby Jesus, Saint Peter, Saint Paul, Saint Ann, and the Holy Father in Rome. The masses are inspiring. The architecture is captivating. The Liturgy is lofty, high and holy. We have come a long way from the simple, first-century sect of Judaism that proclaimed the man from Nazareth to be resurrected from the dead.

But there are some things amiss here. The mass proclaiming the mystery of Christ is beautiful – but you can’t understand a word of it, unless you have a university education and can speak Latin, which isn’t likely. The pictures of the Madonna, the Christ Child, Saint Peter and Saint Paul are as much of the Scripture as you are likely to really know because there is not Bible available for the common person. Bibles are all written in Latin, and the laity is forbidden to possess a copy.

When you go to the priest to say your confession, there is a charge. You are expected to pay for forgiveness. For and extra donation you can buy grace for dead relatives to release them from torment faster. Relief sculptures, mocking and ridiculing the Jewish people, are carved right into the architecture of the church. This is what you know about the Jews. Utter contempt and utter distain.

But listen to that pounding sound.

Outside the door, someone is standing on a ladder. He is nailing something to the door. It is the year 1517, the year Martin Luther, a disillusioned Augustine monk from the Black Monastery in Erfert, nailed his Ninety-five Theses to the church door in Wittenberg.

If you take the time to read his Ninety-five Theses, it may surprise you to discover how benign it is. This is not a list of radical reforms that Luther sought to impose on the church. It is not a statement against the authority of the papacy or Rome, an indictment of images or the worship of saints. It does not call into question the theology of worshipping Mary as the mother of God. It is not very radical at all. It is continuous sustained argument against the selling of indulgences – that is, charging people for grace and forgiveness.

But it was enough. Someone had dared to question the authority of the church to impose its own man-made rituals and doctrines. Someone had dared to say, “Hey, wait a second. That’s not in the Bible. That’s not part of the original Christian Faith.”

Once that point had been made, there was no way to stop the inevitable. Thanks to Gutenberg, it was not long before Bibles were being printed in common languages so that anyone who wanted could read what was written. The average person could read and understand the stories in the Gospels, the words of the Master, the words of Paul, and the whole of the Scriptures. We call it the Protestant Reformation.

But did Luther go far enough? Clearly the myriad daughter denominations of the Protestant Reformation do not think so. Each subsequent Protestant movement has contributed its own set of further reforms. Ostensibly, each reform is an attempt to reach further back to the original first-century church of Yeshua and His disciples.

The effort to return to the first-century church is praiseworthy. It comes from a desire to conform our lives and congregations to the authority of the Word of God. The motives of these reformers were pure and good. Their methodology, however, has been flawed. An important piece of the puzzle is missing.

What the various Protestant reformers have failed to recognize about the first-century church is that she was Jewish. She was part of the first-century Judaism. Yeshua, the disciples, the first believers, the worship system, the Scriptures, the interpretation of the Scriptures, the teaching, the vernacular and even the very concepts of faith and grace, Messiah and God were all patently Jewish.

Any attempt at church reformation, any attempt to return to the original New Testament Church falls short as long as it refuses to acknowledge the essential Jewishness of our faith.

Why did the Protestant Reformation stop where it did? If it was really all about throwing out the umbilical church traditions that had tainted Christianity, why did it retain the Roman calendar and Roman theologies? Why do Protestant churches still call Sunday the Sabbath and eat ham on Easter instead of unleavened bread on Passover?

It seems that during Luther’s lifetime, hopes were high in the Jewish community that the Protestant Reformation would put a stop to Christian persecution of the Jewish People. In fact, the opposite happened. Martin Luther issued an encyclical called Against the Sabbath Keepers and another one called Against the Judaizers. In these papers, he admonished Protestant Christians for keeping Sabbath and adopting Jewish customs. In 1543, Luther published On the Jews and Their Lies, in which he advocated burning down synagogues in every town and forcing Jews to convert or die.

What was the reason for his rage against the Jewish community? Most scholars agree that he was disappointed that Jews did not embrace Protestant Christianity. He had hoped the Jews would share his excitement over stripping back Roman Catholic tradition. When they did not respond with mass conversions, he turned against them. But another part of his ire arose from things that were happening within his own movement. The Protestants were reading their Bibles and concluding that authentic, biblical Christianity was indeed Jewish.

They were returning to Jewish practices, returned to Torah, keeping Sabbath and festivals. The result was even more bitter persecution by the reformers to try and stop the ‘Judaization’ of the Protestant movement.

It is true. The Renaissance Age boasted a strong Hebrew Roots movement.

As early as 1538, just 21 years after the Wittenberg door incident, Oswald Dlaidt and Andreas Fischer launched a radical return to the Hebrew roots of the faith from within the Anabaptist church of Moravia. Fischer translated Jewish liturgy out of the Hebrew for use in services and even went so far as to write a Christian Siddur, essentially a translation of the Jewish prayer book. Once again believers were praying the ancient blessings before eating and offering thanks after meals and praying the basic prayers of the Jewish expression. It was against these Moravian Hebrew Rooters that Luther wrote Against the Sabbath Keepers, which condemned Sabbath observance as sinful. By means of stiff resistance from Luther and persecution from the later Protestant world, the Moravian Torah movement was stopped.

A reformer by the name of Paul Fagius gave a historical interpretation of the New Testament by explaining the Lord’s Supper in the context of Passover and the sayings of Yeshua in the context of rabbinic literature. Luther and his associates labeled him a Judaizer. For Luther and his followers, refuting the radical reformation became synonymous with rejecting Judaizers. The reformation was spinning out of control and, in some places, rapidly returning to Jewish form and practice.

Wherever the Bible was read without theological manipulation, believers were returning to Torah. In the end, however, the Protestants largely prevailed. The return to Torah was stifled. The Gospel would remain in exile. The time was not yet ripe. Several more centuries would pass before the momentum returned.

END OF THE EXILE

Form 1938 to 1945, the Jewish people endured a seven-year great tribulation, the culmination of the horrors of exile. The long years of persecution reached a demonic crescendo. Blackness. Utter despair. Ruin in the face of naked evil. Six million dead. Yet the people of Israel lived.

As the world emerged from the travails of World War II, stories of the Holocaust began to circulate. Slowly, the realization sank in. Christians all over the world began to understand what had happened. Theologians and churchmen were abashed to realize that their own religious prejudices and bigotry had contributed to the greatest human travesty of all time.

Though he was a self-proclaimed pagan, Hitler justified the genocide by pointing to Christian writings and Christian history. He even quoted Luther. “Whole libraries of books have been published which show how Hitler translated Luther’s ideas into action.”[11] Ashamed and mortified, Christian thinkers and theologians began to publicly swear off anti-Semitism. As part of that process, they reexamined old church theologies that had allowed for and even encouraged the historic brutalization of the Jewish people. Bible scholars began to reexamine the assumption that the church had replaced the Jewish people. They also reexamined the assumption that Jews are cursed by God and enemies of Christ. This process was the beginning of a renaissance in Christian thought and theology. A new breed of scholars emerged, willing to examine the organs of Christianity in light of Jewish sources. We are only now beginning to reap the harvest of post-Holocaust biblical research.

At the same time, two other remarkable events added momentum to the return to biblical Christianity. Sometime in late 1946 or early 1947, Muhammad edh-Dhib (“The Wolf”) and two of his cousins from the Ta’amirah Bedouin tribe were seeking a stray goat when they discovered the mouth to a cave near the Dead Sea. Throwing a stone into the cave, they heard the sound of breaking potter inside. They later returned to the cave and discovered several cay jars. Three of them contained ancient scrolls, including scrolls of the prophet Isaiah. At the time the boys did not understand the value of their find.

They had discovered what would come to be called the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Dead Sea Scrolls are an ancient library of biblical and Jewish religious literature dating from the day of the Apostles. They have revolutionized the way we understand first-century Judaism and the origins of Christianity.

In March of 1947, these Bedouin boys sold the scrolls of Kahil Iskander Shahin, a shoemaker in Bethlehem, presumably so that he might utilize the parchment in his trade. Kahil recognized that the documents were ancient and perhaps valuable. He sold four of them to mar Athanasius Samuel of St. Mark’s Monastery in Jerusalem. Professor Eleazar Sukenik of Hebrew University was allowed to see the scrolls and attempted to purchase them, but Mar Samuel did not want to sell the scrolls to the professor.

Sukenik disguised himself and made a secret trip to Arab Bethlehem to pay a visit to Kahil the shoemaker. On November 29, 1974, he purchased the remaining scrolls, one of which was a scroll of the prophet Isaiah. Coincidentally, November 29, 1947, is the day the United Nations voted to partition Palestine and allow Israel statehood. On the same day, the ancient prophecies of Isaiah and the ancient land of Israel were retuned to Jewish hands. These two seemingly unrelated events have launched a revolution in the way we understand our faith and the way we understand the Bible.

The Jewish return to the land of Israel and the reestablishment of a Jewish state came as a fulfillment of biblical prophecy. After those two events, it was no longer possible for Christians to dismiss the Jewish people. The ancient prophecies concerning Israel were coming true. Christian thinkers and theologians needed to reconsider the Israel question.

THE MONDERN JEWISH ROOTS MOVEMENT

The modern-day Jewish Roots movement is born out of an intersection of these things. The Holocaust, the formation of the State of Israel and the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls all combined to spark a complete renaissance in the way the early Christianity is studied and understood. Through the work of Jewish Roots scholars, we are now able to read and understand the Gospel from its Jewish context for the first time since the days of the Apostles. The followers of Yeshua are returning to the ways of Torah. Believers are uncovering the original shape and form of the faith. It is a prophetic reawakening, coinciding with the return of the Jewish people to their ancient homeland.

The long exile of the Jewish people is at its end. In the same way, the long exile of the Gospel is at an end. Just as the Jewish people are returning to their native soil, we are returning the Gospel to its original matrix of the Torah of Moses.

More than three thousand years ago, Moses foresaw the time of restoration. “And you shall again obey the Lord, and observe all His commandments which I command you today.” (Deuteronomy 30:8)

Works Cited
11 Weiner, Peter F., Martin Luther, Hitler’s Spiritual Ancestor, Hutchinson & Co. Ltd., London: New York: Melbourne: Sydney. Online version at www.tentmaker.org/books/MartinLuther-HitlersSpiritualAncestor.html#jews