Celtic Prayer Centre Blog

So this thought came up at our young adults bible study in passing. We know that ecclesia is true greek word and meaning for “Church” as its should be meaning assembly of people etc. But where did they get the word church from and what are its origins?

So the helpful internet supplied us with this (link here):

In the earlier Greek It was pronounced “ku-ri-a-kos” or “ku-ri-a-kon.” As you can see, this word doesn’t even resemble the Greek word “ecclesia” whose place it has usurped. The meaning of “Ku-ri-a-kos” is understood by its root: “Ku- ri-os,” which means “lord.” Thus, “kuriakos” (i.e., “church”) means “pertaining to the lord.” It refers to something that pertains to, or belongs to, a lord. The Greek “kuriakos” eventually came to be used in Old English form as “cirice” (Kee-ree-ke), then “churche” (kerke), and eventually “church” in its traditional pronunciation. A church, then, is correctly something that “pertains to, or belongs to, a lord.”

Now, as you can see, there is a major problem here. The translators broke the rules in a big way. When they inserted the word “church” in the English versions, they were not translating the Greek word “kuriakos”, as one might expect. Rather, they were substituting an entirely different Greek word. This was not honest! The word “church” would have been an acceptable translation for the Greek word “kuriakos.” However, not by the wildest imagination of the most liberal translator can it ever be an acceptable translation for the Greek word “ecclesia.” Are you following this? Consider it carefully. This truth will answer many questions you’ve had about churches, and the kingdom.

“Ecclesia” is an entirely different word with an entirely different meaning than “kuriakos.” In fact, the Greek word “kuriakos” appears in the New Testament only twice. It is found once in I Corinthians 11:20 where it refers to “the Lord’s supper,” and once again in Revelation 1:10 where it refers to “the Lord’s day.” In both of those cases, it is translated “the Lord’s…” – not “church.” This word does not appear again in the New Testament. Nonetheless, this is the unlikely and strange history of the word “church” as it came to the English language. Eventually, through the manipulation of organized religion “church” came to replace “ecclesia” by popular acceptance. Again, we must emphasize the importance of knowing word meanings in order to know the intent of those who wrote the Scriptures.

Here is the intro talk on this session…..here….its Doug’s shorter talk on the circumstances surrounding the split of Judaism in the 1st century.

The various attempts to rid Judea of the Romans in 70 & 135

and the rise of Rabbinic Judaism from the ashes of Jerusalem from 70 onwards.

The path of peace chosen by the Messianic believers ( A Judasim)…which began to show the differences between the messianics and the other movements( Judaisms)

The Jewish War began in 66 AD and culminated in the destruction of Jerusalem in 70. When under the proconsul Gessius Florus in 64, the injustice, oppression and tyranny had reached a climax. The Jews were confident that God would come to their rescue and vindicate their cause. There is no doubt that this Zealot rebellion movement was filled with a theocratic ideal and fervent messianic hopes. By 66, dissatisfaction turned into open rebellion. The conflict started up in Caesarea and above all in Jerusalem. In November of 66 Jewish Zealots had driven all Roman forces from Jerusalem and had actually slain more than 600 Roman troops. The Roman occupation forces, but also the high priest who tried to smother the rebellion, were no longer equal to the situation and were slaughtered.

The bull-necked emperor Nero gave two simple commands – destroy Jerusalem – level the temple. Nero picked the heavy, plodding fifty seven year old commoner, Vespasian, who would be assisted by his energetic son Titus. The conquered nations comprising the Roman Empire watched with incredulity as the Jews, single-handed, fought the Roman Goliath. Josephus was given the task to commander the Jewish forces. The Jews were so close to winning the war that Rome was forced to use her full military weight against them to insure victory. The Romans knew the world was watching and knew that the stakes were high. If the Jews were to win their independence the whole empire would be in revolt. The extreme Jewish patriots were not satisfied with the tame manner in which Josephus conducted his preparations; they had grounds to suspect that the aristocrat, who had formally belonged to the peace party, had not his heart in the undertaking. The bloody business of massacre and counter-massacre succeeded one another with unrelenting horror. Jews were killed in Caesarea, Scythopolis, Ascolon, Tyre, Alexandri. Josephus ends up turning collaborationist for the Romans.

Josephus tells us that when Cestius Gallus had earlier come with his army against Jerusalem, after some time he raised the siege. After he had left, many of the oldest of the Jews went out from Jerusalem as from a sinking ship. He says that a few years later, when Vespasian come with his troops against Jerusalem, a great multitude fled from Jerusalem to the mountains for security. It is reasonable to suppose that some Christians were among these. When Jerusalem was surrounded, the Christians were to think of their safety, and seize the first opportunity for flight. Jesus had warned them when these things started happening to flee into the mountains.

The Jews of Jerusalem revolted against an emperor whom they would not call a god. After the entire land had been subdued by Vespasian, the siege of Jerusalem itself was finally under-taken in the spring of 70 by his son Titus to end the war and destroy them. The “rampart” is the wall of 39 stadia (about 7800 yards) which the Roman legions threw up in three days around the city to starve it out. Part of the rampart east of the city followed the stream of the “Cedron toward the mount of olives” where Jesus was when he wept. Jews, instead of uniting all their forces and presenting a solid front to their common enemy, carried on a constant and devastating warfare with each other which sapped their strength and wasted their resources, so that several Jewish factions existed, John of Gischala, Simon Eleazar, others. The Temple swam with the blood of more than 8000 Zealots. Suffice it to say, that the Jews, deceived by false prophets who promised them a temporal deliverer, persevered in their rebellion long after reasonable chance of success had disappeared; they were divided into hostile factions, who fought against each other in the streets of Jerusalem, while the walls of the city quivered under the battering engines of the common enemy.

Jesus had warned His followers “Verily, I say unto you, There shall not be left here (Temple) one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down.” After the siege had lasted for 6 months, Titus captured the city and slaughtered more than a million Jews. In all, 1,356,460 Jews died and also the Roman soldiers. The famous wailing wall is part of the western portion of the retaining wall of the temple area.

Titus pressed the siege of Jerusalem, which was crowded with people because of the paschal festivities, cutting off the water and food supply. The besieged were terribly hard pressed by these tactics, as well as by the insufferable heat. Those who tried to escape were captured and crucified before the very walls as an example to others. According to Josephus, such famine that a mother actually ate the flesh of her own small son. He tells of 2,500,000 assembled at the last Passover just before the city was taken by Titus. 1,000,000 perished in the siege, 347,000 perished in other places. Of the remainder, 97,000 were carried into captivity and 11,000 starved through neglect or sullen refusal of food. On July 17th the daily sacrifices were interrupted.

Some weeks later, after the legions had assaulted the walls and gained entrance like an irresistible stream, the Romans put to the sword all Jews whom they happened to encounter. Titus desired greatly that the Temple should be spared, and promised to spare the Jews if they would stop their resistance. Several times he sent Josephus to persuade his countrymen, but the providence of God directed otherwise. First the Jews themselves set fire to the court of the temple, and afterwards the Romans. Fire consumed the buildings and the temple went up. But the prophecy of the Redeemer had to be fulfilled; the destruction of the temple occurred on the Jewish Sabbath, August 10th, 70. When Jerusalem was captured, the temple was burned and scavengers would turn over every stone to retrieve the melted gold. The Jewish people were expatriated, and never since has sacrifice been offered up to God on Jewish altars.

After bitter fighting and frightful massacres, in September of 70, after a stubborn and desperate resistance, the city fell and the national existence of the Jews came to an end. The Holy City was taken and burned, and the Tenth Legion encamped in the ruined temple. The temple was leveled to the ground and utterly destroyed. Only the Roman garrison was left. Josephus states that the Romans, having taken the city, brought their standards into the court of the temple, and placed them opposite the east gate, where they offered sacrifices to them. Many who survived were sold into slavery or taken to Rome for the wild beasts. The seven-branched candlestick, the golden table of the shew-bread and the golden trumpets were carried through the streets of Rome in triumph. The Emperor Hadrian dealt the final blow in 132, as a result of another revolt led by a so-called Messiah, Bar Cocheba (son of the star), the Jews were again massacred leaving another million victims. From then on, the Jews scattered over the face of the earth, became the wandering people, without temple or sacrifice, as predicted by the prophets.

The Messianics were  not molested so long as it was regarded as only a phase of the recognized religion of the Jews. Judaism was a “recognized religion.”

 The prophecy of Jesus to the fall of Jerusalem goes on to refer to the final coming of the Son of Man and the consummation of history when all men will be faced with judgment.

After the destruction of the temple in 70 AD, the Sadducees disappear – no temple meant no sacrifices, no place therefore for a priestly class; total national humiliation meant no place for a ruling class skilled in managing foreign rulers. Pharisees alone have shaped the religious life. Judaism, as a political state was ruined, the militant Zealots were decimated; the seething problems which had obsessed Palestine while Jesus lived were history. Jerusalem was the capital of the Jewish world. The catastrophic event of its present, past, or future destruction would be a central, decisive world event-an extraordinary intervention of God signaling the beginning of the last days of the world. Among the messianics it would have prompted an intense expectation of the imminent return of Jesus in glory.

BUT more was to follow

The Bar-Kokhba Revolt

(132-135 C.E.)

by Shira Schoenberg

The Bar Kokhba revolt marked a time of high hopes followed by violent despair. The Jews were handed expectations of a homeland and a Holy Temple, but in the end were persecuted and sold into slavery. During the revolt itself, the Jews gained enormous amounts of land, only to be pushed back and crushed in the final battle of Bethar.

When Hadrian first became the Roman emperor in 118 C.E., he was sympathetic to the Jews. He allowed them to return to Jerusalem and granted permission for the rebuilding of their Holy Temple. The Jews’ expectations rose as they made organizational and financial preparations to rebuild the temple. Hadrian quickly went back on his word, however, and requested that the site of the Temple be moved from its original location. He also began deporting Jews to North Africa.

The Jews prepared to rebel until Rabbi Joshua ben Hananiah calmed them. The Jews then satisfied themselves with preparing secretly in case a rebellion would later become necessary. They built hideouts in caves and did shoddy work building weapons so that the Romans would reject the weapons and return them to the Jews.

The Jews organized guerilla forces and, in 123 C.E., began launching surprise attacks against the Romans. From that point on, life only got worse for the Jews. Hadrian brought an extra army legion, the “Sixth Ferrata,” into Judea to deal with the terrorism. Hadrian hated “foreign” religions and forbade the Jews to perform circumcisions. He appointed Tinneius Rufus governor of Judea. Rufus was a harsh ruler who took advantage of Jewish women. In approximately 132 C.E., Hadrian began to establish a city in Jerusalem called Aelia Capitolina, the name being a combination of his own name and that of the Roman god Jupiter Capitolinus. He started to build a temple to Jupiter in place of the Jewish Holy Temple.

As long as Hadrian remained near Judea, the Jews stayed relatively quiet. When he left in 132, the Jews began their rebellion on a large scale. They seized towns and fortified them with walls and subterranean passages. Under the strong leadership of Shimon Bar-Kokhba, the Jews captured approximately 50 strongholds in Judea and 985 undefended towns and villages, including Jerusalem. Jews from other countries, and even some gentiles, volunteered to join their crusade. The Jews minted coins with slogans such as “The freedom of Israel” written in Hebrew. Hadrian dispatched General Publus Marcellus, governor of Syria, to help Rufus, but the Jews defeated both Roman leaders. The Jews then invaded the coastal region and the Romans began sea battles against them.

The turning point of the war came when Hadrian sent into Judea one of his best generals from Britain, Julius Severus, along with former governor of Germania, Hadrianus Quintus Lollius Urbicus. By that time, there were 12 army legions from Egypt, Britain, Syria and other areas in Judea. Due to the large number of Jewish rebels, instead of waging open war, Severus besieged Jewish fortresses and held back food until the Jews grew weak. Only then did his attack escalate into outright war. The Romans demolished all 50 Jewish fortresses and 985 villages. The main conflicts took place in Judea, the Shephela, the mountains and the Judean desert, though fighting also spread to Northern Israel. The Romans suffered heavy casualties as well and Hadrian did not send his usual message to the Senate that “I and my army are well.”

The final battle of the war took place in Bethar, Bar-Kokhba’s headquarters, which housed both the Sanhedrin (Jewish High Court) and the home of the Nasi (leader). Bethar was a vital military stronghold because of its strategic location on a mountain ridge overlooking both the Valley of Sorek and the important Jerusalem-Bet Guvrin Road. Thousands of Jewish refugees fled to Bethar during the war. In 135 C.E., Hadrian’s army besieged Bethar and on the 9th of Av, the Jewish fast day commemorating the destruction of the first and second Holy Temples, the walls of Bethar fell. After a fierce battle, every Jew in Bethar was killed. Six days passed before the Romans allowed the Jews to bury their dead.

Following the battle of Bethar, there were a few small skirmishes in the Judean Desert Caves, but the war was essentially over and Judean independence was lost. The Romans plowed Jerusalem with a yoke of oxen. Jews were sold into slavery and many were transported to Egypt. Judean settlements were not rebuilt. Jerusalem was turned into a pagan city called Aelia Capitolina and the Jews were forbidden to live there. They were permitted to enter only on the 9th of Av to mourn their losses in the revolt. Hadrian changed the country’s name from Judea to Syria Palestina.

In the years following the revolt, Hadrian discriminated against all Judeo-Christian sects, but the worst persecution was directed against religious Jews. He made anti-religious decrees forbidding Torah study, Sabbath observance, circumcision, Jewish courts, meeting in synagogues and other ritual practices. Many Jews assimilated and many sages and prominent men were martyred including Rabbi Akiva and the rest of the Asara Harugei Malchut (ten martyrs). This age of persecution lasted throughout the remainder of Hadrian’s reign, until 138 C.E

Rabbinic Judaism emerges as the follow up to the Pharisees….all the other movements were decimated.  The split is acentauted now between the messianic Judasim and the Rabbinic.

These closely linked conceptions – singular, harmonious, cumulative, and traditional – contradict the character of the evidence of all Judaisms of antiquity. If we open one set of coherent writings, we find one self- evidently valid answer to a cogent and pressing question, and if we open another set, we find a different answer to a different question. In the one, a given composite of proof-texts will predominate, in the other, a different composite, so it appears that one set of writings speaks of one topic to one group, another set of a different topic to another group. In all, viewed as a conglomerate, the various writings appear to form the statements of different people talking about different things to different people. And that view takes on even greater specificity when we realize that, so far as the diverse writings talk about the same issues at all, they present a mass of contradictions. Archaeological evidence for its part portrays synagogues rich in precisely the images that the written evidence tells us we should not find. So, in all, the conception of diverse, free-standing Judaisms best accommodates the evidence produced in ancient times (in secular categories) by Jews in the name of Judaism, or (in native categories) by Israel in the Torah.

Included in that statement is not only the iron datum that the New Testament writers saw themselves as Israelites teaching the meaning of the Torah, which none can contest, but also the givens of the authors of the documents at Qumran, the writers of the Elephantine papyri, the compositors of the Mishnah, the compilers of the Talmud, and the authorities behind the documentary statements of every other Judaism of antiquity. All writers addressing a community of faithful wrote on the premise that the writers and those who would value, preserve, and conform to those writings formed “Israel” and practiced the Torah (the native category for which the secular one is “Judaism”).

Accordingly, we do not conceive that all writings point to a single Judaism, because the points of differentiation and even contradiction produced by a comparison of one set of writings with another render such a conception unlikely. Then what to do? We concentrate not on all writings of a given period but on some sets of kindred writings to ask about the Judaism that forms the foundation and the premise of that set of writings. That is, once we recognize the diverse character of various bodies of Judaic writings, we take up a single body of what appear on the surface to be closely congruent documents and read them. It follows, in its method, ours is a documentary approach to the study of (a) Judaism. For we insist that each piece of writing or set of cognate writings tells us about the Judaism to which it wishes to attest. We reject the notion that all writings inform us about one and the same Judaism, because we see too vast a diversity, too complex a range of disagreement, among the various writings to allow all to speak to a single religious tradition, even to find the lowest common denominator for their supposedly common address. Then what? Once we abandon the idea that all (acceptable, canonical) writings speak of one and the same Judaism, one that is cumulative, traditional, and paramount, then a new possibility comes to the fore. It is that each writing that speaks for a single, coherent community of Jews will tell us about its religious system – its Judaism

– and, further, take its place in the arena of comparison and contrast with other such Judaic religious systems. We no longer treat all Judaisms as exemplary of one Judaism nor assign priority to one over another, nor, yet, treat one Judaism as in any way related to, influenced by, or dependent upon another Judaism, whether of the prior or of the same age. We may compare and contrast Judaisms (the system of the New Testament with that of the Mishnah, for example), and temporal considerations – the one comes prior to and influences the other, for example – no longer govern the making of comparisons.

And that observation brings us back to the task of this book and the question we here propose to answer. Once we have defined our interest as not a single Judaism supposedly covering everybody but the Christians (there are no other candidates for exclusion!), then, it follows, we take to heart the Christians’ insistence that they formed (an) Israel or a part of Israel, so their writings too have to be read alongside those of all other Judaic groups that saw themselves as (an) Israel or as part of Israel. But that changes the very framing of the question, what is the role of Judaism in the New Testament? It becomes, what does the New Testament look like when we understand it as the statement of a Judaism, that is, the religious world-view, way of life, and theory of “Israel” of a group of Jews whose writings we possess?

The Greek word Χριστιανός (christianos)—meaning “follower of Messiah / Christ”—comes from Χριστός (christos)—meaning “anointed  one/Messiah “[5] —with an adjectival ending borrowed from Latin to denote adhering to, or even belonging to, as in slave ownership.[6]  In theGreek  Septuagint , christos was used to translate theHebrew  מָשִׁיחַ (Mašíaḥ, messiah ), meaning “[one who is] anointed.”[7]  In other European languages, equivalent words to ‘Christian’ are likewise derived from the Greek, such as ‘Chrétien’ in French and ‘Cristiano’ in Spanish.

Hi

I have uploaded these lectures as Mp3’s and just click on the links below and they will download and open.

Doug Pt1 

Doug Pt2

Ger on Galatians.

I also have uploaded an interesting talk by NT Wright on Paul, where he addresses the Jewishness of Paul…here

Dad has asked me to revamp my Romans notes bearing in mind the theme of our current studies, ie. the relationship between Judaism and early Christianity (and whether it can or should be said that a split happened between the two during the first generation). I will do this. In the meantime, I thought I would put some general thoughts on record.

There are four main factors in how the NT, and Paul in particular, has been read that have made it difficult to get a clear picture of the relationship between Judaism and ‘Christianity’ in and around the time of the writing of the NT:

1. Anachronistically reading the subsequent split back into the NT documents.
2. Luther’s reading of Paul.
3. The classical liberal idea of Paul creating a new religion (different to that of Jesus).
4. The protestant mis-statement of the gospel as exclusively concerning ’salvation’.

There are many others things I could say, but I want to briefly deal with at least these points.

An anachronistic reading

A dictionary definition of anachronism is ’something located at a time when it could not have existed or occurred’. A good example of an anachronism (which I found on Wikipedia) is in the famous mural The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci. In this painting there are oranges on the table but it is well known that oranges were not found in the Middle East during the time of Jesus.

Since there was a split between Judaism and Christianity sometime between 100AD and 400AD it is easy to read this split back into the NT documents as if it had already occurred then, or as if it was occurring then, or even as if it was inevitable at that time. However, a level-headed reading of the NT makes it clear that Jesus, at least, did not in any way see himself as founding a new religion. We are currently exploring the idea (which which I agree wholeheartedly) that Paul and the earliest Christians did not think of themselves as part of a new religion.

This conclusion is really not a surprising one if you are careful to avoid assuming its opposite. Even if a few of the details can be tricky, the main point seems clear. However, throughout history Christians have blithely assumed that Jesus started a new religion, called Christianity, and this was separate from Judaism from the beginning (even if it had its roots in Judaism). This idea is seldom challenged mostly because very few people even realise that there is an issue.

Luther

Christians throughout history have read the NT through a distorted lens when it comes to the relationship between Christianity and Judaismh but this problem is made much worse in Protestant circles because of the legacy of Martin Luther.

Luther claimed to go back to Paul to recover the true gospel but it has to be admitted that Luther read the NT through a thoroughly Augustinian lens and, it seems to me, he never managed to get out from behind Augustine. Famously, in a masterful display of anachronistic reading, Luther equated the Jews/Judaisers with the corrupt Roman Catholic church of his day. The Jewish religion became the prototypical example of the wrong sort of religion, a falsely pious religion of works salvation, and Jesus became the purveyor of a new, pure, faith-based religion which he preached over and against that of the Jews.

I am simplifying somewhat, of course, but my point is almost made for me by the historical record. Luther became a virulent anti-Semite in his later years and was actively involved in the persecution of Jews. More recently, of course, the Nazis were delighted to use Luther’s writings in support of their own antisemitism.

The liberals

A common theme in protestant liberal scholarship has been to pit Paul against Jesus. Jesus, it is said, was an itinerant teacher/prophet (how Jewish a prophet he was depends on which scholar is talking) but Paul invented an entirely new religion, with almost no resemblance to Jesus’ teaching. Paul’s religion, it is argued, was much more Greek than it was Jewish and it is this religion that we now know as ‘Christianity’. The argument then goes that the truly Protestant thing to do is to get behind Paul to find Jesus, just like Luther moved the Catholic Church aside to find Paul.

Such readings of Paul and Jesus have increasingly fallen out of favour, and not just with conservative scholars, but they have left their mark all the same. Even when conservatives have argued against this idea they have usually made the argument that Paul and Jesus proclaimed the same religion but rarely placed the teachings of Paul and Jesus in the context of the Judaism of their day.

Moreover, many of the liberal scholars turned Jesus into a teacher of timeless truths that had no essential connection to his own time and so, of course, no real connection to the Judaism of his time. As far as many liberal scholars were concerned (this could fairly be said of many conservative interpreters too) Jesus could have been born at any time and any place.

The gospel

Protestants in particular, but also Christians throughout most of history, have conceived of the gospel as pertaining more-or-less exclusively to salvation. The gospel message is construed as an answer to the question ‘How can I be sure to go to heaven when I die?’ As I mentioned above, the Protestant telling of the story often contrasts the Christian gospel to a distortion of (first-century) Jewish teaching.

However, when we hear the gospel message afresh from the writings of Paul, the gospel writers and the other NT authors we see that it must be properly heard not as the proclamation of a new kind of religion but rather as a thoroughly Jewish teaching. The gospel was the declaration that Jesus was the Messiah and that, in his death and resurrection, he had been proclaimed as King of the entire cosmos. The working out of this included the inclusion of Gentiles into the Kingdom People, and much of the NT is about this particular detail, but the message was a thoroughly Jewish one that made sense only in a Jewish context.

When we proclaim the gospel with no reference to the history of God’s interaction with the Jews and little or no reference to Jesus as Messiah we make possible this divorcing of the gospel from its Jewish context. Let’s take an example: the gospel presentation ‘2 Ways to Live’ has been pretty trendy in the last few years. You can find presentations of it online. There is no mention of Abraham, no mention of Israel and while the word ‘Christ’ is in two of the verses quoted it might as well be Jesus’ surname: the concept of the Jewish Messiah makes no appearance in the presentation. To be fair, the idea of Jesus as ruler does make an appearance (which is the main reason why this particular presentation is considered to be so modern and trendy).

It seems to me Paul would barely recognise this as a presentation of the gospel. Jesus would likely shake his head and say something like `Are you a teacher … and yet you do not understand these things?’

Jesus and his followers had a radically different idea of what the Messiah would be like, for sure, and an even more radically different idea of what the Kingdom and its people would look like but these ideas did not come from nowhere. They were thoroughly Jewish ideas, based on a radical re-interpretation of the Jewish scriptures, and as modern scholarship has shown, they made perfect sense in their context.

Questions

It seems to me that the idea that Jesus, Paul and most of the other NT authors were Jewish thinkers should be pretty uncontroversial. The history of mis-interpretation outlined above means that some effort must be expended in arguing that there was no split between Judaism and Christianity during the NT period, but it still seems to me that this conclusion is the obviously correct one. Indeed, scholars like E.P. Sanders, J.G. Dunn and N.T. Wright have helped us to see that we can only understand the NT when we place it in its Jewish context. However, if we grant the conclusion that Christianity and Judaism did not constitute separate religions in the NT times (and indeed, it was quite some time before they did) there are still a few tough questions out there:

1. Much of Paul’s writing is a defence of the inclusion of Gentiles into the Messiah’s community. Moreover, he argues extensively that Gentiles need not submit to the Jewish law. What was the status of such believers with respect to Judaism? Did Paul redefine Judaism so that these believers now count as ‘Jews’? Paul does seem to redefine the concept of Israel: does this mean that there is a difference between Israel and the Jews?
2. What about Jewish believers in Jesus as the Messiah? Were they expected to continue to observe the strictures of Jewish law? Were they expected to cease from observing the law?
3. Did Paul himself continue to observe the law?
4. What is the status of Jews who do not accept Jesus as Messiah? Do they cease to be part of `Israel’?

I could think of many, many other questions but these are the first few that pop into my head. Many of these are touched on in Romans so perhaps we can find some answers when we look at that.

By Menachem Posner The first person to be called a Hebrew was Abraham,1  and the name
commonly refers to his descendants, known as the Jewish people. The word for Hebrew used in the Bible is עברי (pronounced “Ivri”), meaning “of or pertaining to עבר-ever.” So what does “ever” mean? The Midrash2  quotes three opinions as to where this name comes from: Rabbi Yehuda taught that the word “ever” means “opposite side.” Abraham believed in one G‑d, and the rest of the world worshipped man-made gods. Thus, “Abraham stood on one side, and the entire world stood on the other side.” Rabbi Nechemiah opined that it is a reference to Ever, great-great-grandson of Noah (usually Anglicized as “Eber”), ancestor of Abraham. Eber was one of the bearers of the monotheistic tradition which he had learned from his ancestors Shem and Noah and passed on to his grandson Abraham. Since Abraham was a descendant and disciple of his, he is called an Ivri. The rabbis held that the word is a reference to the fact that Abraham came from the other side of the river and was not a native Canaanite. “Ivri” also refers to the fact that Abraham spoke the Hebrew language—thus named because of its ancient origins, preceding the development of the other languages current at that time.3 So Hebrew means the one who is opposed, on the other side, and different from all others. Abraham was a solitary believer in a sea of idolatry. Perhaps this is why the second person to be called a Hebrew is Joseph.4  A nice Hebrew boy ends up in Egypt, the decadent land of the Pharaohs, where people and the celestial spheres are worshipped instead of G‑d; a lone teenager with outlandish Hebrew beliefs from the far side, in the strongest society of his day. Joseph did not cave in to the pressures. He stood firm in the faith of his ancestors and ultimately rose to the top of Egyptian society, until he was second to Pharaoh himself. In fact, it was after the wife of Potiphar had tried to tempt him into sinning, and he withstood the temptations, that he is first referred to as an Ivri—for then he showed that he was a faithful bearer of the contrary tradition of Adam, Noah, Shem, Eber, and Abraham.

So who are the Hebrews today? The Jewish people, who after over 3,000 years still cling to their peculiar beliefs and are not swayed by the passing fancies of pop culture, are the same contrary people as their ancestors—the Hebrews of old.

FOOTNOTES 1. Genesis 14:13. 2. Bereishit Rabbah 42:8, 3. While the other languages developed after the dispersion which followed the building of the Tower of Babel, Hebrew preceded them all. Perhaps it is etymologically related to the word עבר-past, since it is a language from the past. 4. Genesis 39:14.

We are all after getting involved with the narrative of the Hebrew Scriptures.

Starting in Genesis we are told about God through the lives of various people a/ people groups.  Adam, Enoch, Abraham, Moses and Israel.  All these stories are in the Hebrew scriptures and involve a progression along the path towards fulfillment

THEN Jesus comes the Messiah and we enter the messianic era.  Here we enter the time of the fulfillment of the promises made down through the thousands of previous years.

THEN we have the Jerusalem apostles or messengers and then PAUL.

Paul is involved in bringing the Gentiles to know the Messiah Jesus and continues to do this until he dies in 67ad.

The Temple is destroyed in 70ad and the end of ritual Judaism occurs and in the following 150+ years we see Rabbinic Judaism(today’s Judaism) emerge. The Mishnah is completed in 200ad.  At the same time from the start of the 2nd century (100ad+) we see cracks begin to emerge between Judaism and the messianic Jewish movement that draws the Messianic out of Judaism into a separate religion. This is clearly seen from 125ad+ (Yoder) others state that it is only final with the arrival of Constantine300ad+  and others Augustine 413ad+.

We end with a very religious christian religion with rituals and priests and buildings and shaped often by the Hebrew scriptures…

NOTES:

From the beginning the Jesus movement was Jewish. Its original founder and early promoters were all Jews who remained Jewish. There was no fracture with Judaism during the lifetime of these early Messianic believers. All the later (Jewish/Hebrew ) scriptures ( the new testament) were all finished before any split happened with Judaism.

There is no discourse on division in any texts.

No fracture / division between Jews and Messianics….Certainly for 50 + years and more likely 100+ years……that’s a long time…….

Hi All

Please begin to search out for yourselves the following topic/s

Paul was a jew

Messianic judaism

Jewish Christian split / division

Who was Paul?

Who was Paul complaining about

Did Paul stay a Jew

Did Paul redifine Israel in any way

Did Paul start Christianity

Have a listen to this lecture by Ray Pritz Gentiles in the Church

If you can give some long time and want to dig deep…listen to these lectures by John Yoder

Click on 1980-1989 and then click 1982 and especially listen to the 1st Lecture….it’s long but worth the listen.

(1 Corinthians 12:12-27)

As a human institution, the church is influenced by forms of social organisation popular at different times in history. But the Bible’s descriptions of the church point to dynamics of community life which go beyond secular models of social organisation. The church is not just an assortment of isolated individuals. It is a divine society, in which individuals find their unique fulfilment as members of a larger whole, and their selfishness is overcome in God’s workshop of personal transformation. This message, fifth in a series on ‘The Church’, was given by Rob Yule at St Albans Presbyterian Church, on 22 August 1999.

Non-Biblical Models of the Church

Before we look at biblical pictures that show what the church of Jesus Christ should be like, we would do well to note three widespread, popular models of the church that the Bible does not validate.

1. The Lecture Room

The standard picture of the church in our Protestant or Reformed tradition is that of a lecture room. Seats are arranged facing a central, elevated pulpit, formerly sometimes literally ‘six feet above contradiction’, from which a preacher reads and expounds the Bible to a largely passive congregation. This pattern is intellectualistic, has disenfranchised God’s people from active participation in worship services, and has contributed to the modern backlash against sermons. ‘Poor, talkative Christianity,’ lamented E. M. Forster in Passage to India.

2. The Theatre

In contrast to Protestantism, the Catholic Church has used the model of the theatre. The church service is a high drama, involving choral music and processions, led by people dressed in colourful costumes, with visible props like candles, crucifixes, pictures, and statues. There is a strong aesthetic appeal in these kind of services, but again a performer / spectator disjunction that is at variance with the New Testament descriptions of the church as a vital fellowship.

3. The Corporation

Today, in our entrepreneurial society, the secular model claiming the church’s attention is more likely to be a business or management model – the church viewed as a corporation, managed and promoted like a successful business. Some American church growth literature reflects this model; for example, in recommending that the church survey its ‘market’ and that it package and promote itself to meet the needs of the surrounding community.

Each of these models has elements we can learn from. The one nearest to the New Testament is the first, which can claim some support from the Jewish synagogue. But none of them reflect the real essence of the church as described in the New Testament itself.

Biblical Models of the Church

New Testament scholar Ralph P. Martin, in his book The Family and the Fellowship: New Testament Images of the Church (Exeter, Paternoster Press, 1979, pp. 112-21), contrasts the foregoing secular models of social organisation with the characteristic biblical descriptions of the church.

1. The People of God

The Greek word for ‘church’ is ekklesia, from which we get ‘ecclesiastical’. It means ‘a calling out’ or ‘those who have been called out’. It is the word used in the Greek translation of those passages in the Old Testament which refer to the great assembly (qahal) of Israel – when Israel was called out of Egypt to meet with God and worship God at Mt. Sinai, and then live as distinctive and holy society among the nations. The nation of Israel was the ‘people of God’, God’s ‘called-out ones’, God’s distinctive or ‘peculiar’ people (1 Peter 2:9).

The people of God are not only ‘called out’, but ‘called together’. The church is not just a collection of isolated individuals; it is a group of people called by God to live together as a community to model a new way of living. Michael Griffiths points out that the word ‘saint’ occurs sixty one times in the New Testament. Sixty of those references are in the plural, ‘saints’. Only once is the singular used and that is in the phrase, ‘greet every saint’ (Philippians 4:21)! So Griffiths concludes, ‘The concept of a solitary saint is foreign to the New Testament writers.’ (Cinderella with Amnesia [London, Inter Varsity Press, 1975], p. 24). Christian experience is essentially social or communal.

When we are called by Jesus to believe in him we are also called to belong to a great corporate society, the people of God. Hans Kung, the German Catholic theologian, says, ‘The church begins, not with a pious individual, but with God. Pious individuals cannot by themselves achieve the transformation of isolated sinful people into the people of God. How could an atomised crowd of pious individuals be a home for the homeless and isolated people of today.’ (The Church [London, Search Press, 1971], p. 24).

2. The Body of Christ

Today this is perhaps the best known biblical image of the church. It wasn’t always so. Before the Charismatic Renewal Movement of the 1970s, this term was never heard of outside of Catholic and Anglo-Catholic circles, where you would sometimes hear the church described as the ‘mystical body of Christ’.

Today by contrast we refer almost glibly to the church as ‘the Body’, without really pausing to think what the term means, and what it implies for our relationships together as Christ’s people. The term ‘body of Christ’ implies three things:

• The church is not just a social organisation or institution. It is an organism, a living entity, animated by the very life of God himself. When we become Christians and are born again of the Spirit, we receive God’s life. God’s life is abundant life, able to overcome life’s difficulties; and it is eternal life, capable of overcoming death itself. This is the secret of the church’s amazing ability to rejuvenate and renew itself, just when it has been dismissed as outmoded and irrelevant.

• The church doesn’t just follow its own policies or agenda. We are attached to Jesus Christ as ‘head’, and should seek to receive our instructions and directions for life from Christ himself. Just as the brain and central nervous system gives direction to the body, so Jesus Christ as head gives guidance and leadership to his church.

• The church is not all the same, but is made up of different members, an incredibly diverse and varied collection of people, as diverse in their function and purpose as are the different parts of a body. Each ‘member’ has a distinctive part to play in the life of the whole community. ‘Just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. . . . Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many.’ (1 Corinthians 12:12).

This is a challenge to us – not to be a dyslexic organism, but a healthy body in which all the members play their part. We all consciously need to pull our weight, to make our own personal contribution to the life of the fellowship, and at the same time honour one another’s distinctive contributions.

3. The Household of God

Paul also refers to the church as ‘the household of God’ (Ephesians 2:19, 1 Timothy 3:15). The biblical concept of a ‘household’ is wider than our modern nuclear family. The New Testament oikos, ‘household’, was an extended family, like the Maori whanau, including relatives and friends, perhaps several generations of a family, and also domestic servants and resident aliens.

Today the term ‘Christian Family’ is being used by many churches, even as part of their church title. But sometimes those very same fellowships are using ‘Christian Family’ in an exclusive rather than an inclusive sense. If the church is God’s family, then this is bigger than our modern concept of a family. The church family, for example, is not just for married people, but for singles too, not just for domesticated and conventional people, but for social misfits and unconventional people as well.

God has given us a new birth into his household, his extended family – whether our background experience of our own human families has been all it should be or not. Social outcasts as well as the socially successful, the poor as well as the rich, singles as well as marrieds – all are called by God into this wonderful divine family. Indeed, the early Christian movement spread particularly among the servant classes, and this may be how the Christian faith reached even the household of the emperor in Rome (as John Rutherford suggests, ‘Caesar’s Household,’ International Standard Bible Encyclopaedia, ed. James Orr [Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1946], pp. 537-8).

Family life of course can be challenging. Paul says we need to know how we ought to behave in God ‘s household (1 Timothy 3:15). It’s been observed that ‘You can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your family!’ It needs grace, humility, and cooperation to get on with our fellow Christians. Living with them rubs off the rough and angular corners of our personalities.

The Gemstone Tumbler

The church as God’s family is like a machine owned by a woman in my previous congregation in Christchurch. It was a gemstone tumbler – a rotating drum like a horizontal concrete mixer. Inside was placed abrasive sand paper. Into it were put the semi-precious stones she gathered from the exposed beach at Birdlings Flat on the east coast of New Zealand’s South Island, where the Canterbury Bight meets Bank’s Peninsula. It was plugged in and switched on – then left rotating for 36 or 48 hours. The stones tumbled and banged together, and were worn smooth against one another and against the abrasive paper. Their rough edges were smoothed and polished. At the end of their treatment they emerged splendid and beautiful.

That is what God is doing to us through our life together in the church. Our common life may not be pleasant for our individualism. We may complain and make lots of noise – like the din of the pebbles protesting their treatment in the rotating gemstone tumbler. But God is transforming us though our life in community into human beings of great splendour. The church is his laboratory for transforming humanity.

Rob Yule
22 August 1999

© 1999, St Albans Presbyterian Church, Palmerston North, New Zealand