On with the testimony. I taught on 1 and 2 Thessalonians, as well as occasional topics that interested me (like the symbolism of the menorah, the seven-branched lampstand found in the Tabernacle, Temple, and in a couple of places in Revelation). As time went on, we started to build what I think was a pretty impressive rabbinic library (for a Gentile, anyway). I started in roughly the same place that the founding teacher had started, with a commentary written for Sephardic Jews in Spain who had lost their Hebrew skills and many of their traditions. Torah Anthology is really a remarkable work in some ways; the original rabbi who started it, Yaakov Culi, saw his people in almost complete ignorance of Jewish tradition and decided to combine traditional commentary on the Torah, Midrash (legends and stories providing a backdrop to Scripture, with some commentary), and in-depth exploration of the duties and rituals connected with Sephardic life. He was really a talented author in these fields, and although he died before getting two books of the Bible done, his work made it very, very easy to soak up Judaism like a sponge—its theology, hermeneutics, history, philosophy, and ethics, all in one place. When the footnotes pointed out better primary sources, we put them on our wish list, and got them as we could afford them: Rashi, Ramban, Shulchan Aruch, and so forth. We supplemented the “do-everything-at-once” Torah Anthology with commentaries from Artscroll and Judaica Press. Inside of a few months my presuppositions were changing, because my thought life was consumed with understanding the Old Testament—and when possible the New Testament—from the rabbinic perspective.
You see, Hebraic Roots’ claim is often phrased in a manner like this: “you need the historical and cultural background of the Hebrews in order to understand this book, which was written about the Hebrew people, in a Hebrew mindset and context.” The very presupposition doesn’t stand up to careful scrutiny given a plain reading of the New Testament, which declares its sufficiency, and experience will demonstrate that the Bible is consistent about providing its own context when necessary. There are more problems with the claim than just that. But in practice, the claim degrades into something like this: “you need the historical and cultural background of the post-first-century Jewish religion in order to understand this book, which was written about the Hebrew people, in a rabbinic mindset and context.”
The first question is, does rabbinic Judaism accurately and completely carry within itself the traditions of the Hebrews, from Moses through the Second Temple period, until this day? Judaism says that it does; the most well-known tractate of the Mishnah, Pirkei Avot (the Ethics of the Fathers), begins by declaring the lineage of the traditions passed down, from Moses to the writers of the Mishnah in the second century. But those claims run counter to the claims of the New Testament in some places. There are elements that we see must have been passed down by tradition; the notion of a rock producing water that followed the Israelites around during the wandering in the wilderness, for example, is connected in a typical (emphasis on “type,” as in “the rock is a type of Christ”) way to the Lord, as Paul affirms in 1 Cor. 10:4, even though there is no direct testimony to this in the Exodus account (it mentions water being produced miraculously through a rock, but the rock following them would be questionable were it not for Paul’s corroboration here). This is in the Midrash and commentaries as well. There are a few things like that. But is it possible that there was a backlash against Christianity within Judaism, perhaps starting in AD 70 and locking the believers in Jesus completely out of the synagogues by the time the Midrash was finished? It seems likely, given the statements in the Talmudic documents about Jesus and about the minim (heretics). Could Jewish commentary be changed, even though it was claimed to have been passed down for centuries?
It was obvious that some things had changed. Up to a point, the Jews taught that the Servant Songs of Isaiah were about the coming Messiah. After they were widely appropriated to Jesus, within a couple hundred years, the rabbis taught that instead these were about Israel, and that is the party line today. Also, there is another factor: at what point do Christian commentaries fail, that we must turn to rabbinic commentaries to really explain the meaning and context to us?
This is the real problem. Scripture tells us that natural men do not understand spiritual things. It also tells us that there is no salvation apart from Jesus Christ. Salvation brings the new birth, and the new birth brings spiritual life and the ability to appraise spiritual things. Does that mean that every commentary that is written by a Christian, or that claims to be Christian, must be correct? No, it is clear that believers are not given full knowledge in this world. On the other hand, while it may be possible for an observation by a “natural man” to lead to a spiritual discovery in a spiritual man (much in the way that we can learn to read from an atheist, but then read the Bible and gain eternal life), we must be certain that a natural man cannot be trusted to give a spiritual interpretation to the words which give us life. Right away we must be certain to fence off any spiritual deductions gained from rabbinic material, simply because they have no qualifications to deduce anything spiritually. Repentance and faith in Jesus Christ is an absolute prerequisite to accurately interpret Scripture in order to teach. The Holy Spirit can reveal truth about the Word to a natural man, but only when the Spirit awakens that man to spiritual life… at which point regeneration has begun and will show fruit in… repentance and faith.
In short… atheist, you cannot understand the Bible. Muslim imam, you cannot understand the Bible. Rabbi, you cannot understand the Bible. Only if the Holy Spirit awakens you to new life can you understand the Bible. And when that happens, you have begun a process that will leave you neither an atheist, nor an imam, nor a rabbi. You will end up a Christian.
Last time I said something like this on my website, my former teacher called me an anti-Semite. But let’s be fair; I don’t hate the Jewish people. I am, however, against any religion which does not proclaim Jesus Christ as the unique Son of God, God the Son, died and risen again (in a real, tangible, physical sense), and the only Savior. I’m an equal-opportunity anti-religionist, and I am no more anti-Judaism (the religion) than I am anti-Islam or anti-atheism. There is only one truth, and it is found in the person of Jesus Christ, and in His revelation to us in the Old and New Testaments. To pretend otherwise for the sake of political correctness or to keep from offending people is to lie and deceive, and invite others to spend eternity in hell for fear of transgressing against another’s sensibilities.
To return to my story for a moment, as I immersed myself in rabbinic literature, I gradually acquired their view of the facts, and their way of thinking. Their presuppositions supplanted the ones I held before, going all the way back to good old Luther and his Small Catechism. I began to question the absolute need for belief in Jesus Christ—wasn’t He just a caricature invented by Catholic syncretism after all? How would it be fair to expect an observant Jew to ditch his coming Mashiach for Iesous Christos, who looked in the Middle Ages and in the mainstream church more like an Aryan (Hitler reference, not heretic, that’s Arian) and a product of the pagan “trinity” concept? When a Jew affirms that “The LORD our God, the LORD is One,” how could anybody expect him to believe in the Trinitarian Jesus, making conspiratorial hand signals from church paintings and statues which themselves defy the commandment against graven images? No wonder the Jews didn’t come to Christ! There was an opinion, smiled upon in general but not explicitly taught, that perhaps Jews who understood fully the nature of the Messiah from the Old Testament alone would be saved, even though they might reject a Catholicized Jesus. It was even bandied about that perhaps some of commentators that seemed more insightful, like Rashi, were saved in this way.
Never did it occur to me that anybody who had the Messiah revealed to him fully from the Old Testament would, in fact, recognize him in Jesus, no matter how poorly the medieval church might have shown Him off. But the fact is, the Old Testament alone leaves the Messiah and the salvation of the Israel of God a mystery, to be revealed in Christ, and that revelation was then delivered to the saints through the apostles. The New Testament, having been written, is necessary for us to receive the whole counsel of God. The Church—and that includes Jews who repent and believe in God’s Messiah—is built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets, according to Ephesians.
No, the Bible as it was delivered to the Church was insufficient for me; I felt that I needed more, and I filled my head with rabbinic logic, presuppositions, and hermeneutics. I accepted (usually) what my teacher taught me in terms of how the Church had perverted the Word of God, and the evidence I saw before me, in my volumes of the Talmud, my Torah Anthology, and the persecution that I pretended to suffer, as we held our ground on the “pagan holidays” and so on. I started an interminable series on Psalm 119, using Hasidic commentaries on the mystical meanings of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet to guide the interpretation on each group of eight verses; I abandoned that series when it was clear that I was bogging down in pseudo-philosophical nonsense (at the time I just figured I was “too deep” for everybody else, something else I learned from both my teacher and the rabbis, who themselves had a whole subgenre of literature for the deep, mature thinkers, known as “kabbalah”). I was encouraged to try prophecy, but here I had to stop short, because I knew I didn’t really understand it. The teacher gave me Judah’s Sceptre and Joseph’s Birthright to read, but I told him it seemed like it kind of fell apart for the last third or so (understatement of the decade, but I didn’t know it at the time). Finally he handed me an unpublished manuscript written by somebody he knew, detailing the anti-Semitism of the church, and asked me to teach from that.
Thus I began my study, and teaching on, Church History. I had to start with the Greek philosopher Thales, but this was the beginning of my education, and in some ways the beginning of the end. We are a long way from done, though.
Oh, and in October 1998 my wife and I were ordained. First-year pastors in this ministry were given a one-year ordination, and if things went well, that was followed with longer periods. This was damage control, to fix the problems that came from ordaining unworthy people. We never actively sought it, but we both received it (the ministry was egalitarian in its view of women as pastors and teachers and so forth), and were renewed to ten-year terms in 1999. My parents didn’t come to my ordination—they had a family emergency that night, but in my selfishness I just “knew” that it was because they weren’t happy for me. Now I look back and I know, first, that I was unfair to them, and second, that if they hadn’t approved, they would have been right.
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