The Messiah will not be God who is also God's "son". And no one can EVER change the law (Torah), cannot remove nor add to it, period. No human being can EVER be divine, and confining and limiting the limitless God in the form of a Palestinian Jew with a penis and an unwed mother is blasphemous and evil.
This article by the Biblical scholar,
Dr. Ian Elmer sheds some light on the Jewish roots of Christianity.
Reclaiming our Jewish heritage...
ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT LESSONS that we as Christians have learnt over the past six decades since the Second World War is our indissoluble link to our Jewish brothers and sisters. The horror of the Holocaust has forced us to reassess old, worn-out myths about the Jews as the "killers of Christ" or as the first to persecute the early Jesus movement. However, few of us have fully appreciated the fact that Christianity began as, and remains, a sect of Judaism. We are Jews; messianic Jews to be sure, but Jews none-the-less. The Jewish scholar Alan Segal has poetically referred to Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism as twin daughters born of the destruction of Second-Temple Judaism in 70 CE.
A model of the Second Temple destroyed by Titus in 70 CE
In the year 70, at the height of the Jewish revolt against Rome (66-73 CE), the Roman soldiers broke their thee-year siege of the Holy City of Jerusalem, leveling the city and destroying the Temple. With the fall of the Temple went Judaism as a sacrificial cult. In the decades that followed, one of the few remaining sects of the old Second-Temple Judaism, the Pharisees, began the arduous task of reinventing the Jewish faith and practice. The Judaism that rose like a phoenix from the ashes of smoldering Temple was fundamentally different from that of its forerunner. It was a faith focused entirely upon the "Book", the Hebrew Scriptures, that came to be seen as an inviolable compendium of divine revelation and the source of all wisdom. Along side this authoritative source, the founding fathers of Formative Judaism added further collections of teachings and interpretations deriving from some of the more important rabbinic schools of the Pharisees - the Mishnah and Talmud.
Another Jewish sect whom we might call Christian Jews was engaged in a similar process. They retained their scriptures and, like the Pharisees, added a further "testament" derived from some of their more important schools or communities. One of the reasons that the "New Testament" contains four gospels is because they each represent the gospel used in four of the most important centres in early Christianity. Matthew came from Syrian Antioch, the site of the first "Christian" community (Acts 11:26); Mark from Rome, which increasing grew in importance; Luke from the Pauline communities of Greece; and John from Christian Jewish communities in Asia Minor. The Acts of the Apostles, commonly attributed to the evangelist Luke, offers a view of early Christianity that traces the development of these important centres under the auspices of Peter, Paul and Barnabas.
This variety of texts may give the impression, and it is generally assumed, that the earliest Church was a diverse collection of various movements. This is certainly true, in part. Second-Temple Judaism was a similarly complex collection of various sects – Sadducees, Pharisees, Essenes, Zealots, and the followers of John the Baptist. The earliest Jesus movement seems to have drawn members from across the spectrum of these various other Jewish sects. But it is also significant that none of these early followers of the Jesus movement saw themselves as converting to a new religion. Christianity, a word that will not even appear until the first non-Jews join the movement (Acts 11:19-26), emerged first as just one more sect in the widely diverse spectrum of Second-Temple Judaism. And that fact alone was an important point of unity for all of these diverse Christian communities.
If we had to name one other Jewish group of the time that resembled the earliest Jesus Movement it would be the Essenes at Qumran, whose theology and faith practice can be reconstructed from the Dead Sea Scrolls. Similarly Acts 1-5 offers us an insight into the earliest community of believers in Jesus Messiah at Jerusalem. On the evidence of these two sources, it appears that both communities were consciously apocalyptic in their outlook. Conceiving of their respective communities as the climax of Judaism, the faithful remnant that was destined to constitute eschatological Israel, both communities lived according to a communistic ideal expressed in the sharing of resources and a common table.
Breaking bread at Emmaus
It is not entirely clear that Luke's "breaking of the bread" (2:42, 46; cf. 1 Cor 10:16) is meant as a reference to the Eucharistic celebration; although Luke does indicate elsewhere that this practice would become a central aspect of Christian fellowship (cf. Luke 24:25; Acts 20:7). Moreover, there are obvious parallels between the practice as described by Luke and that of Paul's description of the Lord's Supper in 1 Corinthians (11:17-34), which was similarly enacted in the context of a full communal meal (1 Cor 11:21-22, 33-34), celebrated frequently (Luke suggests both daily in Acts 2:46 and on the first day of the week in Acts 20:7), and involved the entire community (1 Cor 11:18). Such was the significance of the table fellowship in the earliest communities that it would become the instance for division at Antioch when Peter withdrew from sharing a common table with the Gentiles for fear of the circumcision putsch out of Jerusalem (Gal 2:12-13).
On the issue of the commonality of goods, Lukan idealism may have exaggerated the extent to which the Jerusalem church lived the common life. But the community's commitment to the communal ideal is confirmed implicitly in the numerous Pauline references to the "poor" in Jerusalem for whom he initiated a collection throughout his communities in Greece and Asia Minor (Gal 2:10; 1 Cor 16:1-4; Rom 15:25-28). Indeed, according to Galatians (2:10), the sole injunction laid upon Paul and Barnabas following the Jerusalem Council was "only that we remember the poor". It has been noted that the term
hoi ptochoi (the Poor) used by Paul (Rom 15:26; Gal 2:10) may be drawn from the Hebrew word
h'bywnym, which appears sporadically in the Dead Sea Scrolls as a self-designation of the Qumran community (1 QpHab 12:3, 6, 10; 1 QM 11:9, 13; 13:14). It is entirely possible that a similar title emerged early on at Jerusalem to describe this first community of messianic Jesus people who pooled their resources and established a quasi-monastic community in anticipation of the coming eschaton.
This appropriation of contemporary Jewish restoration theology is probably also implicit in the felt need to reconstitute the circle of the Twelve. It is noteworthy that the leadership of the Twelve at Jerusalem has been compared to the ruling council at Qumran, which was composed of twelve men and three priests - although it is uncertain if the three priests were distinct from the twelve (1QS 8:1). Whether or not one can draw a direct connection between the two organisational practices, it seems that for both communities the number twelve held eschatological significance. At Qumran, the War Scroll speaks of the division of the Sons of Light during the coming apocalyptic war into twelve armies representing the twelve tribes of Israel (1QM 3:13-14; 5:1-2). Within the primitive Christian movement, according to the earliest stratum of Gospel traditions derived from the hypothetical sayings source Q, the Twelve were thought destined to occupy the thrones of glory and judge the regathered twelve tribes of Israel (Lk 22:30; Matt 19:28). Later in Revelation (21:12-14), the Twelve Apostles are reckoned as the twelve foundation stones of the New Jerusalem, akin to the twelve gates upon which are written the names of the twelve tribes of Israel.
Remarkably, the Essenes never appear anywhere in the New Testament; although some scholars have thought that the gospel narratives on John the Baptist suggest that John may have been a member of this movement. Whatever the value of that line of speculation, however, it serves to remind us that Christianity did not emerge as a completely new and distinct religious movement until much later in its development. Along the way, the members of the Jesus Movement drew elements from a variety of Jewish beliefs and practices. Like its sister faith, Rabbinic Judaism, an important catalyst in that process was the Roman destruction of the Temple in 70 CE. Once separated from the former focus of their faith practice the Christian Jews, much like the Pharisaic Jews, were forced to reappraise their beliefs and liturgical praxis. It was only during that reformation that Christianity, as we know it, began to emerge as distinct from its Jewish matrix.
The
menorah is a seven branched candelabra to be lit by
Olive oil in the
Tabernacle and the
Temple in Jerusalem. The menorah is one of the oldest symbols of the
Jewish people. It said to symbolize the
burning bush as seen by
Moses on
mount Sinai (exodus 25). See
Wikipedia for more information.
