A FIRST-CENTURY VIEW OF YESHUA, THE MESSIAH
A Historical Account of Yesous Khristos, the Anointed One
"How the Jewish mouse ate the Greco-Roman elephant"
How did we get here? Our understanding of Yeshua, the Messiah, is filtered through centuries of retelling, revising, and projecting our current worldview back twenty centuries ago, resulting in layers of anachronisms.
What went wrong? Why do we see so much animosity between Christians and Jews? Originally, the followers of Yeshua were just considered another sect of Judaism, along with Herodians, Sadducees, Pharisees, Essenes, and Zealots. It arose mainly in the fifth century C.E. in the writings of Jerome and Augustine, as you will see in the conclusion of this book. And where do we go from here?
INTRODUCTION
[This is a preview of my book published on Amazon earlier this year. See all the Print and Electronic Versions.]
The thesis of this book is not only to portray the Person of Yeshua, the Messiah, but also to explore in greater depth the swirling interplay of Jewish and Greco-Roman spiritual, religious, and cultural forces at work leading up to and including the first century A.D. Secondly, it is to illustrate the way in which this renewed and restored Jewish faith would be delivered from captivity and eventually expand to encompass the whole Greco-Roman Empire and beyond - see Gen. 12:1-3, Ex. 3:4-17, Dan. 2:44-45, and Rev. 19:11-16. Thirdly, it aims to point out the Messiah's three years of doing and training others to do diakonia - ministry to "the poor, the lame, the maimed, and the blind" who were the central focus of his earthly ministry, as this work will quote from this author's harmony of the Gospels, The Good News of Yeshua, the Messiah, to answer the question: What does it mean to be a diakon - a deacon?
We as humans tend to perceive what we expect or would prefer to see and hear, and filter out those data that do not conform to our stored experiences. This "confirmation bias" is what all four Evangelists and Paul referred to when quoting Is. 6:9-10 - "By hearing you will hear, And will in no way understand; Seeing you will see, And will in no way perceive: For this people's heart has grown callous, Their ears are dull of hearing, They have closed their eyes; Or else perhaps they might perceive with their eyes, Hear with their ears, Understand with their heart, And should turn again; And I would heal them." We tend to focus on the Lord's Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection because they promise us salvation, but we filter out the parts that tell us about doing hands-on ministry: they do not match up with today's worldview of state-funded social work, welfare and medical care. Let the government pay for it!
The source that has inspired the thesis for this book is "The Old Testament Basis for Christian Worship" - a section in the seminal book on the relation of the Jewish temple and synagogue worship to Orthodox Christian worship: Orthodox Worship: A Living Continuity with the Synagogue, the Temple, and the Early Church1. That book's explanation of early Christianity and its current manifestation in Orthodox worship as being to a great extent a continuation or extension of synagogue worship spurred my interest in the topic. In addition, our home at that time was in a condo/townhouse community built for Jewish people of Pittsburgh: three of our community's residents were victims of the Tree of Life Synagogue massacre on October 27, 2018, heightening my sympathies for the Jewish people and my disgust for the unfair way in which they have been mistreated, maligned, and massacred over the centuries.
This book is also intended to help the reader overcome the anachronistic way of thinking that projects our current mindset back into the mental framework of the first century, thinking that Christians have always been antisemitic, or that Christianity is opposed to Judaism. This work uses alternatively the Hebrew "Yeshua, the Messiah" and the Greek "Yesous, the Khristos, the Anointed One" to illustrate the bilingual ability of the Gospel writers and the tension between the Jewish and Greco-Roman worldviews. "Yesous" or "Iesous" is simply placing a Greek ending on "Yeshua," and "Messiah" translates into Greek as "the Khristos" which means "the Anointed One." But today, many people tend to think of "Jesus Christ" as a man whose given name is "Jesus" and his surname is "Christ." So we must try to uncover the foundations of our present unconscious biases and restructure our distorted worldview. This work aims to point out clearly the historicity, ministry, and most importantly, the deity of Yeshua, the Messiah, not as we might think of it anachronistically today in the nice, sanitized statements of the Nicene Creed, in our services, and in our prayers, but in the rough-and-tumble of confrontations with the first-century Jewish and Roman authorities.
Other examples of anachronistic thinking are Christ and the Apostles being depicted on the iconostases of Orthodox churches with bound books in their hands, but the bound book, the codex, was not invented until the fifth century A.D.; or the way modern preachers speak - "God says in Deuteronomy 10 verse 5..." as if God gave his revelation already divided up into chapters and verses, but these artificial divisions of scripture were not added until the Middle Ages. This versification leads us to think of God's revelation as a random collection of verses, little sound-bites, rather than a vast panorama, a narrative of human history and destiny. The full canon of the books of the Bible was only ratified at the Council of Hippo (A.D. 393), so for 360 years the Church relied largely on oral teaching being handed down ("traditioned") for the most part orally from one generation to the next: see 2 Thes. 2:15.
Even up into the Middle Ages, Bibles were laboriously copied by hand, each one requiring a year or more of painstaking labor, making each Bible a rare and precious item. Only in the mid-1400s did Gutenberg invent the metal movable-type printing press and Bibles began to be widely circulated. So a century later, when Martin Luther proclaimed his doctrine of "sola scriptura" and said that every cowherd and milkmaid could read and understand the Bible, he was thinking anachronistically, assuming that everyone from the first century onward could obtain a printed, bound Bible. But the doctrine of "sola scriptura" would have been simply impossible to apply in the first 15 centuries. We all see the world through the filters of our individual and societal experiences, so in that sense nobody can be completely objective, but at the very least we should strive to be aware of our filters in order to try to see the first-century world as it was then, not as if it were our world of today.
Think of the Jewish influence on Greek culture even before the first century: the Hebrew alphabet begins with the letters aleph, beth, gimel, and daleth - the same sounds and order as in the later Greek alphabet alpha, beta, gamma, and delta. And when this author explained to a Russian Evangelical pastor that the mostly-Greek-based Cyrillic alphabet which Russian uses contains a few Hebrew letters - tsadhe, sin, and shin - for sounds that do not exist in the Greek alphabet, the Russian pastor was shocked, because, as he joked: "We Russians aren't antisemitic, we just hate Jews!" Such an antipathy toward the race and culture that gave birth to Christianity is most certainly out of place, especially for Christian ministers. In contrast, the Orthodox Church retains to this day many features of Jewish synagogue worship: the directional orientation of the building, the menorah on the altar, the chanting of the Psalms, incense, candles, no instrumental music, the bema (ambon) where the scriptures are chanted, and the conciliar form of organization with a structured priestly hierarchy...
[To read the rest of this book, see all the Print and Electronic Versions.]
