Telescope (2)

Therefore when Jesus had received the sour wine, He said, “It is finished!” And He bowed His head and gave up His spirit.  John 19:30 NASB

It is finished – Easter is over, even for Orthodox Christians (it was May 2).  Everyone is the Christian world now believes that once more we have celebrated the death and resurrection of Christ.  Our sins are forgiven.  Death is conquered.  The price has been paid.  We are free!

This theological lens results in statements like the following (taken from various Messianic websites):

to celebrate our Lord’s death as our complete and absolute Atoning Sacrifice.

He IS the final and ultimate Passover Lamb Whose irrefutable last words announced His victory over sin and death: “It is finished” (John 19:30).

We were all born predisposed to violate God through sin, and thus were already under condemnation.

celebrate our Lord’s payment for our sins on that amazing Day,

When we are convicted by the Holy Spirit that we’ve committed a sin and have hurt our intimacy with our heavenly Father, we also have the joy of knowing that He has already accepted the atonement of Jesus for the punishment we deserve.

In your sin nature-dominated soul,

repentance is transformational — you turn from your sin and become more like Jesus through His Spirit in you.

you are progressing on the narrow path to your eternal home:

As you can probably tell, these statements are hardly Jewish.  They are Christian theology found in Messianic authors.  This is Reformation theology, plain and simple.  It even includes Augustine’s view of sinful nature.  The telescope might be pointed in a different direction, but the lens remains the same.  Just as we discovered with James (Acts 15:15) and Copernicus, contemporary Messianics typically read Scripture from a Christian perspective, and so they find what they expect to find, a “Jewish-Christian” Jesus.  By the way, these assumptions are also found in non-Messianic, recognized academics, like this:

“Jesus would have taught in Aramaic . . . Paul, like the evangelists, thought and taught in Greek, . .  the evangelists had no direct knowledge of Jesus, nor did Paul. . . [Jesus’] audience was largely fellow Aramaic-speaking Jews.  Paul, . . . his audience was predominately (if not exclusively) gentile.”[1]

“Jesus’ mission proclaiming the kingdom had ended with his execution.  His followers, prompted by the vindicating experience of his resurrection, injected a specific, and specifically Christian, innovation into the traditional sequence of end-time events: the messiah, they now held, would have to come not once, but twice.”[2]

“God sent his son to die in order to redeem the world from sin—or, rather, from Sin, and from all the other rebel cosmic forces ranged between God and his creation.”[3]

Fredriksen routinely names the earliest followers of the Messiah as “Christians,” but, of course, this just isn’t true.  Nevertheless, her assumption governs the way she sees the discrepancy between Paul and “Jesus.”  Small assumptions often produce large consequences.

One more example:

Augustine, Boethius and Aquinas provide most of the Greek philosophical underpinnings of Christian theology.  The Greek view of God is radically different from the Hebraic view (not the Jewish view, by the way, as Judaism is also heavily influenced by Hellenism).  The result is a philosophically constructed God, not a biblical one.  God is described as :

Omnipotent, omniscient, transcendent, absolute, infinite, and free, God is the opposite of man,”[4]

And, of course, this has an enormous consequence, because if God is the ontological opposite of man, then man is ‘the archetypical victim . . . insofar as he may easily be seen as trapped and submerged in time and matter, blind, contingent, limited, unfree.’”[5]  And if this is true, then what are we doing trying to convince ourselves that God cares.  Now you get to investigate why Yeshua uttered these words from the cross, not as a “Christian,” but as a Jewish statement of identity (hint: go look in the Psalms).

You may wonder (occasionally) why I spend so much time writing about the history of an idea.  Perhaps with this lesson you will appreciate the effort a bit more.

Topical Index:  assumptions, it is finished, John 19:30

[1] Paula Fredriksen, Sin: The Early History of an Idea, p. 11.

[2] Ibid., p. 31.

[3] Ibid., p. 49.

[4] Fernand Hallyn, The Poetic Structure of the World: Copernicus and Kepler, endnote 1, p. 294.

[5] Ibid.