The True Faith?

but these have been written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that by believing you may have life in His name.  John 20:31  NASB

By believing – I received an email advertisement.  It contained the following:

So, of course, I was interested.  Not because I wanted to know the heroic stories of the apostles, but because I was fascinated by the idea that the apostles’ stories would provide me with the Jewish roots of Christianity.  I simply can’t imagine how this could be true.  None of the apostles were Christians.  They were orthodox Jews who accepted Yeshua (not “Jesus”) as the promised Messiah despite the apparent incompatibility of his life with the popular Messianic expectations.  Their stories aren’t stories about how they became Christian believers.  They are stories about how they resisted some rabbinic teachings and continued to proclaim the man from Galilee as God’s chosen one.  If I learn anything at all from their stories, I learn first that Christianity has co-opted their testimonies to fit a theological agenda they never held, and second, that Christianity itself doesn’t really have Jewish roots.  It has anti-Jewish roots.  Christianity is a product of the rejection of Judaism and the incorporation of Greek philosophy into a syncretized pagan system.

I’m not alone in this conclusion.  There are many much more recognized scholars who hold the same view.  But that view isn’t very popular with Jews, orthodox Christians, or Messianic Christians.  It’s so much easier to just follow the Christian historical rewriting that proclaims God’s “Church” is the natural, and inevitable, evolution of the ethnically exclusive Jewish religion.  The advertisement from First Fruits of Zion is but one example.

What was the “true faith of Jesus”?  Can I suggest that his faith was conservative, Mosaic, and prophetic?  It wasn’t Second Temple rabbinic, although that was certainly an influence.  It wasn’t Fourth Century Trinitarian for sure.  It was Moses by way of Jeremiah, Isaiah, and the others, including some we Westerners hardly know.  If we want to recover the “true faith” we have to stop looking at the text though the eyes of Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Erickson, and Grudem.  But this is usually just too uncomfortable to swallow.  It’s so much easier to believe that Peter, John, James, and Paul were Christians.

For a lot of us, this transition is particularly painful.  We lose friends, even family, and we are castaways between Judaism and Christianity, not fully incorporated into either because both have evolved since the first century.  A difficult place, not accepted by either side of the bridge.

Topical Index: true faith, First Fruits of Zion, rabbinic Judaism, John 20:31