Bible Backgrounds/Church History 2012

This is the interactions between Judaism and Jews and the church. One of the things, we have this on the first page of your handout. In Deuteronomy, so here's the fifth book of the Bible. In Deuteronomy, it actually lays out Israel's future. And so that's what you see there, including Israel to be scattered, Israel to be few in number among the nations, and Israel gathered and brought back to the land. And so we're going to see aspects of how that has been fulfilled as we go through the slide set here. Here is the big picture.

If we look at Moses, about 1400 BC, that was about approximately the time when they entered the promised land, going up to the crucifixion, death, resurrection and ascension of Christ in 33 AD, and I think we brought out earlier in this class, increasingly the evidence is pointing to Christ's crucifixion on April 3rd, 33 AD, that specific date and year. Increasingly, the evidence is pointing to Christ's crucifixion on April 3rd, Friday, April 3rd, 33 AD. And that conclusion has been reached by about a half dozen different lines of evidence. The most recent of which, earlier this year, a group of geologists looking at the fact there was an earthquake and then dating that earthquake to April 3rd, 33 AD.

And that's only one of the several evidences. Yes? Was there also an eclipse and all that other kind of stuff too? The eclipse thing I'd have to check out. That I'm not sure of. So I have to check that one out. I was looking at kind of a tabulation of what the different evidences are but interestingly about a half dozen different lines of evidence and I'd have to take a look and confirm that. I'll have to look that up too.

I'll get back to the class on that. Then we have here from Romans, and this is pivotal because much of the church has missed this verse, or set of verses. Romans 11 1-2a, Romans chapters 9-11 address Israel, all three chapters. I say then, God has not rejected his people, has he? May it never be. For I too am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin. God has not rejected his people whom he foreknew. Has God rejected Israel? No. Pretty clear, huh? And he's not talking figuratively, because he says he himself is of the tribe of Benjamin. Now, stepping through the church history timeline, starting with the apostolic era. By the way, for the first decade of church history, what was the ethnicity of all the believers? They were all Jewish. Yeah, they were all Jewish.

You have here in the middle of page one this chart, which I got from an outfit that's no longer in operation here, but I think a pretty neat chart. It shows the spectrum of law and grace, both those who are unbelievers, non-Christian Jews, and Christian Jews. And what we have there is the red line there showing the connection. Here's Saul, who's the most extreme legalist. becomes the man of grace. Saul to Paul. Amazing there. But you can take a look at the spectrum of those in the law and grace understanding. And I say a spectrum, but in fact there is a dividing line.

There are those who are true believers and saved and those who are not. One of the other points that we've made previously, and I'll underscore it, is in the fullness of time, and we said that there were three areas in which God had prepared the field, so to speak, for the gospel.

And the first of those was the Roman Empire providing political stability and excellent roads on which to carry the gospel. Ultimately, the Romans hand-built enough roads to go two times around the globe, if you put them end-to-end. massive, all by hand. And many of them are still in sufficiently good condition. You can drive on them and are being used for that.

The Greek culture brought the Greek language, which was structured beautifully for precisely conveying the New Testament truths. And finally, and this is our point here, the spread of Jewish culture gave the empire a background in the Old Testament so as to better convey the gospel. The Jews were scattered, as was said would be the case in Deuteronomy. They were scattered all over the place, but the Pharisees, not the Sadducees, were missionary, taking it to other Jews in different places and taking it even to the Gentiles.

Finally, we have the Roman victory over Jerusalem in 70 AD. It was actually several years of waves of Roman assault and finally twelve legions of soldiers coming from as far away as Britain attacking Jerusalem and destroying the temple and many many many were lost. That was the end of the descendants of Esau so far as we have any record. Many Jews died as well but obviously survived.

Now in from the apostolic time into the early church period after that. We've shown this before. One of the comments we've had, and I don't have a copy of it in your handout, but one of the comments we've had is this is rather limited. It doesn't go up to Britain, which is likely the case. It doesn't go off to the east, to India, China, other places where there's evidence that the gospel had reached by that time. But it does give you at least a starting representation of where the church was at 100 AD, just a few years after the Apostle John had gone home to be with the Lord.

The idea that the church replaces Israel in God's program was first presented by Justin Martyr, even though he believed in a literal millennium. Some of these ideas that ultimately ended up being horrific and tragic and great doctrinal error did get started early. sometimes mixed up with good ideas and truth. The growth of that idea in subsequent centuries, however, proved to be a pillar of anti-Semitism in an earthly church for centuries to come, even to the present day.

Here was the Church Council at Elvira. This is about six years before Christianity is made legal. There is already a great alienation between the Christians and the Jews. The Christians are not understanding what the biblical position of the Jews is. The church was still under Roman persecution until 312.

Christian landlords were not to allow Jews to bless their crops so they would face expulsion from the church. Parents who allowed their children to intermarry with Jews were barred from the church for five years thereafter. Eating with Jews barred one from the Lord's table. If you would have eaten from a table with the Jews, sorry, you can't take the Lord's table. So you can't have fellowship with Jews.

Then, 312, when Christianity became legal until 590, the time of Gregory I, Gregory the Great, as he's sometimes called. You have the starting point here, and we've shown this before, but 312 AD, Christianity is legal. The next year, 313, it's the official religion. And finally, the only legal religion in 324.

Constantine limited the rights of the Jews. The Code of Constantine 315, so this is only a few years after Christianity is made legal, began to limit the rights of the Jews. Council of Nicaea, here's Nicaea in north central what is now Turkey, Council of Nicaea forbid Jews from owning Christian slaves and from converting others to Judaism.

So the Press against the Jews begins. It gets worse. John Chrysostom, a popular Christian speaker and author in his day, wrote and spoke in the ways that were understood by many to be anti-Jewish. And I think we're going to do a quote here, and you'll find out why it's understood that way, especially as he interpreted some Bible passages. Here is, and I think you have this on the last page of your handout, John Chrysostom wrote this, so that we too, having once known and adored Christ our King. Some folks have been puzzled, or worse, by the fact that we don't call Christ our King here. But there is a reason, and it goes along with this idea. Yes?

Okay, the Castle of Nicaea, just for Was that where the Bible was actually put together? They established all the different books? It was not the last and final statement. There was some reference to it, but the listing of the various ones was not complete yet. So it was just beginning at that point? It was in process still. have the Bible or Scripture as we have it today until later. Well, let's say they had it, but in terms of its official recognition, it was to be a little bit later.

Okay, here's the second quote. The rejection and dispersion of the Jews was the work of God, not of emperors. Well, in some respect, you could say the dispersion, yes. The rejection, no. Because what did the Bible say? God has not rejected his people Israel. It was done by the wrath of God and because of his absolute abandonment of the Jews. Did he absolutely abandon the Jews? No. Romans 11 says not. So he's quite mistaken. Thus the Jew will live under the yoke of slavery without end. God hates the Jews.

And he also made statements like, and if you're a good Christian, you will too. And it was very common to say things like that. On Judgment Day, he will say to those who sympathize with them, depart from me, for you have had intercourse with my murderers. Flee then from their assemblies, fly from their houses, and far from venerating the synagogue, hold it in hatred and aversion.

Okay, you have on page 2, this is kind of a half page slide I think, just shows the Old Testament text. Here there is this alienation between Jews and Christians, but in fact the Christians got both the Greek and the Hebrew Old Testament from the Jews.

Those were the ones who had it. And so there were Jews that, in spite of some of these tensions, were actually cooperative and willing to go along with us getting copies and translating from their texts. So at any rate, what you see earlier on, 200 BC is where the Greek Old Testament came about, and originally just a Jewish document. Once the Christians embraced it, The Jews started moving away from it. That's yours. We don't want to have anything to do with that.

And then you also have the Latin Old Testament copied, by the way, copied by a fellow. It was a rabbi that lived in Bethlehem that he went there and got that from. And then the Hebrew Old Testament. So those kind of three different lines of Old Testament, Greek, Latin, and Hebrew.

Now, then you have from 590 to 1517, 590 being the beginning of Gregory the Great, the Pope, Gregory I, to 1517, almost a thousand years later, the time of Luther. Then there was forced conversions from 612 to 621, the Spanish Visigoth king, how about that, Sisyphus, it almost looks like, you know, Sissy butt, but anyway, told all Jews to either convert to Roman Catholic Christianity, I put that there in brackets because it's not a Christian conversion in the true sense, or be exiled. Some Jews remained in 694, they were dispossessed, that is the elder possessions taken away, and made slaves. Throughout later centuries, orders for Jewish conversion, exile, or execution were given in various times and places.

The Crusades, and by the way, I'm hitting the high spots. You have on pages 5 and 6 a little more detail. If you care to look at that, some bullet points with more detail. But, November 27, 1095, Pope Urban II called for the Christians to take back the Holy Land. This was the initial address to start the Crusades. We talked about that last week. Launching the Crusades, a series of ill-conceived military ventures continuing to 1248, and I say continuing to 1248, but they continued to stay there after that for several centuries, excuse me, decades.

Initially suffering losses just in the course of travel on July 5, 1099, the Crusaders finally captured Jerusalem, slaughtered Eastern Christians, Muslims, and Jews in the process. They couldn't tell who was who so they'd just kill everybody. I can't tell who's who because they're from Europe and now I'm going to a whole different culture and I look at somebody I can't tell what they are so just slaughter them all. So Jews were killed in the process along with other Eastern Christians. You have had this Crusades chart last week there. So that was included and so these Crusades then give you some detail on who was attacked, where, and that sort of thing. There were initially, from the start, attacks on Jews. Slaughtered Jews by the thousands. Medieval expulsions of Jews. Expulsions of Jews from England.

This is about the time the Crusades were ending. 1290 to 1291, expulsion of Jews from France, 1182, 1306 to 1394, expulsions of Jews from Saxony, that's a part of Germany that is right next to the Czech Republic, and expulsion of Jews from Hungary, 1360, expulsion of Jews from Prague, 1380, expulsions of Jews from Austria. 1420, expulsions of Jews from Spain and Portugal.

1492, when Columbus sailed the ocean blue, right? That year. All right, you go sailing and you just go, right? So that was the year. 1496 and 1497. What? We still got some left? Right? Okay. Expulsions of Jews from Sicily, 1492 as well. So the bottom line is they're just going all over the place. You go here, you go there, and how long until the next expulsion? That was the pattern.

Now from 1517 to 1648, from the time of Martin Luther's nailing his theses, that's a TH by the way, theses on the door at Wittenberg, up until the end of the Thirty Years War. We mentioned previously the issues of the Reformation. We had new things, the basis of authority, the basis of salvation, personal Bible study and interpretation, and we had things that were unchanged. The Reformation didn't just change everything, it changed certain things and left other things unchanged. Politically and militarily aligned churches, allegorical interpretation of much of scripture, including that Israel is replaced by the church. Matter of fact, the original printing of the King James Bible in the Old Testament, everywhere it said Israel in the text, up at the notes, up at the top, it had church.

And then Luther, and of course most of these others, carried on the idea of allegorical interpretation of scripture, and that allegorizing fed anti-Semitism in varying degrees. Martin Luther, on discovering the salvation by faith content of the scriptures, initially approached some Jews to discuss his discovery, to which he received a cold response.

He didn't like that. He unfortunately or regrettably wrote on the Jews and their lies, which is pretty evident so far as what the message wasn't there. The next one of the unknowable name and the generations of Christ was also in that same year written and is also anti-Jewish although the title doesn't reveal it quite so clearly. He also preached anti-Jewish sermons. Well the whole sermon was anti-Jewish.

Here you have Martin Luther and the Jews and their lies and I will not read the whole thing because we're short on time. However, first set fire to their synagogues or schools and to bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn so that no man will ever again see a stone or cinder of them. This is done in honor of our Lord and of Christendom, so that God might see that we are Christians, and do not condone or knowingly tolerate such public lying, cursing, and blasphemy of his Son and of his Christians. Second, I advise that their houses also be razed and destroyed, for they pursue in them the same aims as in their synagogues. Third, I advise all their prayer books and Talmudic writings in which such idolatry, lies, and cursing and blasphemy are taught to be taken from them, etc. You have a copy of that on the last page of your handout.

So you can pursue the rest of those paragraphs. Fox's Book of Martyrs. The author of Fox's Book of Martyrs wrote repeatedly of the Jews giving accounts with positive and negative color. So a little more objective, Fox's Book of Martyrs was unlike that of Luther in another way in that Fox's writing seems to hold out hope for the Jews coming to faith in Jesus Christ. And for those of you who signed up for Bible backgrounds and church history fully loaded, I think that's included in the folder there. Let me know if you're interested in that because that's easily publicly available, public domain.

Next we have the Anabaptists, and we would fall in that category, although we wouldn't agree with all those who get called Anabaptists. They sought no political alliance. They were persecuted by Roman Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed groups. During the Reformation, somewhere between 4,000 and 5,000 Anabaptists were killed by the Roman Catholics, the Lutherans, and the Calvinists.

But they had neither the means nor the mind to persecute the Jews so were often more kind to the Jews but powerless to protect them. So directly kind but not in a position to defend them. They were just simply not militarily aligned and didn't have military power to seek it.

Next we have from 1648 the Treaty or Peace of Westphalia to the present. Here we have the arrival of the Jews in New Amsterdam, and then in New York in America in 1654. On September 22nd, 1654, Peter Stuyvesant, the governor, sought to oust Jews from his colony, but failed. The reason that he failed was a whole bunch of Christians objected. He said, no, you're not going to do that. and therefore it became a welcoming place, part of the reason why there are a great many Jews in New York today. Jews were admitted to England by Oliver Cromwell in 1655, although things didn't go well for him, and the Jews were expelled from Vienna in 1670, after that period of time.

You also had another pattern that began to look upon the Jews favorably and no longer embrace this rejection of the Jews, and that is the dispensational teaching. You had originally the teaching under Isaac Watts, who was a hymn writer, but it was Darby that really began to recognize, wait a minute, when it says Israel, it means Israel, not the church or some figurative meaning, and began to see a regard for the Jews as a part of God's plan. All right, so that was under Darby.

Allegories are allegories when they're said to be allegories. For example, Galatians 4, 21 through 31, Paul says this is an allegory. Rather than taking the scripture and allegorizing it, see the difference there? Make forcing an allegory upon the text.

Something else that we saw there on the very first slide, it says gathering the Jews into Israel and into Jerusalem would be the end time plan. Look at the pattern of population growth of Jews in Jerusalem starting back into the middle 1800s, 1844 being the first year. The growth in the number of Jews has been spectacular. Has the Lord been gathering them back? Yes. Who lived there before 1844?

You have in great part, we'll have some numbers on that in a minute, you have in great part a lot of Muslim and Arab groups that had moved in. You also had to some degree Christians of different groups and sometimes you have Arab Christians, which is the case over there. Here is the record, not just bar chart, but breakdown between Jews, Muslims, and Christians by population count in Jerusalem. So you find that the numbers of actual Christians living in there relative to the Jews is rather small. Even the amount of Muslims is relatively small compared to the number of Jews. So Jews predominate as in the last part of this population chart here. Here are key events of the 19th and the 20th centuries.

We've got 1870, the Lord cometh, James Brooks, the idea of a literal coming of the Lord to the land of Israel. So this is a growing and radically different concept from God hates the Jews, but instead, no, He's going to come back and in fact Jews will be saved, and I don't mean just saved by faith, yes that, but they'll actually be rescued from the coming tragedy. 1884, the coming prince, Sir Robert Anderson. Similar idea, a literal Israel and a literal return to Israel.

1897 is the first Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland. The president of that Congress was Theodor Herzl. 1909 was the first Schofield Reference Bible, which talked about Israel as a people that God loved, and as a land that would be restored. 1916, Chaim Weissman develops acetone source for cordite for the British.

Here's what was happening. The British were running out of their explosives and propellant materials during World War I and they were running into trouble and a Jew by the name of Chaim Weissman said, I have a solution for you and I will tell you what your solution is if you'll make me a deal. So that was the basis for his making a deal that would favor Israel. And so he told them and then the British in their World War One battle then had a new source for this cordite, an explosive and propellant. 1948, Israel becomes a nation, and the next year, Chaim Weizmann becomes the first president.

So, we might ask the question, and this is from Torah.org, a Jewish website, why didn't the Jews accept Jesus as the Messiah? And I will leave it to you to read that, but the basic summary, and I've had discussions with people who are Jewish, and not persuaded that Jesus was the Messiah. The basic summary is this. The Jews were looking for a Messiah like we envision in the second coming, except that they do not see the Messiah as divine. They see him as a descendant of David. So they're looking for a descendant of David, so for that Jesus qualifies, but coming as we envision Jesus coming in the second coming, and so a rabbi that I was talking to said, you know, when the Messiah comes we'll ask him, is this your first or second time coming here? So that's the point, they were looking for someone who would come like that second coming event that we anticipate, but not divine, not deity, simply a descendant of David.

Yes? I think it's kind of interesting, Sir Robert Anderson in that book, the coming prince actually used the book of Daniel to prove that Christ was the Messiah. That's correct, he did. He did. And while there are little points I would critique, in general, he was correct. His thesis was correct. So anyway, that gives you some insight there.

Romans 1.16, For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God, for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first, and also the Greek. To the Jew first, right? Does he mean just the church? No. To the Jew.

So what did Paul do when he went into a city? He first sought out, where are the Jews? Philippi, there wasn't a synagogue. What did he do? He met with the Jews that were there by the river. The Jews gathered there in Philippi. still went to the Jews first, even though their number was so small they didn't have a synagogue.

Yes? It's kind of interesting because if you read Romans and stuff, they're talking about the remnant. Yes. So there's basically the large mass of Jews and then there's the remnant. And the remnant was the one that was going to be saved. I think you have to kind of keep that in mind when you're talking about Jews. Yes. It really is a small percentage. Well, and I think that's an important distinction that you make.

And the thing about the three people groups that we see consistently identified in Scripture all the way, by the way, to the last chapters are Gentiles, Jews, and the Church. Of Gentiles, some are saved, right? Of Jews, some are saved. of the church, all are saved. So there's a distinction in that the Gentile and Jewish bodies are an ethnic distinction. The church is apart from ethnic distinction. Some Gentiles are saved, some Jews are saved, all of the church are saved. All of those who are in the genuine church are saved.

By the way, how are anybody How is anybody from those three groups saved? Saved by faith. That's absolutely right. Saved by faith. The Jews are not saved by the law. The law does not determine their salvation. The law determines whether you're blessed or cursed. Deuteronomy chapter 28. If you do this, you'll be blessed. If you don't, you'll be cursed.

It's as simple as that. Well, not that simple, but it can be summarized that way. Okay, you have a timeline. It's on five and six of your handout. The references for that are on page seven. If you want to look at more detail, because we did just hit the high spots, if you want to look at more detail, those bullets go through up to about the year 1200. You'll get more detail on the things that happened early on.

The alienation between the Church and Israel pretty intense. And there were times, for example, during the Crusades, they would take the Jews, put them in the synagogue, bar the doors closed, and light it on fire. And if any ran out, they'd drive them back into the flames. Yeah, in other words, if you look at it, there was plenty of history. And unfortunately, they'd pull out, see what Martin Luther wrote?

And so there was even religious support in some degree. Not that all Christians agreed with it. There were certainly those who didn't. But there was some degree of appeal to religious support for what they were doing. And some groups have had at least a history of doing just that. At any rate, I'll leave it to you to go through that if you care to in more detail.

We'll be looking at evidence regarding Christianity outside of the Bible in the 1st and 2nd centuries next Sunday. And so what is that evidence outside the Bible regarding Christianity? If you were to take the Bible and set it aside, what evidence could you find about Christianity in the 1st and 2nd centuries? from other sources, outside of the Bible, what could you tell? And I think you have a rather amazing answer.

There's a phenomenal amount of evidence, particularly considering that Israel is often at some remote corner of the Roman Empire, and waves and waves of destruction of that evidence. All these battles over Jerusalem and the Crusades and the Muslims coming in, there's still evidence even after all that.

So anyway, that's for next week. I've hopped through this really fast. Questions? Comments? What's that? I know I've been redlining, you know. We will continue through the end of the year. Here are the topics. We're going to go spiritual gifts of tongues, two weeks from now, prophecy and knowledge, when and why the biblical gifts ended. And what we're talking about is the apostolic era, miraculous gifts, and specifically pointing to tongues, prophecy and knowledge, and when and why those ended, and what the Bible has to say about that. A genealogy of dispensationalism from ancient to modern times. A lot of times people will speak of dispensationalism and talk about breaking up things into certain time periods. That time period idea is really a secondary idea.

What is more important is making a distinction between Israel and the church rather than seeing a fuzzing or a replacement. The Pentecostalism and the charismatic movement will be the next one we'll take a look at. Christian foundations in the American colonies. In other words, you'll have people say, well, we were founded as a Christian nation and, you know, we need to get back to our roots and all that.

We'll be looking at that question. So, then there's today's Roman Catholic Catechism. What's in it and why? I have a copy of it that was edited by the current Pope, before he was a Pope, and I've gone through and made quite a few notes and things of that sort and looked at things. I find quite a few surprises. One of them we brought up just last time was what the Roman Catholic Catechism has to say about the Muslims. It says they worship the same God, which is shocking. Anyway, there are actually quite a few shocking things in the Roman Catholic Catechism.

So we'll take a look at that. The birth of ancient heresies and modern cults. The Jehovah's Witnesses say that the Father is God, the Son is a man, and the Holy Spirit is a force. Jesus is a man, not deity. And the Holy Spirit is not personal, he is God's force.

But you might think that's an invention of modern times, but it's not. It's actually an ancient cult that taught exactly the same thing. Yes? They certainly do not. They would strongly challenge that belief, but there are a number of things, even their own New World translation is contradictory. They, for example, used to have a crown and a cross as their symbol, and I've got various documents from that earlier era, but they now say, no, Jesus was impaled, he was hung on a pole with one nail going through his wrists and died that way, not like this. However, when Thomas expresses doubt, he says, I want to look at the nails, plural, in your hands, plural, in his hands, plural, and that's even stated in the New World Translation.

And then the history of Christian music and worship. So we'll be taking a look at that one, which is interesting as well. Fascinating, the history of Christian music and worship over the centuries. Music itself has evolved. And what we have here is an organ and a piano. And the early Christians had neither one of these things. Yes. That seems almost incongruous with playing hymns or something, doesn't it? Okay, so those will be topics we'll be looking at here. the weeks to come through the end of the year. Okay, let's pray. Lord, we thank you as we look at this.

Some tragic and horrible things have gone on in your name and yet you will show your faithfulness to these chosen people, to the Jews, and you will in fact even reign over as their king, reign over them. And they will indeed be blessed because they will know your law and live it out by the power of the Holy Spirit and dwelling them all. And you will be faithful in what you have promised in these things. And indeed, all things will be summed up in the Christ, the Messiah. We do just thank you for your faithfulness in these things and look for your coming for us. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.