THE
CHURCH RETURNS TO ITS TRUE JEWISH HERITAGE AS IT DISCOVERS YESHUA
AND CHRISTIANITY IN ANCIENT JUDAISM AND THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS
In his monumental fourth and long anticipated
book, Full Circle, Israeli author Bob Fischer shares exciting
new discoveries as the Church returns to its true Jewish heritage
and discovers Yeshua and Christianity in ancient Judaism and the
Dead Sea Scrolls. Included are:
- Many of the clear references to Yeshua
and Christian Doctrine to be found in the Dead Sea Scrolls
- The Triune Godhead as a well documented
ancient Jewish understanding
- An exposition of false teachers who
have arisen in Israel and throughout the world as foretold in
Scripture who are polluting the Church with salvation threatening
apostasy and dangerous heresy.
306 Pages $15.00 Plus S&H
Foreword
The "Return to the Jewish Roots"
movement within the Church may have, in a way, had its genesis
in 1976 when author Alex Haley began a phenomenon with his book
and subsequent miniseries, "Roots." With this landmark
work, Haley caused a world-wide movement for it seems all people,
everywhere, to discover who they are and from whence they came.
For Haley, whose passion to find his own
identity ignited all manner of parallel movements, the result
of his efforts was overnight fame and fortune.
For the Church, wherein the "Return
to the Jewish Roots Movement" seemingly started spontaneously
in the early 1990's, then quickly exploded into the ongoing revolution
within virtually every denominational nook and cranny, the result
has too often been utter confusion followed by despair, brought
about by unbelievably bad doctrine foisted upon legions of spiritually
starving, highly vulnerable seekers by a growing army of modern-day
false teachers and prophets.
What rational, supposedly "born again,"
ethnically Gentile believer in Yeshua could swallow the notion
that all Christians, and/or all of humanity are "Israelites,"
blood descendants of the supposed "Lost Ten Tribes"
of Israel and therefore entitled, even commanded by God, to make
aliyah (immigrate)to Israel where they are to claim their share
of 10/12ths of the Land supposedly given to them as an "everlasting
inheritance" by God?
Never mind the blatant physical impossibility
of this proposition there are something like six million permanent
inhabitants of this perpetually war torn piece of Middle East
real estate that is about the size of New Jersey that would somehow
have to make room for 2.2 billion "Christians," or,
at the extreme of this view, something in excess of the 6 billion
other folks that live elsewhere throughout the world.
What rational, "born again" Christian
could believe such an outlandish proposal?
Let me tell you Astoundingly there are tens of thousands of them,
perhaps by now even one hundred thousand, mostly in North America,
who have already passionately embraced this incredible notion,
and their ranks continue to grow by leaps and bounds.
However, let me quickly add that "only"
tens of thousands or perhaps even one hundred thousand poor souls
have so far thus been led down this particular "primrose
path" out of the more than two billion who constitute the
world-wide Body of Yeshua. Praise be to God, since the early 1990's
countless other millions have begun listening, and responding
to the Holy Spirit who has actively been causing both Gentile
and Jewish believers alike to search for whom they are and from
where and how they came into their Christian faith. The message
that they are hearing is both consistent and clear.
It is this same Holy Spirit who ignited
the spark and who is now fanning the flames of the "Return
to the Jewish Roots" movement. And, it is this same Holy
Spirit who is moving quickly, causing people to both discover
and embrace the Jewish roots of Christianity.
For some, several of whom I know personally,
they have found they are, in fact, ethnically Jewish after a lifetime
of unknowingly walking and worshipping from a Gentile perspective.
For others, they are finding the truths
of the Jewish underpinnings and beginnings of their Christian
faith. These are those who have learned to look to Jerusalem instead
of to Rome for the origins of their Church.
For still others, they are just now discovering
the horrors and errors the attitudes and actions within the Church,
beginning with the second and third centuries. They have only
just begun to fathom this misdirection which has caused horrendous
atrocities against the Jews. Rampant denominationalism has split
the church into as many as 2,600 quarreling factions. Runaway
liberalism has led the Church to abandon such foundational pillars
as the Divinity of Yeshua, His virgin birth, and, to embrace all
manner of other apostasy and heresy. All of this, yes all of it
has, inexplicably, been done in the name of Jesus!
For all of these seekers of the truth,
who have taken the time to search God's heart, they will find
themselves being led by the Holy Spirit to discover that their
Christian faith "began" with, and is indeed identical
with the "faith of Abraham."
When I was privileged to introduce my second
book, The Children of God, just two years ago, it was immediately
embraced by several leaders of the Messianic Jewish movement.
One such individual, who has very recently documented her own
personal Jewish ethnicity, went so far as to describe this work
as "the text book for the return to the Jewish Roots movement."
Pridefully, much too puffed up by this
overstatement concerning the value of my work, I quickly concluded
that my call to inform the Church about it Jewish roots was at
last complete and that I could turn to another subject.
However, then, just two years ago, I could
have had no knowledge of the profoundly important, foundation
shaking, new truths that were about to be revealed to the Church
in the most recently translated Dead Sea Scrolls(1). These monumental
new revelations that point clearly to the actual Jewish roots
of the Church are all the more exciting when taken together with
the fact that the main line ancient Jewish precursors of the Essene
Sect held a clear and widely taught Triune understanding of the
Godhead as central to their belief system, an understanding that
may have stemmed as far back as to our father Abraham (2). There
is another tradition, perhaps fanciful or perhaps not, that this
ancient understanding that encompassed the Doctrine of the Trinity
"-- was first taught by God himself to a select company of
angels---who most graciously communicated this heavenly doctrine
to (Adam) the disobedient child of earth---From Adam it passed
to Noah, and then to Abraham---." (3) Moreover, the Essenes,
who were unquestionably the most ascetic and righteous of the
three principal Jewish sects during a more than three century
period before, during and immediately following the walk of Yeshua,
confidently and reverently awaited Him as He was understood to
be the thoroughly prophesied Davidic, atoning and eschatologic
Messiah whom they had meticulously memorialized in the Dead Sea
Scrolls they penned between 250 BCE and 70CE, then stored for
safe keeping in eleven different caves near Qumran where they
remained undiscovered for more than twenty centuries.
Up until these very recent revelations
and understandings, I believe that most Gentile Christians and
many Jews themselves could only look upon Judaism, from a theological
perspective, as a more-or-less cohesive and generally agreeing
body with respect to its fundamental spiritual understandings.
Moreover, I believe that most who even took the time to give the
matter any consideration would most likely have concluded that
the sectarian division among Jews into the principal modern-day
groups of Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, etc. was driven principally
by the application and practice of the religion rather than by
any significant disagreement along major issues of scriptural
understanding.
Stated differently, it is almost universally
assumed that all Jews of every stripe and practice stand in agreement
on such fundamental matters as: the nature and substance of God
(God is one, Ecaud); what constitutes the Word of God (the written
Tanach and the Oral Torah ); and, the nature and purpose of the
coming Mashiach (a priest, prophet and king who will set the world
aright and bring peace).
It thus may come as a surprise to many
Gentile Christians, as it did to me, a born again Jew, that, during
the most immediate centuries surrounding the time of Yeshua, there
were in fact major disagreements regarding virtually all of these
core theological issues among the then three major sects of Judaism:
the Sadducees , the Pharisees, and the Essenes. Further, that
these disagreements had then, and are still having a profound
impact upon both universally accepted Jewish and Christian theological
understandings.
The historical fact is, as we will later
explore in some detail, all branches of modern-day Judaism are
rooted entirely in the theological understandings, practices and
teachings of the Pharisees. The Sadducees were relatively few
in number, left no written legacy and quickly vanished after the
temple was destroyed in 70 CE. The third major sect, the Essenes,
were a much larger group than the Pharisees and differed from
them profoundly with respect to the above detailed three core
theological issues (the nature and substance of the Godhead, the
scope and limits of the Word, and the nature, character and purpose
of the expected Messiah).
It appears patently obvious from both historical
and biblical perspectives that Christianity arose directly and
exclusively from the Essenes. Yet, there is an almost universal
lack of understanding to this point that is just now coming to
the attention of the modern day Church as more and more evidence
becomes available through the continued translation, study and
interpretation of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Recently, a Gentile Christian friend who
was visiting Jerusalem shared a conversation she had had with
a well known Israeli tour guide who is held by some to be an "expert"
on the early church. When asked pointedly from which Jewish sect
these Nazarene believers had evolved, this "expert"
unhesitatingly and quite erroneously replied that Jesus was a
Pharisee and therefore the early Jewish believers where largely
converts from this sect. While there were some, perhaps even many,
believers in Yeshua among the Pharisees, for example, the Apostle
Paul was first a Pharisee, the new movement was overwhelmingly
Nazarene/Essene.
Although some would argue to the contrary,
there is a compelling body of biblical and historical evidence
that Yeshua was, at the very least, intimately acquainted with
the various detailed theological teachings and understandings
recorded in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Virtually all of His central
teachings, as they are prophesied in the Old Covenant and written
in the New, are also found, sometimes even verbatim, in the Scrolls
which were scribed long before His incarnation.
Some credible scholars have even suggested
that Yeshua Himself was an Essene, or even if He was not an actual
member of the sect that in any case He most likely studied the
scrolls at the Qumran library. Further, many scholars agree that
Yeshua's cousin, John the Baptist, was himself an Essene who was
raised and educated at Qumran. Moreover, it is reasonably certain
that John baptized Yeshua at the nearby site on Jordan River,
within easy walking distance of Qumran.
By no means do I mean to suggest that Yeshua
first carefully studied the Messianic expectations recorded in
the scrolls and then proceeded to fashion His ministry around
these understandings. Quite to the contrary, I believe that the
clear and detailed portrait of Yeshua's teachings that predate
Him in the Scrolls is a Divinely orchestrated, multi-faceted Messianic
prophecy pointing directly to its fulfillment in His later glorious
life and ministry. How else, for example, can one explain His
more than fifty astounding miracles as they are separately recorded
in the New Testament but are in no way mentioned in the Scrolls?
While Yeshua's teachings were clearly in
agreement with those of the Essenes, as they are recorded in the
Scrolls, on the other hand He stood in strong and often heated
opposition to many of the Pharisees' theological understandings,
practices and teachings, as evidenced by many New Testament references.
(4)
What is not generally understood, however,
is that the Nazarenes, the first post resurrection Body of Jewish
believes who met on Mount Zion, were not a new group but rather
the much larger of two long-standing major divisions of the Essenes
that were founded well before the time of Yeshua. (5)
The major relevance of all this to modern-day
Christianity is that many participants in the ongoing "Return
to the Jewish Roots" movement stand in significant error
by looking, figuratively, to the Temple Mount, where a temple
no longer stands, as the place from which the Church arose. (The
Temple was virtually abandoned by the Essenes after it became
desecrated in 173 BCE). They should, instead, be looking to the
adjacent ridge called Mount Zion and to the Upper Room located
on that holy summit where the early Jewish believers first met
and awaited the promised Comforter. It is from there that the
Church actually arose.
Moreover, in my view, it is absolutely
certain from the recent evidence set forth in newly translated
Dead Sea Scrolls, and from other sources, that Yeshua and His
Body, the Church, arose from and reflected the very nature and
substance of the Essenes, certainly not that of the Pharisees,
the Sadducees or any of the several other minor sects of the time.
From an historical perspective, both the
Pharisees and the Essenes vanished as viable Jewish groups in
the early centuries of the then just concluded millennium. Both
groups, however, left remarkable modern-day legacies that, interestingly,
continue to stand in juxtaposition with respect to the above detailed
core theological issues.
· The Pharisees principal legacy
is modern-day rabbinical Judaism in all of its several forms,
including the branch of Messianic Judaism that is rooted therein.
· The first roots of modern-day Evangelical Christianity
are in the Essenes, through their sub-division of Nazarenes who
evolved into the first believers in Yeshua and worshipped in the
first "Messianic Kahala" on Mount Zion. These first
roots are not to be found, as is generally misunderstood, in the
pagan soil of Rome and the Roman Catholic Church.
How deeply sad and utterly perplexing it seems through the imperfection
of human perception that these chosen ones of God, these Nazarene
Essenes who at first rallied in droves to worship Him, so quickly
succumbed to a wide range of political pressures and all too quickly
fell away. At their peak toward the end of the third century CE,
out of a total world-wide Jewish population of approximately 1,500,000
(6) there was a mighty force of over 400,000 (27%) believers in
Yeshua.
At that time in history, nearly all of
this ethnic Jewish population resided in the Land of their biblical
inheritance, Israel, with about 100,000 (1/4th) of them living
in Jerusalem and most of the other 300,000 scattered in several
"believing communities" throughout the Galilee and modern
day Syria.
Compare these encouraging evangelistic
inroads with the heartbreaking demographic facts in the year 2002.
Today, there are approximately 15,000,000 Jews in the world among
whom there are only about 20,000 (0.13%) believers in Yeshua.
Worse still is the tiny surviving handful of just over 2,000 (.033%)
of these ethnic Jewish believers who reside among their approximately
6,000,000 non-believing brethren in the State of Israel. Here
in the Galilee, where I make my home, there were once 300,000
ethnic Jewish believers. Today, there are now fewer than 500.
As if this greatly disappointing result
of 2,000 years of attempted outreach to the Jews isn't in itself
bad enough, there is an even more dismal reality Even among the
tiny world-wide group of some 20,000 ethnic Jewish Messianic "believers,"
there is a sizable and growing number who are being led by satan
to return to their Pharisaic (modern day orthodox Jewish) roots
and thus embrace various heretical, Pharisaic rooted theological
messianic understandings of rabbinical Judaism regarding the nature
and Person of Yeshua, such as:
· Yeshua, as the promised Messiah of the first covenant,
came first to the Jewish people as a High Priest and Prophet (not
God) to teach them about the nature of God and to reveal to them
the mysteries of the Scriptures. He will return once again, this
time to reign as a secular King for 1,000 years in order to bring
peace and otherwise set things right inset things right in the
material world.
· While Yeshua may be, figuratively, "the Son of God"
and as such He reflects the Divine nature of God, He Himself is
by no means God. Only God is God.
· While both Jews and Gentiles may be saved by the blood
sacrifice of Yeshua, "works righteousness" provides
yet another means of such justification for Jews salvation for
Jews, they believe, can also be achieved through prayer, fasting
and by the giving of alms to the poor.
· The Trinity (Triune understanding of the Godhead) is
not made up of three equal members but rather is a hierarchical
arrangement with God the Father in a superior position to the
Son and the Holy Spirit.
These misunderstandings are by no means
trivial, a passing concern or a figment of my own exaggeration.
They are very real, current, profoundly dangerous and threaten
the very eternal salvation of those unfortunate many who have
already been led down the river of fire by their false teachers
to embrace them.
Again, to make certain that I have made
my point, the apostatical (salvation threatening) understanding
that Yeshua is not Divine arises from a central understanding
of modern day rabbinical Judaism that took it, in turn, from the
Pharisees who gave it birth. More specifically, this profoundly
serious error can be laid directly at the doorstep of Rabbi Maimonides
(Rambam), the 13th Century Sephardic Jewish pillar of modern day
rabbinical Judaism whose "Thirteen Articles of Faith"
pervert biblical understanding in a way that does not allow the
possibility that God is in fact a Trinity.
As disconcerting as this orthodox Jewish
rooted Messianic misunderstanding of the nature and person of
Yeshua may be, it has yet another, equally perplexing dimension:
there are a growing number of "Christians" who have
already figuratively fallen into this Jewish originated, salvation-threatening,
spiritual abyss from the strangely crowded and compelling Gentile
Christian Church precipice on the other side of this bottomless
pit.
When I am given the opportunity to teach
Jewish roots to groups of Gentile believers abroad or to meet
with such "pilgrims" here in the Land, I not infrequently
hear the heartfelt yet misguided assertion: "I love Israel
and everything Jewish so much that I must be Jewish!" I recently
received the following e-mail inquiry from a Gentile believer
in the southeastern United States: "I am a born again Christian
who would like to become a Messianic Jew. Please send me any free
literature on the subject."
Such misguided understandings, no matter how sincere, are symptomatic
of an exploding cross denominational identity crisis that is currently
sweeping the worldwide Church. It is, I believe, an identity crisis
spawned by satan himself yet another evil weapon on the black
side of the never ending spiritual battle; a weapon that is nothing
more than a modern day manifestation of the age old evil of "replacement
theology" that teaches:
1. Israel has failed God, and therefore
the Church has replaced Israel.
2. The Church has become the "spiritual" or "true"
Israel.
3. Gentile Christians have become the "spiritual" or
"true" Jews.
4. Therefore: Ethnic Jews and the State of Israel have become
irrelevant.
The Roman Catholic Church officially adopted
"replacement theology" at the Council of Nice in 325
CE and continues to state this position even today, a position
which is, sadly, widely shared across the entire Protestant spectrum.
According to the Catholic Encyclopedia:
Other doctrines, specifically Christian,
are not added on to Judaism to develop, but rather to supersede
it. In reality, between the New and Old Testaments there is a
direct but not revolutionary succession as a superficial observer
might be inclined to believe; just as in living beings, the imperfect
state of yesterday must give way before the perfection of to-day
although the one has normally prepared the other. If the mystery
of the Trinity and the spiritual character of the Messianic Kingdom
are ranked among the peculiarly Christian dogmas, it is because
the Old Testament was of itself insufficient to establish the
doctrine of the New Testament on this subject; and still more
because, at the time of Jesus, the opinions current among the
Jews went decidedly in the opposite direction. (7)
Then also, there are relatively new and
prominent purveyors of a repackaged long standing "replacement"
understanding that I introduced at the beginning of this foreword
suggesting that the church has somehow replaced Israel and, variously,
all Gentile believers, all Anglo Saxons, and even all of humanity
are genetic descendants of the "Lost Ten Tribes of Israel"
who are called by God (as many as all 2.2 billion of them) to
take up their rightful everlasting inheritance by repopulating
the ten 12ths of the Land of Israel to which they are eternally
entitled.
There seems to be no end to the offerings
of such malicious and dangerous nonsense spewing forth from the
sewer of satan posing supposed enigmas (the answers to which are
readily and clearly available to any true seeker in the Word of
God) such as: "Who is Israel?" "Who is a Jew?"
and "Who has inherited the Land of Israel?"
In summary, I have three primary purposes in this present writing:
· First, to share in considerable
detail the exciting presence of Yeshua as He can be seen deeply
ingrained in the very fiber of the Dead Sea Scrolls; while offering
as background an exposition of the little understood historical
fact that the Triune nature of the Godhead is a solidly documented
Jewish heritage (not some new derived "Christian" theology
that was dreamt up by the Church Fathers, then later codified
by the Church itself) as many as eighteen centuries after it was
first taught by main stream rabbis as a central Jewish understanding.
All of this will be focused on illuminating a much deeper revelation
that the roots of the Christian Church are not simply Jewish but
they are rather most pointedly deeply planted in the spiritually
rich Nazarene/Essene soil of Qumran, Jerusalem and the Galilee
as evidenced by the Dead Sea Scrolls and other historical reference.
· My second purpose is to expose and address the flood
of error that has been and continues to be promulgated on both
the orthodox rooted Messianic Jewish and Gentile Christian sides
of what I see as an extremely deep satanically authored spiritual
abyss, with particular focus on those issues that speak directly
to the Person of Yeshua or otherwise have salvational impact.
I do so with the earnest prayer that at least some who might otherwise
be eternally doomed might thus be snatched from the precipice
of the "bottomless pit." Many will say to me on that
day, 'Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your
name drive out demons and perform many miracles?' Then I will
tell them plainly, 'I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!'
(Matt 7:22-23 NIV)
· My third purpose is to address those derivatives, although
not necessarily salvation impacting, yet very dangerous and misguided
doctrinal positions that pertain to the nature and constitution
of the Body of Yeshua, the Land of Israel and to "Who is
Israel?"
In summary, my central, underlying purpose
is to provide all believers with a well documented further understanding
of the very Jewish history, nature and substance of the Gentile
Christian Church. Then, having established this understanding
as a base line, I earnestly seek to alert those dear ones who
sincerely believe they are saved but are not those who are thus
lost because they have so grossly misunderstood the Person of
Yeshua.
And, I also cry out to those others who
have been so grossly misled regarding the nature, substance, inheritance,
calling and faith of the Jewish people to be acutely aware of
the false prophets and teachers who are prowling the Land like
the ferocious beasts they indeed are, ready to consume them. Collectively
all of these, my potential brothers and sisters in Yeshua, have
either unwittingly and unknowingly already joined, or stand in
imminent danger of taking up their places in the eternally doomed
congregation of synagogue of satan.
I know your works, tribulation, and poverty
(but you are rich); and I know the blasphemy of those who say
they are Jews and are not, but are a synagogue of Satan. (Rev
2:9)
But there were also false prophets among
the people, even as there will be false teachers among you, who
will secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the
Lord who bought them, and bring on themselves swift destruction.
(2 Pet 2:1)
(1)More than 800 Dead Sea Scroll
Documents and some 40,000 fragments were found in eleven different
caves near the shores of the Dead Sea in Israel between 1947 and
1956. While all of these documents were finally published in November
2001, to date, only about half of them have been translated and
studied.
(2)William Wynn Westcott, "An
Introduction to the Study of The Kabalah," a lecture from
a series published in London (1910) by J.M. Watkins ( Soror S.J.
) page 2. Found at http://www.hermeticgoldendawn.org. Legend has
it that this ancient doctrine was too sacred to be written down
and that it was given directly to Abraham by God to be transmitted
orally from generation to generation until it was finally recorded
in written form in about 200CE
(3)Samuel L. McGregor Mathers,
"Preface and Introduction to "The Kabbalah Unveiled'"
(4)There are more than 80 such
references in the four gospels, for example: Matt 3:7, 9:34; Mk
2:16, 7:5; Lk 5:21, 11:39; Jn 7:32, 9:16
(5)Epiphanius , Parion 29 makes
reference to the smaller celibate group called the "Ossaens"
and the much larger group, the "Nazarenes." Josephus
elaborates on the two divisions, one, the much smaller of the
two who lived as ascetic celibates at Qumran, and the larger,
known as the Nazarenes, who were widely scattered throughout the
country, especially in several major centers in the Galilee. See
Wars Book 2, Chapter 8, 2-13. Also see Philo, The Works of Philo:New
Updated Edition, Translated by C.D. Yonge, Hendrickson, 1997,
pp. 689-691 and 745-746
(6)Dolpin, Lambert, "World
Population Since Creation," article found at www.ldolphin.org
(7)The Catholic Encyclopedia, Article: "The Church."
Article: "The New Testament."
Copyright 2011 by Raymond Robert
Fischer
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