THE MATRIX OF CHRISTIANITY

Yeshua and his first followers remained Jews within Judaism. There was no separate path formed by them. These were Jews who believed Yeshua was in a messianic role according to Jewish tradition — “oral Torah.”

It is critical to understand that their approach to understanding the Hebrew Scriptures was within that framework of Jewish Torah spirituality.

As recorded in the gospels, Yeshua said he came only for B’nei Y’Israel. He did not teach gentiles. He told his immediate disciples not to go to the gentiles as well.

He taught his fellow Jews regarding teshuva – return to Torah.

In response to another (Samaritan) interpretation of the Torah, he told the woman at the well that her people did not know what they were talking about. When the Sadducees challenged him with a question in Matthew 22, his detailed response was from oral Torah.

All his words must be understood within that spiritual framework.
Gentiles who were turning to the one true God, from the time of Moses through the first century, learned about God from Jews directly, or via the Temple gentile courtyard, and later via the synagogue system as referenced in Acts 15:21, and as seen through Paul’s journeys.

HOW and WHAT did these gentiles learn? It wasn’t from any foreign perspective. The synagogues were run by the Pharisees. They were taught from within that same framework of Torah Judaism — the same as if anyone studied in orthodox Jewish circles today.

This does not mean gentiles had to become Jews. It means the BASIS of understanding and their role in God’s plan was all according to the spiritual framework of Judaism, the written and oral Torah. The council in Acts 15 affirmed this, directing gentiles to the synagogue system, which was run by the Pharisees.

So what happened?
Everything changed with the Bar Kochba (Roman-Jewish) war of 132-135CE. This is one of the most critical events in history yet its ramifications are not taught — for obvious reasons. Over half a million Jews would die and a thousand villages were destroyed.
Here’s the key part: Following this war, Rome outlawed all forms of Torah teaching and practice under the death penalty. What remained of the widespread Yeshua groups had no more Jewish leadership or teaching. Pagan and antiSemitic elements took over, and reinterpreted the writings of the Jewish disciples (especially Paul).
With no connection to Torah/Judaism, the remaining gentiles followers decided what to believe on their own, none of which was according to the understanding of Yeshua and his Judaism.
These baseless, foreign ways of understanding the Hebrew writings quickly fractured:
“As early as the year 187, the Christian Bishop Iraneus counted twenty different varieties of Christianity. By the year 384, Epiphanius counted eighty.”
“Caesar and Christ,” Will Durant, 1944, Simon and Schuster, New York, p. 616.
Eventually, these were united under what became known as the universal or ‘Catholic’ Church. Later came the split with Protestantism, which like earlier, broke off into what are now thousands of groups.
The main point to all this, is that none of the teachings of any part of Christianity are grounded in the same Jewish concepts and ways of understanding the Bible, Yeshua and the first followers. This is literally the greatest spiritual ‘matrix’ perpetuated in history.