Rediscover Your Christian Roots: Jesus to John, Part 4

We've moved on into the second century. And where we left off last time, I'll just move on to where we ended here. How the church was fragmenting at the end of the first century. There's no central place to go and work out problems. The Roman Empire itself is going through changes.

There's issues of culture, of language, of who even has a Bible. There's churches without maybe the entire Bible. Churches with maybe the Old Testament and parts of the New Testament. You just have this problem of how do churches survive in this environment. And once all the apostles die, and then, very shortly, there's a point where there's no one who actually knew Jesus.

How does the church survive? Now it did because of God, but it wasn't an easy process. And the second century was a time when Christianity would come really under the influence of other concepts, Gnostic ideas, Greek philosophy. These things would now be brought in at a very serious level. Part of it was they were removing themselves from Judaism. We'll see why. But as they did, they lost their moorings onto the Old Testament.

There's Old Testament things that we take for granted. We know. I don't care what your background is. There's stories we know. And we see that as a continuum from Genesis on where God is working. That began to lose weight in the Christian churches. There's no Christian church yet.

There's Christian churches. Now where do we get some of the information? The Antinicean Fathers. Some people will say, well, there's no information in the second and third century. Well, there is information about the new orthodoxy that was being created.

And that's what's interesting when you go through this group of writers. They start in the early first century, and the writers go up to the time of Augustine, into the 400s. And there's 34 volumes. No, there's 38 volumes. This is part of the writings of Tertullian. It's not everything he wrote. We'll talk about him in a few minutes. In the second and third centuries. Augustine, of course, in the 400s would become the greatest of those writers. And Augustine will change some basic, core, Biblical concepts, because the environment in which he lives has a different viewpoint of the Bible.

Sometimes we take for granted that a more literal view of the Bible, a more literal interpretation of the Bible, is what's normal. And throughout the Middle Ages, especially, it wasn't. The Bible was to be looked on as allegory. Primarily, it's allegory. Now, there may be some truth to some of the stories, but not all of them are true.

And even if they are, we're looking for the deeper meanings. We're going to show how in the second century that began to be a way to interpret the Scriptures. We also have the Nagamati Library. Once again, I mention that if you want to know about the Gnostics, who became very popular in the second century. Let me go back here a minute, because there are some people here that we're going to be hearing about, and talking about over the rest of the time, that has to do with anti-Nicene writers. Clement of Rome, Ignatius, Polycarp, Barnabas, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Tertullian.

Those are going to be ones we're going to be talking about, because I picked these, because they were major players in what was happening. And we can see in their writings, now you're going to ask me, have I read all of Tertullian? I don't know if there's someone on the face of the earth that has read all of Tertullian. I'm sure there's somewhere, someplace. No, I haven't. I've read enough to know, to be able to pick out certain threads that I want to talk about. His writings just go on and on about every subject imaginable.

But I have been able to find enough in his writings to be able to pull out the realization of what was happening in that second century. I want to mention here, this happens in somewhere around 112 AD. Plenty the younger, there's plenty the younger, and he's called that because his dad would call plenty the elder. Now, plenty the elder died in Pompeii. Remember Mount Vesuvius exploded around 70 AD in Pompeii? Plenty the elder was killed there. Plenty the younger was a Roman official.

And he writes this interesting letter. So you get these little bits and pieces of Roman history, too. Like the one where someone talks about in Suetonius, he talks about this Jesus who is this Christ, and how he died because Pilate killed him. Here's what he wrote to Trajan, who was the emperor at the time. And it's a lot of information, but I want to read it because I want you to take another little snapshot.

But they declare, these are the Christians, their guilt or error was simply this. So they're brought before him as criminals. And he writes to the emperor and says, Why am I putting these people in jail? This is it. They even confess to what they had done.

Though on a fixed day, they used to meet before dawn and recite a hymn among themselves to Christ as though he were a god. So far from biting themselves by oath to commit any crime, they swore to keep from theft, robbery, adultery, breach of faith, and not to deny any trust money disposited with them when called upon to deliver it. This ceremony over, they used to depart and meet again to take food. But it was of no special character and entirely harmless.

He says, even the food they ate, just normal food, he says, all they do is have a meeting on a certain day, he didn't even know what day it was, and they agree to follow the teachers of Christ, they agree not to steal, they agree not to lie, and then they have a potluck. He said potlucks were important. He doesn't understand why he has to put these people in jail. Sort of his Roman sense of justice was, they are no threat to Rome.

And what Trajan writes back is, look, ain't no, it's against the law. The best thing to do is just ignore them and pretend they're not there. And so that's why there are certain places in the Roman Empire at this time where you have severe persecution of Christians and other places you don't. I mean, there were just Roman officials that said, they're not doing anything wrong. Although there are cases where people didn't like somebody, their neighbors, so they would bring charges against them, they were Christian.

So they had to start to set up rules to determine whether someone was Christian or not. Because, oh, I'll just get you declared Christian and you'll get kicked out of your house and I'll buy it. So they had to start setting up rules. And basically what it came down to, if they were willing to do an offering to the Emperor, let him go.

In fact, there's cases where certain Roman officials, see some of them were very cruel, others especially out beyond Rome, they were trying to talk them out of it. Come on, can't you just say, Caesar is Lord, like Christ is Lord.

I can't say that. But just say it, you don't even have to believe it. No, I can't say that. Okay, then I'm going to have to prosecute you here. So it's a hit and miss, but when the persecution comes, sometimes they came in waves and they were very devastating. Another thing happens, and some of them mention this during the lunch break, between 1115 and 1117, Hadrian, who's followed Trajan as Emperor, begins to build a new city in Jerusalem.

He says, here is a beautiful city, one of the greatest ancient cities of all time, and we need to build this up. But Jews can't live there. Jews can't live there. We're going to make this a Roman city. We're going to make this an example of a Roman city.

And he's taxed the Jews throughout the empire to pay for the rebuilding of Jerusalem, although they weren't allowed to come in. It set off a revolt, not like the revolt in 70 AD, where they just basically revolted in Judea, all across the empire they revolted, especially in the island of Crete. And they had a general uprising happening through spots throughout the Roman Empire. And where it wasn't happening, they had Jewish communities in all the cities, and there was a fear that they would not now rise up against the Roman Empire. And remember, they could be anywhere from 8 to 10 percent of the population.

The result is that Hadrian, it's the Bar Kokmo revolt, he sends legions into Judea, and he destroys them as a country. In 70 AD, Jerusalem was destroyed, but Judea was not destroyed as a country. He sends them in there, and it's about 1.30, somewhere in there, that this thing finally peters out. And by the time it's done, there's no Judea left.

Many of the Jews have been scattered all over the world, and it's just left to whoever wants to come in and live there. Once again, this would have a profound effect on Christians, not because they were associated directly with Judaism anymore, but because Christians did not want to be associated with Jews. So you have a church that's predominantly non-Jewish throughout the empire.

They're still Jews part of the church, but it's now become predominantly non-Jewish, and they didn't want to be seen as Jews. And so they began, and you see it in some writings then from the second century, these writings as they begin to distance themselves from Jews. There's a couple things we need to understand about writings in the second and third centuries. We mentioned before how they began to... Peter talks about collecting even the writings of Paul. Some of the writings of Paul are now Scripture.

So we have the Old Testament, the New Testament, what we call the modern-day Bible. But if you had a scroll or a codices, which was a primitive book, and you wanted to really become famous, you wanted people to buy it, one of the most common things to do was create a forgery. If you wanted people to read something, pretend you're somebody famous. There was also what used to deceive people, 2 Thessalonians 2. This wasn't just something that suddenly came up in the second century. It's in 2 Thessalonians 2, verse 1. Paul writes now, brethren, concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, and our gathering together to Him, we ask you not to be soon shaken and mind or troubled, either by spirit or by word or by letter as if it came from us.

In other words, there were letters being sent around at that time, and people were saying, I mean, the autograph on it was Paul. Now, in the second century, we have copies of numerous books that were supposed to be written by Peter. There's the Acts of Peter, I mentioned that. There were by Judas, by Paul, that weren't written by them. But how were people to know at times?

Oh, look! They found another letter by Paul. And if you were Gnostics, you simply had your own Bible now, where you had part of the real Bible and these other letters that you would just add in and say, oh, no, those are the real letters. Yours aren't the real letters. You other Christians don't have the real letters. We have the real letters, because we have the secret knowledge.

As I mentioned before, the Gospel of Judas made him the hero. He was the hero of it. One of the most important of these fakes and forgeries was the epistle of Barnabas. Now, there was a Barnabas in the Bible, remember? In the book of Acts, there's a Barnabas, very famous. He's one of the leading disciples.

He's known as the son of encouragement because of the positive impact he had on the church in Jerusalem. Around 130, the epistle of Barnabas shows up. There were lots of copies, we know, because there's little fragments and stuff that existed. The epistle of Barnabas was very, very popular. It seems that many people believed it was actually written by the Barnabas, even though it's, you know, a hundred years later, it was written by him. And this becomes an important commentary on the Scripture, as it is believed to be an authentic book.

I'm going to go through some of the teachings of the epistle of Barnabas. What he said, what he taught, was that the truth given by God to Moses was lost. He had an explanation of why. He says that when Moses came down for the Ten Commandments with the two tablets of stone and he saw Israel's idolatry, that when he broke those tablets of stone, God broke his covenant with Israel. Now, of course, we know that he went up and he got another set, right?

And he came down and we have the whole history of the Old Testament. So the whole history of the Old Testament is not to be taken as truth, it is to be taken by a group of people who thought they had a covenant with God and didn't because God had already thrown out the covenant. Now, if you start looking at the Bible that way, the Old Testament, you come to some really, I mean, totally different conclusions than someone who believes that the Old Testament is the history of God working through these people.

He said that an angel, an evil angel, had convinced them that circumcision was right. And you know, you could prove it because at that time, almost all Arabs, as many do today, practiced circumcision. So how could it be the sign of the covenant between God and Israel, and even the Egyptians, he said at that time, circumcised? So if all through the Middle East, people circumcised, this proves that it's not special. So it's a total misunderstanding. You know, maybe Abraham and his family, but when it came to Israel, once those tablets were broken, there was no covenant between God and Israel.

Now, there's an animosity in Jewish society against Jews because of this revolt. And the government is against them. They're taking away their special privileges. I think I mentioned before, I know I did last night, Julius Caesar and Augustus both gave special rights to the Jews because they were impressed. They were a people even older than the Romans. They had a temple. They had a worship service, a worship of a God that was, you know, beyond any other gods that they had.

So they said, well, this is important religion. And so they gave them special privileges. They were allowed to have their sacrifices. They were allowed to have their temple. They never interfered with that. In fact, they didn't even have to pay temple tax to Rome. And so they had these special privileges. You could not take a Jew in the empire to court on Saturday, on the Sabbath. But now these things are taken away. The Jews are being persecuted. And if you are a Christian, you have this history of, well, you're just another Jewish sect, aren't you?

I mean, you worship a Jew, right? Jesus? Was he a Jew? They want a divorce from that. And the Epistle of Barnabas really outlines how to do that, to realize that from Moses on, they weren't the people of God anyways. We're not Jews. We reject everything that they believe. And so he goes through and shows, well, pigs. You know, the Jews would not eat pigs. And that's what he tells them there.

There's a law in there. They're not to eat pigs. And he says, see how stupid they are. God gave them those instructions, even after he broke the covenant, he still gave them these instructions, and they don't understand allegory. All those laws are allegories. What that means is you're not supposed to talk to people who act like pigs. So there's a whole new interpretation of the Scripture going on. It's all allegory. We must look for the deeper meanings inside the Scriptures.

Of course, the Gnostics are saying, we're real ahead of you there, because we're looking for all the mysteries in the Scriptures, and so we're way above where you are. So you weren't to take the Old Testament literal. You're to read the stories. In other words, the Old Testament is simply parables. Oh, there may be some truth to it, and some of these people may have lived, but it's really, it's parables.

I'll give you another example. He talked about, and I just want to show you how this extends out over the rest of the century. He writes that, okay, they misunderstood the Sabbath, that seventh day. That is, they totally misunderstood that. And we understand as Christians that we're to keep the eighth day. Now, the problem is, there's only seven days a week.

So now he had to build this huge explanation of the eighth day, and that is, number eight has hidden meanings in the Bible. There are allegories. I mean, you were circumcised. The Jews were told, the Israelites were told to circumcise their children on the eighth day. There were eight people put in the ark, okay?

These are little messages from God that teach us things. So the seventh day is Saturday, the Sabbath. The eighth day would be the next day, so the eighth day is Sunday. So the eighth day is a mystery day, and that's why Christians should keep Sunday. Now, nobody today would teach that. I mean, that's...but for 200 years, that became the primary teaching of why you should keep Sunday.

Because it became part of the culture of our Christianity was becoming. Justin Marcher, I talked about him, the one who wanted to be killed so much that he... his last name became martyr, right? He taught that the eighth day was once again mysteries. It was a mystery number, and therefore that's why we should keep Sunday as our day of worship. Clement of Alexandria, we're going to talk about him later, another writer from that second century. I'm going to read something he wrote, because I want you to understand the Hellenization that's going on. Clement is a major theologian who lived in Alexandria, Egypt.

He taught that Plato's Republic, or the Republic by Plato, which is probably his most famous writing, prophesied the significance of the Christian eighth day. Plato was becoming a Christian prophet. Now I say that, not that they would say he was a Christian, but what they believed is that God sent to the Greeks, since they were the culture, for the major culture of Europe for hundreds and hundreds of years, he sent to them people to teach them something, now in the second century, literally claiming that Plato was a prophet that told about the eighth day, which is why we don't keep the seventh day. That seems a little convoluted, doesn't it? But that's the direction this is going in, because if you're not basing, if you look at David as a real person, if you look at God's interaction with Jeremiah as a reality, or God's interaction with David, not just as allegory, but reality, you study the Old Testament as part of the thread of our Christianity. You can't separate the two. There's a reason I've always been upset when you see the New Testament in Psalms without the Old Testament. You see these Bibles sometimes at hotels. Every once in a while I still see them. Maybe that's the quality of motel I'm staying in.

So what that does is it divorces the Christian church from the Old Testament. No, it's one book.

And so that's what they're doing here. They're divorcing Christianity, and the reason why is they had already separated themselves from the Old Testament. It didn't have much importance except as allegory. And as that happens, how do you now interpret things? I mean, if I would interpret Jesus Christ in the entirety of the Scripture, first place I'm going to go to is Genesis 3.15, where God says, I will send a seed, He tells the Eve, of yours to save you. I'm paraphrasing, but that's what it says. Or Isaiah 53, 52 and 53, I will send the Messiah, the suffering servant, and His blood will be for your sins.

Those things lead me to here. If you sort of move that out and make it allegory, you start to lose the connection between the two. And that's good because we don't want to be Jews anyways. We don't want to be associated with Jews. That's what was happening. So the anti-Judaism that was happening because of this revolt throughout the Roman Empire affects Christianity.

And so they desire so much to divorce themselves from that, that now you find Plato being glorified as being used by God to sort of prophesy about these things. And they would pick out passages of Plato to make that. So you have that issue taking place. You also have the growth of Gnosticism. Now we've talked about Gnosticism because it's getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And we talked about how the belief that Jesus hadn't come in the flesh. It's called docetism. And he was just sort of a spirit that showed up and was there. He really didn't die because the Son of God couldn't die. So it was just all a play acting. It wasn't real. And that was an early form of Gnosticism.

But if they took Plato's belief that the world was made by this evil God, this demiurge, and matter was basically evil, then you have all kinds of things happening. You have the Canites. The Canites believed that Cain was the good guy. I think I mentioned that. Carper Craydys led an agnostic group that said, you know what? Really, in order to be good, we need to be evil. Because the spirit's good, but the body is evil anyways. So get all the evil out. Just go be evil. So they were famous for doing anything they wanted to do. That Roman law would allow. You couldn't go around killing people. Now that seems strange. We get the word thug in English. In the Indian culture, in Hinduism years ago, that's where that comes from. There were the tugs, who were a religious sect in which the goddess they worshiped evil was good. So they would rob and steal and kill people.

And so we have the word thug in English. It comes from that. So the Gnostics were alone in coming up with this kind of bizarre viewpoint. Another group became extreme aesthetics. And we're going to have to talk about asceticism, and how that came into Christianity here in the next century. Okay, let me just point out two groups, so you can get how Christianity is so diverse at this point.

I always put him in here because I like his name. Lucius Cassius Dio, this great name. He was a Roman historian that tells us a lot about the Kockla revolt. Okay, the Ebionites. The Ebionites are a group of Jews who said they were Christians, but they totally were Jews. They never moved away from anything. They kept the Sabbath day Sabbath, clean unclean means and circumcision. But they denied the divinity of Jesus Christ. So the other things, as a Jew, wouldn't have been wrong for them to do those things. Some of those things are things that we as Christians should consider, but except for circumcision. They accept that Jesus has the Messiah, but denied his divinity. So they're denying Jesus. So they consider themselves Christians on one end. On the other end is Marcion. He arrives in Rome around 140. He causes such a big stir that by 144, no church in Rome will keep him. He's been excommunicated. But he's already started a group. He's already started a group, and he has a lot of writings that survived him. The difference for Marcion between the God revealed in the Old Testament and the God revealed in the New Testament were so contradictory. He concluded there must be two gods.

The God in the New Testament would not have killed the people inside of Gomorrah because that's cruel. Now that sounds strange, but do you realize today that is a question that over 50% of people under 35 are a point that they believe in in this country. God couldn't have done that because God's too nice. He would have killed those people inside of Gomorrah. So there's something that people have in common with Marcion. The God of the Old Testament was a creator God who emphasized justice and war. Jesus came to reveal the supreme God who was a being of love and grace. So the Old Testament was meaningless to these Gnostics. He threw it out and then he edited the New Testament. He basically kept Luke, but he edited it down and he only kept 10 of Paul's letters. The rest of the New Testament he threw out. Now let me say about this something. Thomas Jefferson as a deist took the Bible and decided he needed an American Bible. He edited out large portions of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and John. You can go buy the Jeffersonian Bible because he didn't believe in all those miracles.

So the editing of the Bible, mass of editing to create a point, is not new. Paul Johnson is an English historian and famous English historian. He's written numerous books that are huge bestsellers. He wrote one about the history of Christianity. And he looks at Marcion and he praises him as the first truly modern Biblical scholar.

Now Paul Johnson's alive today. This is a modern writer. He's the first true because he looked at the Bible and he dared to question everything in it. Yeah, and he ends up with 11 books out of the entire Bible.

So there's some elements of this Gnosticism that's still in, especially in the education level, the high education level inside Christianity today. So we have these two groups, the Ebionites and the Marcionites. That's just two examples. And you have everything in between this, all over the place, as individual churches are desperately trying to hold on to something as new generations come along, and that little regions were formed together. We'll look at that. Little regions were formed together. And there is one place that everybody looks to because of its location. The most powerful central place in the world, Rome. If there is an answer, it must come from Rome. Jerusalem doesn't matter anymore. You can't even be a Jew and go into Jerusalem. They do have some record of the names of the people in the Christian church after they rebuilt Jerusalem. And every one of them is a Greek name. Not one is a Jewish name. Because they wouldn't let them in.

So you have a place where the answers may be found, and you have churches in Rome, and they don't agree. There is no one central church in Rome yet, but there's one growing.

There's one growing. But there isn't yet. There are Gnostic groups in Rome. There are all different kinds of groups. But there is one group that is starting to get more and more control of what's happening in the church in Rome. They actually have very little influence outside there yet. They are looked up to as an important place. What I'm saying is the Pope doesn't exist. There is a book that was a very well-selling book here. It came out a few years ago. It's the history of the Popes. It's written by a man who is a professor at Notre Dame, and he's an editor of a Catholic Encyclopedia.

He starts the book with, there is absolutely no proof that Peter was the first Pope in Rome.

So he starts the book.

In fact, he says, there's proof he wasn't.

And then he historically proves what happens, which is very similar to the story we're talking about here. A church that gets stronger and stronger and stronger, but everybody looks to and begins to have more and more influence over time.

And that's going to culminate in the 300s. That's what's going to happen by then. So we have these various groups.

So what we have here, okay, we're going to end that there. Any questions or comments about this? Now this is where everybody gets like, oh my, Ebionites, Marcionites, you know, Martians. What are we dealing with? People from outer space? So this gets a little tough, okay, this section. Okay.

John.

John wasn't. Oh, you're the John that this question says, okay. I'm about to get out the Gospel of John. I'm thinking, okay, I get it. Weren't the babies abortions primarily after the priests and temple, from the priests and temple prostitutes? In Corinth, that's probably true. In Corinth, that's probably true. The question was, you know, the abortions and the abandonment of babies, remember we talked about that in Rome, wasn't that a result of temple prostitution? And in a place like Corinth, where it was enormous, the amount of probably pregnancies that are going on among these priestesses, that's probably true. I guess that's a pity on my part, but what would you do with all those babies? You know, so those were probably left out and abandoned to die, or there were abortions taking place. And abortions back then weren't very safe. They weren't safe at all.

Who would want? Okay, yes.

I didn't catch the date for when was the Bar Kokhvah revolt? Okay, let me look at an exact date for you here. How does that... I was intrigued by your idea that Jerusalem was no longer the head of the congregation or the church, and how that revolt also played into the separation of the church and synagogue.

Let's see. So it's around 130. Emperor Hadrian decided to rebuild Jerusalem.

The Bar Kokhvah revolt, I don't know exactly when it ended, but it was between 130 and 135.

They did probably different parts of the empire, because the Jews just sort of rose up in different places. Why they thought they could overthrow the empire? I don't know. They may have thought the Messiah was coming. Oh, that's another question I had about how did... Someone asked me. They said, the Jews expected Jesus to come back, and many of them did. I mean, not Jesus to come back, I'm sorry. The Messiah to come. He didn't come the first time. And that's why so many of them looked at Jesus as the Messiah, and that's true. But the Pharisees, the Essenes thought the Messiah was coming. The question was, why? What scriptures did they use? I've never looked at the Jewish sources that would say why they came to those conclusions. It's just everybody knows they were looking at... I mean, every report from that time period talks about, they were expecting this Messiah. They were expecting this Messiah. I don't know what scriptures they used. That would be an interesting study to go back through Jewish sources and try to find out why they thought that. But it was quite popular. Yes? So I had a question to ask, but I think to your question here, I've understood that Daniel chapter 9 places the timeframe for Messiah to come specifically when Jesus appeared. So this is something that apparently Jews in this day and age, that they do not talk about the specifics of when the Messiah, according to scripture, should come. This is ignored in their conversation. So that's what I have heard scholars speak about. I don't know if you want to comment about that, or have you heard anything on that wise also? I have read different Jewish explanations of that. I'm not sure they have a central explanation. What would be interesting is to find out if there's anything written of what they believed in the first century. I think there is. That would be fascinating. I think there is. The scholars are pointing to this that actually, according to their interpretations of Daniel 9, with the weeks that are appointed, that the Messiah had to appear within a certain frame of time. But because they didn't accept Jesus at the time, they don't want to discuss this any longer. I would like to see that material. I'll give you my email address. I'd like to see that. First of all, I want to compliment you for your incredible research and your contextualization of what you're presenting to this. I think it's so important. But I guess my question is, as we're analyzing all these things, are you making an appeal, like through the knowledge of these things, are you making an appeal to return to apostolic Christian faith? Is that part of your goal? Okay, very good. And the problem is we're two thousand years removed. So, we have a lot of work to do to even figure out what that is. Of course. So, if this is the appeal you're making, do you actually believe that God is actually behind this? Same movement? Or obviously, if things are being revealed to us historically and biblically, there must be an initiative that comes from beyond this realm, that is actually bringing us together in this motion, I guess you could say.

Anyway, that's maybe a complicated question. God is... He wants all of us, He wants all Christians to go back to that.

So, that's a cry out from God. I don't know if there's a movement.

I'm just a foot soldier, so I just march along like the rest of us. So, I don't know if there's a movement, we just march and we tell what we know, and we keep trying to learn. I mean, if I wrote this book five years from now, I'd have all kinds of stuff I don't even know now. So, we're just moving in a certain direction, and that's what I want. I want more and more people to get moving in that direction. Well, no. I want to give the message, and hopefully they'll turn to God, and God will get him the moving direction. I can't get anybody moving in the direction, I'll just put him in the wrong direction. God puts people in a direction, right? So, we want Him doing what He does. That's... Okay. I'll be back to you in just a minute, because we'll get you the microphone. Just in response to his question about a resource that gives the Scriptures and such that the Jewish community in the first century used to pinpoint when the Messiah would come, if you go to a website called jews3eshua.com and you go to the mini-studies section, there's a teaching there called What Judaism Does Not Tell You About Messiah. Okay. And it goes into all kinds of quotations there, both from Scriptures and from the Talmud, explaining what their view of the Messiah was, and how they actually saw two messiahs, one a suffering servant, one a conquering king. And it's very interesting, so I think we might find... Yeah, the two messiahs, because you've got a king and you've got a suffering servant, so you have to have two of them. Could you... Kim, could you write this down, my wife? Could you give that website again? Yes. jews4eshua.com. So, yeshua is spelled Y-E-S-H-U-A. And that's the Hebrew name for Jesus. So, jews4eshua.com.

Okay, then we had one down here. Oh, the question is, like he was saying, about your appeal. When you say that, are you saying we turn to the literal interpretation of the Bible? Because there's so often this allegory, and not been here all the time, all the different... So, are you also making the appeal to a more literal interpretation of the Bible? I want to be literal when the Bible's literal, and we should be... look at it as an allegory, where it's supposed to be an allegory. And my question is, well, I think we have to... so I can't explain all that. I'm not smart enough. But let's go to the first century Christians. Let's look at Jesus, and Paul, and Peter, and John, and how did they look at it? That will tell us what we're supposed to do. They saw parts of the Old Testament very much as real. Jesus believed that Jonah was in the whale... whale... in the fish for three days and three nights. Because he said, that's the proof. I'm the Messiah. I'm going to be like that. So he had to believe it was literal, or he's not using a children's story to make his point, right? So there are things weird to take literal, and others things that are allegory, too. And there's various depths of meaning of understanding. I mean, the more I study the Psalms, I think, wow! There's so much here I never got 20 years ago. So there's all these depths of meanings. But what did Jesus say was literal? What did Jesus say was allegory? Because he taught allegory. They're called parables. So I think we need to go back to there and say, let's see how they saw it. Because that's our founding fathers. It's those people. And let's go back there and let's learn how they lived and how they taught. Now, there's certain cultural things. You and I don't have to wear sandals, okay? There's certain cultural things we understand that aren't applicable. But the core message, how they interpret the Old Testament, how Jesus came and introduced new things, and how that was spread through all these different cultures and peoples to create this church, that's what I think. We need to go back there. I think everybody starts with the Sermon on the Mount. We start there. Then we read Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Move to the Book of Acts. We start looking at these people. That's our story. That's the story of Christianity. And let's go back and discover what C.S. Lewis called authentic Christianity. Because he wanted to go find something that was more authentic than what he knew. We have to go to. We have to go find that authentic Christianity. That's my purpose, why I do this. Because they're not paying me anything to do this. I do this because I want that passed on. There are people here who bought these books. I gave them to them at cost. They bought them to give them to you. Because they considered it that important. So that's the reason why. Let's talk. Let's try to ask God to help us move there. Now I've got to preach a little bit. We were talking about allegories. You mentioned earlier Genesis 3.15 as a messianic prophecy. In my mind there's clearly plenty of messianic prophecies in the Old Testament. There's no question there. But I don't think that Genesis 3.15 is a messianic prophecy. And here's why. It appears to me to be a Greek allegory. Because bruising a heel does not kill a person. Even amputees survive. So I think it's from the Greek mythology that the idea from Achilles' heel, that bruising a heel would kill somebody. So that's why I think Genesis 3.15 is literal and not an allegory. That it's from Greek mythology that a lot of seminaries teach and think that this has something to do with a messianic prophecy. There are different interpretations of that. I just stand on the one that I believe is a messianic prophecy.

Okay, it's time for another break. We've got two more to go. And I will talk about Ebionites or Marcionites in the next one.