Episode Transcript
[00:00:05] You know that person who.
[00:00:08] They love to tell stories and it's fine to tell stories, but they love to tell the same stories over and over and over again. They do that. And you know the story better than they do.
[00:00:24] And you know, you're talking and of course the conversation's usually not about them, but you can see it coming.
[00:00:31] There's that pause and they say, did I ever tell you about the time?
[00:00:37] Yeah, you did actually. You did tell me that. And it doesn't matter that you say, yeah, you did tell me that. You're gonna hear the story again.
[00:00:47] You're gonna hear it, and as they tell it, you're nodding and you're like, yeah, I remember.
[00:00:52] Yeah, you told me that. Yeah. Worst of all, it's got a funny ending, you know, and they like. Like, ha ha, right? They slap you on the back.
[00:01:01] You get it. Yeah, I remember you told me you have to laugh like it's the first time you heard it again. And you ever been in that situation?
[00:01:11] I have a lot. And I actually sort of feel like I'm in that situation right now.
[00:01:19] I'm the one telling the same old story.
[00:01:23] And you're the one who is forced to sit here and listen to it. Because our topic today, part baseless hatred, Christian roots of antisemitism, root causes, it's all about you. Ready?
[00:01:39] Ready.
[00:01:40] Replacement theology.
[00:01:44] Did I tell you about that one?
[00:01:46] Have I ever told you about supersessionism?
[00:01:52] And a collective goes up or a groan in your mind, of course, because you don't want to hurt my feelings.
[00:02:01] And you say, yes, we've heard that one before. You tell us about it a lot, as a matter of fact.
[00:02:10] Do we really have to?
[00:02:14] I've gotten a number of emails through the years, more than a handful from Torah club people and others who ask questions, why do you guys constantly talk about this?
[00:02:24] Why do you keep saying it? We get it and we don't subscribe to it.
[00:02:30] And I hear that same thing from many people talking about their churches, and they say, no way we subscribe to that idea. Absolutely not. You don't have to talk about it anymore.
[00:02:43] And I admit in our circles of what I would call higher learning religious education, Messianic Judaism, we do talk about it a lot. But do you know why?
[00:02:57] Because it still exists.
[00:03:00] Because not only exists, it is more prevalent than ever. And therein lies the difficulty. Many people claim to know what they are not when it comes to replacement theology, and that is they are not racist.
[00:03:19] Okay?
[00:03:20] They do not dislike or have hatred toward Jews Thank God. They don't think that God hates the Jews, thank God. And they can still see a world where Jews can be God's chosen people. But it's not that easy.
[00:03:35] It's not that easy because there is a history, there's a story behind the story of what is Christianity. And do you know where that story comes from? What it's built upon?
[00:03:50] Supersessionism and this. And none of what I'm saying to you over the last weeks or the following weeks is about bashing the church or bashing Christians. That is not what this is about. I am trying to help the church. I am trying to edify the church and Christians by helping them see a different path and mostly to understand that history of the story behind Christianity. Because within one generation of of Jesus followers, all of whom were Jews, the movement underwent this radical transformation. And by the second century, even early to mid second century, the church, which now had a name, had become predominantly Gentile. These new believers had zero Jewish context. They did not understand their own scriptures. And this shift led to supersessionism. It did not. And this is important to understand, starting as antisemitism, that is a racist position.
[00:05:06] It started as anti Judaism, that is a theological position. There is a difference.
[00:05:14] And that nuance, that understanding, that actually clouds people's perspective of what replacement theology actually is, because they equate it to immediately with antisemitism. And it's not that easy.
[00:05:29] So I want you to be equipped to truly battle it. And to do that, you have to know the history. You have to equip yourself with the knowledge of the origins of the thinking, because again, it provided the foundations, the root, the tap root, I said last week, of Christian antisemitism. What was created even by the second century isn't really a story about hatred.
[00:05:56] It's first of all a reaction to historical circumstances, mainly heresy.
[00:06:06] And I want to teach you that. Second, it's a solution created by the earliest church fathers to deal with what we would call early on, the Jewish problem, which is what I want to teach you. That problem is how do we keep the Jews in the story and yet demonstrate how Christianity has written them out?
[00:06:25] Or worse yet, God. From that point forward, once that problem was solved, it embedded itself into thousands of years of thinking.
[00:06:37] And that thinking, replacement theology still exists. I want to show it to you even for people who would deny, not in this room, but in that very big room out there that I'm talking to, even to those people who would deny any affiliation with it or to it and it's not even really their fault that they don't understand it.
[00:07:04] They simply have not been taught the history because like it or not, religion, doctrine, dogma, it is human.
[00:07:13] It is created by humans. And you can trace the effect of humanity throughout history and you can trace the effects of where some things took a wrong turn, went off the rails. And hopefully, if you know those things, you can correct the course. And I want to make it interesting for you, I really do. I want you to be interested, but most of all, I want it to be memorable.
[00:07:32] I want you to remember these things. So here we go. Time machine. Time. You ready?
[00:07:38] You ready to go back?
[00:07:40] Let's go back second century. Let's meet some very interesting guys who on some level, set the course of Christian history.
[00:07:48] You can feel like you're in a college level religious history class at this point because this is what this is, and it's important.
[00:07:56] Meet the heretics. We should call this message.
[00:08:00] Actually, let's go further back. Let's start at the source of the great heresy. Who knows the word Gnosticism?
[00:08:09] Probably a number of people know Gnosticism. It gets a lot of attention for good reason, in early church history. Probably most, though, how many of you who do know it can explain it to me or to the audience in two minutes or less?
[00:08:26] Cole can come on up. Cole. I'm just kidding.
[00:08:29] But Cole can do it. That's important.
[00:08:33] Most people cannot if they know what it is. That's a good start. But to really explain it, it's not that easy. But let me help because it's really important. Imagine being a newcomer to this faith in the second century. You're trying to understand the story about Jesus. You want the. You know, you want to know, but there's this inside group that's claiming we have the inside scoop. We have the secret knowledge that will blow your mind.
[00:09:05] Knowledge.
[00:09:07] Gnosis. In Greek.
[00:09:10] The Gnostics. Their name literally means the knowing ones in Greek. Gnosticism. Let me break down their wild story quickly, like a. Like a train ride through Tomorrowland at Disney World. The Gnostics. I want you to imagine this is like a picture, our reality like a badly renovated house, okay? Our whole world like a badly renovated house. The Gnostics said there's this perfect pure God.
[00:09:42] He's way up there.
[00:09:45] Think of him as the original architect.
[00:09:48] But somewhere down the line, a confused contractor got ahold of the plans. They call him the Demiurge.
[00:09:56] The Demiurge and the Demiurge really messed things up. And here's the thing about him, he's not exactly evil, he's just incompetent. Think of him as a lesser God who doesn't even know that he's not the supreme God.
[00:10:15] He, like a builder who found these plans and screwed them up. He built the physical world, but because he's flawed, everything he made is flawed too.
[00:10:30] That's why, according to the Gnostics, our world has some beauty, but it's pretty much broken. That's our physical world, beautiful in places, fundamentally flawed. Why?
[00:10:42] Because the lower God made this world, the higher God, he's supreme. And here's where it gets personal. Because that higher God, there's a little spark of the perfect God's light that's in each of us. But we're trapped, trapped in this gross, disgusting physical form that's existing in this broken world.
[00:11:08] And the goal isn't to be good or to follow rules. Your job is to wake up and remember that your soul belongs up with the highest God and to reconnect this spark, that's him, way above this lower lesser Demiurge and get back up there where he is. Gnosis is the key. You need this mystical, esoteric language. And Jesus, he's not what you think.
[00:11:38] In the version that the Gnostics told, he wasn't really human.
[00:11:44] He was a hologram. Think hologram versus flesh. Why?
[00:11:49] Because Jesus, why would something so pure and beautiful ever come and mix with this disgusting natural world and take on a purely human form? No way. His job, sent from the demiurge, is to do one thing that is to awaken the spark within you that is of God. It's to awaken you to the secret knowledge so that you can ascend.
[00:12:17] And that teaching spread like wildfire through the second Temple period. It sounded smart, had Greek, philosophical elements. It felt sophisticated. And there was, you know what? Enough correlation in some way of the truth to kind of be believed. It explained why life is hard. We blame it on the cosmic contractor, not on the perfect God up there.
[00:12:45] It made people feel special. Congratulations, you are in on the secret. You have the secret knowledge.
[00:12:55] And for gentile converts, it solved a very big problem.
[00:13:00] Because they could follow Jesus without dealing with all of the Jewish history. Do you know why?
[00:13:07] Because the God of the Jews was the demiurge.
[00:13:11] The God of the Jews was the lower God. He was the confused contractor. Do you get this?
[00:13:19] Do you understand it?
[00:13:24] They could write that God off. They could keep Jesus. Drop everything else. And the last point is very, very crucial because it sets the stage for some of the most influential heretics who would come along and, and that's where our story really begins. Because now we meet Valentinus, who knows Valentinus.
[00:13:46] Amazing. I love it. I'm so glad we're doing this.
[00:13:50] Meet Valentinus Picture Alexandria, Egypt, around the year 120 CE.
[00:13:56] In that city is this Christian guy named Valentinus. He's trained in the scripture and Greek philosophy in Alexandrian schools by about 135 CE. He carries that learning to Rome where he develops this incredible reputation for eloquence and death.
[00:14:15] Eloquence and depth. Tertullian, one of the Church fathers explains that Valentinus was being considered for the arising position of bishop in the church of Rome.
[00:14:30] That's how well known he was.
[00:14:33] But he didn't get it. Another candidate was chosen, so he formed his own party, a church split.
[00:14:41] So Valentinus looks at Genesis and he has what he thinks is a revolutionary insight.
[00:14:47] Wait a minute, he says the God described in this book is an idiot.
[00:14:54] He couldn't even find Adam in the garden.
[00:15:00] Wait a minute. He doesn't know what happened with the tree until he asks.
[00:15:07] And here's the kicker. He tries to keep Adam and Eve from acquiring the knowledge of good and evil.
[00:15:15] This was proof for Valentinus, the God of Genesis was actually an inferior ignorant deity, consistent now with Gnostic thinking and the demiurge. Valentinus claimed he had the Gnosis, he had the true meaning, he had the secret, this familiar teaching. In his view, Jesus, again in line with Gnosticism, was sent from the highest God on a rescue mission. And again matter is this is gross and inferior. That's very Greek by the way. So Valentinus also agreed Jesus couldn't have a body, he just appeared to.
[00:15:56] And this led to a radical reimagining of Judaism's relationship to Christianity. The Jews, according to Valentinus, were just trapped in this physical world. Physical customs like circumcision and dietary laws, all serving a lower God without actually realizing it.
[00:16:18] Meanwhile, true Christians with this special knowledge that they could see, they had been enlightened, they had seen the light. And for him, true spirituality meant escaping the physical world. This body, this is not something to be resurrected. This is a prison to escape.
[00:16:39] And when you escape this body, the goal isn't God's coming kingdom to earth, but souls floating up to the spiritual heaven of the highest God.
[00:16:51] And here we can already see the birth of an anti kingdom theology.
[00:16:58] While the biblical vision is very physical and earthly, we have resurrected bodies, there's a unique earth God comes to dwell with us. On the earth. Valentinus flips that completely around.
[00:17:09] Disagrees. But it's not really just disagreeing with Judaism. It's creating a completely different religion.
[00:17:19] It's creating that sees Jewish hopes which Jesus talked all about.
[00:17:26] Related. The kingdom can be compared to the kingdom is coming. Repent. The kingdom is near.
[00:17:33] No God's kingdom on earth. Nah, that's spiritually primitive.
[00:17:39] You with me?
[00:17:40] Judaism was on his radar because he was reading the Septuagint. He had the Septuagint on his desk. That's what he was reading. But Jews were actually not the main problem that Valentinus was trying to solve. His project was an inner church remix of the biblical story. It wasn't even the Jews were. Eh, whatever. It's basically irrelevant. Why mention him? No one knows him. Why mention him?
[00:18:08] His blend of Christian vocab and his philosophical polish and all that stuff that he had the. That drew students from across the empire.
[00:18:21] Many of the writings that we find, not many, but enough. The Gospel of Truth, the Tripart Tractate, these things were found in an ancient repository of documents called Nag Hammadi. They found these documents and what's important is it required an orthodox pushback. Not Orthodox Jews, Orthodox Christians. Irenaeus church historian developed he had entire books against heresy to dismantle Valentinus.
[00:18:54] Those critiques, those things actually were very influential in forming the later creeds and dogmas of the Christian church. And you'll see it at some point. But Valentinus cast a very long shadow.
[00:19:13] He died in 180 roughly Valentinians were active for two centuries after him.
[00:19:20] And we don't know about him.
[00:19:24] But it forced church leaders to clarify what they believe. But I want you to notice Valentinus sidesteps Judaism more than he attacks it. Okay. That indifference that actually paves the road for someone who will attack it directly.
[00:19:41] Valentinus was the forerunner of a more well known massive influential supersessionist influencer.
[00:19:52] Can you guess who I'm talking about?
[00:19:56] Marcion or Marcion?
[00:19:59] Marcion. Who knows who Marcion is?
[00:20:04] We are so blessed to be spending this time together.
[00:20:12] The architect of anti Judaism, Marcion.
[00:20:17] I'll run through this with an equal speed. I hope you're tracking with me.
[00:20:23] Valentinus sidelined. Marcion launched a full scale theological assault on Judaism.
[00:20:30] 144 CE. Okay. The Gospels are written in the late first century. We're less than 50 years after that. Okay. 144 CE. He very wealthy guy, ship owner, sails to Rome, gives the Roman church a huge donation and he brought these radical ideas with him. And Rome initially welcomed Marcion in. They later expelled him and returned his money because he was a heretic. That was nice of them.
[00:21:00] Why did they expel him? Because his teachings threatened the very foundation of the Christian faith. And they also were very popular.
[00:21:12] Marcion's two gods theory we talked about Valentinus. Marcion's two gods theory was revolutionary and destructive. It was in concert with Gnosticism. We had the high God and you have the low God, the Demiurge. He's a creator, this low God, but he's completely incompetent. But Marcion added some updates.
[00:21:33] He is obsessed, this lower God, with rules and with punishment.
[00:21:38] He is tribal. He chose just Israel and he's just. But he's cruel, legalistic, but he's petty. And he contrasted that with the New Testament God. You understand how important this is.
[00:21:55] The Old Testament God contrasted with the New Testament God.
[00:22:01] You contrast Old Testament violence with Jesus mercy, God's warfare, commands to wipe people out versus love your neighbor. Law and judgment versus grace and forgiveness. Does that sound familiar?
[00:22:16] Marcion's solution to this problem was surgery.
[00:22:21] A Judeo ectomy needed to remove the Judaism complete separation. And this is the key. The Old Testament completely rejected. And here's where Marcion takes it up a notch. Since the Jewish God was not the true God, his book was not part of the Christian scriptures.
[00:22:45] He claimed that the original apostles misunderstood the entire message of Jesus.
[00:22:55] That after they left, after Jesus ascended, that these confused disciples went back to their Jewish ways and they messed the whole thing up. They never understood that Jesus was actually teaching that the Creator was not their God.
[00:23:15] And that is why Paul had to be called.
[00:23:21] Because Paul got it.
[00:23:24] Paul really got it. And the apostles before Paul, they had actually altered the text in their ignorance. Their scribes and those who copied the writings, they had messed it up.
[00:23:41] Scribes. They didn't know the truth. They didn't know there were two gods, that Jesus wasn't really born, that he wasn't really a human. They missed the whole thing. So they inserted all these false views and scriptures into these texts.
[00:23:55] Marcion had this figured out. So you know what he did? He created the first Christian canon, not the New Testament. That was much later.
[00:24:08] Marcion created a canon that included one gospel, probably a bit of Luke and 10 Pauline letters, heavily edited.
[00:24:24] Okay, this is Marcion's canon. One bit of a gospel, 10 heavily edited. He eliminated all of the Old Testament quotations.
[00:24:35] He took out anything that would positive references to Judaism. Marcion was the first too Jewish Claimant, it's too Jewish and man. He meant it.
[00:24:52] Only Paul got it.
[00:24:54] And his Christology follows this as well.
[00:24:58] Since the God of Jesus is not really the God of the Old Testament and therefore not the creator of the world. Well, Jesus doesn't belong to this created order either. So here again we have this non human thing. He could be born. He couldn't be born.
[00:25:14] He couldn't be born here, flesh and blood, otherwise he'd belong to the God of the Jews as every other created being. So Jesus came from the highest heaven, from the true God directly, and for that reason, no human form. He only seemed to be.
[00:25:31] Marcion was something called a Docetist, another type of Christian heresy, which meant that Jesus did not have a human body. All of this is tied together for his view. He could again actually appeal to the writings of Paul, who said Jesus came into the world in the likeness of sinful flesh.
[00:25:55] It was in appearance Marcion was a heretic and he was a huge threat.
[00:26:05] The Christian writings against Marcion during the second and third centuries are so numerous that I could never bring them in to discuss. But big names, Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Irenaeus, they all come against him. These are the guys who built Christianity who actually, you know, we don't have much of what Marcion said. We actually know it from his critics. So it's actually probably a little bit slanted. But what we need to be very, very clear about something with Marcion.
[00:26:39] This is the last section of this lesson for today.
[00:26:45] We need to note a nuance about what he actually says, because he does not actually fit into what we would call replacement theology, that the church or gentile believers has replaced Israel as God's covenant people. Israel's election is finished.
[00:27:04] No, he doesn't fit into that. Exactly. And someone says, how can you say that? How can you say Marcion is not a replacement theologian? It's the actual definition that he's trying to get rid of the Jews. But you need to notice that's not actually what he said.
[00:27:25] For Marcion, the Old Testament was not the story of the Christian.
[00:27:33] It was another God and another people entirely. And there was no common bond. It is actual history, but it's not his history.
[00:27:45] It doesn't have any impact on him. He didn't see Christians replacing Jews in the story. He would just simply say that God is not our God, the God of Israel is not our God. In other words, the story hinges not on the people, but on the gods.
[00:28:03] His two gods, one high, one low. His is the High, theirs is the low. And there's no connection between us. He would say. Now do you see in that a major problem for traditional orthodox Christianity?
[00:28:20] I will show you what the problem is.
[00:28:24] Traditional orthodox forming Christianity that saw the God of Israel, the God of the Jews, as the God and Father of Jesus Christ.
[00:28:39] Marcion created something completely separate from that God, a new canon. He threw out the Old Testament, a new God. He wasn't dropping himself and the Christians into the story. Jews were irrelevant, non existent, gone, not important. His gospel does not replace the old.
[00:29:02] Replacement is not really the right word.
[00:29:06] Quoting a work from Snedeker, Marcion's gospel is new in this radical sense. It's not new in relation to the old.
[00:29:17] It is rather absolutely the singular novelty, a total new product. Here's the clearest way to say this, to understand the difference. It's like saying, I'm moving into your house and I'm taking your place.
[00:29:34] Replacement versus Marcion's approach. I'm building a completely new house and pretending that yours never even existed.
[00:29:46] That's different than replacement theology.
[00:29:52] This was a huge problem for the defenders of Christianity, the church fathers. It had to be solved.
[00:29:58] We cannot, they said, allow the masses, and Marcion was affecting the masses, to buy into a story that erases the God of Israel and his working through history to this point and even the people of that God who are being erased. And Jesus was one of them. He was Jewish.
[00:30:22] For the likes of Justin Martyr and Origen and Irenaeus and Tertullian and later others, they had to have the Jews in the story.
[00:30:34] Judaism needed this authenticity. And yet how to tell it in such a way that Christianity emerges as the proper and only true answer.
[00:30:47] Remember too that Christians found themselves at odds with everyone.
[00:30:52] Everyone. The Jews, who on one hand they kept the law of Moses.
[00:31:00] That's weird.
[00:31:01] The Gnostics, who are teaching two gods in a completely different thing, and their Roman pagan friends who think they're weird atheists because they don't celebrate the pantheon of Roman gods. They're against all of it. What happened? How did they solve this Marcionite problem?
[00:31:24] Well, the Christian idea gradually emerged that the difference between the Testaments was that one was imperfect and one was perfect.
[00:31:35] It implied now that the New Testament was an advance on the Old, but it was not actually the antithesis of it. It was just the improvement. The Old Testament had at one time a function to fulfill, but that function, nah, just prefigures the new.
[00:31:53] This is so prevalent today anyway. I mean, still, once the New Testament was enforced. The Old Testament stopped. It just lapsed. Its literal meaning didn't matter anymore. And this idea actually will then transfer also to the people spoken of in the Old Testament. The Jews will also.
[00:32:17] And here at this moment, my friends, we arrive at the truest, first, clearest iteration of replacement theology, solving this Jewish problem. Meet Justin Martyr.
[00:32:36] Not the first to express the idea, but he was an architect nevertheless. He was the first big name church father with an explicit extended supersessionist theology. And how did he pull it off?
[00:32:52] What case did he make? Well, it's troubling and we'll learn about it next week. But let me conclude by saying this.
[00:33:01] You might ask yourself, why did I come to the synagogue today for a deep dive into 2nd century religious history?
[00:33:13] Because you should know.
[00:33:16] And you didn't know.
[00:33:19] Now you do.
[00:33:21] That's the point of a synagogue. You come to learn, but you should know the players that set the stage for everything that followed. Valentinus sidelined Israel. Marcion tried to erase it. This was the world the church fathers. And the task was not easy, but their solution was was theologically misguided. And it ended up causing tragic real life consequences.
[00:33:50] It started here.
[00:33:54] These are the roots.
[00:33:57] This week has gotten us down to the bedrock, the source. And next week we'll begin to see the tree grow with Justin and Augustine.
[00:34:07] And eventually the fruits of their Christian thought will be harvested.
[00:34:17] Are you up for this journey?
[00:34:20] I hope so, because it's what we're doing.
[00:34:25] Shabbat Shalom. I'm Darren with Shalom Makin. If you enjoyed this teaching, I want to ask you to take the next step. Start by making sure you subscribe to our channel.
[00:34:35] Next, make sure you hit the like button on this video so that others know it's worth their time to watch.
[00:34:40] Last, head over to our website to learn more about Shalom Macon, explore other teachings and events, and if you're so inclined, contribute to the work that we're doing to further the kingdom. Thanks for watching and connecting with Shalom Macon.
[00:35:00] Sam.
