Episode Transcript
[00:00:05] So here's my first interactive question for you.
[00:00:08] Who here knows Marcion and Valentinus?
[00:00:16] None of you were here last week.
[00:00:18] Oh, good.
[00:00:19] I saw some. Okay, perfect. The light's too bright.
[00:00:23] First of all, we need to correct one thing. Last week, I over and over called him Valentinus.
[00:00:30] The Latin name is Valentinus. His academic name is Valentinus. Okay, we got that corrected. Who here knows Marcion and Valentinus?
[00:00:46] Good. I hope you do. I hope some of you know at least a sense of it after last week. They are Gnostics who introduced something radical, a new religion completely severed from Jews and Judaism. They offered a dual God theology and offered a fresh, fresh narrative on the people of God. Marcion even gave us the first curated Bible of sorts. He created his own version of the New Testament, his canon.
[00:01:24] But as we saw and learned last week, this theology simply could not work. For the growing Gentile church to be disconnected from Israel, it was too disconnected. It was too extreme. So what came next?
[00:01:44] The church devised a solution.
[00:01:48] The emerging Gentile church needed a theology that kept the God of Israel somewhere in the picture, that kept the Scriptures, the Old Testament, the Tanakh, but still could claim superiority and the final claim to truth. So here's what they came up with. You ready?
[00:02:12] The God of Israel must be true, and so must his scriptures, but only as a prelude to. To Jesus Christ.
[00:02:26] That's it.
[00:02:31] And what about the other part of the problem? The Jews? The Jews were still around.
[00:02:38] They had these Scriptures, but they had missed the Messiah. What do we do? Well, that's easy. We'll now see early Christian writings increasingly depicting Jews as those who cling to the mere letter, who cling to the sterile external rituals and laws, while the Christians who are now guided by the Holy Spirit are able to see the spiritual truth that those laws were always meant to convey, namely, Jesus Christ.
[00:03:09] The Jews were blind and legalistic.
[00:03:15] The emerging church creates a theology, one that conserves the Old Testament, it conserves Judaism, but only as a necessary and negative moment in history.
[00:03:31] And it is this response that creates now the true foundation of supersessionism, really what we refer to as authentic replacement theology.
[00:03:45] Now, we hear that word a lot, but I want you to see it come to life. I want you to recognize that the term has nuance, it has levels, it has types.
[00:03:55] Arkindel Solon, in his book that's called the God of Israel and Christian Theology. It's fairly academic, but it's an incredible read.
[00:04:06] He recognizes and develops several ideas related to supersessionism, but primarily to two Distinct economic supercession and punitive supersession. You need to remember those words.
[00:04:22] Economic Judaism was always meant to be temporary. It was part of God's plan, but it was temporary. Punitive punishment. That's what that means, punitive supersessionism. The Jews not only missed Messiah, they also killed him. And therefore they deserve judgment and suffering.
[00:04:44] Economic and punitive supersessionism from this.
[00:04:51] And there's one more called structural. It's a lot to take in in one message, so we're not going there today. But from this point they could push forward one more accessible point, one that ultimately moved the needle from just anti Judaism into full on racist hatred of the Jews, anti Semitism, that is through later developments in Christian theology.
[00:05:19] If they killed Jesus, that means they killed God.
[00:05:24] Deicide, they become God killers. Punished for rejecting Christ causes God to revoke their status. And for this brutal murder, they would rightfully suffer forever.
[00:05:40] This is uplifting, right? Maybe this is why the seats are empty. Three weeks, that's all people can handle. Oh God, here we go again with this.
[00:05:50] These are the facts.
[00:05:53] They are undeniably the facts.
[00:05:58] And here's a key point.
[00:06:00] The idea of supersessionism is much more than we're just another religion, we're a new and better religion in the competition of religions. Or this is more than we've separated from what was before because we're better. No supersessionist. This project, this theology that was laid out, it lays claim to what it surpasses or succeeds. It grabs it and says, you are mine.
[00:06:33] Christianity does not leave its Jewish anti antecedents behind.
[00:06:40] The supercessionist gesture grabs ahold of the antecedents. As I said, necessary and negative moments in the trans historical sweep of Christianity.
[00:06:57] The Jews had the opportunity, but they blew it. And now it is ours.
[00:07:04] We're going to meet three voices today who helped solidify this thinking. We'll meet Justin Martyr, we'll meet Melito of Sardis, we'll meet Tertullian. There are many, many, many others. I could have talked about Irenaeus or Ignatius, both in the second century. But this is a lot to digest.
[00:07:22] So meet Justin Justin, 2nd century.
[00:07:28] He is a converted pagan.
[00:07:33] He engages in one of his most famous works in a book with an interlocutor. You know that word, right? A Jew named Trypho. It's called Dialogue with Trypho.
[00:07:46] And it is in essence a long attempt to prove from the Jewish scriptures that the church is the new Israel. And Justin is building his case from the Hebrew Scriptures. Do you know why?
[00:08:00] Because that's what he had, the Gospels.
[00:08:06] And this, this is only happening in the background.
[00:08:13] There was no canonized New Testament.
[00:08:16] And so he takes these ideas.
[00:08:19] He solidified economic supersessionism. It is not financial, obviously.
[00:08:25] This is the idea that God's divine plan or his economy of salvation, the way that God arranges history.
[00:08:36] Justin argued, as I told you in the definition, that Judaism was just a temporary stage in that, like a developmental phase that naturally was going to give way to Christianity. It's God's divine plan.
[00:08:51] He always intended Judaism to be there, but only as a preparatory stage, like a teacher preparing students for a greater truth. And so Justin, he has this striking claim. And if you ever read Dialogue with Trypho, you gotta read it very closely because it's not easy reading. But he has all of these claims, but here's one that I wanted to pick out for you which really brings this home.
[00:09:18] He says he has been gracious towards the Gentiles also, and our sacrifices he esteems more grateful than yours.
[00:09:26] Talking to Trypha. What need have I of circumcision who have been witnessed to by God? What need do I have of other baptism? I've been baptized with the Holy Ghost, he says. I think that I could persuade anyone with what I have to say, for these words have neither been prepared by me nor established or embellished by the art of man. But David sung them, Isaiah preached them, Zechariah proclaimed them, Moses wrote them. Are you acquainted with them, Trypho? Justin asks.
[00:10:05] They are contained in your Scriptures, or rather not yours, but ours, because we believe them.
[00:10:16] You, though you read them, do not catch the Spirit that is in them.
[00:10:23] That statement, not yours, but ours, perfectly captures economic supersessionism.
[00:10:31] It was for a bit, but now we properly understand these Scriptures. While Jews only grasp the letter, they miss the Spirit. Now let me be very clear about something. It is very true that God revealed a new aspect of the plan of salvation in Messiah Yeshua. All of the disciples were amazed by this. It was a mystery. They talk about it in Acts. You're kidding me. Salvation is available to all humans. They don't have to become Jews, Jew and Gentile. The Messiah of Israel represents a universally accessible plan to the nations.
[00:11:06] Do you remember their amazement about this?
[00:11:11] They can become partakers of the glory to be revealed in the Kingdom. This is a progressive revelation that occurs throughout the Bible. And that revelation may be the highest point of wonder that it's. Now there's no distinction any longer, right?
[00:11:30] Everything's available to Jews. That's true, but that's not what Justin said.
[00:11:38] There is a difference between a progressive revelation and a revelation of replacement.
[00:11:45] Justin is credited as the first Christian author to deploy the phrase the true Israel in response to the being birthed Christian community.
[00:12:00] We have been led to God through this crucified Christ and we are the true spiritual Israel. He tells Trypha.
[00:12:09] You see the wonderful creativity. And he goes on to say the descendants of Judah, Jacob, Isaac and Abraham, even though uncircumcised, they were approved blessed by God because of his faith.
[00:12:25] Do you remember that thing we talked about about Abraham in the second week of this series?
[00:12:30] That is economic supersessionism. It started right here.
[00:12:37] You see that creativity. The heretics of Gnosticism, Marcion, Valentinus, they've been put in their place.
[00:12:45] There is indeed the one God, the God of Israel, who's done this. His story is told in the scriptures of the Old Testament. And now, most importantly, Justin can put the Jews in their place, or actually out of their place to be exact.
[00:13:00] He says we Christians got the story.
[00:13:07] We, not you, are Israel.
[00:13:11] This is an idea whose impact has crossed millennia and influences the way that the Bible is read in many circles to this day.
[00:13:23] The Hebrew scriptures do not belong to the Jews. The national and historical documents of the Jewish people have been transferred and in fact every word in them anyway only proclaims the good news that's enacted in the New Testament. That's the idea.
[00:13:42] And all those laws that the Jews continue to follow.
[00:13:47] Justin has an answer for this.
[00:13:49] He explains that the distinctive Jewish practices like circumcision and Sabbath, they were never also never meant to be permanent. Rather, get this, God enjoined them on the Jews on account of their transgression and the hardness of their hearts.
[00:14:06] The laws and the commandments of God were a punishment to the Jewish people.
[00:14:13] And he says Christians Trypho. Listen dude, if we didn't know why they were given to you, we might do them too.
[00:14:23] But we know it's because of your hard heart. The laws of Torah, they had a function for Israel's spiritually immature state. That's what they were about. Does this sound familiar?
[00:14:38] Roots, my friend.
[00:14:40] 1900 year old roots. Justin says all of the things Moses commanded can be interpreted as types, as symbols and prophecies of of Christ and the Church.
[00:14:55] It must be noted briefly that his tone is still not really one of hatred, though it's theological, it's anti Jewish, which is consistent with economic supersessionism. However, he begins to Sow some other seeds as well.
[00:15:15] He sets this precedent for treating Judaism as this obsolete. It had the truth in shadow form, but in the light of Christ rendered those shadows unnecessary. But he doesn't actually stop there because he continues on with a variation of the second type of supersessionism. I told you punishment or punitive supersessionism. The idea that Jews deserves punishment for rejecting Christ. He claims also that circumcision was given to the Jews as a mark so that Jews could be identified for suffering.
[00:15:52] That you may be separated from other nations and from us Christians. That you alone may suffer that which you now justly suffer. That your land may be desolate, your cities burned with fire.
[00:16:05] These things have happened to you in fairness and justice, for you have slain the just one. Now remember when Rome came into Jerusalem after the Bar kokhba revolt in 135. Do you know the number one way that they identified the Jewish people?
[00:16:23] Men, anyway, you can guess.
[00:16:33] Justin interpreted the destruction of Jerusalem, the temple, that's obvious. He says this is divine punishment. Terrible precedent is set. Jewish suffering wasn't just a historical tragedy. This is God.
[00:16:46] This is God's action. It's a judgment for rejecting Jesus. Now this was early stuff. This is very foundational stuff. So let's see that develop just a little bit more with Melito of Sardis, who was writing around a similar time. He has a beautiful Easter message that he gives. It's called Peripascha on the Passover.
[00:17:09] And what we find here that's interesting is Melito now takes this economic and punitive supersessionism and he puts them into this on full display.
[00:17:19] He calls the Lamb, the Passover Lamb.
[00:17:22] A prototype.
[00:17:24] Its whole purpose was and only was to foreshadow Jesus.
[00:17:31] Every plague, every blood on the lintel, all of the miracles in the wilderness. That was only pointing toward the real Passover, which was the cross in Jerusalem.
[00:17:43] This is Melito's message. He says the people listen to this.
[00:17:48] The people was precious Israel. The people was precious before the church arose. And the law was marvelous before the Gospel was elucidated. But when the church arose and the gospel took precedence, the model was made void, conceding its power to the reality. The people, the Jews were made void when the church arose.
[00:18:11] That is replacement theology in purest form.
[00:18:21] In his mind, the entire Sinai covenant ages out the moment that Jesus enters in festivals, Torah obedience, Judaism replaced they mattered. Now they don't. As a matter of fact, they're cursed. They are cursed.
[00:18:39] We need to note that his Punitive edge sharpens. Melito coins the most chilling deicide formula. Deicide. The murder of God.
[00:18:52] He says. God has been murdered.
[00:18:55] The king of Israel slain by Israel's right hand.
[00:19:00] He addresses them directly. He says, you killed your Lord, you pierced the Lord of glory. Jerusalem's ruin is preached as evidence. The land is desolate because the people rejected and executed him. That line, as I said, it's the earliest fully developed deicide charge. And we're talking about 160ish CE.
[00:19:28] Why does it matter? Well, first of all, that became the ultimate Good Friday message for thousands of years. After Melito fuses the streams. The Old Testament, the covenant people expires. That's economic, the punitive. The Jewish nation bears unending guilt for Christ's blood. That's punitive. Later fathers will run with this idea.
[00:19:58] And now what we see is the seeds that Justin planted starting to sprout.
[00:20:07] Tertullian enters from North Africa, Carthage. Actually, he was the first church father. He wrote in Latin. He wrote a book or a treatise called Adversus, or in Latin, Adversus Judeos answers to the Jews. It's a discussion between a Christian and a proselyte Jew. He was fairly well educated, we can see from his writings in Jewish practice, which offers him the opportunity to once again craft a creative and compelling story of the Gentiles replacement. His argument should sound pretty familiar by now. Christianity's interpretation of the Hebrew Bible is better than that of the Jews.
[00:20:50] He used specific Jewish examples to illustrate the futility of the practices and how they'd been abrogated.
[00:20:57] Circumcision. This is a really easy target.
[00:21:03] They just always want to cut it down.
[00:21:12] Reminds me of a joke. I'm not going to do it. This is serious right now, he says in answer to the Jews.
[00:21:22] Just as circumcision of the flesh, which is temporary, was initiated as a sign for a stubborn people, so one of the Spirit was given as salvation for an obedient people. The Jews of course, are who the stubborn people, the chosen are. The Spirit filled the Sabbath, same thing. The Sabbath was meant to be a temporary. It was a mere foreshadowing of the eternal Sabbath. Not that was coming at the end, but that Jesus would bring that when Jesus came, God rested on the seventh day of creation.
[00:21:59] Moses tells people to keep a weekly Sabbath, so it follows. Tertullian says that this was temporary, that was imparting a partial truth. But now that Christ has come, Christians observe a Sabbath not one day a week, but perpetually resting from sin and dedicating their lives to God at all times.
[00:22:22] That's creative. That's working really well around the Sabbath, isn't it?
[00:22:30] This is actually a classic statement of fulfillment theology. We make the external practice obsolete because it's been fulfilled in us through the Spirit, the Sabbath, the fourth commandment of the ten.
[00:22:47] Okay? In the very opening chapter of Adversus Judeos, he says, and just listen carefully. I don't like to read a lot of things, but this is important while discussing God's word to Rebekah.
[00:23:01] You know who was in Rebekah's womb, right?
[00:23:06] Two peoples and two nations are in your womb. The greater shall serve the less. Tertullian writes, and he explains that the first nation is Israel and the second is ours. The gentile Christian people who inherit the covenant favor. So the prior and greater people, that is the firstborn, no, they came first, that's Jewish. But they must necessarily now serve the less, the younger the Christian, because we have overcome the greater.
[00:23:43] Look at the allegory and the creative flipping.
[00:23:49] He speaks of the golden calf. Of course, he talks about later incidents of idolatry. But he goes on to say, whereas we, the less, even though we came after, we are quitting the idols we formerly had, and we've been converted to the same God from whom Israel had departed, Israel had walked away. For thus the less that is the posterior, overcome the greater people while it attains the grace of God's divine favor from which Israel has been divorced.
[00:24:26] Do you get the picture?
[00:24:30] There are so many examples I could give you, but I'm certain you'd get it. Now, remember the name of our series, Baseless.
[00:24:36] The Roots of Christian Antisemitism.
[00:24:40] These are the roots.
[00:24:43] This is what's blooming and blossoming.
[00:24:47] But let me end by making one more important point or two. One could argue, and people do argue well, but to a large degree, they would say these are simply critiques of Judaism and misguided zeal.
[00:25:07] And even this morning, in the Torah portion, the Haftarah reading, we read Isaiah, and it's a scathing, scathing accusation against Israel.
[00:25:22] And people say, what's the difference?
[00:25:25] You know, Jeremiah says, you've only done evil in my eyes, even the Torah, you've only been rebellious since the day I came to know you. That's Moses. What's the difference between them? I'll tell you the difference.
[00:25:37] It's actually very easy. The prophets critiqued as insiders, intra family dispute. They rebuked Israel in love. They hoped that Israel would come back. But the Church fathers spoke about Jews, not to them. They conquered from the outside. They condemned not your family, but ours.
[00:26:02] The prophets are what we call social critics of the Hebrew Bible.
[00:26:09] The prophets, Moses, they're offering stern correction, but they speak as members of the social structure that they're critiquing.
[00:26:18] They are attempting to come back. We even see this in Yeshua saying, come back, repent, come back.
[00:26:29] But this is not what was happening in the second century among Christians.
[00:26:34] Jewish scholar Zvi Novik, he says in this book, Judaism A Guide for Christians. It's very good. The author's last name is Novik. N O V I C K Judaism A Guide for Christians, he says this the revoicing of the prophetic rebuke in Christian anti Judaism completely transformed this tradition altogether. So that no longer is this being able to be called social criticism at all. It's from outside. They've created an other at which all insults are directed.
[00:27:15] The Christian critic does not identify with the Jews when he condemns them, nor does he speak to them. He speaks about them to other Christians. And that process transformed prophetic rebuke into the expression of hostility. And that, my friends, set the course again of nearly all future development of Christian theology toward Jewish people. Not all.
[00:27:44] Not all. This is not a universal statement. I am not saying that.
[00:27:50] But for a long time and even and until the Holocaust, virtually nothing changed.
[00:28:03] Lastly, Novick discusses the important idea in social criticism of punching up and punching down. Do you know this term in comedy and ethics? There's that utilization of this illustration, punching up, that's criticizing power from below, okay? Prophets calling out kings, corrupt leadership, a comedian making fun of someone in power, punching up, punching down, criticizing the weak, the marginalized, the vulnerable.
[00:28:43] And those early attacks, Listen, the early attacks on Jews and Judaism by those early, early church fathers could conceivably have been somewhat of a punching up. Because you have to understand that Judaism was much more well established at this time. It had a Roman protection over it. On some level, these communities of Christ worshipers were small, they were precarious.
[00:29:11] So they may have been challenging.
[00:29:15] But as these early second, third century ideas mature into fourth and fifth centuries and beyond, everything changes. I'm not saying that what they did by punching up was right. I'm only saying there is the possibility. But. But what changed that changed the entire world is when Constantine and the Roman Empire became the Christian Roman Empire and the conversion. And not only did the prominent voices of Christianity begin to punch down, they did it with extreme malice and hatred to the Jews.
[00:30:02] But it is these ideas birthed that we've discussed today that fuel the fury.
[00:30:11] Many Christians today believe that they get their theology straight from the Bible, from the words of Jesus, from the Gospels, from the New Testament, from Paul. But I'm going to tell you something that maybe controversial, that's not the whole story.
[00:30:30] The real theological framework, the assumptions, the subconscious interpretations, the way that it's read came from these guys.
[00:30:44] Justin, Melito, Tertullian, Ignatius, Irenaeus, the church fathers. They were shaping Christian theology before there was New Testament canon.
[00:30:59] Of course they were familiar with the writings, but before Matthew, Luke and John had been all put together in the Gospels, before Paul's letters were even recognized as authoritative scripture, they, these guys, this time period were defining how it would be read, how it would be interpreted and how it would be be weaponized, especially in relation to the Jewish people.
[00:31:31] When the New Testament does start to gain formal authority, it is already being read through this lens, the lens they created, which as brilliant as these guys were, is simply wrong.
[00:31:58] There is by necessity more to say.
[00:32:02] But that's all for today.
[00:32:04] Shabbat Shalom. I'm Darren with Shalom Macon. If you enjoyed this teaching, I want to ask you to take the next step. Start by making sure you're subscribed to our channel. Next, make sure you hit the like button on this video so that others know it's worth their time to watch.
[00:32:19] 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.
