It’s not even matters of opinion. These are simply facts. No it’s not the easily dismantled narrative of church history they traditionally tell us in Christianity but this narrative is just as much fiction as theirs.

The fact is Christianity emerged in the second century and developed through the 3rd and 4th.

The early disciples were called Natzorim (Nazarenes) but that was an exonym not an endonym. The other sects of the Yehudi were calling the talmidim of Yehoshua by what they thought a derogatory term. And then the people of Yeshua embraced it. Before that they were simply called HaDerechk (The Way).

In 70AD Rome did infact overthrow Jerusalem, but did not carry off the Hebrew writings and make a new religion.

That’s just buffoonery.

They carried off the gold of the Temple and whatever else survived the fire and the war but few manuscripts. Contrary to the very Messy narrative that Rome was trying to make a new fake religion, she was actually trying to crush an existing one, the Jewish rebellion and in the next generation the final revolt under BarKochba which resulted in Rome rampaging through the land of Israel massacring town upon town of the Yehudim, killing anyone they thought Jewish even if they weren’t and burning all Hebrew manuscripts they could find.

This left the followers of Yahshua not only running for their lives but a vast majority fleeing open Torah observance, as it was thought a Jewish thing. And with so many of the leaders in The Way killed off, Greek converts to The Way came to prominence. Men not trained in Torah but trained in pagan philosophy and tradition.
In a similar manner to how the other Jewish sect called the followers of The Way by the exonymic pejorative term Natzorim, the pagan Greeks called the Natzorim by the even more foreign exonymic term Christianos. Also meant as a pejorative for a foreign people, this became the widely known name among the heathen to refer to followers of The Way. Eventually a myriad of Greek peoples came to faith in the Jewish Messiah whom they had been always calling Christos, joining a people whoM they had spent a lifetime calling Christianos.

At the same time as Rome was ramping up its hatred of Jews, all things Hebrew (which they equated with Judaism), and all persons whom they thought of as Jewish (Rome didn’t bother with subtle distinctions), Greco-Roman conversion started to ramp up aswell.

Partly because the Romans were killing off the more knowledgeable members of the Natzorim along with other Jews, and partly because many followers of The Way were attempting to distinguish themselves from Judaism So as not to suffer death by misunderstanding, the new converts from paganism came into The Way in overwhelming numbers.

These people were not trained in the Hebrew Scriptures as those who came before. Most of those well trained in The Way had been killed off by the Empire. These newbies were well trained in Greco-Roman language, law, religion, tradition, and philosophy. And they had been accustomed to reimagining the Jewish Messiah in a Greco-Roman visage, with a Greek title and a Greek name and the movement as a Greco-Roman idea.

…and in the absence of the Hebrew leaders, these novice philosophers became the dominant interpreters of The Way which they rebranded as they saw it to be - Christianity.

It’s easy to blame everything on Constantine and his mommy, but though he has much guilt in the matter, he’s not the lone cause of Christianity coming to be.

Long long before Constantine these people were teaching Christianity. And with every successive generation removed from Calvary, more and more Greek philosophy, Greek thinking and Greek religion crept in becoming more and more the norm.

By the time of Constantine there was turmoil in the empire because too many people were Christian (already) to conquer, kill off, or curb, and they were all disagreeing over doctrine to the point of its becoming disruptive to the Pax Romana (peace of Rome).

Constantine created nothing.

He simply called the meeting of those who did.

Yes he presided over Nicaea and the Athanasius backers held the overwhelming majority but the council decided by vote to worship iesous (not called Jesus for another 1200 years or so).

It was a devolution and dissolution that made Christianity, not a malicious manufacturing of a completely different faith made of mixed mumbo jumbo out of thin air.

One generation had their Torah teachers annihilated. The next had their teachers picked from converts who were raised in Greco-Roman ways and converted to their generation’s version of The Way, which by then had gone well off in the wrong direction.

Simple as that.

And the more nonsense messy-anic versions of history our side tells the more ridiculous the truth looks to those who would otherwise be inclined to to seek it out.

Again these are not matters of opinion. They are simply facts with which people may be unfamiliar.

Unfortunately there is an entire wing of the messianic movement sharing fictional history like to this graphic, based largely upon the manufactured reality of Alexander Hislop in the “Two Babylons.”

We can go back and forth and round and round with “that’s not true” no “that’s not true” statements and it gets no where. The fact is the details shared in this graphic are approximately 90% fiction. It’s an altered version of reality manufactured from a preconception of anti-constantinianism, anti-romanism, and anti-babylonianism. And all subjective study leads to biased findings. The one thing the original poster got right was how easy these things are to uncover when we do a little digging. But biased research, little or much, leads only to biased findings. None of these issues are hard to find out about if we put our bias aside first and study.

If we don’t we will find the Christian religion starting over 175 years after it began and in a completely different place and by completely different means and for a completely different reason. And as is so often the case our hearers of such horrific revisionism reject not only our recreant imagination but the truth of our Messiah and His Way aswell.

And reasonably so…

If our accounting of history reflects our desired findings instead of the unbiased facts, and we have attached our Hebrew Messiah to the mixed up traditions we have manufactured, our audience will see right through it and rightly reject Him with all our fiction.

The simple story is the same as every other tradition that stands the test of time…

It started as one thing, was picked up by others, molded into the image of the new people, passed off to another group for a time and then repurposed to serve their ends and intentions, handed off to another people in another country in another time and changed again, and finally inherited by us in our age.

It doesn’t get made by 100% malefactors. It isn’t drummed up all at once. We can’t single out to one specific group or person. One line time period can’t even be pointed out as the particular problem apart from others.

Christianity, like anything else, is the product of time, neglect, well-intended compromise, ignorance, forced conversion, monarchy, immigration, imagination, manipulation, forgetfulness, bigotry, misinformation, misunderstanding, etc etc etc.

It can not be emphasized strongly enough that those of us returning to The Way, by whatever name you are known or call yourselves, much question everything.

Everything…not just some things.

And that includes what other messianic teachers tell us.

And especially our initial conclusions and natural inclinations.

Otherwise we are in danger of doctoring our doctrine with distortion, mixing truth and lies and passing off yet another false narrative to those poor folks seeking to be freed once and for all.

And the lie being discovered by them instantly or eventually only instills more doubt in their hearts.

The overwhelming majority of converts to The Way today, either deconstruct into atheism, return to the church they came from, deconvert into a different denomination of Christianity, or flee to a foreign religion altogether.

And the major culprit behind this mass exodus from the Messianic Movement is finding lies in this religion. The rot so many leading Messianic teachers are mixing in to spiritual food is turning stomachs all over and rightly so.

It is high time our side took stock of what is being taught and attached to the truth of the Torah. False origins. False histories. False doctrines.

If we want people to come to The Way and follow the Truth and to stay, we much feed them pure food. No mixing. No messed up nonsense and false accusations against ancient peoples and races and places.

The perversions happened over long periods of time and for profoundly different reasons.

What matters is that YHWH is our Elohim.
What matters is that He gave us His Torah to enable us to have success in this life.
What matters is that He sent the Messiah, Yeshua to show us how to live according to the Torah perfectly and to die and rise again to pay for all our breaking of Torah.
What matters is that Christianity was not the intended religion but rather a return to being Israel.
What matters is that we are called to be Hebrew, to leave our gentile lifestyle, crossover into true worship of the One and Only Elohim and join the people of Israel.

Forget about who did what, when, why and how to distort the truth of all the above into Christianity.

What matters is, what is knowable and probable is that all that is the original Biblical position and the Christianity we were given is different.

We have the obligation to share the truth and call people who want to know the truth back to it in full obedience. As for the rest, we have no obligation to explain, though if we can we are so allowed. But we must be caution not careless. We must be shrewd not instantly certain.

We can easily trace the origins of certain things back but only so far. Not to Babylon or Constantine. But usually to one particular theologian or one particular Bible version or one particular country and their peculiar custom.

It’s irresponsible to blame Babylon and Constantine for everything. And it’s just plain lazy.

Focus on your obligations and not the extras unless you have finished teaching the truth of what we are responsible for in its entirety and you have had the time to select all your biases, set them each aside, study objectively in their absence, and then scrutinize all your findings subjectively against your biases in an effort to disprove your suppositions.

Check and recheck. Check and recheck.

Anything else is risking the reliability of the main message.

Question Everything
templecrier.com