Yeshua was from the tribe of Judah (and therefore Jewish) and his apostles were Jewish. Paul was Jewish and was a Pharisee and remained a Pharisee throughout his entire life. The only Scriptures they had early on were what Christ referred to as the Law of Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalms. There were no New Testament books until after Paul began writing his letters. The New Testament writers wrote from a Hebraic mindset: they understood halakah (ordering one's life after the Scriptures), relied on "Old Testament" Scriptures for support of any proposition, and reasoned just like others of their kind in the first century. This is clearly demonstrated from research of the Dead Sea Scrolls and an analysis of like Biblical exegesis.
Since we believe in the supremacy of the Scriptures as the final authority for faith and halakah, we receive the Scriptures as the divinely inspired word of God. As such, we recognize both the divine and the human elements that combined to produce the Scriptures. We strive to understand the language of any given biblical text in its linguistic milieu, taking seriously the grammatical, syntactical, and literary structure through which the author communicated his meaning. This requires that we work hard to understand the historical context in which the text was written. We appreciate the role that history can play in helping to understand the original intent the New Testament writers had when they penned their writings.
Christ did not come to do a new (that is, unexpected) thing. He came to not only fulfill the prophecies that had been given in the Scriptures regarding his need to suffer, to die, and to rise from the dead on the third day, but he also came to magnify, or give clearer meaning to, the Law. Protestant Christianity frequently attempts to teach that Christ fulfilled all the Law and the Prophets. We believe there are still prophecies that will be fulfilled in the future. Protestant Christianity frequently uses the NIV version of Colossians 2:17 to demonstrate that the festivals, new moons, and Sabbaths were shadows of things to come. Greek dictionaries unanimously agree that the verb should be translated in the present tense, revealing a major divergence of belief between Protestant Christianity and Hebrew Roots believers.
Protestant Christianity teaches that the "law was nailed to the cross," citing Colossians 2:14. The word in question here, cheirografon, has always (including in secular Greek) meant "a handwritten document which is a record of indebtedness". We disagree with this incorrect interpretation, which belies a reading into the text what they want it to say to support their doctrine against God's law.
Concerning the Torah, we believe that Christ came to make clear the God-ordained interpretation, and many major Protestant Christian scholars agree (see point #6 under "Why we Believer What we Believe"). Psalm 19 makes its case that the Torah is perfect. Paul, just before his death, says that all Scripture (which includes the Torah) is profitable for learning what is right, what is not right, how to get it right, and how to keep it right.
Protestant Christianity teaches that the Jewish believers stopped keeping Torah. But the history of the second, third, and fourth centuries prove beyond any reasonable doubt that the original apostles (including Paul) and other Jewish believers kept and continued to keep all the Torah all the way into the fourth century. Protestant Christianity quotes passages such as "Christ is the end of the law" (Romans 10:4) in an attempt to support doing away with the law, which is God's righteous standard for living, but in reality, when evaluated in context, it makes no sense. Consider the demonstration below.
Romans 10:1-5That is nonsense. Christ did not abolish God's righteous standard for all believers because the unsaved Jews failed to keep the law perfectly in the flesh. And the lifestyle of the Jewish believers proves beyond a reasonable doubt that they never considered that Christ abolished God's righteous standard at all! This is just another case of misinterpretation that history solves.
On our website, we list 12 points we pose to Protestant Christianity. Consider our points and evidence and disprove them. That's all we ask. But meet common scholarly qualities of conciseness, readability, and clarity, without resorting to eisegesis and prooftexting. Search for the truth with us.