The Jewish Roots of the Early Church
As taught in the Messianic Jewish tradition
How the Messianic Jewish lens reads the church as Israel's wild-olive engrafting, not its replacement.
The Messianic Jewish movement reads the New Testament as a thoroughly Jewish book describing a thoroughly Jewish movement. On this lens the first community of Yeshua's (Jesus') followers did not understand itself as a new religion launched against Judaism, but as the faithful remnant of Israel that had recognized its own Messiah. The apostles were Jews; the first thousands of believers in Jerusalem were Jews; their Scriptures were the Hebrew Scriptures (the Tanakh); their houses of prayer and study were synagogues and the Temple courts; and their early forms of worship and ethics carried over the patterns, prayers, and moral instruction of Second Temple Judaism.
By the end of this lesson
- Explain the Messianic Jewish reading of the church as a wild-olive engrafting into Israel (Romans 11) rather than a replacement of Israel.
- Trace why Gentile inclusion was the central first-century crisis and how the Jerusalem Council of Acts 15 resolved it without requiring proselyte conversion.
- Identify concrete continuities between synagogue and Temple practice and the worship, offices, and ethics of the earliest church.
- State fairly where the Messianic lens agrees with, and where it presses against, covenant and dispensational readings of Israel and the church.
- Apply Romans 11's warning against Gentile boasting and Acts 15's lifting of an undue yoke to questions of unity across cultural lines today.
Scripture
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