On Messianic Mondays for the next several weeks, we are sharing excerpts (and sometimes entire chapters!) from my book, Jerusalem Secret.
Today, we catch up with David (you can read how David’s time-traveling adventures began in Identity Theft, the first novel in the series). David is back in the heavenly classroom with Ariel, his angelic instructor. The truth about the first followers of Yeshua is starting to come into focus, but there's much more to come!
“Okay, I’m ready. Let’s go.”
“Right, David. Let’s start then by reviewing some of the things you learned here on your first visit.”
I didn’t have to think long. “All of Yeshua’s first followers were Jewish. And John was not a Baptist, but a Jewish prophet.” I had to chuckle as I remembered meeting John. “Let’s see. Yeshua died on Passover, was raised from the dead on the Roshet Hakatzir, the day that the Jews would bring their First Fruits offering, and the first congregation was birthed on Shavuot—the Feast of Weeks.”
“What many non-Jews refer to as Pentecost—Greek for fifty,” added the angel.“Yes, on that day three thousand Jewish men, plus women and children, became believers and were immersed in water in the mikvot—immersion tanks—surrounding the Temple.”
“Each time I remembered something, it appeared on the massive screen. I felt like I was on the TV show Family Feud. It was kind of fun to think about an event and see it—and I didn’t even have to click anything like Dad did when he showed the Jackie movie.”
“Go on,” said Ariel.
“Okay, um, the names. James’ name was actually Jacob. Paul never changed his name, he’d always had two names—his Roman name, Paul, and Hebrew name, Shaul or Saul in English, and Yeshua’s mother was not Mary, but Miriam like the sister of Moses.”
“Okay, what was the most significant fact you discovered?” prodded Ariel.”
“That’s easy. I was amazed to see how many Jews followed Yeshua. Growing up in a Jewish home, I knew He was Jewish, even that He lived in Israel, but for some reason I’d never realized that the first believers in Him were all Jews—I just naturally assumed that His followers were Christians from a Gentile background, and that He’d started a new religion. The truth is, I never gave it much thought, and I certainly never knew that Jeremiah the Jewish prophet had actually prophesied that God would make a New Covenant with the Jewish people. And that it would not be like the Covenant He made with Moses when He brought His people out of Egypt. This time, God would write His laws, not on tablets of stone, like this,” I knocked on the stone tablet in front of me, “but upon their hearts.”
“Suddenly the verse, in its entirety, appeared on the tablet.”
“The days are coming,” declares the Lord,
“when I will make a new covenant
with the people of Israel
and with the people of Judah.
It will not be like the covenant
I made with their ancestors
when I took them by the hand
to lead them out of Egypt,
because they broke my covenant,
though I was a husband to them,”
declares the Lord.
“This is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel
after that time,” declares the Lord.
“I will put my law in their minds
and write it on their hearts.
I will be their God,
and they will be my people (Jeremiah 31:31-33).”
“Good,” encouraged the angel. He waited.”
He obviously wanted me to elaborate, so I did. “I never realized that there was such a massive Jewish following of Yeshua in Jerusalem. You showed me a verse in the book of Acts where Paul came back to Jerusalem to visit Jacob and the other apostles; it stated that there were tens of thousands of Jewish followers.”
Instantly the verse filled the giant screen in place of the list of things I had just recalled:
“On hearing it, they praised God; but they also said to him, “You see, brother, how many tens of thousands of believers there are among the Judeans, and they are all zealots for the Torah” (Acts 21:20 CJB).
“Right, not only were they large in number, they also continued to honor the Torah. There is absolutely no evidence they thought of themselves as any less Jewish or that they were, in any way, part of a new religion. Some have falsely taught that the New Covenant canceled out the Torah—”
“—yet the Jeremiah verse says,” I interrupted, “that the main difference between the Mosaic covenant and the New Covenant was not that the Torah would be done away with, but that it would be written on their hearts.”
“Correct, and the Jewish prophet, Ezekiel, said the same thing,” declared the angel as the passage simultaneously appeared on the screen.”
“I will sprinkle clean water on you [Israel], and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your impurities and from all your idols. I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws (Ezekiel 36:25-27).
“So what happened?” asked Ariel.
“What do you mean ‘what happened’? What happened to what?”
“Okay, it is clear to you now that the Yeshua movement of the first century, sometimes called The Way, was totally Jewish—at least in the beginning. Yeshua didn’t travel to Turkey, Greece, or Rome, but He stayed in Israel saying, ‘I was sent only to the lost sheep of the House of Israel.'
“So, what happened?” he asked again.”
“I am not following you.”
“After He was crucified and rose from the dead, Jews from all over Israel followed Him—not just Jews from Jerusalem—but all over Israel, even Tel Aviv.”
“But Tel Aviv is only a hundred years old,” I corrected him, knowing there would be a twist.”“Yes, but Jaffa was a city, and Tel Aviv came out of Jaffa. That whole area—from the present-day Ben Gurion airport, southeast of Tel Aviv, all the way past Netanya, twenty miles north of Tel Aviv—was touched by the message of Yeshua. Look at this passage. Oh, and just a reminder, the actual name of Peter was Kefa—rock.”
“I remember, Peter comes from the Greek word for rock, Petros, but they spoke Aramaic and rock is Kefa in Aramaic.” I was surprised that I remembered all that. It must have been the atmosphere. I’m really not that good on earth.”
The large screen once again flickered to life:
In Joppa [Yafo] there was a disciple named Tabitha (in Greek her name is Dorcas); she was always doing good…
“Whoa, what a minute. Her name was Dorcas?”
“Tabitha actually, but in Greek it was Dorcas. So?”
I needed to behave, but I really couldn’t resist. There was someone in the Bible named Dorcas? That’s hilarious.
“Ah, nothing. It’s just good she didn’t grow up in New Jersey.” The angel was genuinely confused. “It’s just that Dorcas is not a pleasant word in English. No worries. Continue please. I shouldn’t have interrupted you.”
“Well, Dorcas is not an English word, but it is Greek for gazelle.”
“Okay now,” I said, “gazelle is way cooler than Dorcas!”
“You know what? I think we should start a few verses earlier.”
As Kefa traveled around the countryside, he came down to the believers in Lud. There he found a man named Aeneas who had lain bedridden for eight years, because he was paralyzed. Kefa said to him, “Aeneas! Yeshua the Messiah is healing you! Get up, and make your bed!” Everyone living in Lud and the Sharon saw him, and they turned to the Lord. Immediately Aeneas got up (Acts 9:32-34 CJB).
In Joppa [Yafo] there was a talmidah [disciple] named Tavita (Dorcas in Greek)—
“Which means gazelle,” Ariel emphasized with fake anger.”
—she was always doing tzedakah and other good deeds. It happened that just at that time, she took sick and died. After washing her, they laid her in a room upstairs. Lud is near Yafo, and the talmidim [disciples] had heard that Kefa was there, so they sent two men to him and urged him, “Please come to us without delay.” Kefa got up and went with them.
When he arrived, they led him into the upstairs room. All the widows stood by him, sobbing and showing all the dresses and coats Tavita had made them while she was still with them. But Kefa put them all outside, kneeled down and prayed. Then, turning to the body, he said, “Tavita! Get up!” She opened her eyes; and on seeing Kefa, she sat up. He offered her his hand and helped her to her feet; then, calling the believers and the widows, he presented her to them alive. This became known all over Yafo, and many people put their trust in the Lord (Acts 9:37-42 CJB).
“When Jacob referred to tens of thousands of Jews who followed Yeshua, he was actually referring to Judeans—meaning Jews who lived in Jerusalem and the surrounding areas. The word Jew originally derived from the tribe of Judah that mostly resided in Judea, but after the northern ten tribes were taken into exile the term became inclusive of all the Hebrews who remained in Judea and eventually all Hebrews.”
This was a lot to take in, and Ariel was just beginning. Somehow, it was easy to digest in heaven’s atmosphere. I hope I’ ll be this cognitive on earth.
“You will pray for the mind of Messiah,” Ariel put in, again answering my thoughts before I could verbalize them.”
“The mind of Messiah?” I asked. “Is that possible?”
“Yes. Paul stated in First Corinthians 2:16 that believers on earth have the mind of the Messiah.”
That was a new concept—one I wanted to think about further after I returned to earth.
Ariel walked toward the table and pointed at the large screen above it. A map appeared. “Now even more Jews came to faith in Yeshua in the coastal cities. You see at the end of the first paragraph, after Aeneas was healed, it says that all those who lived in Lod and Sharon saw him and turned to the Lord.
As Ariel mentioned those areas, the map highlighted their location and quickly showed the central market of each city, revealing the culture and language all at the same time. This was classroom technology that far surpassed the twenty-first century.
Ariel smiled as I adjusted to the quick screen plays, then continued. “The area between Lod, Yafo—or Jaffa as they say in English—and Sharon is more than two hundred square miles! That is a lot of people and they were all Jews. How do we know? Simple. No one was yet preaching to the Gentiles. Only Jewish people were invited to believe. The apostles had not yet been given the revelation that non-Jews could receive Yeshua.”
“So, once again, David, what happened?”
“What happened to whom? I don’t understand what you are asking me?”
“How did something that was initially so completely and utterly Jewish become considered completely and utterly non-Jewish? As I just mentioned, in those early years no one preached to Gentiles—today it is exactly the opposite, people almost exclusively reach out to Gentiles and very little emphasis is put where all the emphasis was placed two thousand years ago—on reaching the Jewish people. You know yourself how terrified you were to accept Yeshua—even to merely consider Him was a huge step. You thought that to do so would be to reject your people and your heritage—and to convert to a new religion.”
“True, I had no idea that Yeshua’s mission was foretold by the Hebrew prophets.”
“What did your dad say, just a few minutes ago? He equated becoming a believer with joining a Baptist church and singing Christian hymns. But do we see any of the first Jewish believers acting that way? Of course, at that time there were no Baptists, much less churches. They met house to house and in the Temple courts—that would be the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, the geographical center of Jewish life—a strange place for the purveyors of a new religion to meet.”
“When Kefa meets Yeshua, he’s not worried about doing something un-Jewish. In fact, he brings Him home with him (see Matt. 8:14). His followers called Him Rabbi (see John 1:38, 49), not Pastor, Father, Vicar, Reverend, or Priest. So what happened to this movement, this Jewish movement, to make it so utterly repulsive to the people from whom it originated?”
“Well, I do know that the Church began to persecute the Jewish people. Particularly in the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition.”
“Yes, but that was many centuries later. The Gentile believers began to turn against the Jewish people as early as the middle of the first century. And this only increased in the second century. Would you like to know what started it?”
“Of course!”
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