Chapter Overview

Hebrew Truth Abandoned

Jesus led a Jewish renewal movement rooted in the Hebrew Scriptures. Following his death, the disciples in Jerusalem, led by James, remained observant Jews. They viewed Jesus as the promised human Messiah, not God Himself, and continued to live according to the practices and obligations of their faith. Life in this movement rested on faithfulness to the Scriptures, trust in God and a shared way of life rather than in complex beliefs.

As the movement spread beyond its Jewish setting into the wider Roman world, this foundation was gradually eroded. Greek philosophical ideas, such as the immortal soul, divine mediators and abstract concepts, replaced the oneness of God and the concrete hope Jesus proclaimed. Pagan festivals and mystery-religion practices were adapted into Christian holy days. Women, who had participated fully in Jesus' movement and the Jerusalem church, were progressively excluded as Greek cultural assumptions replaced Jewish practice.

After Jerusalem was destroyed in AD 70, the original leaders were scattered. Gentile churches gained dominance, marginalising Jewish believers as heretics and reshaping the faith into a religion Jesus and his first followers would scarcely recognise.

A Jewish prophet's urgent message of repentance and the coming kingdom became overlaid with philosophical speculation and pagan ritual. What Jesus taught came from the Hebrew Scriptures, which remain unchanged to this day.

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Death and Resurrection

One of the most significant Greek influences on Christianity was the immortal soul. This belief stood in sharp contrast to the Hebrew Scriptures, which present death as sleep until the future resurrection of the body on a renewed earth. Israel's prophets had promised that God would one day raise the dead to bodily life in a transformed world. The earliest believers maintained this hope, looking forward to the resurrection of the dead at the last day.

Over the early centuries of the church, this understanding was displaced by a different view. Christian teaching came to assume that the soul departs the body at death, experiencing immediate reward or punishment in a disembodied state. The doctrine emerged from Greek philosophy, particularly from traditions that taught the soul to be eternal, and the body merely its temporary prison. As this foreign concept took root, the biblical promise of bodily resurrection was diminished, reinterpreted or ignored altogether.

The Greek immortal soul teaching redefines death itself. Where death should mean the end of life, it becomes merely transition to a new life. Where destruction should end existence, life continues, echoing the serpent's original lie that man would surely not die. The teaching transforms eternal life from a gift granted at resurrection into an inherent human quality. If the soul enters its eternal state at death, judgement and resurrection become redundant. The biblical hope is resurrection itself, when God restores bodily life to those who sleep.

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The Oneness of God

Jesus lived a faith centred on one God alone, the Father, whom he called the only true God. He acted as God's perfect human representative, the anointed Messiah sent to speak God's words, perform God's works and announce the coming kingdom. The earliest followers in Jerusalem maintained this understanding of one God while proclaiming that God had exalted Jesus to His right hand.

As the movement spread into the Greek-speaking world, concepts of divine essences and multiple persons entered the picture. Through the church fathers and imperial councils, these were shaped into the doctrine of the Trinity, one God as three equal persons. When the concept resisted rational explanation, it was declared a holy mystery that could not be questioned without facing punishment, often execution.

The opening of John's Gospel personifies God's Word using the same poetic device the Book of Proverbs uses to personify Wisdom. English translators chose 'he' and 'him' for the Greek logos, wrongly suggesting a distinct person, and transforming John's Hebrew personification into a literal pre-existent divine being. Other verses in John have been similarly misunderstood. Jesus himself declared the Father was his God, maintaining the distinction between God and His anointed representative.

The Trinity established a precedent for defining mysteries beyond biblical teaching, opening the door to further doctrinal errors in the Catholic Church, the Reformation, and modern Christianity. Though each generation rejected some corruptions, all retained the principle that incomprehensible mysteries defined true faith, undermining Christianity's credibility to this day.

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The Reformation Examined

The Reformation began as a challenge to corruption and excess within medieval Catholicism. Luther and others questioned indulgences, purgatory and the power of the church, emphasising faith and Scripture as the basis of salvation. Their promise of a return to biblical truth and wider access to Scripture raised hopes of spiritual renewal.

Central doctrines shaped by Greek philosophy, including the belief in an immortal soul and the Trinity, were largely accepted without reconsideration. Drawing heavily on Augustine, the Reformers developed doctrines of original sin, total depravity and predestination, creating a theological system that reinforced the Trinity.

The Reformation unfolded in close alliance with political power, continuing Christendom's merger of church and state. Reformers made church attendance mandatory, enforced infant baptism as a civic obligation, and used state authority to suppress dissent. Calvin supported the execution of Michael Servetus for questioning the Trinity, while Reformers joined Catholics in executing Anabaptists who sought a non-violent faith independent of the state. The true heroes were these Anabaptists who rejected all state involvement in the church.

Such developments fragmented Christianity into competing movements and eroded confidence in biblical truth. The exhaustion from prolonged conflict produced not genuine tolerance but indifference to truth. Scientific speculation and human reason became new objects of worship. The Reformation followed the Renaissance pattern of elevating the human intellect, placing human reason above Scripture as the source of ultimate authority.

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Atonement and Reconciliation

Jesus taught reconciliation with God through repentance. During his ministry, Jesus freely declared forgiveness to those who came to him in humility, including the paralytic and the woman who anointed him. These acts occurred long before the cross, showing that Jesus was acting in continuity with how God has always dealt with repentance. Throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, God freely forgave those who genuinely repented.

Later Christian theology reframed atonement through penal substitution, the idea that God required punishment for sin and that Jesus bore it in man's place. This doctrine was developed by the Reformers using Aristotle's system of retributive justice. It depended entirely on the Trinity, for only if Jesus were God Himself could his death carry infinite value and avoid the charge of punishing an innocent third party.

The biblical pattern contradicts this. Prophets such as Moses bore the sins of the people through identification and intercession, never by receiving punishment in their place. Old Testament offerings could be as simple as flour, expressing devotion rather than functioning as substitutionary punishment. Ezekiel 18 explicitly forbade transferring guilt from the wicked to the innocent, teaching that all men bore responsibility for their own sin while God promised forgiveness to those who genuinely repented. God sought the heart of the giver, not a transfer of guilt, and in this same pattern Jesus bore sins through solidarity with sinners rather than by receiving their punishment.

The life, death and resurrection of Jesus all demonstrate how we are reconciled to God. His life embodied righteousness, his death expressed obedience, and his resurrection defeated death, freeing us from powers opposed to God. The relatively recent doctrine of penal substitution originates in pagan religion and distorts God's character, portraying Him as an angry deity who must be appeased through blood sacrifice. Returning to the biblical pattern restores the truth Jesus proclaimed. God freely forgives the repentant heart, requiring no payment, only genuine return.

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Modern Revival Movements

The Charismatic movement emerged in the early 1900s with revivals like Azusa Street, promising supernatural gifts such as tongues for worldwide missions. When early missionaries like Alfred and Lillian Garr found their supposed gift of Bengali utterly ineffective in India, leaders redefined tongues from real languages to private heavenly speech. The Weekly Evangel officially announced this shift in April 1916, moving the focus from evangelism to personal experience.

The movement developed through three distinct waves. First came the Pentecostal emphasis on Holy Spirit baptism and signs. Then, the Charismatic wave spread into mainline churches with contemporary worship and informal styles. Finally, the Third Wave brought kingdom theology, teaching that the church must establish God's rule on earth before Jesus returns, often through spiritual warfare and end-time revival expectations.

The focus increasingly became experience itself, with visible displays becoming the measure of spiritual life. Techniques for producing responses shaped worship and preaching, drawing more from psychology and crowd dynamics than from Scripture. Private spiritual experiences became the final authority, protected from scrutiny by accusations of causing offence.

In the first century, spiritual gifts authenticated the apostolic message. Tongues were actual foreign languages understood by listeners. Healings were immediate, complete and verifiable. No such gifts are evident today, though God's Spirit continues to work in response to faith.

These movements persist in expecting an imminent worldwide revival that Scripture does not promise. Rather than recovering the message Jesus preached, they reduce faith to signs, success and personal fulfilment, producing short-lived enthusiasm that ultimately disappoints.

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Prophecy and Fulfilment

Modern Christianity approaches prophecy with the assumption that biblical predictions concern the distant future. This interpretation, known as futurism, requires redefinition of language, making words like 'soon' and 'this generation' cover vast amounts of time.

A central misreading underlies this distortion. Daniel 7:13 describes the Son of Man coming to the Ancient of Days in heaven to receive dominion. The futurist interpretation reverses this direction, reading the passage as Jesus descending from heaven to earth. This misinterprets every New Testament passage that quotes it, most notably the Olivet Discourse.

Jesus warned of Jerusalem's destruction with specific signs and instructions for escape. When Roman armies surrounded the city in AD 70, his words proved accurate as the temple was reduced to rubble and the religious establishment that condemned him was obliterated. This vindication fulfilled what Daniel described in his vision. Jesus received authority in heaven, and demonstrated it through judgement on those who rejected him.

Questions remain, but they do not justify reinterpreting the plain meaning of Scripture to resolve apparent tensions. Futurism does exactly this, redefining time markers and reversing the direction of Jesus' 'coming' to postpone fulfilment. The system originated with John Nelson Darby in the nineteenth century and was popularised by the Scofield Reference Bible, which strongly shaped this interpretive framework in the English-speaking world. The resulting theology reoriented Christian understanding of history and influenced political support for modern events in the Middle East. Many believers now await future events that Scripture places in the past, shaping expectations and priorities around a prophetic framework rather than the message Jesus proclaimed.

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The Faith of Jesus

After examining how Christianity departed from Jesus' original teaching, the focus turns to what Jesus himself believed as true. He affirmed a faith rooted in trust and obedience, walking faithfully with God without complex doctrines. Like Abraham before Moses, he called people to repentance and righteous living according to God's timeless moral instruction, the eternal Torah that Abraham himself kept, distinct from the ceremonial regulations Moses later gave to Israel.

Jesus did not invent a new religion. He stood firmly within the faith of Israel, affirming the Hebrew Scriptures as authoritative and calling people back to devotion to God. This understanding was preserved by the Jerusalem church under James, where Jewish believers continued to live zealously under the law (Acts 21) and Gentiles were welcomed without becoming Jews.

Christianity was absorbed into Roman culture rather than transforming it, bringing doctrines and structures foreign to Jesus' teaching into the church. To return to the faith of Jesus is to recognise this transformation and reject what Rome imposed, placing the Hebrew scriptures above tradition and allowing them to correct later innovations. The seven letters in Revelation commend those who refuse compromise with the surrounding culture, a faithfulness that requires hard choices and separation from institutional Christianity.

This faith remains accessible in the Hebrew Scriptures Jesus endorsed and the life he lived. It proclaims the oneness of God, the readiness of God to forgive those who repent, and the hope of resurrection and restoration. It calls for allegiance to this faith, recovering not a lost religion, but the way of life Jesus himself walked.

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