SID: So, you know the question that a lot of people have is, the church started out all Jews, Jewish scriptures, Jewish God, the whole thing was Jewish, by the way there also was a lot of power, miracles happened, I mean some Jewish people would walk around and under their shadow people would be healed. Everyone was excited about Jesus, one day a Jewish fisherman gives a few sentences and three thousand Jewish people come to believe in Jesus, so how did it come so anemic today? My guest Robert Heidler is a specialist in this area, he is a graduate of Dallas School of Theology, Robert how did you first get interested in this whole deal of the Jewish history of the church, or this manuscript, this unpublished manuscript I have here called The Messianic Church?
ROBERT: Well I’ve long been interested in history, I was a student of church history in seminary, but in 1997 I was asked to teach a course in church history from a Messianic Jewish perspective, and so I began to do research and I began to study and the first question I had was, “When did the church stop being Jewish?” And like many Christians I had assumed that shortly after Pentecost they decided that well, this is no longer Jewish, we’re going to have a Gentile church and set it up to minister to Gentiles. And so I went back to the book of Acts and began to study through to find where the break from Judaism came, and what I was amazed with was as I read through the Book of Acts was that break never came, there never came a point where they said now we’re leaving Judaism and we are going to become a Gentile movement. As a matter of fact as you go through the Book of Acts they still worshipped in the Temple and in the synagogues, they still took Nazerite vows, they still celebrated the holidays of the Old Testament scriptures. Even at the very end of the Book of Acts Paul is say, “I am a Jew.”
SID: So okay, did it happen you think in the first century?
ROBERT: Well, that was my next thing to study,
SID: I mean after the New Covenant was finished was the break, or
ROBERT: Because I thought if the apostles never divorced the church from Judaism, where did it happen?
SID: Yeah.
ROBERT: And you study through the second century, through the third century, you see the church for the most part still celebrating the Shabbats and the holidays and being very Jewish. And it wasn’t really till you get to the fourth century under the Roman Emperor Constantine when he made the church an offer it should have refused, because basically he said if you will let me change the church I will stop the persecution. And so the church, because of the persecution they had been under they agreed and they compromised.
SID: What changes did he make?
ROBERT: Well, as a Roman he hated the Jews. He viewed the Jewish people as a rebellious people that had been conquered by Rome,
SID: Right
ROBERT: And so basically he came out, right out and said it, we want to remove everything Jewish from Christianity.
SID: So you are saying to me that God didn’t remove it
ROBERT: Right
SID: The scriptures didn’t remove it, but a man removed it.
ROBERT: A man removed it, a pagan Roman emperor. He wanted to unify his empire and he felt the best way to do that would be to take Christianity and make it a little bit more pagan so all the religions of the empire could merge together and be happy together.
SID: That was a very political thing, just like what they do today. What effect did this have, okay so they got rid of all the Biblical festivals, they got rid of the Shabbat, the Sabbath, what else did they get rid of?
ROBERT: It really got rid of a whole Biblical mindset, because the Christianity of the early church was based on the scriptures, Old and New Testament. It had a biblical attitude toward God, a Biblical attitude toward the home, Biblical attitude toward the scriptures, you know it is interesting in the early church, their attitude toward the scriptures was every believer needs to understand the scriptures, just like the Jewish people
SID: Well look at how it changed over the centuries and the Catholic church, it was done in a language they didn’t understand, I can tell you from Judaism, from my viewpoint as from this generation I would go to the orthodox synagogue and it would be in Hebrew and I wouldn’t understand a word of what they were saying. So, what about this whole separation of clergy and layman?
ROBERT: Well see, in the Greek mindset, Greek religions were mystery religions, which meant that the leaders, the priests were initiated and they were able to understand the sacred mysteries and the common people worshipped in ignorance, they weren’t allowed to read the sacred books. And so when that mindset come over into Christianity instead of having people taught the scriptures and expect them to understand them, you had the priest who knew the scriptures, the Bibles were written in a language the people didn’t know, they were chained to a pulpit where they couldn’t be read, and the people would come in and worship in ignorance.
SID: Now when they would come in, I was shocked when I read this unpublished manuscript, and you literally say that it was punishable by death if they met in their homes and that is where the first church really met.
ROBERT: That was one of the things Constantine outlawed. He started building large church building all over the empire and once they were built he commanded, he outlawed the house church, he outlawed houses of prayer and said, because he couldn’t control what happened in a house church but he could control what happened in the ones he built.
SID: what about this whole structure of the pope, the bishop, the elders, and then in Protestantism they still had the same thing they just changed the names, where did all this come from?
ROBERT: Well that is very interesting to study, if you look on the Internet and there are a lot of sites out there about Mithraism, it was a pagan religion, it was Constantine’s religion, and in Mithraism the priest was called, each congregation, each temple had a priest who was called father, the high priest wore a special hat called the miter, his symbol was the shepherds staff and a key, and he ruled the religion from his temple on the Vatican Hill in Rome.
SID: A great deal of authority.
ROBERT: Yeah, but as you look at the church two centuries later, the church is made up of priest, the rulers, the leaders are priests who are called father, and the high priest has his church, his temple on Vatican Hill on Rome with the same symbols the Mithraic priest had.
SID: Did you say in your book, I mean this is amazing, that many of these occult type priests, pagan priests, they would take their temples and instantly one day it would be for pagans and the next day it would be a Christian temple, it was sort of like, this is the new official religion in town, and you know what, we went from a vibrant intimacy, 24-7 with God to religion. I’d like to find out from this expert what the first church really was like, don’t go away.
