The Romanizing of the Jesus Movement

Author: Dwight A. Pryor

WHAT TODAY IS CALLED “CHRISTIANITY” actually began as a messianic

movement within Judaism. It was nurtured by the fertile spiritual soil of Second Temple
Judaism, which was especially diverse and vibrant in the First Century.

From its inception the Jesus movement was thoroughly Jewish in its composition and
culture. The Rabbi from Nazareth taught in the manner and methods of other Jewish
sages, but with uncommon authority and unprecedented claims of Divine identity. Like
other esteemed teachers he raised up many disciples, all of whom were Jewish. He taught
them from the Torah and the Prophets, never undermining or “abolishing” the Word of
God, but filling it fuller with sound interpretation and spiritual implications.

Before his sacrificial death, Yeshua promised to empower his disciples with the Holy
Spirit to take the good news of the Kingdom message that he had proclaimed to Israel, to
“all nations” (Luke 24:47). Beginning from Jerusalem, the word of the Lord was to go
forth from Zion “to the end of the earth” (Acts 1:8).

The rest of the world at that time was Roman. Its Hellenized (Greco-Roman) culture was
every bit as compelling as its imperial rule. To successfully transport, therefore, the
message of a Jewish Messiah, steeped in the Hebrew Scriptures and Hebraic mindset, to
the Greco-Roman world required skillful adaptations of the Greek language and concepts.
The Apostle Paul succeeded in that difficult task, although even then his writings were
often misunderstood (2 Peter 3:16).

In subsequent centuries, however, the Hebraic foundations of the Gospel in the West
were eroded or even excised under the weight of the prevailing Roman worldview. Some
of the shifts were seismic, others were more subtle, but together their influence
reverberates upon the Christian mind even today.

FOR EXAMPLE, BY THE END OF THE FOURTH CENTURY, the emperors

Constantine and Theodosis had wed the church to the Roman Empire. What began as a
persecuted minority sect metamorphosed into a persecuting majority, a triumphalistic
State religion concerned more with worldly power than fidelity to Yeshua’s gospel of the
Kingdom.

Theological shifts occurred as well. Preoccupation with the individual and the soul’s
place in the afterlife displaced the Hebraic orientation of creating a new humanity, a
renewed covenant community of people, reconciled to God and one another in love. The
powerful redemptive work of Messiah that transformed lives became objectified in the
sacraments, held to be efficacious apart from faith and repentance. And the church which
began as a redeemed community of committed disciples became an imperial organization
composed of anyone willing to confess the Apostles’ Creed.
The multiple images of atonement found in the New Testament, all drawn from the
Hebrew Bible – such as sacrifice, conflict and victory over evil, ransom and redemption,
reconciliation, and adoption into a family – gave way to doctrinal “theories of
atonement.” Justification and a juridical view of salvation began to dominate, conceived
more in categories of retributive Roman law than the relational context of a Torah given
in grace to a redeemed covenantal community. Satisfying Divine justice and honor via
penal substitution (Christ dying in our stead) suited the West’s preoccupation with
introspective conscience and guilt that prevailed from the time of Augustine and his
doctrine of Original Sin (in which all stand guilty from birth for Adam’s transgression).

Y/H/W/H, Israel’s gracious God, became re-imaged in the popular mind after the likeness
of Greco-Roman deities whose anger had to be appeased and whose wrath propitiated.
Once the Torah was dislodged from its covenantal context of grace, Temple sacrifices
were construed as attempts to appease the anger of a judgmental Deity instead of the
means of evoking repentance, enhancing fellowship and drawing near to a gracious
Father who abounds in hesed or lovingkindness.

The sixteenth century Protestant Reformers charged that “Hellenistic errors” had crept
into Latin theology. Though they rejected many of the practices of the medieval church,
ironically, Luther and Calvin retained the Augustinian assumptions and Roman
worldview that lay at the base of it all.

The restoration of Yeshua’s full Jewish identity and the Hebraic foundations of the
Kingdom movement he started is a profoundly important work of God’s Spirit in our
time. The church is being transported back, beyond Wittenberg and Geneva, Rome and
Athens, all the way to Jerusalem, to recover the foundations of our faith. In this we
should rejoice!

© 2011 The Center for Judaic-Christian Studies.

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