Jewish Rabbis claim that Christianity has distorted the teachings of Judaism in the same way that Mormonism distorts the teachings of Christianity. Are these claims that Orthodox Jewish rabbis make against the Christian religion valid? What is the B’nei Noach religion of Noahidism? How do these non-Jewish, Gentile followers of Rabbinic Judaism practice the religion of Judaism? What are the 7 Laws of Noah? How do the teachings of these anti-Christian Jewish missionaries compare with the teachings of ancient Judaism?
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[Music] Is Christianity the Mormonism of Judaism? What is the Bnei Noach faith of Noahidism?
Hello, I’m Christy Darlington, director of Witnesses for Jesus ministry. As you know, our ministry specializes in contrasting the truth of the Bible in contrast to error that is found in the teachings of Mormonism and Jehovah’s Witnesses, but today we’re going to do something different. We’re gonna start a series I’m calling, “Is Christianity the Mormonism of Judaism?” This is a video series that we are starting that is going to be contrasting the teachings of Judaism and Christianity against Mormonism. Now why are we doing this? Well, I had a really good friend that, about a year ago, announced to me that although he had left Mormonism and had converted to Christianity, and had claimed to accept Jesus as his Savior and the gospel, and was very involved in Christian ministry and we had worked together in ministry for six years, he had been convinced that Christianity was a counterfeit like Mormonism. And I asked him, “where’d you get this information? How did you come to this idea that Christianity is the Mormonism of Judaism? And he pointed out several Jewish rabbis that he had been listening to over a period of about two months.
They convinced him to leave his faith in Christ to convert to this branch of Judaism known as Noahidism or B’nei Noach faith. Now what is the B’nei Noach or Noahidism faith? It’s basically a branch of Judaism for Gentiles – those the people that do not have Jewish blood. In Judaism, you have to be of the Jewish faith by descent in order to be fully Jewish. And if you want to convert to Judaism they will put you in this other branch of Judaism they will consider you a B’nei Noach or Noahidism member of that particular branch of Judaism. What it basically entails is that you commit yourself to follow seven laws of Noah. They are seven laws that they believe God gave to Noah after the flood. Now, I will say that there is no record of these specific seven laws being given to Noah when we read the account in Genesis, but there are some of these laws that, as we read them, we do see them revealed in the Bible elsewhere.
For example, let’s start with just a brief overview of these seven laws. The first one is that we are not to worship any idols. Now that law, although not specifically stated to Noah, it is implied that God wants our full devotion throughout Genesis and when we get to the account of Moses receiving the Ten Commandments, that law is clearly stated.
Now, the Jewish rabbis will argue that they were given to Noah, even though we only see them recorded in Exodus in the Bible. They’ll say there is a Jewish tradition in the Talmud that specifically talks about these laws for the Gentiles and non-Jews who want to be Jewish. So they’ll say that, all non-Jews whether you want to be Jewish or not, you really are supposed to obey these laws, And so I would tend to agree because, as we read them, even though this specific law about not having any idols was given specifically to Moses in the Ten Commandments, it is implied as we see the accounts of Genesis, and read about how God treated people in Genesis, how God worked with people, He wanted His people to follow in full devotion to Him and not worship anything else. So this would be a law
that I would see also written in the conscience of every human heart to worship only God, although we do not in our flesh, we tend to go after other things and other gods, as we see all recorded in the examples in Scripture. In Exodus, especially all of the Egyptians had many different gods that they were worshipping, they were not worshiping the one true God Yahweh Jehovah. So that first law: do not worship any idols. They require, if you’re going to be a member of this Noahic faith, you’re to follow these laws. Number one: Do not worship any idols, only worship God. Number two:
“Do not blaspheme God’s name.” His name is holy. We see that in the Ten Commandments given to Moses, and the third law is, “Do not murder,” and the fourth law, “Do not practice sexual immorality,” the fifth law, “Do not steal,” the sixth law, “Do not eat the flesh of a living animal.” Now, this one law here, “Do not eat the flesh of a living animal,” that was given to Noah. We read in Genesis 9, “Do not eat the flesh with the blood of an animal.” So God made it clear: the life of the flesh is in the blood, and we are to drain that blood out and make sure the animal is dead before we eat it. So this sixth law of the Noahide faith is given clearly in the Scriptures “Do not.” And then the seventh law, established Courts of Justice to build upon these laws.
Now, this seventh law kind of goes with the idea that Noahidism is to be compatible with people of all religions, faiths, creeds; for the most part, in that pretty much every government, every nation, every people group, is to follow the laws of the land, and to obey the higher authorities.
Even in Christianity, we’re told to honor our governments and our governing authorities where those laws do not conflict, clearly, with God’s laws. So that’s basically what this seven point is – to honor those laws set of governments that follow these kinds of principles and follow these laws,
so that justice can reign in the nation. So there’s nothing really inherently wrong with these laws. They seem to apply to every person’s conscience, and appeal to the teachings that we see in the overall Scriptures, both the Old and the New Testament.
Now, the Jewish rabbis, and particularly those who adhere to this B’nei Noach faith, reject the New Testament as Scripture. They believe only the Old Testament is the Scripture that God has given to mankind, and particularly the nation of Israel, and so they have a number of teachings that are put together to counteract the Christian interpretation of these Scriptures in the Old Testament, particularly as it relates to Jesus as the Messiah. When my friend announced that he was leaving Christianity to become a B’nei Noach follower, he announced to me that he no longer believed that Jesus was God in the flesh or that Jesus was the Messiah, and that he denounced the Christian teachings that we are to follow Christ, and that we are to trust Him alone for salvation, that Jesus paid the price for our sin, so that we could be acceptable to God, that teachings of the gospel that Jesus is our Messiah Yeshua, our Messiah. They reject and he
rejected, it broke my heart, because the Scriptures are clear that Jesus is the only way to God. Jesus said that “I am the door,” that we are to come to Him to receive salvation. He says, “I give eternal life to my sheep and they will never perish.” He says, “I am the door, no one can come in but by Me. No one comes to the Father except through Me. I am the way, the truth and the life.” And so, when my friend decided to join this movement, B’nei Noach, it broke my heart because denying and denouncing the gospel and denying Jesus Christ is essentially the
unpardonable sin, that Jesus said that will not be forgiven those who reject or blaspheme the Holy Spirit, and if you blaspheme the Holy Spirit by rejecting the one whom God has sent, there is no propitiation for your sin. There is no atonement that can cover your sin. You will have to pay for your sin yourself, and so I asked my friend and I said, “So what are you going to do about your sin?”
And he said, “Oh, my good works. I’m just gonna do good works. I’m gonna follow these seven laws of Noah, and these good works should be sufficient.” Because he was told by his Jewish rabbis, the Orthodox Jewish rabbis that are pushing this belief system, we call them counter-Christian counter-missionaries, countering Christianity, and he has embraced the idea that blood sacrifice is not necessary for atonement for sin. The Jewish rabbis of today, because there is no temple in Jerusalem, they teach that you do not need a sacrifice for your sin, that you can use your life of repentance, and living a humble life trying to obey these laws, that will be good enough. Because they say that God looks at the fruit of our lips as repentance, as a sacrifice for our sins, and we don’t need a blood sacrifice, much less a human sacrifice, as was in the case of Jesus. So they vehemently
oppose the vicarious atonement of Christ. We’re going to be dealing with this subject in this series, and asking the question: is there a basis for the blood atonement of Christ in the Old Testament, and we’re going to be discussing a number of passages that these Jewish rabbis believe that Christianity has taken out of context. We will be studying the context of those passages and the stories behind those passages, and demonstrated unequivocally that Jesus Christ is the only sacrifice that could possibly be good enough to cover these sins. As Isaiah 53 says, that He Himself became a guilt offering, His soul became a guilt offering for sin.
We will be examining what that guilt offering entailed and entails in the both Old Testament Scriptures, the Jewish Bible and how Hebrews explains these passages in the New Testament. So, as you can see, we’re going to be covering quite a bit in our series, as it relates to the arguments of these anti-missionary, Jewish rabbis or of the Orthodox Jewish religion that are pushing these ideas out there and their goal is to try to de-convert people from Christianity. Our goal in this series is to answer their claims against Christianity by both examining the Scriptures in the Bible, and examining the teachings of the ancient Jewish
rabbis. As we go through this series, we’re going to be learning things like, when we read Isaiah 53 and analyze it verse by verse, we’re going to see and ask the question: is this speaking of the nation of Israel, or is this suffering servant speaking of a Messiah who has suffered on account of our sins? We’re gonna be talking about that in our Isaiah 53 passages that we’ll be looking at in our videos, and we will also examine the claims of the ancient rabbis who, prior to the Jewish rabbi Rashi in 1050 AD, all of the ancient rabbis applied Isaiah 53 to an individual person, to a messiah-like figure, and they did not believe and did not agree with Rashi when he came up with his brand-new interpretation in about 1050 AD, where he started teaching that no, this is not a messiah person, this is referring to a
nation of Israel suffering in persecution. We’re gonna examine those claims in our video series, and look at what the ancient rabbis actually taught and, be reminded in the whole series that we’re going to be contrasting the Judaism of the ancient rabbis with Christianity today and answering the question: “is Christianity the Mormonism of Judaism?”
As we go through this series, not only will we be looking at the popular messianic passages like Isaiah 53, we will also be looking at Daniel chapter 9 and Jewish chronology. Did you know that the ancient akkadian scribes of the Dead Sea Scrolls, when they were reading Daniel 9, came up with a calculation for those seventy weeks – 490 years – that spanned the distance from approximately – I believe was the second year reign of Darius all the way until the first century – in which they believed the Messiah Jesus would come. They actually gave a date range that ranged from 3 BC to 2 AD, in which they thought the Messiah would come by that timeframe. And most historians today
believe that the Messiah Jesus was born in 4 BC. So there are calculations for Daniel 9’s prophecy of the seventy weeks fell within one year of the actual date that Yeshua Jesus was born. This is fascinating because the Jewish rabbis of today, which have you believe that there is no calculation that could fit the timeframe of Jesus’ life and they actually have reinvented their Jewish calendar, called the Seder Olam, which was produced around the 2nd or 3rd century AD, that was a hundred to two hundred years after the time of Christ, to try to change the dates for certain events in the Old Testament to try to make it look like Jesus’ life and death did not come in the timeframe of Daniel’s prophecy, that his birth did not fit these Akkadian calendars. They actually twist and distort the date of specific events in history. In our series, we’re going to be examining their claims and looking at the actual evidence for the Neo-Babylonian Era, we’re going to look at business tablets and transactions that were done within the reigns of these Kings, and we’re going to tie them in with the astronomical calendars that we have a record of all
the way back, three thousand years of eclipse records that go way, way back, way before the Babylonian era. Astronomers are able to pinpoint the dates of the specific actions of certain events in the Old Testament, based on the Babylonian calendars of those kings, that were dated to the reigns of these Kings, and they would say, in the reign of such and such a king, such and such eclipse took place of the moon or eclipse of the Sun and they recorded, meticulously, these events on specific dates and specific days of the month, and so astronomers are able to look back at those eclipse records going way back three thousand years and they’re able to pinpoint to almost precisely the exact day, the year when these events took place. And so, by looking at the Babylonian business tablets, where you have interlocking reigns of Kings from, like, the forty-third year reign of Nebuchadnezzar to the first-year reign of Evil-Merodach, and you have these business transactions and, let’s say, that took place, it was a one-year transaction. It started in the forty-third reign
of Nebuchadnezzar ended in the first year reign of Evil-Merodach. You have a clear timeframe that that event took place, that the reign of Nebuchadnezzar could not extend beyond forty-three years and, of course, Evil-Merodach was the next king. And you could do that with the business tablets all the way down through the Babylonian era, to come to get the exact dates in how many years each King reigned by looking at the business tablets that were contemporaneous with that particular timeframe. So you can interlock those reigns together and then with the eclipse records that go back three thousand years of records, and astronomers can look back to these eclipses that occurred during these kings reigns that were dated to, let’s say, the seventeenth-year reign of Nabopolassar, who was the last king to reign in the Babylonian era, and you had this eclipse that took place, I believe in his second year of reign, you know these events and yet business transactions, that show that his reign lasted for seventeen years. And if you have this eclipse that took place
in the second-year reign and you’ve got an astronomical record that can pinpoint the exact day and year of that event, you can pretty much calculate when, let’s say, the fall of Jerusalem took place, which the Bible says was in the eighteenth-year reign of Nebuchadnezzar. So if you have Nebuchadnezzar’s reign for forty-three years, Evil-Merodach‘s reign for two years, Labashi-Marduk only reigned about nine months. You have Neriglissar for four years and then you have Nabopolassar for seventeen years. You have a record of reigns going all the way back to the eighteenth-year reign of Nebuchadnezzar, where the fall of Jerusalem took place, and you could pinpoint the exact year of that fall. Then you look at the Jewish calendar that they’ve made up in the second and third century AD, and you find out that they have fudged the dates.
One-hundred sixty-seven years have been removed from their calendar to make the fall of Jerusalem a hundred sixty-seven years later than the event actually took place. You could see how they have fudged dates: to get the focus off of Christ, to get people not to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, that He fulfilled the prophecies of Daniel 9
and Isaiah 53, and we’re going to be examining all of these things in this series. We’re going to be looking at the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament, which the Jewish rabbis produced. Most historians believe they were – it was fully translated within a hundred-fifty years before the first century, before the time of Christ, and yet the Jewish rabbis today teach that Christianity has distorted the Greek Septuagint that was translated before the New Testament was written.
So we’re going to be examining those claims and examining what we see in the Dead Sea Scrolls that has textual variants in the actual Hebrew text, which support many of the differences of readings that we find in the Old Testament quotations found in the New Testament. So the Jewish rabbis would have you believe that these variants don’t exist, that the Jewish Bible – yes, there might be a variant here or there, but they’ll basically claim that there’s no differences in the manuscripts of the Hebrew text, and so therefore, when the New Testament quotation of the Old Testament disagrees with the Hebrew Old Testament, they will say that the New Testament writers were distorting the Old Testament text. We’re going to examine those claims and see that those claims are clearly false in the light of history, in the light of manuscript evidence and archaeology.
So this gives you a little bit of an overview of what we’re going to be covering in this series “Is Christianity, the Mormonism of Judaism?” And now let’s just do a brief overview of the thirteen videos that cover this series, and I want to encourage you to watch these videos and especially if you have any doubts about your faith as a Christian, or, let’s say, you’re a Mormon – you’ve just come out, you’re considering leaving the Mormon Church or you just came out of Mormonism, you’re a former Mormon and you’re questioning whether to accept the claims of Christianity. This series is for you as well, because it will help ground you in your faith as a Christian, help ground you an understanding how we got our Bible, both the Old Testament and the New Testament, how we got our Bible, how we can trust those manuscripts and how we can trust the claims of the New Testament concerning the resurrection of Jesus Christ, which, as Apostle Paul stated, if Christ did not rise from the dead, our faith is in vain. Our faith is worthless if He didn’t rise from the dead, yet there’s a lot of historical evidence for His resurrection, and indeed that is the foundation of our faith in Christianity. It’s the foundation of the resurrection of Jesus Christ that gives us hope
that we, too, will rise from the dead, because Jesus died, paid the price for our sin and rose from the grave to prove that what He claimed to be, that He is the Messiah, that He is the truth, that He is the Son of God, and if we trust Him, His payment on the cross for our sins, we will be forgiven. Those claims are true, as Jesus said, “All that come to me, I will not cast out. I give eternal life to My sheep and they shall never perish.”
So if you’re questioning your faith or you run into any of these questions that the Jewish rabbis bring up, these arguments that they bring up against Christianity, to try to destroy the faith of Christians and get them to believe in their version of Judaism, their twentieth-century switch of Judaism. As we’ll see, the ancient Jewish rabbis believed in a son of God, Messiah. Messiah, who would be divine in two powers in heaven: a visible manifestation of God and an invisible manifestation of God. That’s what the ancient rabbis believed, and so when Christianity came out in the first century, saying that visible manifestation of God, that we see the angel of Yahweh, that Moses spoke to in the burning bush, or that we read about in Daniel 7:1, like the Son of Man riding on the clouds of heaven. All the ancient rabbis saw that son, a man on the clouds as an allusion to the Messiah, who was a divine-like being. They believed in two powers in heaven, but the
Jewish rabbis, in an attempt to get people not to believe in Christianity, in the claims of Christ, in the second century, made it a heresy to believe in two powers in heaven. They changed Judaism at Yavneh to get people not to believe in a Messiah that’s Divine; in a Son of God that would ride on the clouds of heaven. So we’re gonna examine all these claims, and we’re going to see and prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt that Christianity did not distort Judaism. Rather, it’s the Judaism of the twentieth-century that has distorted Judaism. It’s the Judaism of the Middle Ages under Rashi that distorted their interpretation of Isaiah 53, so that they would not believe in Jesus. It’s the Judaism of the second century that distorted the belief in a Messiah who would be divine, that they produced a version of Judaism that we can say today is the Mormonism of Judaism. It is not Christianity that is the Mormonism of Judaism, but Judaism of the twentieth-century that has distorted the ancient Judaism found in the Bible. So I hope you enjoy this series. I hope you enjoyed these videos.
And now let’s do an overview of what you will be learning in these 13 videos. [ Music and slides ]
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