I seriously did not want to send this brief essay to you.
Not because I’m not confident in what it has to say, but because I know how it sounds coming from me, and I know some of you who will actually read it. I have family in the same pews you go to. There are people I love, people more devout than I am on plenty of days. So before anything else, I want you to hear the words in the title of this essay. This is definitely a plea. This isn’t a takedown; this isn’t a gotcha; this is a sincere plea.
Allow me to reiterate who I am, because you should know there’s a real cost to this for me. I am a Jew who does not believe in any artificial religion. Any of them. My people built one too. The one we built has a fence around tradition, a fence around the law, and definitely a fence around the text, and I don’t follow any of that. The written Torah, the prophets, and the Messiah they promised: that is the entire foundation of my faith.
This week, as I was prepping for my group Bible study and thinking about how I was going to do Shabbat, it impacted me more strongly than usual. It’s the one thing I feel Christians need to really stop and sit with.
I can trace and justify every aspect of my faith, all the way from the candles on Shabbat back through the book to the Garden, where no man’s hand ever enters the chain of custody:
Avraham (Abraham) to Sinai
Sinai to the Prophets
the Prophets to the Brit Chadashah, the New Covenant promised in Yirmeyahu (Jeremiah) 31
our Messiah, Yeshua (Jesus), who lifted a cup and said it had arrived
Every link is written on a page. Not a committee, not an emperor. Nobody voted.
So here’s the honest plea, Christian: can you do that with yours?
Breathe for a second. This is meant as a real question, not a trap. Please sit down tonight and actually trace your faith backward, from the pew you’re sitting in and the pastor you’re under, and I want you actually to watch where the chain runs. Before you know it, it passes through a room in 325 CE, at an emperor’s palace, with a council that had zero members of the earliest church sitting there. They reassigned the timing of a festival God fixed by name, and they explained themselves in a letter that still survives, a letter that wanted nothing in common with the very people who founded the faith. And that letter still dictates your calendar to this day. From there forward, the story you inherited was not simply laid out. It was 100% managed by a government institution, very much on purpose and very much intentionally. I just published the whole account with primary sources so you don’t have to take my word for anything. There Were No Jews at Nicea!
And if you need a visual, I created a map. I built the timelines. The Ekklesia timeline follows the unbroken covenant line I referred to earlier. The 283 Years shows the faith before the Empire took it over. The Christianity Tree maps everything that grew out of what Rome did. One Roman edict. One council. And they are all sourced, all sitting there wide open for your examination.
This is what I really want to know, and this is why I’m sincerely asking. Why do you not want to look? Why does an invitation to think about where the faith you stand on every Sunday morning, the faith you lift your hands to, was crafted feel like an attack? Because crafted is the right word here. There are only two possible craftsmen: the hands of men, or the hand of God.
And this is where things get tough, because I’m not pretending. If I can trace my lineage through the entire book without one aspect of man’s hand on the chain, and you cannot, which one of us is truly standing on the concrete foundation of our faith?
Please, please hear me. I’m not questioning your faith, and I’m not saying it isn’t real, and it’s not on trial in anything I write. Ever. The question I’m asking is whether the story you were handed about how the faith reached you is true or manufactured. Those are two very different things, and at the end of the day, the only one that really matters is the God you believe in. A true story does not fear tracing. It welcomes it. A manufactured one depends on you never trying to trace it, never digging!
So here’s my challenge: try it! Take the essay, review the timelines, grab your Bible, and ask yourself:
Who taught you what you believe?
Where did it come from?
Who taught them?
Where does the trail actually end?
If it runs clean to the Garden without man’s interference, you have lost nothing but an evening of your time. If it runs through a palace in 325, you have found something you needed to find. Yes, you will have to come to terms with it eventually. But the root is still very much there. It’s still very much alive, and it is still carrying everything grafted into it. Human hands have never managed that part of the story.
Read it like a Berean. Suspicious, and searching.
There Were No Jews at Nicea → https://www.bereantable.com/posts/there-were-no-jews-at-nicea The timelines → https://www.bereantable.com/timelines
Always be Berean.
Sergio
Brother Sergio. I'm grateful that you've called out the people of The Matrix who don't know they are in it. Most every denomination claims something special that separates them from and divides the Body to some degree.
The problem I've encountered along the way is that the original Church was started by the Jewish people. There was no such thing as Christianity. It's a manufactured name derived from non believers in Antioch and elsewhere. No one early on called themselves Christian.
The original believers following The Way. The only way in Scripture is Yeshua Jesus Christ.
The deviation from The Way was subtle but did eventually end up in a Council in 325ad. From that Council, the Roman Catholic Church ran the show for over a millennia. It ruined The Way with traditions that Christ never mentioned in His ministry. The reformation didn't change things much other than challenging the gospel of works. That is huge but we still have reformation churches that follow their own traditions of men.
You along with many others delivered me from the shackles of The Matrix because I was willing to look. God tells us to test all things through His Word. Are we not disobedient if we do not follow His mandate?
My walk has put me on a path to fully knowing Christ through all that He did while walking this earth. Anything other than The Way indicates you might be on the broader path!
Thanks again for all that you do. My life has been enriched from Hebraic tradition because you invited me to look. Can't dismiss the past. We are all One People under One Covenant period!
I need to start by thanking you, Sergio, for enabling me to admit to myself that I am in much the same place as you. I'm much more focused on the Holy Spirit and the New Covenant. But let me answer your questions first. I'm not sure why He wants me to do that, but here goes.
Who taught you what you believe?
The Lord through His Spirit. Plus, I was directly mentored by my blood father when I met the Lord for nearly two years on a daily basis. He was seminary trained, and had some real problems with what he was taught. Pat (my wife) and I spent a lot of time examining what we had read and discussing what it actually meant. She had seminary training which I could clearly see as a problem. Plus, she read commentaries which added suspicious stuff. We were often shunned because of our charismatic background. Pat was taught to hide that fact by her seminary training. But being gifted socially, she learned how to be much more direct, as needed.
Where did it come from?
52 years of intensive bible study with almost no commentaries by men or women. I read a lot of stuff, probably well over a thousand or maybe three thousand books—most current, but many Christian classics. I studied through at least two dozen different translations, cover to cover. Since I met you I read through and studied the CJB. But almost all the teachings were compromised by assumptions and intellectual logic.
Who taught them?
As I said, the only resource I trusted was what the Ruach HaKodesh showed me in the scriptures. I had a lot of trouble with teachers who taught intellectually. Hence my focus on the Holy Spirit. I learned that through hard experience. Regularly, as I quoted a book I had read, I discovered that the book was in error. So, I've grown increasingly suspicious throughout the decades.
Where does the trail actually end?
Hopefully working on the creative team in the Kingdom, helping my Messiah during the millennium. Then the New Creation. On the other end, I didn't accept the 6000 year earth until 2011 or so. I was raised an evolutionist and didn't really question that. But every year I find out that more of scripture is literally true.
So, the question is where do I go from here? I live in a city where I know almost no one, though I am making friends at the senior independent living high rise. However, I have found no serious believers among any of them, either. I recently began keeping Shabbat, and I like it. Though it has been difficult for me to hear from that Lord clearly how I need to handle that.
Pat and I finally found a church here just before she died. But, it is a spec ops street evangelism ministry which has no concept of discipleship. They would not allow me to do anything, because all that stuff is supposed to be done by the "pastor". I put that in quotes because he is a pure evangelist. I still support them financially. But I have no church here, nd I have quit looking. I'm hoping to get a bible study going here. But they have a history of very flawed Bible study leadership.
So, I'm praying a lot. Learning to love the people here. Expecting the Lord to move in the future. Plus, I have learned a lot from you, Sergio, and several other Substack writers.
In general, I don't do well with poetry, so I get little out of any of the Psalms. Being socially challenged means that much of the emotional stuff doesn't touch me at all. I read the Psalms for prophetic content—and there is a lot of that. I read the major prophets a lot, but I prefer Isaiah and Ezekiel. In the minor prophets I favor Zechariah, Joel, Malachi. But I read all the prophets regularly. I also read Genesis and Exodus a lot. In the New Covenant I tend to get the most out of John and Luke, Romans, 1 Cor., Galatians, Colossians, Ephesians, Hebrews, and both Thessalonians, plus Revelation. But, in general, I read the New Covenant 3-4 times as much as the Tanakh.
I'm not sure what or why I have written what I did. But the Lord has approved it, so I'll post it.