Twenty Five Years of bad explanations

A reader wrote me. Hebraic-first is why.

Good morning,

I get messages and emails behind the scenes. Quiet ones. The kind that do not make it to the comment section.

After the most recent article, the most powerful one I got was this:

“I’ve been. asking various pastors for 25 years and never understood why Jesus got baptized. Thank you.”

Twenty Five years.

That sentence is the whole reason I do this work.

There is very real contention about whether the New Testament was originally written in Hebrew. Scholars argue. Manuscripts argue. I am not settling that question. What I am telling you is what I see when I read the apostolic writings carefully:

The whole underlying spine is Hebrew. Whether the Greek text we have was composed in Greek first, or translated from Hebrew or Aramaic, or some combination of the three, the conceptual framework, the imagery, the verbs, and the prophetic logic underneath every page are very Hebrew. The covenant categories are Hebrew. The Tanakh is the substrate. The Greek New Testament is a translation of a Hebraic mind into a Greek surface. And if you just step back and take a look at the big picture, it’s 100% Hebraic.

This is why I read Hebraic-first. Not because I am ideological about language. Because the meaning lives deep within the substrate.

Read the deep dive on baptism, The Mikvah Beneath the Water, and you will see what Hebraic-first uncovers. Yeshua (Jesus) is not in the Jordan to remove a sin-debt he never had. He is in the Jordan because that is how a king of Israel is enthroned. The descent to water. The prophet’s voice. The priest’s anointing oil. The people’s acclamation. Solomon at Gihon. David’s son being made king. The pattern is in 1 Kings 1. The fulfillment is in Matthew 3. The reader who had never seen it had no framework for the question. Hebraic-first gives you the framework.

There is a bonus in that article most readers will catch only if they sit with it.

The largest Protestant denomination in the United States, the one whose annual gathering is the biggest religious convention in the world, is built on a false premise about the very rite it is named for. Outward sign of inward decision. That is not what mikvah was. That is what Augustine grafted onto mikvah, fifteen hundred years downstream of the substrate. The Baptist position is not a return to the Bible. It is a partial correction of medieval Catholicism that kept the medieval one-time-event assumption.

It all boils down to human logic. Men did not know when to stop.

This is exactly why HaShem took the seventh day off. He did not need to. He modeled it because we do not. The seventh day is a discipline of cessation. Most of what gets called church history is the opposite discipline. Adding. Refining. Codifying. Drifting one centimeter at a time until the substrate is gone and only the additions remain.

The Bible is counterintuitive. Men’s logic is one of the things it warns against most consistently. If we follow what we think instead of listening to what HaShem said, we end up in false traditions, false doctrines, and false dichotomies.

Almost every reader who sends me a note had been in those false traditions for many years. Hebraic-first there is always the reason behind the messages becoming clarity.

That is what this work is for. And if you haven’t seen it, check out the tool I’ve built for this very reason. Click Here

Shalom v’shalvah, your brother in the Way,

Sergio