{"id":11902,"date":"2024-02-29T01:15:19","date_gmt":"2024-02-28T19:45:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/2024\/02\/29\/a-long-lost-letter-back-to-paul-from-the-jewish-christians-at-rome\/"},"modified":"2024-02-29T01:15:19","modified_gmt":"2024-02-28T19:45:19","slug":"a-long-lost-letter-back-to-paul-from-the-jewish-christians-at-rome","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/2024\/02\/29\/a-long-lost-letter-back-to-paul-from-the-jewish-christians-at-rome\/","title":{"rendered":"A Long Lost Letter Back to Paul From the Jewish Christians at Rome"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div>\n<p>If I could go back in time, I\u2019d love to be a fly on the wall to hear how the Jewish believers in the church at Rome heard Paul\u2019s words in his letter to them. (Actually, if I really could go back in time I\u2019d first make a pit stop along the way so I could win the Power Ball Jackpot, but I digress.)<\/p>\n<p>Here we have <a href=\"https:\/\/peteenns.com\/open-letter-romans-apostle-paul\/\">Paul writing a letter<\/a> to a church he had neither founded nor even visited and that had a significant Jewish population. And he says things like the following:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Gentiles (a.k.a. Greeks) may be sinners, but Jews are no better off in God\u2019s eyes, since they are the ones who have God\u2019s gift of Torah but don\u2019t do what it says.<\/li>\n<li>Jews and Gentiles are in the same boat as far as God is concerned because both are enslaved to the power of sin, both equally fall short of God\u2019s glory, and both equally need Jesus, not Torah, to defeat that power.<\/li>\n<li>This decentering of Torah to allow Gentiles to become equal partners with Jews in Israel\u2019s story, though appearing to be an unexpected move, has actually been God\u2019s plan all along, beginning with Abraham.<\/li>\n<li>Neither circumcision nor maintaining food laws, both of which are commandments to Israel, remain necessary for God\u2019s people\u2013either Jews or Gentiles\u2013in view of Christ\u2019s death and resurrection.<\/li>\n<li>Those whose conscience tells them that they need to maintain food laws may continue to do so, but rather than being praised as obeying Scripture, these believers are \u201cweak\u201d in their faith as opposed to those who are \u201cstrong,\u201d i.e., those who understand that no foods are unclean.<\/li>\n<li>Neither the weak nor the strong are to judge each other, for love and unity among the people of God take priority over whether Israel\u2019s ancient practices continue to be maintained.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I hope one day we find a long lost letter written back to Paul by these Jewish believers. It might go something like this:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><em>Dear Paul,<\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><em>We read your letter with great interest, and it sparked no little amount of commotion among your fellow Jews. <\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><em>Have you lost your mind?<\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><em>We believe in Jesus as you do, and like you we are still scratching our heads a bit about why our messiah came in humility and weakness, even dying a criminal\u2019s death, and then was raised. You\u2019ve actually helped us quite a bit on those things, especially early on in your letter, and we much appreciate it.<\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><em>But Paul, you\u2019re Jewish. You\u2019re one of us. Do you really think that the God of our fathers would simply reverse course and expect us to figure out that Jesus the Galilean brought an end to our ancient traditions\u2013especially given how (according to the stories we heard) Jesus himself never said any of what you\u2019re saying here?<\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><em>We\u2019ve never met, though your reputation precedes you. We believe that you are an apostle, but do you really think we should just take your word for it that all that we\u2019ve known is now, at best, an add-on and at worst a hindrance to true faith in the God of our fathers?\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><em>And we appreciate how fervently and creatively you cite scripture to support your point, but don\u2019t you think you took your creative readings of scripture a bit too far?\u00a0Was obedience to Torah really <em>never\u00a0<\/em>central to the Lord\u2019s overall plan? We\u2019ve read our scripture cover to cover many times and we can\u2019t find where God even hints at that idea.<\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><em>Your reading of the story of our father Abraham to marginalize Torah-keeping is way over the top, and your handling of the Psalms and the Prophets to show how the Lord has always \u201celected\u201d Gentiles is\u2026well\u2026you might as well say that there is really no advantage at all to being a Jew\u2013like we\u2019re one big mistake. <\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><em>You try to get out of that implication a couple of times in your letter. You sense the dilemma, but frankly, you don\u2019t do a very good job of talking your way out of it. \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><em>And\u00a0then toward the end of your letter, when you talk about clean and unclean foods (which seems to be the real point of your letter), you call \u201cweak\u201d those who have the courage and faithfulness\u00a0<em>amid our pagan culture\u00a0<\/em>to maintain God\u2019s holy laws, given by him to Moses on Mt. Sinai, and you call others \u201cstrong\u201d for not doing so.<\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><em>So, what\u2019s up with that?<\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><em>Paul, we cannot stress this enough: you can\u2019t just pick and choose what parts of scripture you think are worth holding on to. <\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><em>After all, if everyone did that, there\u2019d be chaos. And where does it end, Paul? Once you start denying one part of scripture, there is no logical reason not to deny anything else. And then what happens to the authority of scripture? <\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><em>You can\u2019t do this sort of thing with God\u2019s word and you can\u2019t claim that God is telling you to deny what God had told us from ancient days up to now.<\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><em>We respect you as our brother, Paul, but when you finally pay us a visit, which we do hope will happen in the not-too-distant future, we would like to sit down with you and hear from you more clearly your\u00a0reasoning\u00a0process in all of this\u2013exactly how Jesus\u2019s death and resurrection, which we firmly believe, leads you to draw the\u00a0conclusion that God is turning his back on the very traditions he commanded.<\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><em>So, those are our main concerns. If in the meantime you decide to write back, could you please work on writing shorter sentences, and maybe not breaking off in mid-sentence to follow another train of thought? That would help us a lot. <\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><em>We would also appreciate it you used certain keywords a bit more consistently\u2013like faith, righteousness, and law. We see some ambiguity here and it\u2019s already caused us no end of debate.<\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 60px;\"><em>Most sincerely,<\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 60px;\"><em>Your brothers and sisters in the faith, <\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 60px;\"><em>fellow children of our father Abraham, according to\u00a0the\u00a0flesh<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><br \/>\n<br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/thebiblefornormalpeople.com\/a-long-lost-letter-back-to-paul-from-the-jewish-christians-at-rome-that-i-totally-made-up\/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-long-lost-letter-back-to-paul-from-the-jewish-christians-at-rome-that-i-totally-made-up\">Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If I could go back in time, I\u2019d love to be a fly on the wall to hear how the Jewish believers in the church at Rome heard Paul\u2019s words in his letter to them. (Actually, if I really could go back in time I\u2019d first make a pit stop along the way so I [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11903,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[]},"categories":[44],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11902"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11902"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11902\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11903"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11902"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11902"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11902"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}