← The BEMA Podcast
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A
And I would walk 500 miles. And I would walk 500 more. Brent Billings,
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B
you want to be the man who walk a thousand miles to
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A
fall at my door? I stopped it up. I stopped it on purpose. But I'm not here to talk about 500 miles. I'm here to talk about 500 episodes.
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B
Yes.
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A
This is episode 500, which it's kind of like episode 502 because there was zero and there's like negative one and
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B
then there's like 49B. Yeah, right, right. So it's like 504. But we acknowledge that that exists. But also this is number 500.
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A
So number 500. We got to do something special. I felt we. We're not a big, like, milestone group. What am I trying to say? Bama doesn't make a big deal out of, like, milestones necessarily, but I felt like, man, episode 500, which happens to land rent billings right around 10 years we've been doing this. This August will be 10 years doing the Baymaut podcast.
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B
Yeah, it's been a while.
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A
So it just felt like. Felt like it's time to do something. And so we're starting this episode, which is going to be an interview with Dr. David Rudolph. And it's excellent. You guys should hang around, talk about Passover with Dr. Rudolph. But before we get into it, we wanted to make a special announcement. We're making a special announcement on episode 500 to celebrate 500 episodes. And the announcement is this. Brent Billings. We are going to celebrate 10 years. This July, we are having our very first live Bama podcast event recording. I don't even know what you call it. Or we're going to be live. We're going to be recording an episode with an audience and we want people to be there. How else would you say that? Yeah, we do.
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B
I want all the people there. I wish we had a 100,000 seat stadium that we could fill with all of the Baymont listeners. That would be. Unfortunately, we have capacity for about 200.
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A
That's right.
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B
That's right.
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A
And it's an experiment. I don't know if we'll ever do a whole bunch of this stuff, you guys, but we're going to try to have some fun. We're going to try some new things. We love to try new things. We're going to try a new thing and Maybe we'll celebrate 15 years in five years. I don't know. But we're going to try. We're going to see how this goes. So we are on July 30th everyone, we are going to be gathering in Boise, Idaho. We found a venue. We kind of looked in a few different places. We got team members in different spots. One of our team members, Amber Miller, she is located out in Boise and we were able to get kind of like the perfect little sized venue for what we needed. It's going to be at Cathedral of the Rockies, Amity Campus. Not the big campus, not the big one downtown, but they have a kind of a smaller campus. They call it the Amity Campus. It's in South Boise and that's where we're going to be on July 30th. We're going to have an event that's going to run from 7 to 9pm Doors are going to open at 6pm we're going to encourage people to be seated by 6:45 because we hit record. And you're going to hear Brent Billings voice in person or on recording. If you don't get to make it, you're going to hear his voice there at 7pm sharp on July 30.
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B
You get to see me get distracted by blue letter Bible on my laptop while somebody else is talking. You get to hear me clear my throat before I come in with the scripture reading or whatever. Who knows?
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A
We're going to have the co host there. You're going to get to see Reed, I'm sure make stupid motions behind me while I'm talking. You'll get to see Elle and not just her perfectly placed voice and details and substance and data, but also the fun faces and it'll be great. So Brent, what can we say about tickets and where those are going to go on sale and where people can look for those?
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B
We're still working on all the details because we haven't done this before. So we have a few logistics to figure out. But we're going to put them up for sale early May. So that first week in May, May 6th. Wednesday, May 6th is when the Bayma messenger will go out that month and that will be the place to get that link. Who knows how fast this is going to go? It does cost money. So it's not like, it's not like you're going to have everybody immediately sign up. But maybe we like. I don't. I have no idea. We have no idea. We've never done this before. So if you want to be the first person to get that link, the Baymon messenger, we will send that, let's say 9am Pacific Noon Eastern on Wednesday, May 6th. So that way it's not going to Come in the middle of the night.
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A
We're going to try to throw a link on the website, too, in case people. We're going to try to do that at the same time as the messenger as it goes out. But messenger is always the place to be if you want the real action in real time.
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B
And then, Marty, what are we thinking for the price? We haven't nailed it down, but, like, what's. What's our range?
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A
Yeah, we've got a. We got a rough idea. And we're not. We're not doing this as a fundraiser. We're not making money on this, but we are definitely trying to just cover our costs. We're trying to make this event as close to a net zero. It's still going to cost us a big chunk of money, but we're trying to get a lot of the costs taken care of just so your ticket isn't. Like, we're not trying to rake in the dough. We're trying to help just pull this thing off. We're guessing somewhere around $100. So right now we're kind of in the $89 per ticket could easily be 99. We really don't want to go above 109. It's going to be somewhere in that $100 per ticket range. So that's what you can be prepared for.
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B
I've been paying attention not necessarily because of our event coming up, just because of our connections with the chosen and all of the stuff they've been doing with Chosen Con and dealing with ticket prices. And it's like. And I've had interactions with people who do live events for various things. And just the amount of work that goes into this, the amount of money everything costs, like, it's just. Everything is so much more expensive than you think it should be. And it probably is more expensive than it should be. And yet that is what it costs. So, yeah, like I said, I wish we could have a hundred thousand people there. I wish it could be free. I wish all that stuff. And unfortunately, that's just not the reality. So we're gonna make it fun. I think we're gonna make it worth it.
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A
Yep.
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B
But, yeah, unfortunately, it does cost some money.
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A
Yeah. And we've always been really good and we still are gonna be. Like, one of our commitments is always to do is like, Bama just needs to generally be. Be free. It needs to be advertisement free. It needs to be unmonetized. It needs to be. Every now and then we're gonna try to try some things and it might cost some money. And we're not gonna be afraid to do those things. But that's not changing about our culture. We love that most of everything we do, we get to ask you to give freely as you're able, but it doesn't cost you anything. And so that's going to be something that remains. But that's the announcement. Brent 500 episodes, 10 years of celebration packed into one evening. Cathedral, the Rockies Amity Campus July 30, 7:00pm
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B
well, speaking of freely, give Marty the interview that you are about to hear from Rabbi Dr. David Rudolph. We are going to talk about a paper that he wrote and presented at a conference. And I can't remember exactly what we say about it during the episode, but this paper is otherwise unpublished. And so we're like, well, you can find some things here or maybe some other elements here. And we try to give some resources. After we recorded, Dr. Rudolph was like, hey, I think I have a way that I can get this to you guys and you can give out the paper in some form. So in spite of what we may say in the episode ahead, that paper will be in the show notes. So please check that out. It's not very long. It's absolutely fascinating. So please check that out in the show notes, read it and enjoy the rest of the episode. This is the Behemoth Podcast with Marty Solomon. I'm his co host, Brent Billings. Today we are joined by Special Guest Rabbi Dr. David Rudolph. He was raised in Washington, D.C. and ultimately acquired a Ph.D. in New Testament from Cambridge University with master's degrees in Old Testament and other things along the way. Your interests overlap so much with everything that we love to talk about here. So, David, welcome to the show.
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C
Thank you for having me.
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B
And if you want to give more, more of a personalized introduction of yourself, the things that you care about, the things that are on your heart, any of your background, whatever you want to talk about, give us your own introduction.
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C
Well, I'm a Messianic Jew. I grew up in the Messianic Jewish community and the conservative Jewish world. And I teach now at the King's University in Southlake, Texas. I'm the director of the Messianic Jewish Studies program and also teach courses in Biblical studies. My area of specialization is Second Temple Judaism and New Testament. And along the way I've developed a real interest in Messianic Jewish studies. So I teach courses in Messianic Jewish history, Messianic Jewish theology, Jewish practice and Messianic context and courses like that.
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A
I first met David at. Let me back up and go here we have a mutual friend in connection who's been on the podcast before and Dr. Jen Rosner. And Jen invited me into this fellowship called Yachad Be' Yeshua that we're a part of. And I first heard you, I think maybe, I can't remember if maybe I'd heard you on a Zoom call, but I really first got to really listen to you, well, at the Toronto gathering that we had a couple years ago. And just ever since, whenever I've heard David share, I'm just like, oh, yes, somebody who sees the world and history. And I love any kind of historical nerdy bond. And I have definitely found that to be true anytime I've gotten to hear you share, David, and it's been just a. I'm looking forward to just a continuing, growing friendship through that fellowship. But could you give, for anybody who hasn't had the opportunities that I've had to listen to you just give like, a snapshot of, like, what is your academic body of work? You mentioned that you kind of like to specialize in Second Temple Judaism, have a passion for Messianic Judaism. For anybody that was like, who is this guy? Give us a short footnotes version of where you've been and what you've done and. Yeah, tell us more.
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C
All right. Well, I attended Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary for part of my master's work.
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A
You're the fifth Gordon Conwell person I've talked to this week. I don't know what Jesus is trying to tell me, but goodness gracious, I love that.
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C
Glad to hear it. Yeah. So there was a time in my life actually when I sensed a call from God to go back to school and get a PhD in New Testament. So I went to Gordon Conwell for a degree in Old Testament, another degree in Biblical languages, but the goal was toward getting a PhD in New Testament. And essentially at that time, we really did not have any New Testament scholars who represented the Messianic Jewish community that could be a voice from our community within the world of New Testament studies. So I ended up studying under Dr. Marcus Bokmuhl at Cambridge University. He's now at Oxford University and focused on a passage in First Corinthians 9, 1923, where Paul says, I become all things to all people to the Jews. I became as a Jew to win the Jews, etc. And try to address that question of is there a way of understanding this text in the context of Second Temple Judaism and not just the Greco Roman world, which had been more of the focus of the studies in that passage. So anyway, that doctoral work led to more and more interest in the issue of Jewish Christian Relations. So when I finished my PhD, I ended up doing more work in that subject of, well, how can we understand Christian origins in the light of Second Temple Judaism? How do we go from a Jewish Jesus, you know, a Yeshua Hamashiach Adonai, Jesus, the Messiah, our Lord? How do we go from Jewish Jesus to this parting of the ways, where today many gentile Christians really don't have a sense of closeness to the Jewish people and to Judaism, and where there's more of a sense of the two religions being separate and distinct religions without any kind of common origin? So over the past, I guess, two decades, I've written a lot on the subject of the parting of the ways. And what about Messianic Jews and where did they fit in that history? And what about Messianic Jews and Messianic Judaism today? So, for example, with Joel Willits, I co edited a book called Introduction to Messianic Judaism, published by Zondervan. My monograph was published by Morsbeck entitled A Jew to the Jews. I'm working now with a couple of other general editors on An Oxford Handbook on Jewish Christianity and Messianic Judaism, forthcoming with Oxford University Press. And I'm also working as the general editor of the Messianic Study Bible, which Zondervan is putting out.
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A
I love that I had not heard about that project. That's excellent. Yeah, well, very good. We got a message from somebody on your end that was basically saying, hey, Dr. Rudolph is working on this stuff when it comes to the Council of Nicaea and the dating of Easter, and you should have him on your podcast. And I was like, well, A, that's a really odd request, and B, that's exactly what we would want to do. So, yeah, absolutely. I had a whole bunch of questions. I've had questions about exactly how this whole dating of Easter has worked in relation to the Ecumenical councils. And so I was just super excited to have you on, and you've sent us some of the stuff that you've been working on, and we're going to link to some other stuff by the time we're done with our conversation today. But I thought we could just kind of like walk through some of what you've been working on and unpacking. Basically, this work is about the controversy of the dating of Easter and how it shows up in the Council of Nicaea where they're trying to make a decision on this. Should it be here or should it be here? How do we date Easter? Do we date it this way or that way? Give us the historical backdrop. How did we get to this spot where in the 4th century, we're dealing with an argument about how to date Easter from a Jewish perspective, from a Gentile perspective, what's going on and how do we get to this spot three centuries after Jesus?
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C
So first of all, I think it's important to say that this subject is particularly helpful for understanding the parting of the ways between the church and the Jewish people as it developed. Because it's a story. It's like a little snapshot or kind of vignette into one particular area in which there was divergence over time. And it just kind of gives a sense of how things developed. So I think we all know that Yeshua, Jesus was, I would say, still is Jewish. And all of his first disciples were Jewish. The apostles were Jewish. The first people who gathered around him and followed him were Jewish. Eventually we read about, like in Acts 10, Cornelius and other Gentile believers join this community. And so as time goes by, there are Gentile believers who were worshiping in local synagogues and heard about Yeshua, heard about the Gospel, the Basora, through Paul, as he preached in synagogues. As we read about in the Book of Acts, we don't know much about how Passover was observed, like in the Pauline churches. We can assume that in the Jerusalem congregation and congregations that were predominantly Jewish, that the Messianic Jews, the Jewish believers, observed Passover like other Jews, but with some additional theological understandings in light of this Gospel that was taught and shared. So when we move forward, we have to ask ourselves, what about the Gentile communities? How did they deal with Passover? So we really don't know. But I think we can assume that the Jewish believers within those communities celebrated Passover. It's very likely that Gentile believers may have joined in still maybe with some of the Jewish believers. But at the Jerusalem Council In Acts chapter 15, when they discuss the issue of do Gentile believers need to become Jews? Do they need to take on the Torah, the yoke of the Torah, as part of becoming the people of God? The answer that the apostles and elders of Jerusalem come up with is they do not need to become Jews. They do not need to take on the full yoke of the Torah. There are some things that they are expected to to do. And in Paul's letters, there is a lot of reference that Paul has to ethical aspects of the Torah that the Gentile believers are responsible for. But Passover is not included in the Jerusalem Council's expectations for the Gentile believers. Now, that said, again, the Gentile believers in this early movement related to the Jewish believers as brothers and sisters, and they fellowshiped together, they worshiped together. And so we learn from the writings of the early church fathers that one of the disciples of John, as an example, his name was Polycarp. He knew John in person. He knew other apostles as well. And our understanding from the early patristic sources is that Polycarp observed what was referred to as Pascha, which was the Greek and Latin way of referring to Passover on the same date that the Jewish people celebrated Passover, and that he did this because he saw this modeled by John. And so this became Polycarp's tradition. Polycarp, in turn, we're told, even encouraged the bishop in Rome at that time. Polycarp, by the way, was born around 6970 CE and is a Gentile disciple of John's.
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A
Is that correct?
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C
Exactly.
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A
Yeah. So you have, like, all these pieces coming together in this relationship.
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C
Right. But we shouldn't think that he was, for example, like celebrating a Passover Seder. We don't have any evidence of that. It seems that at that period of time, for Gentile believers, the experience of Pascha or Passover was to have the Eucharist. And for Polycarp, having it on Nisan 14 was the Apostolic example. And so that was the tradition that he followed. But the Bishop of Rome followed a different tradition. So the bishop of Rome, Oniketas, observed Pascha on a Sunday. So there was some discussion between Polycarp and Aniketas. Polycarp even went to Rome, discussed the dating of Pascha with Aniketas, and he could not convince Aniketas to change his tradition, and Aniketas could not convince Polycarp to change his tradition. So we can see here, toward the beginning of the second century, there was some disagreement over when Pascha or Passover. Again, we're not talking about a Passover Seder. We're talking about just the taking of the Eucharist at a very sacred time, that there was this difference of opinion. Now, we might say, well, what's the big deal here? But for Polycarp, it was a big deal because it had to do with the example that he had seen by this Jewish apostle. And so his observing Pascha Passover on Nisan 14 was continuing this apostolic tradition. But it wasn't just that there was. If you think about it, how would Polycarp know when Pascha would take place. How would he know when Nisan 14 would occur? So the only way that he would know would be by asking someone within the Jewish community.
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A
Right. He'd have to have some direct tie to what the Jewish community is doing with their calendar.
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C
Exactly.
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B
Yeah. I loved this quote. Epiphanius quoting the regulation of the apostles. It's like, you shall not calculate it. Just do whatever the Jewish brothers do. Just keep it with them, even if they mess it up. Don't be concerned about that.
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C
Exactly. So there was this sense of, like, connection to the Jewish people because early Christian leaders, Gentile Christian leaders like Polycarp and others, and those who were in their communities, especially in Asia, felt a sense of dependence on the Jewish people. There was this connection because they needed to learn from them about one passer. Passover was. And I don't think it was simply that. That they just needed this information. But of course, that leads to some kind of relationship that you have to have. And when you're depending on an entire community for your own worship calendar, then it binds you to that community. And I think for many people in that period, like in that quote of Epiphanius, it was a positive connection. There was something of a sense of unity within the church between Jews and Gentiles because there was some recognition that each provided some blessing to the other.
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A
Yeah, you made a really good point. We have this disagreement between. I always want to say anicetos, but you're saying it aniketos.
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C
That's just the Greek way of.
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A
Yeah, aniketos. Okay. So I want to keep in line with that, this disagreement between Polycarp and Aniketos, one wanting to stick to the Jewish date, the other one sticking to the week, the Sunday following. So there's this disagreement. You make a great point on two fronts. Number one, Anacaitos is not claiming apostolic tradition. He's just simply saying this is what the leaders before me did. So he's not trying to claim that this is the way the apostles did it. He's just saying this is the ecclesiological. Ecclesiological tradition up to this point.
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C
Exactly.
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A
On the flip side, you also made a great point. Polycarp, as this Jewish disciple of John, there's nowhere in his words that say, oh, he's trying to be Torah observant. But this beautiful relationship between the two. I thought both those points were really well taken.
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C
Yeah. So this is a period in church history when there's difference of opinion, but there's a general sense of unity.
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A
Sure.
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C
So this begins to this unity begins to fracture around 135 CE. And the reason for that is that there was the Bar Kochba revolt. So this was a period of time when the Jewish people were under Rome's occupation of the land of Israel and Jerusalem. And the Jewish people revolted against Rome under a general by the name of Bar Kokhba, who was widely regarded as the Messiah, as Rabbi Akiva proclaimed him. And it was a failed rebellion. So hundreds of thousands of Jewish people perished and countless Roman soldiers no doubt also died. And after that, essentially what happened is that Rome exiled all Jewish people from Jerusalem. And by the way, it's at that point, interestingly, in Jewish history, that the land of Israel, the name of that land, was changed from the Roman perspective, from Judea to Palestine. For Jewish people, they referred to it as the Land of Israel. But from that period of time, that's where we get the name Palestine attached to the Land of Israel from that period. But in exiling all Jewish people, all the Jewish believers were exiled as well. And so that meant these Jewish, in patristic literature, they're referred to as bishops. These Jewish bishops were exiled as well. And I would say that from that period of time, what we lose is the centrality of Jerusalem as kind of like the mother community, as it's kind of described in Acts chapter 15. Suddenly the body of Messiah, the Ecclesia, the church, loses this kind of mother congregation, out of which the Jewish believers are providing a model of how to address different issues. And so one of the things that's lost is the modeling of when Pascha or Passover should be observed. And so as a result of the loss of the center. And again, I just want to reiterate that we're not talking about Gentile believers, Christians observing Passover Seders again, we're talking about when is the Eucharist celebrated. So what happens is Rome becomes much more of the center of the Church at this point. And so Polycarp passes away around 156. And it's just another, I think, 40 years or so that we begin learning about the continuation of this kind of disagreement over when Pascha should be observed. But this time it gets much more heated, whereas the conversation between Polycarp and and Aniketes was very peaceful and we could agree to disagree. Now what we have is a situation where Victor, the bishop of Rome, and Polycrates, the bishop of Ephesus, enter into a conversation over this issue. And essentially Polycrates sends a letter to the bishop of Rome explaining why the Church's in Asia. And when we talk about Asia, I'm talking about Asia Minor. So we're talking about churches like in Ephesus and Smyrna, churches in this area that today would be Turkey, these kinds of areas. So in this letter, he explains why they observe Passover on Nisan 14. And he explains, we're following the example of Polycarp, we followed the example of John, we follow the example of Philip, we follow the example of Melito. And he lists a number of people who have followed this Jewish tradition, essentially, which goes back to the Torah. And he refers to the Scriptures as kind of the origin of this tradition, then modeled by the apostles. So what happens when he sends this letter to Victor is that Victor essentially goes ballistic. Victor decides that he's going to excommunicate all of these churches in Asia as a result of them celebrating pascha on Nisan 14. And this creates a great deal of tension between the churches in Asia, obviously, and the churches in the west, like in Spain and in Britain, in Rome, of course. So here we're talking again, about 40 years. We're talking about toward the end of the second century into the third century. So during this whole period from, let's see, I would say 190 all the way up to the Council of Nicaea in 325ce. So we're talking about, you know, a period of like 150 years or so. What we see is a great deal of fragmentation within the body of Messiah, the church, over this issue. And we might say, well, what's the big deal? And we're just talking about a date. But if you think about it, like, if we were to change the date of Easter today and say, well, we're going to move it to another date, I think a lot of people would be very upset about that.
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A
You might have a hard time getting consensus on that.
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C
Yeah, because it's a day of worship. It's like the central day of worship on the church's, or at least the Gentile wing of the church's calendar. And so it was an issue of unity. Like, what binds us together in part, is this day of worship. And so this fragmentation, which was caused by the excommunications, continued all the way up to 325 CE, when Council of Nicaea occurs. But just prior to that, there was a council about 10 years earlier in 314 CE, which was the Council of Arlais. And at that council, there was a decision made that the whole church should celebrate Pascha again. They're still calling it Passover Pascha.
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A
I know a lot of our audience, too, David, I think we should stop here and make some of the. You made a really good point about this in your paper. Like, a lot of our audience is going to be very. Like, we do Lord's Supper every Sunday, like the early church did, and which I can appreciate, and I very much appreciate, love that tradition that I belong to. But what you're saying is that there's a Jewish Passover and then you've got this Gentile church, and we don't really know exactly what the relationship is. Eventually, though, there is a Gentile expression of what we might call a Gentile Passover, a Gentile Pascha, which has not yet become Easter, as we understand it. And this Gentile expression you talk about has a. Like, there might be a fast involved in different parts of the. Like a fast leading up to it. You talk about the Syrian churches. They're not trying to do a Jewish seder like Pascha for them is connected to the same date because of Jesus and these Jewish apostles. But they're also having like, a very gentile Christian expression. But what they start arguing about that expression, that Pascha celebration, is how to date it and whether that should be related to this Jewish root, this Jewish antiquity. Is that right?
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C
That's right. And just to highlight how much of a difference it was between, like, the Jewish celebration in the gentile Christian Pascha, the Eucharist was celebrated with leavened bread, not with matzah.
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A
Sure. Yep. Right.
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C
So like, that alone. And then after the Eucharist was celebrated, there was no attempt in the Gentile Christian post Pascha observance to, for example, avoid yeast or avoid leavened products for a week, as in the Jewish community, would be the custom. So those were some significant differences. But at the same time, the. The preservation of the name Pascha, and for the churches in Asia that continued to Observe Pascha and Nisan, 14 represented, as we were talking about earlier, a very strong connection to the Jewish people. And so again, they had to depend on Jewish people in order to have their own time of worship, which was the centerpiece of their calendar. So this controversy that we're talking about today is referred to as the Quarto Deciman controversy. For those who may be interested, Quarto deciman, as in 14. So it's like the fourteeners versus the Sunday observers of Passover within the Gentile wing of the church.
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A
So this basically, this schism ends up basically just becoming this disagreement for over a century. Yeah. And eventually you talk about the Council of. Is it Arles?
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C
Arlis Arlais?
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A
I think it's Arlis Arlais, of course, obviously. But yeah, so this council shows up, which was not one I was even familiar with.
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C
Yeah. So that council, again, 10 years prior to the Council of Nicaea, attempted to bring greater unity in the Church and overcome this fragmentation by expecting all churches to follow the tradition of the bishop in Rome. And essentially at that time, the tradition in Rome was to observe Pascha on the Sunday following the first full moon, following the vernal equinox. Following the vernal equinox, which eventually became March 21 as a kind of designated date. So you can see that if you follow that approach, then you don't need the Jewish people at all to be able to determine when Pascha would occur. So the Church in Rome had been following that tradition for some time. And also, by the way, in addition to that, it became the tradition in the Church of Rome to always do that after Passover, to make sure it was always after, I'm sorry, after the Jewish celebration of Passover on Nisan 14. That way there would be less of a chance of the Christian Pascha, Passover overlapping with the Jewish Nisan 14, Passover Pascha. And by the way, even today, the Eastern Orthodox Church follows that tradition of Easter, always following Passover. But anyway, at that council of our lay, interestingly, Constantine was present. And so this gives a little bit of a possible explanation for why 10 years later, he kind of raised the level of priority of this issue to being one of the top two issues that the Council of Nicaea was focusing on. The other issue being the Arian controversy, the question over whether Yeshua was fully Jesus, was fully divine, or was he a creation of God? Did he eternally participate in the divine identity of the God of Israel, we might say, or was he a creation of God? Now that seems like such a high level theological question to resolve. And that had huge implications for the next 1700 years of the Church following the Council of Nicaea leading up to 2025. Today we just celebrated the 1700th anniversary of Nicaea. But also Constantine thought this issue about the dating of Passover rises maybe not to exactly that level, but high enough that he put it right next to that other issue. And so this was the second issue that the Council of Nicaea, the first Council of Nicaea, addressed in 325 CE.
- [37:59]
A
If you don't mind, can I read the statement that Constantine wrote, according to Eusebius, that you have in your okay. This is good to me. I love this. This is Constantine through Via Eusebius. At this meeting which, talking about the Council of Nicaea, the question concerning the most holy day of Passover was discussed. And it was resolved by united judgment of all present that this feast ought to be kept by all and in every place on one and the same day. And first of all, it appeared an unworthy thing that in the celebration of this most holy feast we should follow the practice of the Jews who have impiously defiled their hands with enormous sin and are therefore deservedly afflicted with blindness of soul. For we have it in our power, if we abandon their custom, to prolong the due observance of this ordinance to future ages by a truer order which we have preserved from the very day of the Passion until this present time. Let us then have nothing in common with a detestable Jewish crowd. For we have received from our Savior a different way. A course at once legitimate and honorable lies open to our most holy religion. Beloved brethren, let us, with one consent, adopt this course and withdraw ourselves from all participation in their baseness. For their boast is absurd indeed, and it is not our power, without instruction from them, to observe these things, for how should they be capable of forming a sound judgment who since their parasidal guilt lay enslaved their Lord, have been subject to the direction not of reason, but an ungoverned passion, and are swayed by every impulse of the mad spirit that is in them? That feels pretty anti Semitic.
- [39:43]
C
Yeah. So, you know, I think it's important to understand that the Council of Nicaea did some wonderful things in clarifying the divinity of Yeshua, of Jesus. And absolutely, it was a very important council in that respect. But there's this other side to it that often gets missed and is not talked about and is largely unknown in the Christian world by most laypeople, we might say. I would add, too, that in bringing this out, at least, my purpose is not certainly in the paper and other things that I've written. And when I teach about this, my purpose is not to bash the church and say, oh, well, you see, the church is really somehow apostate because it's anti Semitic or something like that. But in this case, my purpose, at least with this paper, and it was presented at a conference where the Council of Nicaea was being celebrated and honored and the anniversary of it was being acknowledged. And my purpose was simply to say, like, this is an opportune moment for those of us who are in the body of Messiah, whether we're Jewish or Gentile believers to acknowledge that this is part of the history of the church and not just like sweep it under the rug or pretend it doesn't exist, but to recognize that this happened and that actually, and this was my original point when we started, that this has to do with our understanding of the parting of the ways. And how did this happen? How did the Jewish people become so negatively viewed within the church? And how did this kind of alienation take place between the two communities, the two religious communities? And this helps us to kind of see from a particular vantage point how this developed and the kinds of decisions that were made that contributed to it. And just like the positive decision of the Council of Nicaea about the divinity of Jesus, the divinity of Yeshua had reverberations for the next 1700 years. So too this decision that had antisemitic motivations behind it had reverberations for the next 1700 years.
- [42:17]
A
I think that's just super well said because I know there's an impulse in me as well that oh, well, we got to go back and fix all the, we gotta go. Oh, we gotta like, oh, the church is apostate. Oh, we gotta get back and like do it the way it ought to have been from the very beginning. The bigger issue is that we learn the content. Like we could fix the calendar. Even if we could, we can't. But even if we could fix the calendar and still miss the greater point.
- [42:43]
C
Yes.
- [42:44]
A
Of what has happened historically and what the body of Yeshua is supposed to look like.
- [42:50]
C
Yeah.
- [42:51]
A
And I think that's a point well made because I think our there is a quick impulse to just want to fix the problem and miss the actual problem, which is something we still live around and live with today.
- [43:04]
C
Yeah. So there's several points that I really try to drive home at the end of this paper related to this very question. And that is first, okay, we have these anti Semitic statements and they do center from Constantine's words on the issue of the Jews killed Christ. The Jews, as he put it, killed, slayed their Lord. And so this is the deicide charge. This is the crime of deicide that the Jews killed God. And sadly, even this way of thinking continues today. Like I was just reading in Poland recently, there was a situation within a Christian context where this statement was made. There have been terrorist acts by self declared Christians in this country. In the United States, in their manifestos, they make these kinds of charges against Jewish people before shooting people in a synagogue. So the Catholic Church has clarified through Vatican ii And Nostra Aetate, that this was not accurate. Actually, it wasn't just Jewish people who were involved in the death of Yeshua, but there were Romans, you know, there were. There were others. And even though Jewish people who were involved, it's not like they represent all Jewish people, you know, for all time or something. And then lastly, of course, Yeshua said, no one takes my life. I lay it down of my own accord. And he did that for us, for our sins. So the idea of accusing the Jewish people for the crime of slaying God, deicide is something that needs to be laid to rest. And in 2026, Christians, Gentile Christians, and Jewish believers need to be that much more committed to clarifying this. When we hear people, especially on social media, I think we see this much more these days. So that's one issue. And that relates also to just fighting antisemitism. We see it proliferating all over the world. And I think this, recalling this, especially as we get closer to Easter, get closer to Passover, being educated and being more aware of this history should help gentile Christians especially, be more aware of this sense of, I need to fight this. I mean, one way of true repentance for the history of this is to proactively go after it and say, I'm going to protect Jewish people. I'm not going to do anything that's going to put them in harm's way. And then secondly, the letter that Constantine wrote envisions a church where there is a separate and distinct relationship with the Jewish people. He said, and this is a quote, let us then have nothing in common with the detestable Jewish crowd, for we have received from our Savior a different way. So this way of thinking that we should have nothing in common with the Jewish people, like our tradition, our religious tradition is completely separate, even to the point that sometimes people talk about a different God, like the Christian God is even different from the Jewish God. These are the reverberations. We should not be doing things with Jewish people. We should not be spending too much time. We should not be going to a synagogue. We should not be having close relationships with Messianic Jews. There's something they should be assimilating into the church. So these are the kinds of things that come out of that way of thinking that reflect the parting of the ways. And I think looking at the history helps us to just remember that, no, this is not really what God wanted. You know, God was actually wanting much more of a unity within his body between Jews and Gentiles and Messiah and even outside of the body of Messiah, outside of the church, that we should be viewing the Jewish people as brothers and sisters in the people of God. And there is a distinction between the body of Messiah and the wider Jewish world. But there isn't this, like, hard separation that Constantine described.
- [47:33]
B
Yeah, I liked what you pointed out earlier in the paper about the celebration part, especially pre 135. There was a unity to it, especially in the date of the celebration. But the actual practice was distinct. And you would expect that practice to be distinct because the Jewish celebration, it had a covenantal purpose, whereas the Gentile celebration wasn't part of that covenant. They're like, no, you don't have to become Jewish, so you're not part of that covenant. So you would expect the celebration to look different. But there was supposed to be a unity to it. And so I think that's maybe a good point for people today is that as a Gentile, me as a Gentile, I'm the only Gentile on this call,
- [48:18]
C
so I'll represent us.
- [48:20]
B
I don't have to celebrate the Passover festival in the same way because I don't have that covenantal purpose to it, but I should celebrate it in unity.
- [48:30]
C
Yeah, exactly. And I think it's worth actually even reading that quote about what that early period was like. It's from Epiphanius and you alluded to it before because it does actually bring out an important principle for today. So what Epiphanius says is this is again regarding the way in which the Gentile Christian world observed Pascha up until the year 135 CE. So he says, for this was their chief and entire concern, the one unity, so that there would be no schisms or divisions. Now, altogether there were 15 bishops from the circumcision. Those are the Jewish bishops. And it was necessary at that time when the bishops from the circumcision were being ordained in Jerusalem for the whole world to follow them and celebrate the feast with them. So I just want to highlight that with them that there might be one accord and one confession, one feast celebrated. This was the reason for their solicitude, which gathered the minds of people into the unity of the church. So what I think is so neat about that statement is that today we have this kind of Hebrew roots movement where a lot of Gentile Christians want to celebrate the Jewish festivals. And Passover ends up often becoming the doorway into that. And so there is a very strong focus within the Hebrew roots movement in trying to encourage Gentile Christians to. To have Passover Seders and how to do it. They even create Passover Haggadahs for Gentile Christians. And what I would say is that for the reasons you mentioned, because we're talking about a covenantal ceremony, a covenantal meal, there are a lot of nuances to the celebration of Passover that require real theologically processing. Okay, what am I doing and what am I saying? And can I say this as a Gentile believer who brought us out of Egypt? Can I really say that as a Gentile believer, which is like a refrain throughout the Passover Haggadah? And so in the Hebrew roots movement, what's really interesting is that the celebration of Passover has become an event that many Gentile Christians think that they can do without Jews, like, without Jewish people being involved, where there's no sense of a need to even depend on Jewish people for doing it, which kind of gets back to the original problem that led up to the Council of Nicaea with the Western churches. And so my response to that problem today, in my opinion, is for us to consider following the principle do Jewish things with Jewish people. So if a Gentile Christian feels led by the Lord to celebrate Passover, well, by all means, you know, follow the Lord in that. But my suggestion would be that there's a great deal of wisdom in then finding a local Messianic Jewish congregation or, you know, find a Messianic Jewish friend and join in their Passover seder if, you know, if they extend the invitation. And it's quite common in Passover Seders. It's actually like the custom to have guests. And most Messianic synagogues have congregational seders that are wide open and welcome to the Christian world, and, of course, seders in the wider Jewish world, too. So I think that in some ways, this early principle, up until the year 135of with them doing this with them, is something that today we should really look back on as being a very wonderful principle. Not only does it help us navigate through those nuances that I was talking about, but it also helps to kind of create more of that Jew gentile unity and more of a sense of the one new man described in Ephesians 2, where there's interdependence and mutual blessing and mutual humbling between Jews and Gentiles in Messiah.
- [53:04]
A
Yeah, yeah, I love that. I love that. And good timing for our episode. We got Passover coming up next week because this releases and Easter and all these things top of mind as we get close to the Resurrection and the Holy Week and all the things that will be swirling around. It's a great time. And you've touched on questions I routinely get, whether it's via email or in person when I'm at places. I think you've really hit on some things that are just really beautiful. But where can people go to get connected to you, David, if they want to learn more, read more, maybe not even about this, but other things. Where can they find you and your work?
- [53:40]
C
Well, I have a personal website, rabbidavid.net so they could go there. And a lot of my work is mentioned there. And you can download it, come to the King's University and take some courses.
- [53:53]
A
There you go. Yeah, I love that. Good work on grabbing rabbidavid.net that's pretty good. Good work there.
- [54:00]
B
That's good.
- [54:02]
C
Yeah, I wanted, actually, I think rabbidavid.com but it was already taken by a Moyol. That's like someone who does circumcisions.
- [54:12]
A
Yeah, there you go.
- [54:14]
B
I love that. All right, well, let the listener not be confused by the.com versus.net, your.net rabbidavid.net and then so the paper that we're looking at is not published as we were looking at it, but there is a version of it that you told me it's called the Science of Worship in the Bulletin of Ecclesial Theology. Is that right?
- [54:34]
C
Yeah.
- [54:34]
B
Okay.
- [54:35]
C
Part of it.
- [54:35]
B
And so that'll be on your website, but people can search for that. I'll try to put a link in the show notes as well. So we have lots of things for people to investigate and dive into and wrestle with and everything else. So this has been a beautiful conversation. Thank you, David.
- [54:51]
C
Well, thank you so much.
- [54:52]
A
Yeah. And I would just add you kind of made this light hearted comment in passing. I get asked all the time, like, where would I go study stuff like this, where would I go? And part of what I always tell people is find a teacher that resonates with you that teaches the things and go study under that professor somewhere. And so for those that are looking, I don't know what kind of programs or online options at the King's University has, but track it down, find it. If this conversation resonates with you, it's a great time to A great option to go study with others and under people that you can really learn from in this way. Yeah.
- [55:24]
B
And we have an awful lot of listeners in the Dallas area, so some of them may be able to just come right to you.
- [55:29]
A
So that'll be great.
- [55:30]
C
Great.
- [55:31]
A
I got a business card on my desk upstairs. I was in Dallas the last time, and they said, why have you not come to the King's University? I said, I don't know, but I need. So next time I'm in town, I'll try to swing over there and check it out.
- [55:43]
C
Wow. Thank you, Marty. Thank you, Brent.
- [55:46]
A
Absolutely.
- [55:46]
B
Okay. Well, listeners can find those show notes in their podcast app or@bamadiscipleship.com and you can use the contact page there to get in touch with us if you have any questions. But everything we do is made possible by listeners who support our work. So thank you for joining us on this journey and helping us consider these things and wrestle with these things. So thank you for joining us on the Behemoth podcast. We'll talk to you all again soon.