“Seek Yahweh while He may be found. Call upon Him while He is near. Let the wicked forsake his way and the unrighteous man his thoughts and let him return to Yahweh, and He will have compassion on him. Turn to our Elohim, for He will abundantly pardon.”

Isaiah 55: 6-7

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Rabbi Akiva did Great Harm to Jewish People

In yesterday’s SnyderTalk (April 9, 2022), I mentioned “Jewish sages”. Over the centuries, they are the people who were responsible for writing the Talmud, the Mishnah, and the Gemara. Collectively, those compilations are called “the Oral Law”. They are also referred to as “Halacha” and “the traditions of the Jews”. The Oral Law contains the rules that govern Judaism. It’s a seemingly exhaustive set of rules that address almost every imaginable situation Jewish people might encounter in their day-to-day lives.

In today’s SnyderTalk, I will talk about one of those sages who did a great deal of harm to a particular group of Jews, the Sect of the Nazarenes. The sage’s name is Rabbi Akiva. In my book The Trilogy, I talk about what he did. Below is an excerpt from the book:

Rabbi Akiva is one of the most prominent Jewish sages of all time. He was a major contributor to the Mishnah and to Mishnah Halacha.

During the Bar Kochba Rebellion (135 A.D. to 137 A.D.), Nazarenes fought alongside other Jews to oust the Roman occupiers from the Promised Land. At first, things went well for Bar Kochba’s forces. That prompted Akiva to declare that he was the messiah.

Akiva’s declaration infuriated Nazarenes, because they knew the Messiah. They could not continue to support Bar Kochba under that condition. Not long after Nazarenes withdrew their support, Roman forces defeated Bar Kochba.

Akiva blamed Nazarenes for Bar Kochba’s defeat and declared that they were not Jewish. But he didn’t stop there. He forbade any contact whatsoever between Jewish people and other Jews who belonged to the Sect of the Nazarenes.

In Akiva’s eyes, it was as though Nazarenes ceased to exist. That tradition is still in effect today, but it is much less troublesome than it was when Akiva made his pronouncement because most Jews don’t take Judaism seriously.

Akiva’s proclamation was outrageous. Jewishness is not determined by beliefs or by actions. It’s based solely on lineage.

According to Lawrence Schiffman, author of “Who was a Jew?: Rabbinic and Halakhic Perspectives on the Jewish-Christian Schism”, the rabbis meeting in Yavneh never questioned the Jewishness of Nazarenes. Rabbinic law at the time prescribed the conditions under which people were considered Jewish. Either their mother had to be a Jew or they had to convert to Judaism. For males, conversion required immersion, acceptance of the Torah, and a sacrifice. If a person met those conditions, he was considered Jewish no matter what he believed and no matter what he did.

Akiva’s shameless pomposity was breathtaking. It defied logic, common sense, and Halacha. Even so, he did what he did, and it was enthusiastically supported by the vast majority of Jewish people living in Israel at that time.

In the years that followed, more and more Gentiles became believers, and Nazarenes who had been driven out of the synagogues and declared non-Jews became a minority of believers. Keep in mind that Nazarenes never made an attempt to present their beliefs as a new religion. They always understood that their beliefs were Judaic through-and-through.

Constantine was born about 150 years after Akiva died. As I said, for political reasons, Constantine did manufacture a new religion called “Christianity”. It worked for him politically, but it had terrible consequences for believers, Nazarenes in particular.

Ironically, Nazarenes who had been reduced to non-Jewish status by Akiva became targets for Constantine because of their Jewishness. They refused to betray Yahweh, so they became his mortal enemies. Many of them were murdered for adhering to Yahweh’s commands.

Constantine and Akiva have done more harm to Jewish believers than anyone else in human history. Akiva was first by more than a century.

Akiva’s logic is so convoluted that it is impossible comprehend or justify. A person is born Jewish, or he is not. There is no in-between. Either he is a descendant of Judah, or he is not. If he is a descendant of Judah, he’s a Jew. If he is not a descendant of Judah, he is not a Jew.

Admittedly, the Oral Law looks upon a person who converts to Judaism as a Jew. Although the religion allows that sort of thing, there is no support for it in the Tanach, the Word of Yahweh. Yahweh’s word allows non-Israelites to attach themselves to the Children of Israel if they have faith in Him and obey His commands, but their lineage doesn’t change.

Consider Uriah the Hittite, for example. He was identified as a Hittite, even though he attached himself to the Children of Israel, swore allegiance to Yahweh, was a prominent soldier in King David’s army, and married Bathsheba, the granddaughter of Ahitophel, the counselor to the king. Where Uriah’s lineage was concerned, none of that mattered. He was a Hittite. See 2 Samuel 11 and 12.

Now consider this:

According to the Oral Law, if a Jewish person decides that Yahweh doesn’t exist and declares that he is an atheist, he is still considered to be Jewish. The fact that he believes Yahweh is a mythical being doesn’t change anything.
According to the Oral Law, if a Jewish person declares that he is a homosexual, he is still considered to be Jewish. The fact that homosexuality is explicitly forbidden by Yahweh doesn’t matter. Jewish religious leaders may reject the homosexual lifestyle and recognize homosexuality as an abomination, but they make no attempt to strip homosexuals of their Jewish identity.
According to the Oral Law, if a Jewish person abandons Judaism and joins any other faith besides Christianity, he is still considered to be Jewish. For instance, the world headquarters for the Bahai faith is located in Haifa, Israel. It’s a monotheistic religion with about 7 million followers worldwide. Many of them are Jews, and they are recognized as Jews.

Why do Jewish religious leaders harbor so much animosity and hatred for Jewish people who recognize the Messiah as the Son or Elohim, Yahweh incarnate?

I’ll give you the answer in two words: Rabbi Akiva.

Akiva’s animosity and hatred for Jewish believers in the Messiah knew no bounds. He hated them with a passion that is difficult to fathom. It was a maniacal hate. Even so, Jewish religious leaders supported Akiva’s declaration that a Jewish person forfeits his Jewish identity if he accepts the Messiah.

Religious Jews today like to say that the Oral Law is an essential complement to the Torah and that it connects restrictions on Jewish behavior and culture now with the restrictions Yahweh imposed on the Children of Israel (not just Jewish people) at Mount Sinai. That’s nonsense. The examples I have shown explain why Yahweh would never give them that kind of authority.

When the Messiah was with us in Person, He told the religious leaders to their faces that they did not have that authority, and they hated Him for it. Their reaction was understandable. People with inflated egos and superiority complexes don’t appreciate being told the truth about themselves.

I can almost hear the religious leaders now. In essence, they said, “Do you know who I am?”

To which the Messiah responded, “Before Abraham existed, I AM.” (John 8: 58)

They understood exactly what He meant.

Over the centuries since Rabbi Akiva made his declaration, untold numbers of Jewish families have been torn apart, because someone in the family accepted the Messiah who was foretold by Moses and the prophets. As far as the other members of the family were concerned, he ceased to exist. He didn’t just lose his Jewish identity. He lost his personhood, because he understood who the Messiah is. They should have rejoiced.

“I tell you that in the same way, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.” (Luke 15: 7)

As I explained in The Trilogy, the religion we call “Christianity” today didn’t exist until the 300s AD when the Roman Emperor Constantine made it the religion of the Roman Empire and created the Roman Catholic Church to govern it. Until then, believers in the Messiah were considered to be a sect of Judaism called “the Sect of the Nazarenes”. They were first called “Christians” in Antioch, but they did not call themselves “Christians”. Gentiles gave them that name. (Acts 11: 26)

The thing that set Nazarenes apart from other Jews was their belief that Yahweh fulfilled His promise to provide a Savior and a Redeemer when the Messiah came and died as the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Nazarenes made no attempt to create a new religion, because they understood that they were simply exercising faith in Yahweh, faith that Yahweh requires. I call it “the faith of Abraham”, because all of Yahweh’s promises can be traced back to Abraham and his faith in Yahweh.

If you read the gospels carefully, you can’t help but notice that the Messiah spent a lot of time attacking Jewish religious leaders. They had abandoned the faith of Abraham completely and created an exhaustive set of rules (the Oral Law) to govern Jewish behavior and culture. Theirs was a works-based economy, not the faith-based economy that Yahweh established. Adhering to the Oral Law meant everything to them. The Messiah pointed out that they were hypocrites, because they didn’t keep the laws that they strictly enforced on others. See Matthew 23.

The religious leaders who governed Judaism while the Messiah was with us in Person, were extremely wealthy men. They made themselves rich off the people they ruled. From Yahweh’s perspective, that’s a no-no. They didn’t see their role as serving Yahweh or the people over whom Yahweh gave them authority. They used their positions to increase their wealth and their political and social influence, and the Messiah condemned them for it.

That wasn’t the first time Yahweh condemned Jewish religious leaders. About 500 years earlier, He told them that they were feeding themselves instead of the flock. It was a scorching indictment, and Yahweh told them that He would come Himself and shepherd His flock. See Ezekiel 34. The Messiah’s arrival was the fulfillment of that promise.

The Messiah was a serious threat to the religious leaders. If He continued teaching and attracting followers, they stood to lose everything they had including their wealth, power, and social standing.

Many thousands of Jewish people heard the Messiah speak, and they watched Him do things like heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, and feed people by the thousands with a few fish and a few loaves of bread. That’s why they had faith in Him, and that’s why the number of Jewish people following the Messiah grew by leaps and bounds. Of course, the religious leaders were concerned.

As the number of believers grew, so did the hatred of the Messiah by Jewish religious leaders. They wanted to eliminate Him. Eventually, they did, but the number of Jewish people following the Messiah grew even faster after His death than before.

That should surprise no one. Three days after He was crucified, the Messiah rose from the dead and appeared to hundreds of Jewish people. Their eyewitness testimony was impossible to ignore. Additionally, on Pentecost (Shavu’ot) 50 days after His crucifixion, the Messiah fulfilled His promise to send Yahweh’s Spirit to believers to indwell them and give them power to do things that were humanly impossible. Their testimony and their works were equally difficult to ignore.

The Messiah’s death on the cross backfired on the religious leaders who condemned Him. All they could do was attack Him in the Oral Law, so they did it with a vengeance. When Rabbi Akiva came along more than a century later, he was simply building on the foundation of animosity and hatred for the Messiah that had been laid in the Oral Law by Jewish religious leaders of the Messiah’s Day.

It should interest you to know that the Oral Law doesn’t deny that the Messiah performed many miracles and that He had enormous power to do things that were humanly impossible. In fact, it confirms the things said about the Him in the gospels, but it attributes those things to the devil.

That’s the true meaning of blasphemy. By now, I’m sure they know that, because they have had their One-on-one with Yahweh.

If the Jewish religious leaders could have denied the Messiah’s many miracles, they would have, but there were too many credible eyewitnesses including members of their inner circle, people like Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea. Denying the Messiah’s miracles would have made them look like frauds and idiots, so they decided to attribute Yahweh’s acts to Satan.

Imagine their surprise when they approached the Judgement Seat of Yahweh and realized that He is the One they sentenced to death. Every detail of what they did to Him was foretold by Isaiah. See Isaiah 53. As the Messiah said, “The Son of Man is going away just as it is written about Him; but woe to that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed! It would have been good for that man if he had not been born.” (Matthew 26: 24)

When Yahweh says something like that, it’s best to take Him seriously. He doesn’t say things that He doesn’t mean. Their lives on Earth were decades long, but they will spend eternity is a place where Yahweh said there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Eternity never ends. They will have plenty of time to reflect on what they did.

In my book His Name is Yahweh, I talk about many of these things in detail. You should read it if you haven’t read it already. It’s an eye-opener.

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“I am the good shepherd. I know My sheep and My sheep know Me — just as the Father knows Me and I know the Father — and I lay down My life for the sheep. I have other sheep that are not of this fold. I must bring them also. They too will listen to My voice, and there shall be one flock and one Shepherd. The reason My Father loves Me is that I lay down My life — only to take it up again. No one takes it from Me, but I lay it down of My own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again. This command I received from My Father.”

John 10: 14-18