Biblical Heritage Center Blog

Dates, History, Customs, Jewish New Year Explained Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, is celebrated in 2011 from sundown on Sept. 28 to nightfall on Sept. 30. The Hebrew date for Rosh Hashanah is 1 Tishrei 5772. Though Rosh Hashanah literally means "head of the year, " the holiday actually takes place on the first two days of the Hebrew month of Tishrei, which is the seventh month on the Hebrew calendar. This is because Rosh Hashanah, one of four new years in the Jewish year, is considered the new year of people, animals and legal contracts. In the Jewish oral tradition, Rosh Hashanah marks the completion of the creation of the world. Find more about Rosh Hashanah at -- http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/23/rosh-hashanah-2011-the-je_n_978220.html#s370737&title=Apples_and_Honey

John the Baptist was a Jew doing something that was very common, and still is, in Judaism. He would have been called "John the Immerser," not “John the Baptist.” Ritual immersion has been an important part of Judaism for thousands of years. Click on this link below for Rabbi Leynor’s discussion about the Jewish meaning of baptism - http://groups.google.com/group/biblical-heritage-center/browse_thread/thread/eeedbeb9163d8806

The Jewish Jesus was a teacher and the men he called to be the apostles were called “disciples,” which means they were students. The Jesus Movement was a movement built upon an educational model.   The definition of the word “teach” is “to cause to know,” so what did Jesus want his disciples to know? Read the current issue of Discovering the Bible at – http://www.biblicalheritage.org/BHC%20Newsletters/bhcnews.htm

The Biblical Archaeology Society published two very informative articles in its “Bible History Daily.” Was Jesus a Jew? But Jesus was born in a Jewish home and lived in the Jewish culture and in the land of Israel. Was Jesus a Jew? Yes, Theological study is further discovering the Jewish Jesus and what his Jewishness means to Christian theology and Jewish-Christian relations. What Price the Uniqueness of Jesus? To wrench Jesus out of his Jewish world destroys Jesus and destroys Christianity, the religion that grew out of his teachings. Even Jesus’ most familiar role as Christ is a Jewish role. If Christians leave the concrete realities of Jesus’ life and of the history of Israel in favor of a mythic, universal, spiritual Jesus and an otherworldly kingdom of God, they deny their origins in Israel, their history, and the God who has loved and protected Israel and the church. They cease to interpret the actual Jesus sent by God and remake him in their own image and likeness.  Rea...

The Mishnah is also called the Oral Law and was first written down around 200 CE. The Talmud came several centuries later. They are the writings that are the foundation of Rabbinic Judaism. Rabbi Leynor gives an overview and some interesting insights into them.  View YouTube video at --  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUYoNF31QNE  

 This article from "The Girl and the Drash":  And the man that will act willfully, not listen to the priest who stands there to sever God, or to the judge, that man shall die, and you shall destroy the evil from among Israel. (Duet. 17:12) T After the temple is destroyed and the court in Jerusalem is abandoned, the early rabbis read this passage and saw nothing of their world within it. Forced to abandon temple Judaism, they begin the incredible task of creating a Judaism that walks off the Torah scroll and finds shelter in the Talmud's folio. For this new Judaism to work, the everyday litigant and the highest court in Jerusalem are replaced with rabbinic scholars and the study halls of Yavneh, the first city of rabbinic Judaism. The litigant who does not obey the court is transformed into the rebellious elder, who does not obey the rabbinic majority.   However, unlike the insubordinate litigant, the rebellious elder is not killed. In the Babylonian Talmud, his dissent...

From their very beginning universities were the seedbeds for new ideas in many disciplines, including religion. John of Wessel , a professor at the University of Erfurt in Germany (1445-1456) introduced some of the new ideas that would pave the way for a completely new form of Christianity. The major transition would come a century later under the leadership of Martin Luther. [i] “He who thinks to be justified through his own works does not know what it is to be saved . . . the elect are saved by grace alone . . . Whom God wishes to save He would save by giving him grace.” Did Wessel influence Luther’s work? A number of scholars believe he did, but Luther denied it. He said, “If I had read the works of Wessel beforehand, it might well have seemed that I derived all my ideas from him.” [ii] [i] http://www.answers.com/topic/wessel-johann [ii] http://www.ccel.org/s/schaff/history/6_ch09.htm