Hosts of THE LIVESTREAM - What Does The Talmud Teach? dismantle the "Judeo Christianity" myth, labeling Rabbinic Judaism a "whole perverted system" where the Talmud, evolving from Rabbi Yehuda Hanasi's Mishnah (200 AD) to the Babylonian Talmud (500 AD), replaces God's authority with man-made loopholes. They contrast Jesus' direct Scriptural appeal against this legalistic accumulation of moral capital, citing Gittin 57a to allege Jewish hostility toward Christ and Islam as Judaism's "broom." Ultimately, the episode asserts that while Western civilization rests on the Old Testament, true salvation comes only through faith in Christ, positioning Judaism as a subversive enemy hostile to the gospel rather than a sister faith. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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It is commonly assumed that Christianity rests upon the foundation of Judaism.
Douglas Murray, best selling author of The War on the West, recently commented Western civilization could not survive the destruction of the Jewish state because it would be, among much else, the cutting away of the whole tree that we're on.
Western civilization would die.
It is reasoned that since the Old Testament forms the bedrock that the New Testament and Christ rest upon, that it would be impossible to do away with Judaism without also threatening the moral, legal, And theological edifice that the Christian West rests on.
But inherent in this assumption is a failure to distinguish what Judaism actually is.
Judaism is not just the Old Testament, as if they are only working with the same scriptures and laws that David and the prophets had.
Rather, in less than a millennium, from the giving of the law at Mount Sinai, a rabbinic tradition began to develop that cut away at the commands, worship, and reverence due to God.
It replaced mercy with loopholes, God's authority with man's tradition, and instead of faith, a convoluted legal system meant to trick God into their favor.
By the time of Jesus' ministry, 1500 years removed from the giving of the law, barely anything resembling true religion and worship remained.
So today we are unpacking the source of these rabbinic teachings, the Talmud.
What does it say?
What does it actually teach?
What relation does it have?
With the lives of the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
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All right, we are back.
We're talking about the Talmud.
It's a day that ends in why?
What else would we be talking about?
So, Wes, you've outlined this episode.
I'm going to let you kick it off and frame it up.
But it is important that cold open.
I hope that the listeners were paying attention because that is a common misconception.
People think that Judaism is half of Christianity.
But the reality is that Judaism is not half of something true, but rather it's a whole perverted system.
It's not just Christianity minus the New Testament, Old Testament alone.
But in many ways, we could say that the New Testament is the lens that ultimately is resting upon the Old Testament.
There was one, you know, a Christian Old Testament scholar who said that the Old Testament is a richly furnished room that can only truly be appreciated and viewed properly in the light of the New Testament.
The New Testament is the light that illuminates the Old Testament, that makes sense of it, so that we can see all the treasures, you know, that are placed throughout.
But But Judaism has its own New Testament, in a sense, and its New Testament is the Talmud.
And so, the same way that for us, the New Testament, right, we're not Marcion, the New Testament illuminates the Old, and there's a cohesive thread between the two, they're not in contradiction to one another.
Well, the Talmud functions for the modern Jew to distort and pervert the Old Testament.
So, it's not just that they have half of Christianity, the Old Testament.
They have none of Christianity because the Old Testament, even that, the Torah, which they do have, has been so perverted and undermined by the Talmud that when you're done with it, there's nothing left.
Yeah, absolutely.
I wanted to dive into this topic because I almost feel like there's no book that's single handedly, in one sense, for one, the boogeyman for so many others.
And then on the other hand, there's tons of people that are like, this is just another religious text.
You're kind of like, is this full of just nasty teachings?
And it's, you know, the Zions, the protocols of the elders of Zion, some master plan.
Is it all of this, or is it just you've got the Bhagavad Gita, you've got the Quran, you've got the Bible, potato, potato?
They're kind of the same thing.
And so I really wanted to get into what it actually is.
And funny enough, it was Charlie Kirk who was on campus.
Perfect Continuity with Moses00:15:21
And there was a young guy, and he's a week into his first red pill.
And he came up and he actually challenged him on the Talmud.
He challenged him on some of the stuff we're going to be getting into.
And to be honest, he looked kind of foolish.
He just didn't have the information, didn't understand what he was dealing with.
And so we want people to be informed because it's when we're informed that we offer the best apologetic for Christianity, that we can anticipate arguments, we can destroy them, we say, This is why Christ is supreme, and why this doesn't match up, and this doesn't work, and this argument fails.
And so we're going to dive in.
Who knows?
We might do multiple parts of this.
There's tons of different background, tons of history, tons that we could dive into.
But for sure, this is going to serve as a foundation for just an understanding.
What are we dealing with?
How has this text impacted this people across the last 2,000 years or so?
And so, to your point, Joel, I want to show this diagram.
Nate, you can pull up graph number one here.
This is just a visual way of really looking at and understanding how it is that God has stretched out, how he's laid out.
Redemptive history.
And so you have up top here, you have historic Christianity.
Adam and Eve were the first Christians.
That is to say, Adam and Eve were saved the same way you and I are.
They were saved by faith, by grace, through faith in Christ.
Adam and Eve had faith in Jesus.
They trusted in the one who would come and crush the serpent.
Jesus even says of Abraham later on Abraham saw my day.
Abraham looked forward to Christ.
Adam and Eve looked forward to Christ.
Moses and Joshua.
And so, from the very beginning of time, from the fall, when man eats of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and he sins, God has been saving people and they've always been saved in one way, and that's looking to Christ.
Now, in his redemptive plan, he used a particular people.
It talks about this early on in Deuteronomy, I believe Deuteronomy 6, that he chose out of all the nations of the world.
He chose one people and he said, I'm going to set my favor on you.
It's not because you're great, if anything, it's because you're pretty bad, but I'm going to set my favor on you and I'm going to use you.
The way you could think of it would be like guardrails.
To work towards the Messiah.
So I'm giving you the law.
Now, obviously, law is written on all of men's hearts, but for Israel and for Moses, he said, I'm going to give you written law.
So I'm going to give you the benefit.
Romans chapter 2, Paul talks about this.
I'm going to give you the written law that you're going to have.
I'm going to give you prophets that are going to speak on my behalf with the intention of aiming towards Jesus and to the Christ.
And the blessing that Israel would have had is they would have been preeminent.
It's like if you're your son, just your son, I'm not going to say daughter, if your daughter's in sports, I would say take her out.
But if your son, I mean, is just the star quarterback that takes, you know, your Texas Tech football team to the national championship and wins, how much pride would you have?
That's my son.
That's my last name.
And so, Israel, out of all the nations in the earth, had the privilege of being chosen to be the recipient, the oracles, the law, the prophets of God.
And they were intended when the time was right that Christ would come and he would be received, that they would welcome him, that he would make atonement for sin.
And then they, before all the other peoples of the earth, would be preeminent.
However, what obviously happened was his.
He came to his own, that is Christ, and they rejected him.
They received him not.
They crucified the Lord of glory.
We've talked about all of this before.
And he comes back and visits judgment upon them just a mere couple of decades later at the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD.
And so, if you look at this timeline, you just have a brief period.
It's not the whole time and it's not from the beginning, but you have a time where Israel is stewarding the guardrails through which God is unfolding his redemptive plan.
Now, Rabbinic Judaism doesn't start with the Pharisees in the first century, it starts a couple hundred years prior during the complicated Alexander the Great, the Hasmonean dynasty.
The complicated geopolitical.
Like the Maccabees?
Getting into some of the Maccabees revolution.
That's a revolt against Hellenistic Judaism as they're caught between kind of the Grecian influence.
But along the line, there comes a rabbinic Judaism.
And this rabbinic Judaism, it's not what it was originally intended to be.
So God didn't give the law to Moses with the intention that an oral tradition be carried down for hundreds of years that would mar and twist and contort and do all these things.
That was never the intention.
Rabbinic Judaism is a departure from God's redemptive plan.
One of the ways it's commonly seen, and that's on the bottom of that graph, is that you have.
The establishment of Israel, you have the law given, and it's kind of seen as Christianity is then the new step, the plan B.
That you have modern Jews that are in continuity with the old Jews, and we're waiting for them.
We're anticipating, we're expecting.
Come join us on this new path that has come forward.
You obeyed the law, you obeyed the prophets, the software update is in, guys.
It's time to jump ship.
That's not what God intended.
That's not how we're to understand it.
Rabbinic Judaism is a departure from true religion that God established.
Yep, that's helpful.
Any questions on that, gentlemen?
No, that's good.
People need to see that.
I mean, what we're talking about is basic Christian theology for 2,000 years.
It's covenant theology that draws continuity from the Old Testament all the way back to Adam and Eve, you know, all the way up to present day.
That people, there's no plan B.
It's not as a, you know, well, God has, you know, saved Israel, you know, according to the law and the Priestly sacrificial system, and he had plan A, and then he created plan B for the Gentiles, and that's Christianity.
They'll be saved through Jesus, and Jews, they'll be saved on their own A plan.
That's not the way that it's worked.
People have only ever been saved one way, which is by looking to Christ.
Those Old Testament saints were looking forward to Christ through all the prophecies that were given.
And the first of those prophecies was given to our first parents all the way back in the Garden of Eden to Adam and Eve after they had sinned.
You know, that God came and even as he was dealing out judgment, he gave the first picture of the gospel and saying that he would put enmity between the serpent and its offspring and the woman and hers, and to the point where the serpent would.
Bruise the heel of the woman's son, of her offspring, but that he would ultimately crush his head.
And so Adam and Eve had faith.
They had faith in the promised seed that would eventually come, that would be bruised, his heel bruised by the serpent, but would ultimately redeem Adam and Eve from the curse of sin and from the serpent by crushing his head.
In other words, Adam and Eve, who were they trusting in?
Who was the object of their faith?
Jesus.
They looked forward to Jesus, and you have more prophecies given to Abraham and then Moses and then Isaiah, you know, and Jeremiah.
And so all of these Old Testament saints were saved by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone.
And it really is in Christ.
They're looking forward to Christ.
And you and I, we're looking back to Christ.
But the center of everything is the cross, it is the gospel, it is the person and work of Jesus.
And saints have always been saved one way, whether they're Old Testament saints or New Testament saints, either looking forward or looking back.
But it's all by grace, not by works.
It's all through faith, and it's all in the person and work of Jesus Christ.
And any departure from that is, well, it's just that a departure.
So Judaism is the departure, Judaism is the detour, not Christianity.
Yep.
I'm going to read this history.
It sums it up really well.
So, where do we get the Talmud then?
So, we have Torah, we have the law, we have the prophets, we have the other.
There's three distinctions in the Tanakh.
They call it the Tanakh.
Obviously, we call it the Old Testament.
Because we anticipate a new, but for Jews, it is the Tanakh, the writings, the sacred scriptures.
And I'm going to read this description of how, in that time period, about 400 BC before Christ, into the first couple hundred years of AD, the rule of Christ, how this transitioned.
The oral Torah, so this is the oral tradition, this is the rabbinic teachings.
The oral Torah is an explanation of the Torah.
Prior to 425 AD, there was an institution called the Sanhedrin.
The Sanhedrin had the ability to interpret the Torah, resolve legal and halakhic disputes, that stands for law.
And make Jewish rulings.
The authority of the Sanhedrin rests in several verses, which say to establish courts as well as listen to them.
After the destruction of the Second Temple, this is 70 AD, however, as well as the defeat of the Bar Kokhba Revolution and ensuing scattering, massacre, and general expulsion that befell the Jews of the time, it became much, much harder to remember the oral Torah.
This is the oral tradition that they'd kept for hundreds of years.
After the destruction in 70 AD, the Sanhedrin began to lose some aspects of their authority, gradually losing more and more of their power until 400 AD.
When it eventually ended, you'll remember Jesus sparring with the Sanhedrin during his time.
The Pharisees were a little bit more religious.
The Sanhedrin were very much so comfortable with Jewish or Roman rule.
So you had the revolts, the zealots, they were the revolutionaries.
You had the Pharisees kind of on the religious side, the Sanhedrin, they were go along with it.
Well, the Pharisees weren't they the ones who, you know, Paul even turns, you know, he kind of gets out of the pickle by, you know, sparking a fierce debate between the Sadducees and the Pharisees.
And the Pharisees believed in a bodily resurrection of the dead, where the Sadducees didn't.
And the Sanhedrin, The Sanhedrin, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it was, there were some Pharisees who sat on the Sanhedrin.
The Sanhedrin was almost like equivalent to, it was religious, but it was also civil.
It was like this combination of both religious and civil power.
It would be, yeah, it would be the equivalent of the Supreme Court in a theocratic society that's both religious and legislative.
Yes, yep, exactly.
So you have the decline of the Sanhedrin.
Jews are scattered everywhere, there's no temple left, and they're struggling to continue to pass down this oral tradition.
In 200 AD, Rabbi Yehuda Hanasi, the head of the declining Sanhedrin at the time, went around and collected as many different traditions as he could.
He was the compiler of the Mishnah.
The Mishnah.
Hold that in your mind.
The goal in his compilation was to standardize the amorphous traditions that were floating around into one standardized corpus of halakh, which is law or Jewish law.
He collected different things from different contemporary rabbis and incorporated these things into the Mishnah.
He did not include everything and specifically only included things which had a stronger justification than others.
He did not explicitly say which teaching, which tradition to follow in the Mishnah.
So this is important because people will read it and they'll say, Well, this is what the Talmud teaches.
Not necessarily.
It's a very convoluted system, but a lot of it is just relaying so and so said this, and then so and so said this.
And for Rabbi Yehudi Hanasi, he's compiling it.
All he's doing is he's compiling the back and forth.
He's not making a commentary on it, he's not describing, he's not taking sides.
Essentially, what the Mishnah is, is Rabbi Yehudi saying, all of these things are valid, anything outside of this is not.
Due to the fact that they couldn't know which tradition to follow, both are considered to be valid interpretations of the Torah.
And so it's getting around this problem that a lot of Jews had.
Well, so and so says this, but Rabbi so and so has commentated on this.
And so they compile an oral tradition detailing all of the different views.
And part of that gets real quick to Jesus and so much of his preaching ministry, but especially the Sermon on the Mount, where he would say, You have heard it said, but I tell you.
And a lot of modern evangelicals with very bad theology take that as indicative of Jesus pitting himself against Moses.
So you have basically like New Testament Christianity.
That is somehow in contradiction or opposed to Old Testament Christianity.
So you have grace versus law, you have gospel versus Levitical code, you have Jesus versus Moses, and they're sparring off.
And Jesus is, of course, better.
And so, therefore, the ultimate conclusion in the mind of many Christian midwits is that Marcionite conclusion that, like Andy Stanley, we should just unhitch from the Old Testament.
And so now the New Testament, instead of illuminating the old, actually subverts and replaces the old.
And that's not.
Christian, that's that's that's bad.
But really, what Jesus was doing, notice that there's this one line that reappears again and again throughout the gospel narratives.
Jesus would finish telling a parable, he'd finish a sermon, and it would often say, you know, people would marvel at the miracles that he would perform, but they also marveled at his preaching.
And the text will specifically say at multiple places throughout the gospel narratives, they'll say, and they marveled at his teaching because he taught as one who taught with authority.
And what's meant there, you know, I've looked into commentaries on this.
Like, well, what does it mean he taught with authority?
Does it just mean like the pathos and the passions of the preacher, you know, that he was just an incredible order, you know, that George Whitefield, George Whitefield, Charles Spurgeon, you know, he's just going at John Knox, you know, like he's banging on the pulpit as he's preaching the sermon.
Like, does he have just, you know, fantastic illustrations, you know, like he's like using props in the Sermon on the Mount, like, hey, go ahead and bring me this and setting up sketches and skits, you know, like, what does it mean he, or is there something divine that's actually visible, physically visible and manifest?
You know, he's glowing while he's preaching, you know, or the clouds are opening up and there's a sunbeam that's coming down, you know, or the volume of his voice is being supernaturally amplified.
And the reality is, it's none of those things.
Isaiah says there was nothing about his appearance that would cause us to worship him.
That's what's so significant about the Mount of Transfiguration, that's the only place where Jesus, and even then, not even with the 12, but just with, you know, the inner circle of the three, Peter, James, and John, takes him up and actually.
Doesn't replace his human nature with a divine nature.
The divine nature was always there, but it's like the veil of the human nature is temporarily supernaturally lifted so that the divine is now shining through.
And so they see Jesus transfigured and in his divinity and they're blown away.
And even then, Jesus says, Don't tell anybody about it until later on when it's inscripturated after his crucifixion, his resurrection, and ascension.
So my point is this they marvel because he taught as one who taught with authority.
They're not marveling because of some.
Supernatural, divine, you know, visible, miraculous element.
They are marveling, nor because he's just such a good order.
They're marveling because all the rabbinic sermons and homilies that were given at that time were always a reference, always a piggyback, just a further interpretation or a further tweak or a further development of some other rabbi.
Nobody was directly going to Moses.
So a rabbi would get up and say, you know, Rabbi so and so would be preaching a homily, you know, on the Sabbath, the Jewish Sabbath in the synagogue, and he would say, So and so says, Rabbi so and so says, and Rabbi so and so was commenting on Rabbi so and so, and he was commenting on this other rabbi and this other rabbi, and building his argument by rabbi to rabbi to rabbi.
Jesus taught as one, they marveled he taught as one with authority because he did not appeal to any of the teachers of the law.
He didn't appeal to anyone within their rabbinical system.
Jesus would just go straight to the source and he'd be quoting Moses, and then he's not pitting himself against Moses, but with continuity, perfect continuity, he's now exegeting.
Carry the Crown as King00:04:30
Moses.
He's expositing Moses, illuminating Moses, not disagreeing.
And so he would go straight back to the scripture itself, to the prophets, to Moses, and then he would say, And I tell you.
And that phrase right there, but I tell you, is not meant to pit gospel against law, grace against law, Jesus against Moses.
It's illuminating Moses.
But what's so significant about it is everyone else at the time within this rabbinical system would say, So and so says, so and so says.
Jesus would say, I say.
I tell you.
And so when they marveled because he taught as one with authority, what was so marvelous about that, what was so fascinating and so countercultural for the time, is that Jesus is actually going straight to the biblical source and then giving his own exegesis as the one who ultimately is responsible for writing the scripture.
He is the word incarnate.
And he's not appealing to any other rabbinical authority or figure in order to make his point.
He's saying, no, it's the word of God, and I'm the word incarnate, and this is what it means.
He's teaching with expertise.
He's teaching as his own source of authority and not having to appeal to the traditions of men.
Yeah, exactly.
Let's hit our first commercial break and then we'll continue this discussion.
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Jews Scattered After 200 AD00:15:27
So, continuing on the history, how the Talmud eventually develops, how we get to where it is, you have about 200 AD or so.
Jews are scattered, they're dispersed, they don't have a land anymore.
The Sanhedrin, this kind of religious political figure, their power is declining, they're losing the oral tradition.
And so, someone comes along and he begins to actually write down again, not commentary, not decisions, not here's what we actually teach as Jews, but simply recording here's what has been said before, kind of like case law.
Well, so and so decided this, and then this way is what they ruled.
Etc., etc., etc., and so that's 200 AD, about 200 years, 170 years after the life and ministry of Jesus.
And continuing on, the Mishnah, that's that oral tradition, is incredibly important as it is a first in Jewish history that the oral Torah was actually compiled and standardized rather than left amorphous.
For many years, the Mishnah was the only thing, however, after the start of the diaspora, there again became the problem where different interpretations of the Mishnah come about.
People debated the meaning of the Mishnah as well as how to define things.
For example, the Mishnah might say it is forbidden to read outside books.
Okay, but what is considered an outside book?
Is that a specific list of books or a general category?
How do we determine what is and is not?
Different answers came about from these questions.
Those questions and answers and debates form in large part what is then what we call the Talmud or the Gemara.
It is Gemara.
It is trying to define terms, understanding premises, resolving contradictions, and the like.
Two different Talmuds come about.
This is one that Charlie Kirk hit that young man on.
Two different Talmuds come about in these couple hundred years following the compilation of the oral tradition.
First is the Jerusalem Talmud.
This was published from about 350 to 400 AD.
So, this is the earlier one, and this is obviously from Jerusalem, and so it's written from a center of rabbinic thought, and it's influential on the second one that comes after.
So, you have the Jerusalem Talmud, 350, 400 AD, it's compiled and records the kind of debates outlined that I just talked about, and the answers given by Jews who were still in Israel mostly.
In 500 AD, there comes about another Talmud called the Talmud Bavili, the Babylon Talmud.
These are recordings from the Jews who were already in the Exodus, so they're in Babylon at that time, about 500 AD.
And modern Jews learn both the Jerusalem and the Babylonian Talmud, although the Babylonian is given more emphasis.
And that's typically thought because they were in exile at the time.
So it's more relevant to Jews that are in the United States or in Europe that they're exiled the same way Jews in Babylon were when they compiled that.
I think also we don't have a complete record of the Jerusalem Talmud.
Yes, correct.
There's little bits of it that are left off.
They apparently mostly align.
So this would be like we have textual differences or whatever.
So apparently there's a lot of agreement, not major differences between the two.
So, you have two different ones.
The authority of the Gemara.
So, then this is the commentary upon the oral tradition, which is then the debates on the actual law of Moses.
The authority of the Gemara is also debated.
And it is of note to mention it took hundreds of years after its publication for everyone to fully accept it.
Like the Mishnah, a potential answer is that because at this point everybody had accepted it tacitly and that gives it power.
Others say it was a very real rabbinic conference that gave it authority.
So, a lot of rabbis got together.
They said this is the authoritative commentary upon the commentary upon the law.
And that's what basically gave it authority.
Nate, for anyone watching, you can take a look at this graph.
I think this is really helpful to kind of see what's being layered on top of what God originally gave at Sinai.
So you have the Tanakh.
I mentioned that for Christians, that's the Old Testament, the Old Testament that precedes the New.
The Tanakh, you could split it.
They split it into three portions the Pentateuch, that is the law, the first five books of the Bible.
Then you have the prophets, and you have the writings.
On top of the law, Torah, the Pentateuch, you have that oral tradition that's been passed down.
And the Talmud is what's Is composed of the Mishnah, that's that codified oral tradition, and then the commentary upon that.
And then the Talmud itself.
There are two different variations of it the Babylonian Talmud and the Jerusalem Talmud.
Very long, something like 5,000 pages in total.
Long, meandering.
Most of the Babylonian one is written in Aramaic, although there's parts of it that are Hebrew in some sources.
I think a lot of the Mishnah is actually in Hebrew.
So you have different language barriers because Hebrew has no punctuation.
Like it's just sentences upon sentences upon sentences.
5,000 pages of it.
And that's the Talmud.
Do you have a sense of whether or not modern day rabbinic Judaism refers back to the Old Testament as we have it, or is it more referring primarily to the Talmud?
So, within the Talmud itself, it does make a lot of sense, there's graphs out there of like the different references, and you'll see this in some portions I'm about to read that they'll frequently have callbacks to the prophets and to Zechariah.
And so, most certainly, it is true that within Talmudic Judaism, going back, and you're asking about today in Orthodoxy, Within Talmudic, there is definitely a reference and a type of reliance.
Now, however, it's very spurious.
It's very like, hmm, should the Sanhedrin make policy?
They say, well, hey, here's a psalm that says this.
Like, even the written one, there's a psalm where one of the rabbis read it and he said, I think this is the time.
This psalm is the verse I think justifies writing it down, even though it's already been oral.
And so there certainly is some reliance in the Old Testament within the written tradition leading up to it.
As far as actually Orthodox, of all the content that I've read, different content I've consumed, I'm about to play a clip from like just a modern practicing Orthodox Jew today.
I have seen very, very, very, very little actual going back to the Old Testament and saying, we do this because this verse in Leviticus, we do this because of this precept in the law, et cetera.
I had one other quick question.
When the Pharisees were giving their interpretations in the time of Christ, it sounds like what you're saying is their citations of previous rabbis, because that tradition started pre Christ, right?
The oral tradition.
A couple hundred years.
That would not have been written down yet, right?
So they were memorizing that, and the common man would have really had no ability to verify or check or even learn those things apart from sitting under some rabbi and devoting your life to learning the oral tradition.
Is that right?
Yep.
That's absolutely correct.
It's a huge change in Jewish theology when a couple hundred years after the dispersed, after the end of the temple, when they're literally like, we're losing the oral tradition.
We're forgetting it.
If people are coming up, it's like telephone, you know, like across a hundred years, we thought we had this.
And then there's two different conflicting ones.
But exactly to your point, you would have Torah, certainly that would be written.
But then the oral tradition was memorized.
I literally like these rabbis, these Pharisees, they're memorizing it and they're trying to pass it down.
But no one else had access to that.
You'd have to be a teacher to have access to.
The authoritative inspiration and commentary and explanation of the law itself.
Let's, if we can, let's go ahead and show this video and just give the audience just a little taste.
Just a little taste of modern Judaism, you know, the serious ethical questions that they're dealing with in our time today.
Yes.
So this is, there's tons of pages out there like this.
This is not like, I was stomping on you.
You didn't cherry pick it.
I don't have an axe, you know, and I'm in the mines, like digging, like, where is this?
Like, this is stuff you'll just run across organically.
There's a big page, I think it's like Moses and.
Zipporah, where she asks him, I'm an Orthodox Jew, how do I turn lights on on Sabbath?
And they actually like, well, actually, the light has to stay on.
What you can do is you can turn something so it reveals a light or turn it like this so it turns off.
There's Sabbath mode so the oven's always on.
So there's lots of pages like that.
This is one of the ones that's very academic, very so and so said so and so.
But this is a homily on Sabbath, right?
This is not.
This is a question and answer.
Okay.
So we're going to play a question and answer based on, I think it's Passover and then Sabbath because this year, literally this year, 2025, Sabbath and Passover fell on the same thing.
So there's huge questions.
What do I do with the meal, the bread, what time, this side or the other?
So we'll play this clip.
Erev Pesach will fall on Chavez.
Let's say a person is planning on eating kidneys, egg matzah.
What time does he have to eat them until?
Again, a person can eat the egg matzah until the same time that he'd eat chomets.
Same with kidneys, which in New York is about 10 20, according to the Magna of Rum, or 10 40 according to the Dol Nagon.
So whatever time it is that normally he would make sure to stop eating chomets, you shouldn't eat.
kidneys, beans, legumes, corn, you shouldn't eat after that time and same is true for egg matzah.
There's a regular matzah, there's a prohibition of eating matzah on Ere Pesach.
Some include that night before as well.
Some permit eating it on Friday night.
Certainly all agree that on Ere Pesach one may not eat matzah until the Seder.
If a person's eating bread, they have to make sure to finish the bread by 1020 or 1040, depending on which time they go with.
They can continue eating the meal afterwards and make a bench later, but the bread should be stopped by 1020 or 11.
Because Passover falls on Sunday, you have to stop eating the bread, then you have to do it.
If you're in New York, it's 10 40.
On Friday.
On Friday.
Yeah.
But 10 20 in other places.
And some, right, some would say Friday, some would say otherwise.
There's more videos, I didn't dialogue them, but one question was like, I have to say a bracha, a blessing upon bottled water.
So I take a bottle of water.
Does the bracha last throughout the day?
If I take the bottle and I take it to work, does it have to do it in your car?
You go to work with your water.
Exactly.
So you fill up a water, you say a prayer over it, a blessing over it, you take the bottle, you put it in your car, and you go to work.
Well, is it the same water bottle?
And so scholars have debated this.
Some would say 40 minutes.
So, as long as you're taking a sip every 40 minutes, it's the same drink.
It's been blessed.
It's been blessed.
That's about the time it takes to digest.
So, if it's longer, you might have to say an additional bracca over it.
And I mean, to infinity, like meat and cheese.
Some homes, we were talking about this earlier, they have two sinks so that they can wash dairy dishes and meat dishes because dairy and meat can't mix.
You can't boil a kid in its mother's milk.
Exactly.
And what that comes in is if you wash with cold water, you accidentally mix them, but you wash with cold water, well, you're okay.
But if you wash with hot water and some of the food from the top plate that had the meat got down to the dairy, It might get cooked and get dairy, and then you have to go to your rabbi.
And it's just layers upon layers upon layers upon layers.
In New York City, don't they have like cables that run like as a border around the city so that they're able to move about in the city?
So, certain enclosed spaces you can do different things on Sabbath, Shabbos.
And so, in New York City, there's lots of Jews that live there.
There's a wire encircling a huge portion of Manhattan.
So, then that space technically counts as inside your home.
And I've seen videos too where some of them will say a stroller can technically count as inside your home.
So, different things that you can do if you put your hands in and work your phone in your stroller versus have them out.
And then, same thing for you in New York.
Normally, if you're outside of your home, you can't do X or Y or Z.
But technically, because you're in your home, you can use transportation or an elevator or this or that or the other.
And I have a point to all of this.
I was talking to Michael before we started, but there's a reason I think when Jesus shows up on the scene, it's not as though he shows up and it's like, all right, what's the threat?
Now it doesn't appear to be Islam.
You know, we've got 500 years till Muhammad crawls out of a cave.
It doesn't appear to be, you know, Buddhism.
Looks like the threat here is Pharisaicalism.
Let's have at it.
I guess this is what we're dealing with in our time.
I think there's a real perpetual threat.
A real threat to true religion is the self righteousness and the self justification that continually falls back on, well, I did this and so and so said this and I'm not really to blame and I did my part.
The greatest threat to true religion, to true worship of God, is a lack of faith.
And instead of saying, I'm trusting in Christ, I'm trusting in God, I'm not going to justify myself, I'm not going to explain myself.
What Judaism does, and you hear it as they cite their scholars, they cite their rabbis, as they're trying to build this airtight case no, no, no, no, I'm righteous.
Like, I think in the last day, you'll have many Jews and they'll be cast into judgment.
They'll be like, What gives?
I kept every Sabbath, I stayed inside, I didn't boil a kid in its mother's milk, I didn't accident Y, didn't Z. You owe me.
I behaved, I performed, I did all of this.
You owe me for how I did.
Whereas it's true religion and it's true faith that says, I'm owed nothing.
And it's grace that has been given to me that I'm actually off the hook.
And I offer back up that obedience.
I keep the Sabbath.
We all keep the Sabbath.
Now, that's Sunday, Resurrection Sunday, the Lord's Day, but we keep it out of thanks for the day of rest that God has given us and in remembrance of Christ, not a you owe me for this.
At the end of the day, hey, hey, hey, I've got 500 Sabbaths that I was good on.
And that's a real difference between a man centered religion, religion centered on man, and a religion towards God.
Right.
Yeah.
Within Judaism, the Sabbath is something to keep and, uh, And it's basically with each passing Sabbath, you're working, you know, the God of the universe further and further into your debt by accumulating your moral capital, you know, by keeping the Sabbath and the things you observe and the things that you do, the things you accomplish.
Whereas the Christian Sabbath, you know, we believe, and this isn't just some hangover from, you know, a sun god, you know, some false religion.
It's also not just some, you know, conspiracy from Constantine.
But Christians for 2,000 years have practiced the Christian Sabbath on the first day of the week, the Lord's Day, the Christian Sabbath, by virtue of Jesus and his resurrection, that he rose from the dead on the first day of the week and appeared to the apostles.
And then a week later, also on Sunday, the first day of the week, he appeared to the apostles again when Thomas was with him.
Even the apostle Paul says in one of the Pauline epistles, when you gather together on the first day of the week, that this is the day that you should take an offering.
And it's implicit in the text that he's.
He's acknowledging, he's just assuming that Christians are gathering together on the first day of the week.
And there's something about that gathering that's unique because, you know, the apostolic texts say elsewhere, you know, that they were daily devoting themselves to the breaking of bread and to prayer and to the apostles' teaching.
And so I take that to mean like an organic gathering of Christians that's not formalized, but that's just that Christians were sticking together and they were spending daily time together in discipleship.
So this is, you know, it's two or three families that are getting together.
And the breaking of bread in this instance is not a reference to the Lord's Supper, to the communion meal, but it's more indicative of a potluck.
It's Christian hospitality.
So there's two or three families that are getting together on a daily basis, think, for lack of a better phrase, a small group or a discipleship group.
And so that was a daily occurrence, but that's not what Paul's referencing when he talks about this special gathering that's happening on the first day of the week where they're taking an offering for a church in another location where they were oppressed and persecuted and poor and had need of financial assistance.
And so, daily, yes, there are individual, organically individual families, a few families that are coming together as discipleship, organic discipleship groups that are not taking the Lord's Supper, but rather just sharing a meal, a potluck, hospitality together, and are talking about theology and doctrine like we do still to this day, you know, with members in our church getting together on a Tuesday night, having them in our home to share a meal, talking about the Lord, talking about the apostles' teaching.
The Christian Sabbath Renewed00:05:23
We still do this as Christians 2,000 years later, talking about the New Testament, talking about theology.
And spending some time together in prayer and sharing a meal together.
So that's just basic Christianity that the saints love being with each other and being in fellowship and relationship and community with one another.
But the Apostle Paul specifies, and by way of implication, he assumes that there's a special, more formal gathering that's happening on the first day of the week, which happens to be the same day that the Lord Jesus was raised from the dead and the same day that a week later he appeared to the apostles.
And so Jesus, who himself claims to be the Lord of the Sabbath, he doesn't come to abolish or remove the Sabbath.
But rather, Jesus, who's Lord of the Sabbath, that means he has authority over the Sabbath.
Jesus, who is Lord of the Sabbath, does not remove the Sabbath, but rather renews, not removes, but renews the Sabbath from the last day of the week to the first.
And all that back to Wesley's gospel presentation that was very good, by the way.
There's gospel indicatives baked in even to the Christian Sabbath being renewed to the first day of the week by virtue of the Lord Jesus and his resurrection.
And what those indicatives are, the implications of this, Is that under the old covenant, the Sabbath came in many ways as a reward for six days of labor?
So, for the first six days of the week, people are working hard as unto the Lord, and then they are given this privilege and a gift, a reward in a sense, of six days of work.
And now, on the seventh, as a response to the six days that are initial of working, now on the seventh, they're being rewarded with a day of rest.
But under this gospel age in the new covenant, That's reversed and flipped on its head.
Now we don't receive the Sabbath, a day of rest, as a reward for our labor, but instead we begin our week.
The foundation of the Christian life.
The first day of the week now is a day of resting in free grace that's afforded to us by the Lord of the Sabbath, the Lord Jesus Himself.
And so we have Resurrection Sunday, the Lord's Day, the Christian Sabbath, a day of rest that begins our week rather than finishing it.
And so we're not given rest as a reward for labor, but rather we're from a place of rest.
We begin with rest, begin with grace, begin with the gospel.
And then our labor now is a response of gratitude, not meriting the rest that comes in Christ.
But a response of gratitude for the free gift of grace and rest that we receive first.
It's 1 John 4 19.
We love, but we do so as a response of gratitude because he first loved us.
So it's Christ giving us rest because of his work that's finished, and we begin our week in that.
So even a picture of the gospel comes with the Christian Sabbath being the first day of the week.
And so all these things, the difference between Christianity and Judaism. Is incredibly stark.
These aren't two sister religions, parallel religions with overlap and a lot of things that we share in common.
Judeo Christianity.
Judeo Christianity is a false religion.
There's no such thing as Judeo Christianity.
That would be like saying Antichrist Christianity.
Right.
Judaism is founded on a rejection of Jesus.
And so to say, like, oh, well, you know, like the West in America, you know, was built on Antichrist Christianity, Antichrist Christianity.
That's, I mean, that's an oxymoron.
That's, that's, Preposterous.
So, Christianity and Judaism are not parallel.
They don't share things in common.
They're not sister religions or a set of similar values and virtues.
Judaism is wholly opposed and hostile towards Christianity.
It is the reverse, in many cases, the absolute opposite perversion and reverse of Christianity.
It denies grace, it denies the gospel, it denies Christ.
And so, yes, as Christians, we do believe we are Sabbatarian.
We believe that there is a Christian Sabbath that's been practiced for 2,000 years, really, until.
Recently, all the guys who are anti-Sabbatarian within Christianity, that is a novel position, much like dispensationalism and Zionism, I might add.
But that's a novel position that really didn't exist until really the last century, the last hundred years.
But for 1900 years running, within every single wing of Christian thought, they were Sabbatarian.
But even the Sabbath was directly opposite to the Jewish Sabbath.
It's the first day of the week, it's beginning in gospel and grace and rest.
And then working as a response of gratitude for the free grace we've already received rather than receiving that as a reward because we merited it by our labor.
Judaism is a wholly other, not wholly H O L Y, but W H.
It's entirely other religion.
Let's hit our last commercial break and we'll be right back.
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Who Is My Neighbor Book00:11:56
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So I want to get into a couple of the actual teachings, and we'll have to do a full series, all of the different.
There's a lot in there.
There's 5,000 pages.
It's meandering.
But I want to isolate one kind of string and stream of thought that runs through Jewish consciousness.
And this matters not just for, well, Orthodox rabbinic Jews believe this.
Like, well, actually, no.
This is a thought that shaped a people for at least 2,000, if not more years.
And that's a very strong sense of narcissism that we are what matters.
I'm going to read a quote here.
This is from Al Goldstein.
This is the Jewish man that made pornography mainstream in the United States.
And he was asked in a book, he said, By another Jew, do you believe in God?
Goldstein said, I believe in me.
I'm God.
Screw God.
God is your need to believe in some super being.
I am the super being.
I am your God.
Admit it.
And I'm going to pick up on this in a passage from the Talmud.
We're going to play a quick clip here, too.
So this is another rabbi, and he's talking about the Jewish people.
Listen to what he says.
You guys are worshiping one Jew.
That's a mistake.
You should be worshiping every single one of us because we all die for your sins every single day.
And that's exactly.
What's going on here?
We're all God's firstborn.
We're dying for your sins right now because the Jewish people in the land of Israel are the bulwark against the orcs.
A little self important, don't you think?
You should be worshiping us.
Yes, because we're dying for your sins.
We're important.
The interpretation of Isaiah 53 is why we've heard this.
That is the interpretation about the prophecy about Christ.
I mean, how do you get around it?
The suffering servant, the innocent lamb who, by his stripes, we are healed.
Do you know what the Jewish interpretation of that passage is?
It's Israel, Jews are the suffering servants.
That we're the ones that are afflicted, we're the ones that are innocent, have all these transgressions laid on us, and we're the ones literally because it can't be about Christ, right?
And obviously, you know, it's not about someone so far in history.
Well, who is it?
Who is the suffering servant?
They literally, many of them say us, the Jews, throughout history, they're perpetual suffering.
Yep.
I'm going to read a quote.
This is from uh, Gittin 57a, the William Davidson Talmud.
This is one we cite a lot.
So, this is talking about Jesus of Nazareth, and uh, obviously, now, of course, believe it or not, you know, two Jews, three opinions.
There's debate over who this actually refers to, but I'm going to read it at length because it highlights some of that thing that I just said there.
And it also, you'll see the language in it.
So I'm going to do my best to kind of self censor.
If you got kids, you know, maybe just for the next two minutes or so, turn the volume down.
But this is what it says.
So the Gemara relates this is saying this is commentary, top of the Mishnah, top of the Torah.
The Gemara relates Onakelos bar Kalinikos, the son of Titus's sister, wanted to convert to Judaism.
He went and raised Titus from the grave through necromancy and said to him, Who is the most important in that world where you are now?
So in the realm of the dead, These raised Titus through necromancy.
Who is most important?
Titus said to him, The Jewish people.
Oncellus answered, Should I then attach myself to them here in this world?
Titus said to him, Their commandments are numerous, and you will not be able to fulfill them.
It is best that you do as follows Go out and battle against them in that world, and you will become the chief, as it is written, Her adversaries have become chief.
Lamentations 1 5, which means anyone who distresses Israel will become the chief.
Oncellus said to him, What is the punishment of a man?
A euphemism for Titus himself.
So he's saying, What's your punishment, Titus, in the next world?
Titus said to him, That which he decreed against himself as he undergoes the following.
Every day his ashes are gathered, and they judge him, and they burn him, and they scatter him over the seven seas.
Onkelos went and raised Balaam from the grave through necromancy.
He said to him, Who is most important in that world where you are now, the realm of the dead?
Balaam said to him, The Jewish people.
Onkelos asked him, Should I then attach myself to them here in this world?
Balaam said to him, You shall not seek their peace or their welfare all the days.
Deuteronomy 23, 7.
Onkelos said to him, What is the punishment of that man, Balaam, in the next world?
Balaam said to him, He is boiling in.
I literally, I'm just not even going to say the word here.
Nasty substance as he caused Israel to engage in licentious behavior with the daughters of Moab.
All right, pay attention.
Onkelos then went and raised Jesus the Nazarene from the grave through necromancy.
Onkelos said to him, Who is the most important in that world where you are now?
He's asked this question three times.
Jesus said to him, The Jewish people.
Onkelos asked him, Should I then attach myself to them in this world?
Jesus said to him, Their welfare shall you seek, their misfortune you shall not seek.
For anyone who touches them, That is the Jewish people, is regarded as if he were touching the apple of his eye.
Onkelos said to him, What is the punishment of that man?
And that's a euphemism for Jesus himself in the next world.
Jesus said to him, He is punished with boiling excrement.
As the Master said, Anyone who mocks the words of the sages will be sentenced to boiling excrement.
And commentary on this, because Jesus mocked the Pharisees, that's also considered to be a reference to him.
He mocked the wisdom of the sages.
He did this.
This is his punishment that he's receiving.
As the Master said, Anyone who mocks the words of the sages will be sentenced to boiling excrement.
And this was his sin as he mocked the words of the sages.
The Gemeric comments, the commentary in the commentary, come and see the difference between the sinners of Israel and the prophets of the nations of the world.
As Balaam, who was a prophet, wished Israel harm, whereas Jesus, the Nazarene, who was a Jewish sinner, sought their well being.
There's minimalist and maximalist interpretations.
Minimalist minimizes all references that we say this is not about Jesus.
This is not about Christianity.
Because a lot of the Talmud, again, is being compiled as the Christian empire is beginning to be assembled.
So some would say this is not in reference whatsoever.
I look at it, I say yes.
But here's the deal Does it really, literally matter?
Let me give one more quote from the Talmud.
And this is just.
Keep it down if you've got kids.
So, Ray Ashaya, so another rabbi commentating, raised an objection to the opinion of Ray from the Mishnah.
With regard to an adult male who engages in relations with a minor girl less than three years old, or a minor boy less than nine years old, who engage in relations with an adult woman, or a woman who is ruptured by wood or any other foreign object, their marriage contract for each of these women is 200 dinars.
This is the statement of Rabbi Mir.
And the rabbis say, and it continues on and on and on.
And this is the book.
This is the book that has shaped Jews for 2,000 years.
This is the commentary, the meandering, the back and forth.
And then you get to Brooklyn.
Oh, we found a tunnel, and my goodness, there's kid sized mattresses with stains.
Like, this is the ethos, the thought that has shaped them to where they get to where they are now.
They're not our friends.
They're not our allies.
Israel is not best buds with us.
As far as Christians go, we would say this about Muslims, we would say this about Buddhists, and we say this about Hindus.
Jews are our enemy.
For the sake of the gospel, they are our enemy.
And they're doing damage to Christendom.
There's lots of enemies, to be fair, to Christendom.
But there is one enemy that's done a lot of damage.
I think the thing to take away from this is the idea that Christians have a duty to have a, and I'll say it differently the idea that Christians have been trained to see the Jews and Judaism in particular.
As a sibling religion, right?
Where, you know, I might look very much like my father, might look a little bit like my cousin, right?
And so the idea that Judaism would be a religion of a family relation, a cousin or a brother, where there's, yeah, maybe we don't have the same exact biological father if it's my cousin, but there's a family resemblance and a congeniality between the two that ought to be preserved.
And the religion of Judaism is, like you say, Wes, it is a complete departure from the Old Testament.
And as such, one of the things I was going to mention earlier is I think the Apostle Paul, when he wrote Hebrews, he points out over and over and over again that the contrast between what the Christians at that time who were tempted to go back to Judaism were facing was literally not a contrast between two faiths.
It was a contrast between faith in Christ or reliance on self, which God hates.
Right.
And so the idea that we have a kind of congenial, long lost cousin relationship with Judaism is this.
This took me a long time to kind of get through my head.
As a lot of people, it takes a long time to get through their head as well, which is why I'm saying it kind of, you know, dispassionately.
But it is something that Christians have to realize.
This is not a family.
Relationship of we're cousins religiously with the Jews.
It's not that at all.
Big Brothers holding out on coming to the US.
We have no problem saying this about Islam or some other religion.
We would say this is anathema.
This is contrary to the gospel at its core in every single way.
Evangelicals are perfectly fine with recognizing Islam as an enemy, an enemy of the West, an enemy of Christianity.
But for some reason, they always carve out.
Not for some reason.
I mean, expensationalism and Zionism.
Right.
Yeah, no, you're right.
So there are theological reasons.
And false teachings that carve out some kind of subcategory, Christian adjacency for Judaism, where there is no such carve out for Islam.
But in addition to that, I also think part of it is also looking at the destruction that has taken place with Islam.
So it's a lot easier for evangelicals to say, well, look at what Muslims are doing in England with RAPE.
Or what they did in Spain.
Yeah, exactly what they did.
Yeah.
Or let's look at 9 11.
And I understand that 9 11 is extremely complicated, and who actually is the culprit there?
Who is celebrating what happened?
Well, yeah.
Jews were celebrating when it happened.
But I'm just saying, but for the normie, right?
So I'm not saying this is necessarily exactly my position on 9 11.
Maybe we'll do an episode on that someday.
But for the normie evangelical, it's like, well, look at what Muslims did in our own country just a couple decades ago.
And so.
So there's all these, you know, whether it's Spain, whether it's England, whether it's 9 11, you know, it's Muslims, Muslims, Muslims.
And hear me, like, I think Muslims hate the West.
I think that Muslims hate Christianity, you know, and there may be some Muslim that listens to this and says, well, I don't.
Modern Evangelicals Look to Israel00:15:39
That's not true.
You know, that's just Muslim extremists.
You know, that's Islamic extremism.
No, that's Islamic faithfulness.
Yeah, you're a bad Muslim.
You're just a bad Muslim.
That's right.
That's absolutely right.
You know what America is called in the Middle East?
It's called the Great Satan.
Yeah, yeah.
So, are there millions and millions of peaceful Muslims?
Yes, there are millions and millions of compromised Muslims, apathetic Muslims, half hearted Muslims.
Of course, there are.
Inconsistent Muslims.
Yeah, inconsistent Muslims.
So, of course, there are peaceful Muslims.
There are peaceful Muslims insofar as there are compromised Muslims.
But the Muslims who are extreme are really just faithful to the Islamic text, they're being faithful to the Quran.
They're carrying out jihad.
And how do we know?
Because Christians have been willing to take the time to look at what their sacred text says.
Right about slaying the infidel and all these things, so that like what we've done, all I'm saying is I'm just simply advocating that the same process that we've employed when it comes to Islam and taking the time to read the Quran and to see, oh wow, okay, um, this is what Christians should be willing to do with the Talmud, this is what we should be willing to do with Judaism.
And over the centuries, there have been various times and places and countries and nations that have done just that, that they've taken the time to actually read what the Talmud says.
The reformers were known for as they wanted to get back to the scripture and they were breaking away from Roman Catholicism and the Vulgate, which was the Septuagint, but kind of twisted into the Latin and perverting, twisting some scriptures and actually changing what the Bible said.
As they were trying to get back to the original manuscripts and texts, they needed to be able to read the Hebrew.
They knew Greek, but they needed to be able to read Hebrew and they were trying to do exegetical work and translating the Bible into the modern tongue.
And so they sought out Jewish rabbis to help them.
Toward that end.
And there were some Jewish rabbis who were willing to help.
But as they taught them how to read and write and speak in Hebrew, eventually some of these Christian theologians went and began to now know how to read Hebrew.
They had Jews that were living in their settlements and in their countries and in their societies.
And so they were like, wait, well, I'm curious, what did the Jews believe?
And so they started, now that they knew how to read in Hebrew, they started reading the Talmud.
And there are several occasions that upon learning Hebrew from Jewish rabbis and then reading the Talmud, All of a sudden, they decide, hey, you know what?
We're going to kick out the Jews.
We don't want to part ways here.
We're going to part ways.
Yeah.
Like, oh my goodness, that's in the Talmud.
The Talmud says, what?
No, you guys don't get to live here.
And so, my point in all this is, and I've said it before, but I'm going to say it again because I really do think that it's true.
I'm not saying it's universally true, but I think it's generally true.
And there is a difference, okay?
Not universally every single Jew or every single Muslim for that matter, but a general truth.
All the destruction that you've seen from Islam.
You do need, I think you do need to draw a correlation and at least attach some of that destruction that is the doing of Islam.
It is.
So I'm not trying to let, like, let's let Muslims off the hook.
No, no, no.
They are responsible.
But I would like for you to share some of that moral responsibility with Judaism.
Not each and every, universally, each and every Jew.
But there's an old saying that Islam is the broom of Judaism.
And I think that that saying is, again, not universally, For each and every individual Muslim and each and every individual Jew, but I think it's generally true.
And what I mean by that is, in many cases, Jews who have achieved political office and high positions in various Western countries are the ones who statistically vote lockstep.
They vote the most ardently towards poorest boers, open society.
80% for Kamala this past election.
80% for Kamala this past election.
And so it has been in many cases in Western countries.
Christian countries, or at least previously Christian countries, it is a bunch of white guys who aren't Jewish who suck.
There's plenty of those.
So we're not saying, you know, that Joe Biden.
Yeah, Joe Biden, right?
He's not Jewish as far as we know.
You know, I'd be interested to see a 23andMe test on Joe Biden, you know, but I think that there might be, you know, there could be a little Ashkenazi in there, but I'm being facetious.
Joe Biden, as far as we know, is not a Jew.
And yet he absolutely hates Christ, hates Christianity, hates the Catholic Church, which he claims to be a part of, and hates the West and hates America.
And all of his policies display that.
Overtly.
So I'm not saying it's just the Jews.
Maybe the easiest way I could say it is like this Not all Jews are sinister, deceitful civil officers in Western countries destroying the nation.
So if you look to Jews, you would not see every Jew doing this politically to America.
But if you look to the civil officers themselves, you will find a lot of Jews.
Right.
I'll say that again.
So you look to Jews, a million Jews, you're not going to find that even 50% of them, or even close, or even 10% of them, are sitting in Congress.
If we love in banging the door.
Okay.
Yeah.
But the point is, you look to Jews and you don't find, oh, it's 50% of Jews are sitting as civil officers in America destroying the country.
But you look to the civil officers in America destroying the country and you will find a lot of Jews.
And especially if you look per capita, And start thinking, but there's only this small percentage of Jews that even are here in America.
Oh my goodness, but it's this percentage in Congress and this percentage, and you know.
And so I think there is a general, not universal, but general truth that Islam is the broom of Judaism.
And again, what I mean by that is that Jews often don't do the overt destruction, but they do the subvert destruction.
Judaism has been, this isn't all Jews, again, but Judaism has been very subversive.
Whereas Islam has been an overt enemy of Christian Western nations, Judaism has been a subversive enemy.
And often what it does is it doesn't light the city on fire, but it opens the door and holds the door open for the Muslims who then come in and light the city on fire.
And so my point is this.
Both from a theological standpoint, just like you would read the Quran and say, This is wicked, you should be able to read the Talmud and say, This is wicked.
So, theologically, Judaism is not Christian adjacent.
It is no closer to Christianity than Islam is.
And so, theologically, on the merits of the actual sacred text, these are not our.
I've read excerpts of both the Quran and the Talmud.
The Quran is slop that can be wrong.
It's terrible.
It's not as bad as the Talmud.
The Talmud is much more wicked in proportion.
Yeah, in terms of.
Perversion, and also, of course, its view of Christ, right?
So, within Islam, honors him as a failed prophet.
Exactly.
So, within Islam, like Jesus is, you know, he's a decent guy.
He's a decent guy.
You know, he's not God, but he's a decent guy.
Within Judaism, it's not just that he's not the son of God, he's not divine, but he is also not a decent guy.
And so, on the merits of the sacred text themselves and the theology of Islam and Judaism, Judaism is no closer to Christianity than Islam, and you can maybe even make an argument that it's further away.
But I think a lot of evangelicals, you know, still have this fondness for Judaism and Israel that they don't have for Islam.
And so that's so getting away from the theological merits, but getting to the experience.
What have they done?
I think that that's one of the ways where a lot of modern evangelicals will look to Judaism, look to Israel, and say, well, Israel, you know, as far as we know, you know, the Norway version, Israel's not flying planes into, you know, the two towers.
You know, Israel is not.
Is not trying, you know, saying death to America, you know, in their videos like ISIS, you know, or something like that.
And that's true.
But Israel is in very many ways, and you have to recognize this, they are opening the door to a third world invasion, to an Islamic invasion.
They don't invade, but they open the door for those who do.
And there are direct correlations that you can look through history of, oh man, it was in large part, not exclusively, but in large part, it was Jewish influence.
That took this Christian Western nation and made it vulnerable to the Middle East and Islamic powers.
And so it's worth acknowledging.
That quote that Islam is the broom of Judaism, that was, by the way, a quote from a Jewish rabbi.
That was not something that Joel made up on the spot.
Right.
That was a quote from Jewish rabbi David Tauatau.
There you go.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, you can maybe hear, pick up on the mics here.
Um, we've got five little people that are very loud, namely my little people with little hats.
No, no tiny hats, not in this family.
As for me, in my house, we we love the Lord Jesus Christ.
Um, but yeah, my kids are home and uh, they're loud and ready to hang out with their dads.
So, Wes, you outlined the episode.
This is going to have to be a series because it's fascinating, it's vital, it's important.
There's a lot of deception, and just for the record, it's not even just like oh, we really got to pick on the Jews.
If if if we were living in a time of Christendom, Where the average Christian, 90% of Christians in America were saying Islam is pretty good.
Yeah, it's false, but it's pretty good.
And Muslims are our greatest allies in Afghanistan.
Yeah.
If that was it, then, dude, we would be talking about, you know, we'd be like, all right, we're going to have to do a 20 part series on why Muslims are not your friends.
And so it's not just, well, we think Judaism is so much worse than Islam.
We've already said, you know, on the textual basis, there is an argument to be made for why it is just as bad, if not worse.
But the main reason we're doing this is not because we're saying, Jews are worse than Muslims, worse than Hindus, worse than.
It's at the large part we're doing this because we think that that's the blind spot in the West.
We think that that's the average Christian's blind spot.
I'll connect this to 48 hours ago as of recording this.
Governor Greg Abbott is threatening to strip the city of San Marcos of millions of dollars worth of grants because they're considering the divestiture of $4.4 million that were in some type of Israeli defense or whatever.
They're considering taking that money, not investing it in Israel.
There's laws on the books that require that any business or state or city that does business with Texas has to, in writing, be clear and promise that they won't divest or boycott Israel.
As you literally have the governor of our state where we live, he said anti Israel policies are anti Texas policies.
Right.
Just insane.
Like, guys, this stuff matters.
People will be going to prison if you don't start now loud and clear.
We are Americans.
We are not greater Israel.
We are Christians, not Jews.
This is where we stand.
Like, this stuff matters.
Matters.
Right.
It matters for Christians.
This is going to be the fight potentially of our generation.
I think so.
Yeah.
It matters for Christians.
It matters theologically.
It matters for what's most important the ultimate, the eternal, heaven and hell, and what a person believes.
But it also matters politically for our nation.
We're not, America does not exist to shill for Israel.
And so when you have a governor saying anti Israel policies, and he's not talking about the city of San Marcos, you know, held a rally where everyone came out and was saying, Death to Israel.
We hate Jews.
We hate Jews.
No, no, no.
That's not what he's talking about.
He's talking about them, the city in Texas, not an Israeli city, a city in Texas simply removing from their books foreign aid to Israel.
I think they had a resolution in support of Palestine.
Don't love it.
Not great.
Taking the money away, resolution in support of Palestine.
But here's the thing they're both foreign nations.
So I don't love that either.
No, I like to keep the money for Texas.
So, yeah, you don't need a resolution for Palestine.
But that's where we're at, is where governors in America, you know, Allegedly, conservative states like ours are threatening using financial restraints and threatening their American states if they simply don't want to send money to Israel.
And so, yeah, this really is, I think, one of the premier issues.
I would put it right up, I don't think it's the issue, like the only issue.
But in the same way that, like, if you're like, man, they're talking about Jews again.
Put it in the same category as Zionism.
So, like, there are a few staples because we think they're widespread problems.
We think that feminism is rampant, that it's rampant, that it's a monster.
It's accumulated so much power.
It influences all of our policies, everything that we do.
We just did an episode on Wednesday where we were talking about the birth rate.
Like, we literally think feminism is.
Killing us.
It's literally killing us.
So, I'm not saying that Zionism is even more of a problem than that, but we're saying there are some issues, and we think feminism is one of them.
We think Zionism is one of them, and there's maybe a few other, but there are a handful of issues that we think are crippling the West, crippling Christianity, crippling churches, which that's what we care about most importantly, even more than America, is the Church of Jesus Christ, and where there's just an unusual blind spot, an unusual amount of ignorance.
And so those are issues that we're going to talk about.
A lot.
I mean, how many episodes have we done on masculinity, on patriarchy, on raising your tea levels?
And I think that this is similar.
Not enough.
Not enough.
We need to do more.
And this is similar.
It's similar in the sense that it's destructive, that it's demonic, that it's theologically twisting and obscuring.
But then it's also politically a huge threat to the West.
But then the last piece that I'm trying to draw.
Is also, um, it has an unusual amount for Christians in ignorance, right?
Right, so if everybody was aware of these things, which we were all there a few years ago, too, right?
So, like, during COVID, yep, you know, I did a ton of episodes about COVID, right?
Right, because a bunch of people were hoodwinked, and so, uh, so that when you're thinking, like, you know, um, well, what is there any uh guiding uh factor for what you guys you know choose to emphasize, and I would say, yeah, there is, and and it's uh What is most urgent?
What is most threatening?
And where is the average Christian the most blind?
Those are some factors that influence us in determining what we need to probably talk about a lot.
And this is one of those things.
Christianity Became Man00:03:26
So, our promise to you is we're not going to be unhinged.
We're not going to be hateful.
We're not going to be extreme.
But we are going to say things that, according to the ADL, and sadly, even according to the average evangelical, they will consider to be hateful and extreme.
But it's not.
These are basic views that Christians have held for centuries.
I mean, many, I won't say most, but there have been many Christian nations and societies where they said, we're going to treat Jews with respect, but they're not allowed to hold public office.
Samuel Rutherford.
Yeah, Samuel, like we're talking.
You don't get to hold office.
Yeah, you don't get to hold public office.
We're not going to, there are many Christians that wouldn't allow publicly for there to be a synagogue.
And there's a far cry between that and the final solution.
We're not talking about that, but we're talking about our Christian fathers and even our American Christian fathers and the views that they held.
And all we're saying is maybe they were onto something.
Maybe they were onto something.
And so I think that this is a series worthy topic, and we hope to investigate more of it and get deeper into it in the future.
So thank you guys for tuning in.
Let me end with this.
I'll just say the biggest tension between the two Christianity is a religion of faith.
And when we stand before God, we don't have, I did this, I performed, I kept the law.
The tradition said we have faith.
What do I have to offer?
You told me if I trusted in your son that you would forgive my sins.
The Jew does not have that.
And they've been shaped by, I have to be righteous, I have to justify myself.
The Christian doesn't have to do that.
And he rests in faith.
And in that regard, well said.
That's a great place to end.
In that regard, I just want to point out and broaden it just a little bit and say, in that regard, a religion of grace.
Versus a religion of merit and the works and traditions of men.
That's the difference between Christianity and every other religion.
Every other religion.
That's the difference between Christianity and Judaism.
It's the difference between Christianity and Islam and Hinduism.
That's the difference between Christianity and offshoots of Christianity, like Jehovah's Witness and Mormon.
Only historic Christianity, it's the only religion of free grace.
Yep.
It is.
And that's the beauty of the person work of Jesus in the gospel.
So if you're not a Christian, I implore you and plead with you to put your faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.
There's only one religion where their God, our God, became man.
Instead of just giving a path for man to become as God, God actually became man, lived a perfectly righteous life, and fulfilled all the law of God for you in your place, and then took upon himself your sin and paid for the wages of sin, which is death, the wrath of God, nailed to a tree, and then rose again on the third day and is now seated in heaven, praying on your behalf, interceding for you that more and more grace would be given to you so that you might live a life for him.
That's the Christian faith, and there is no other.
Nothing else is like that.
And Judaism will leave you high and dry, just like Islam, just like atheism, just like any other worldview.
So trust in Jesus and get plugged into a biblical church right away.
Thanks for tuning in, and we hope to see you again next time.