I think Messianics owe everything they have to the Church. The Bibles, concordances, dictionaries, the allegiance to Yeshua over the centuries even in times of persecution, the good works and charity, the faith of martyrs and saints who gave up everything to follow the Messiah. All this is the result of centuries of faithfulness and following when our Jewish forefathers were rejecting all of the above as a lie. The MJ movement is indebted forever to the faithfulness of the Gentiles.
What's more is this:
1Co 12:11-27 "All these are empowered by one and the same Spirit, who apportions to each one individually as he wills.
For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.
For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one bodyJews or Greeks, slaves or freeand all were made to drink of one Spirit. For the body does not consist of one member but of many.
If the foot should say, "Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body," that would not make it any less a part of the body.
And if the ear should say, "Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body," that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell?
But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, yet one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, "I have no need of you," nor again the head to the feet, "I have no need of you."
On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and on those parts of the body that we think less honorable we bestow the greater honor, and our unpresentable parts are treated with greater modesty, which our more presentable parts do not require. But God has so composed the body, giving greater honor to the part that lacked it, that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together. Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it."
It seems to me that being anti-Church is being anti-Christ's body.
Going over your post again and procesisng on it, I do think that part of the main reason why others assume that it's okay to be against the Church (and thus, by default, setting themselves against Christ whether they wish to acknowledge it or not) is due to the issue of having false views on what the Church and Christianity ever came to - some of this fleshed out more in threads such as
Messianic Heliocentrism
The Church and Israel - as the Apostles saw it - was never meant to be seen divorced from one another, even though it was intricate. Ethnic Israel (i.e. all Jews and those in the nation of Israel) weren't the same as God's Israel (i.e. Jews of the Remnant as well as Gentiles grafted in) - and although God had a plan to save Ethnic Israel, you needed to be a part of Remnant Israel to truly be secure....otherwise, folks would perish. Romans 11 and Romans 15 bear this out more in-depth.
Because Early Jewish believers (as you know) did not see the physical state of Israel in their day to be the Kingdom of God or God's Israel, they didn't get involved in the Revolts to liberate it - they understood how Yeshua meant what he said when saying "My Kingdom is NOT of this world - for if it was, my followers would fight for it."..during his conversation with Pilate. They had a mindset that understood the Kingdom of God would be brought to Earth in the future when the Messiah would come and reign.
Unfortunately, many aspects of Jewish culture miss that - similar to others today in many parts of the modern Messianic movement when assuming a "Kingdom Now"/"Dominionist" focus with the concept of Israel and who the Messiah was. With the
Bar Kokhba revolt when seeing the most reliable information on the fate of Jewish believers during the
revolt ... "the leader of the
revolt of the Jews, ordered
Christians only to be subjected to terrible punishments, unless they denied Jesus/blasphemed him" (
more discussed here for historical review). Some of this flowed out of the views others had even of Yeshua decades before..
For others wanted Yeshua to be political in taking a side against those they deemed to be the enemies of Israel - one of the reasons they felt physical action was necessary to honor the Lord. Historically, the First and Second Jewish Revolts were a disaster for God's people - as people often saw in Jesus a Davidic king, a military conqueror who would rescue them from the Romans (John 6:15; Acts 1:6)...but his kingdom was not the kingdom of the Zealot or the sword (Matt. 26:51-52), even though he had a Zealot disciple (Matt. 10:4). The Lord frequently commanded those he taught or healed not to tell anyone, possibly because they would misunderstand, given the political climate of the day (Mark 1:44, 7:36, 3:12, 5:43; Matt. 8:4, 9:30, 12:16; Luke 8:56). ...and when we remember how many messiahs proclaimed their message during this time, we can understand the uniqueness of Christ's message and the reticence of his audience.
... Jesus predicted the destruction that would result from the revolt (Matt. 24:1-2). ..and it led him to weep on one occasion as he described exactly what would happen (Luke 19:41-44) - noting for ALL Time that they would never see true security till they acknowledged/blessed Him. And it seems that Jesus was saddened because his fellow Jews looked for military solutions to their problems rather than spiritual ones....always looking to a political messiah rather than the Lamb of God. The Lord warned his followers not to take part in that method of bringing in God's kingdom, as the coming destruction was not God's judgment as much as it was the natural result of human beings seeking salvation through their own political and military might.
When seeing the ways that the views of Jewish believers in the Early Church led them to be involved but only so much in the affairs of the world, it's not a surprise that there were many bad things done - but that's consistent with the fact that they felt their faith required them to not be as involved as others would have liked them to be, in the same way others see Christianity today as when it comes to preaching the COMING Kingdom of God and preparing for it. Others say that this is "Escapist" - but the early Jewish believers felt that preaching the Gospel of SALVATION in Yeshua required noting that we're to always be ready for good works (Titus 3) while knowing that this world is passing away in preparation for another one.
The early believers had an apocalyptic faith inb multiple respects - and that's not new seeing that many Jewish sects (notably the Essenes) had something similar to a Preterist mindset while others had a combination of a Futurist/Preterist ideology ( more shared before
here and here in #
49/ #
118 ). Rabbinic Judaism (often considered to be THE definition of Judaism) was in many ways a totally new synthesis which borrowed from at least three different streams of Judaism which had emerged during the Second Temple period - Zadokite (covenantal) Judaism, Enochic (
apocalyptic) Judaism, and Sapiential (wisdom-based) Judaism. And The Essenes (possibly from Ossim, meaning Doers of Torah), who wrote or collected the Dead Sea Scrolls, pioneered certain aspects of this Way (Acts 6, Acts 4, etc.) over 150 years before the birth of Jesus. They were a wilderness (out in the Arava, near the Dead Seabased on Isaiah 40:3), baptizing (mikveh of repentance as entrance requirement into their fellowship), new covenant, messianic/apocalyptic group. They believed they were the final generation and would live to see the end and the coming of the Messiahs of Aaron and of Israel (priest and king). They saw themselves as the remnant core of Gods faithful peoplepreparing the Way for the return of YHVHs Glory (Kavod) as set forth in Isaiah 40-66. They too referred to themselves as the Way, the Poor, the Saints, the New Covenanters, Children of Light, and so forth.
Although they may have been isolationist from the world, the concept of seeing the coming of Israel connected with disconnecting from the world isn't new - and thus, when others assume Christianity chose to have no regard for Israel being brought together again, they have an error in thinking in forgetting that many camps of Judaism already had the same mindset - more on the issue found in good works such as
Apocalypticism in the Dead Sea Scrolls,,
Beyond the Veil of the Temple: The High Priestly Origin of the Apocalypses and
Prophecy and Apocalypticism: The Postexilic Social Setting.....or in books such as the
Apocalypse Against Empire: Theologies of Resistance in Early Judaism and
Roots of Rabbinic Judaism and
Beyond the Essene Hypothesis: The Parting of the Ways Between Qumran and Enochic Judaism by
Gabriele Boccaccini (one of the best scholars around) - the later work being about building his case on what the ancient records tell us about the Essenes and on a systematic analysis of the documents found at Qumran and showing that the Essene community at Qumran was really the offspring of the Enochic party, which in turn contributed to the birth of parties led by John the Baptist and Jesus.
Early Chistianity truly did much to spread the Gospel by the suffering it endured for centuries at the hands of imperial rulers - with them hoping for Israel to be regathered even as they faithfully suffered for the faith as the Apostles/Christ noted and realized that God's Kingdom would not be brought forth by might alone....and
this was kept in mind even into the era of Constantine when the followers of the Way were allowed to have freedom from persecution/develop more - leading to greater platforms to spread the Gospel around the world as it concerns salvation found in Yeshua and being a part of His Remnant.
They addressed many issues of their day in faithfulness to call of doing good works (Matthew 25, Luke 10:25-39, etc.) while also noting that the Messiah had yet to come and that his people should await him.
And thankfully, when it came to other issues harming the body of believers (such as dualism), Christianity was well positioned to address those issues as well as others plauging Greek culture. The dualism aspect was something that is highly fascinating seeing how those who were Hellenized Jews were amongst the first to address the issue - while also noting the ways dualistic thought could be altered in order to advance the faith. For the early Jewish Body of believers already held a
dualism of two powers (Christ and the devil) established by God.
In "The Johannine Community as Jewish Christians? Some Problems in Current Scholarly Consensus," Raimo Hakola relates how mainstream scholarship at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century saw behind the Gospel of John a community that had drifted away from its Jewish roots. Johannine features such as its christology, determinism, and dualism were understood as being part of the generalizing rubric of "Hellenism" and John was viewed by some as reflecting a time when the earlier conflicts between Hellenistic Christians and Jewish Christians were left behind and the separation of Christianity from Judaism had been completed. But with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls,
scholars reaffirmed the Jewishness of the fourth canonical Gospel and Certain features, such as John's dualism, could now be compared with the dualism of the sectarian Qumranites (e.g., the Community Rule).
Because Christian ideology was able to handle the dualism of the gnostics that claimed the physical world was of no consequenc and evil while the spirit was all that mattered, the Early Church was able to address the Gnostic heresies that occurred and damaged the message of the Gospel - especially those like Arianism or others claiming that Christ didn't really become a man or that He was only Spiritual/God and not tempted fully since (in their view) it was all an illusion. Ironically, some of those same views have infiltrated the Messianic Jewish world - under the guise of trying to combat Gnosticism even as they advocate a Gnostic worldview when claiming Christ wasn't divine..