If you interpret Acts 15 as ruling that Gentiles don't have to become Jews obey the Torah in order to become followers of Christ in spite of him spending his ministry teaching his followers how to follow it by example, then the point raised in Acts 15:1 would never have become an issue because there would be no point in trying to get Gentiles to obey the Torah if Jews were supposed to stop obeying it when they became a follower of Jesus. So there has historically been a form of Christianity that is compatible with Torah observance, there has historically been some Jews who have publicly or privately converted to Christianity who continued to be Torah observant in accordance with the example that Christ set for them to follow, though historically the roles became reversed where there where was pressure put some that they needed to cease being Jews and obeying the Torah in order to become followers of Christ.
From this article:
God Always Left a Remnant of Jewish Believers - ONE FOR ISRAEL Ministry
"Hegesippus was a Jewish Nazarene believer in the second century, and an early church historian. Although other early church leaders like Ignatius wrote against maintaining Jewish practice, Ignatius’ letters to the Philadelphian and Magnesian congregations shows that there were many Jewish people among them, some of whom had abandoned Jewish practices and others who had not.
Similarly, John Chrysostom’s anti-semitic writings indicate that there were Jewish believers in Yeshua still maintaining Jewish identity and the traditions of their ancestors well into the fourth century CE, much to his frustration. Epiphanius (303-403 CE), was the bishop of Constantia in Cyprus in his time, and though he was Jewish, he trained in monastic circles. By this time, the pressure on Jewish people who believed in Yeshua to identify only as “Christians” and to renounce their Jewish identity was extreme.
Saint Patrick (late 300s to 461 CE) is thought to have been a Messianic Jew, from a family who kept Jewish customs and lifestyle, like ritual purity traditions, celebrating Passover instead of Easter, and observing Shabbat. Attempts to edit his Jewish heritage out of the picture during a time of deep antisemitism in the church didn’t manage to cover the tracks completely.
The scant evidence of Jewish believers after the fourth century is due to the fact that the Jewish Messianic believers hid their Jewish identity, rather than ceased to exist. However, from the Middle Ages onwards, we see more and more evidence of Jewish people following Yeshua as their Messiah, especially in the last three centuries."
"Theodore John of Prague was a student and then teacher of Talmud and Rabbinic writings in Treves, Germany, but in 1692 declared his faith in Yeshua as Messiah, declaring “I found the said Christian faith to be in all its articles firmly grounded upon the Word of God, and agreeing with the faith of the former true Israel, in the time of the Patriarchs, as well as that of Moses and all the Prophets; which I praise God for, and heartily rejoice in.”[3]"
"Bob Dylan was born in 1941, originally named Robert Allen Zimmerman (Hebrew name Shabtai Zisl ben Avraham), and came to believe in Jesus in the 1970s. In 2011 he played in Tel Aviv and opened his set with the song, “Gonna Change My Way of Thinking” from his first openly Messianic album, with the lyrics, “Jesus is coming. He’s coming on back to gather his jewels”."
From:
A BRIEF LIST OF MOST FAMOUS MESSIANIC JEWS
"RABINOWITZ, Joseph ben David(1837-1899), Russian Orthodox (Chasidic) Rabbi of Kishinev in Bessarabia, Hebrew scholar and writer. After the pogroms of 1881, he sought a Jewish homeland to solve the Jewish dilemma. He arrived in Jerusalem in 1882, representing Russian Jews, and while standing on the Mount of Olives, overlooking Jerusalem, he realized that "Jesus, our brother" was the only solution. On returning to Kishinev in 1885, he established the first modern messianic congregation called "the First Assembly of the Israelites of the New Covenant." Talmudic scholar and lawyer Joseph Rabinowitz is baptized in 1885 and, through writings and sermons, begins influencing Russian Jews to become "Sons of the New Covenant." He draws up a list of 12 articles of faith, patterned after Maimonides's 13 principles, but proclaiming Jesus as the Messiah. He writes parables such as this one: "Two foolish people were traveling in a four-wheeled wagon. Noticing that the wagon was moving heavily, they examined it and found that a wheel was missing. One of the foolish people sprang out and ran forward along the road, saying to every one he met, 'We have lost a wheel. Have you seen one?' At last a wise man said to him, 'You are looking in the wrong direction. You should seek your wheel behind the wagon, not in front of it.' This is the mistake that Jews have been making all of these centuries. The four wheels of Hebrew history are Abraham, Moses, David, and Jesus. Jews have been looking into the future when they should have been looking into the past." He kept ties with many Christian denominations, but kept his congregation insulated from denominational controversies and maintained the Jewish feasts and order of service (Aron Kodesh, Shabbat, Hebrew siddur, brit milah, mikveh-baptism, prayers and preaching in Hebrew, Yiddish and Russian). However the Brit Hadashah became part of the Scriptures and verses concerning Yeshua adorned the walls, such as, near the Torah, "Messiah is the end of the law." He also maintained that all Jewish believers retained their Jewish identity although there is no difference between Jews and gentile believers. Most of his flock were victims of war and the Holocaust."
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LEVERTOFF , Paul Phillip (1878-1954): late 19th and early 20th century pioneering Hebrew-Christian scholar and leader. Born in Orsha, Belarus, as Feivel Levertoff, of a Sephardic background whose religious persuasion was Hassidic. Attended the Volozhin Yeshiva, a Lithuanian Jewish prominent Rabbinic seminary. He was baptized in 11 August 1895 in Königsberg, where he was pursuing University studies. Seeking employment as a missionary on 11 December 1896, he applied for a position with the London Jews Society (L JS). He was accepted and soon worked full time in his new vocation. In 1901, having joined the staff of the Hebrew Christian Testimony to Israel (HCTI), founded by David Baron and Charles Andrew Schönberger in 1893, he served as their principal translator and writer. He published numerous articles in the Scattered Nation between 1901-1909 and traveled throughout the Mediterranean as one the most active missionaries. [ Read more] Levertoff’s book on Jesus in Hebrew,
Ben ha-Adam, (“The Son of Man”) predated Joseph Klausner’s own book on Jesus,
Yeshu ha-Notsri, by over 17 years, which itself is generally considered the first book written on Jesus and Christianity’s early beginnings by a Jewish scholar in Modern Hebrew. It has been reprinted in Israel Jerusalem: Dolphin (1968). He also authored
Viduyei Augustinus ha-Kadosh (“The Confessions of St. Augustine”), the first translation into Hebrew of a major work by a Latin Church Father. In 1910, he was appointed as Evangelist in Constantinople by the United Free Church of Scotland Jewish Committee, met his Welsh future wife there, and returned to England where they got married. He was appointed to the position of teacher of Hebrew and Rabbinics with the Institutum Judaicum Delitzschianum (IJD), a postgraduate institute for Jewish missions founded by Franz Delitzsch in Leipzig, Germany. He relocated from Warsaw to Leipzig on 1 April 1912, to take over the teaching position at the IJD, which had been left vacant by the death of Jechiel Zebi Herschensohn-Lichtenstein. A year later, Levertoff and a colleague posthumously published Lichtenstein’s revised Matthew commentary in Hebrew. The IJD’s class schedules from 1912 to 1917 (published in its journal
Saat auf Hoffnung) have Levertoff teaching a variety of courses. He was commissioned by the University [of Leipzig] to write three books:
. The edition and German translation, with commentary, of the Pesikta Rabbati, a collection of ancient Synagogue homilies never before translated into any language, a German translation of the whole of the Palestinian Talmud [Talmud Yerushalmi], with commentary, “Die religiöse Denkweise der Chassidim” – the first systematic treatise on intellectual Jewish mysticism. The first and third of these works were produced, though, for lack of funds, only the third was published. The Talmud… never reached the public…[because of] the advent of a new “race-cultured” system in Germany… render[ed] its publication impossible. Levertoff eventually made an English adaptation of this third work that he later published as
Love and the Messianic Age. It was his attempt in exploring similarities between Hassidic and New Testament theology. Impoverisshed by WWI, Levertoff and his family returned to his wife’s native Wales, where, between 1919 through 1922, he held the position of librarian at St. Deiniol’s Library, Hawarden (Flintshire County). During this time, he was also ordained by the Archbishop of Wales into the Church of England. In 1923, he became Director of the East London Fund for the Jews and took over Holy Trinity, a church in Shoreditch while making his residence in Ilford. While in this position, he published the quarterly
The Church and the Jews. He followed in the tradition of Joseph Rabinowitz and Hayyim Yedidyah Pollak, to establish an independent community and congregation of Jewish believers. Levertoff appealed to “… those Jews who are not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ and of their Jewish origin … to unite as a community … and institute Jewish Christian services of worship which would present our Faith in terms of the rich background of devotional and mystical Jewish traditions.” To that end in 1925, Levertoff published his Hebrew liturgy
Meal of the Holy King. Levertoff read from a Torah scroll with tallit and kippah as part of the Hebrew services at Holy Trinity. Levertoff himself mentions his involvement with the IHCA’s Hebrew Christian Church Commission in 1932 in his publication,
The Church and the Jews. In the same space, he presents his own draft for the “The Ten Principles of the Faith of the Hebrew Christian Church” much of which was later incorporated into the final version as “The Proposed Articles of Faith for the Hebrew Christian Church.” In 1933, along with Harry Sperling and Maurice Simon, he helped translate the Zohar into English for the first time for Soncino Press. During his tenure as the priest at Holy Trinity, in addition to leading a small community of Jewish believers, Levertoff assisted everyone from Hans Herzl , also a believer and son of Theodore Herzl, to provide succor to refugees from Austria and Nazi Germany. One intriguing work by Levertoff that unfortunately seems lost is
Christ and the Shekinah, which Lev Gillet, a friend of Levertoff, first mentioned in 1939. Levertoff considered it his magnum opus. Gillet explains “…[Levertoff] understood the importance of an intellectual appeal and the necessity of expressing the theological concepts of Christianity in Jewish terms (according to him, along the lines of the Shekinah teaching and of Hasidic mysticism).” Levertoff lived in the twilight of the
Haskalah and died 31 July 1954, at the dawn of the modern Jewish state. He is today perhaps more relevant to us than he was 75 years ago when he seemed nothing more than a fringe theological curiosity. (Source:adapted from
From Mishkan #37, Fall 2002. © J. Quiñónez)
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Pointing out what Christianity was like during the first 7-15 years does not mean that it immediately fizzled out after that. Again, there were a number of Jewish Christian sects like Ebionites and Nazarenes were followers of Jesus who continued to live in obedience to the Torah, and Nazarenes were still referred to in the 11th century:
"As late as the eleventh century,
Cardinal Humbert of Mourmoutiers still referred to the Nazarene sect as a
Sabbath-keeping Christian body existing at that time.
[24] Modern scholars believe it is the Pasagini or
Pasagians who are referenced by Cardinal Humbert, suggesting the Nazarene sect existed well into the eleventh century and beyond (the
Catholic writings of Bonacursus entitled
Against the Heretics). It is believed that Gregorius of Bergamo, about 1250 CE, also wrote concerning the Nazarenes as the
Pasagians."
Again, if someone starts to following the teaching of a Jewish sect in the 1st century, then they are returning to something ancient, not inventing something new, and whether or not the teachings of that sect should be considered to be correct should be evaluated on their own merits.
Lutherans and Baptists are denominations that didn't start until the 1500's or 1600's, so it seems inconsistent to reject what a denomination teaches simply based on when it started. Much of what the Torah teaches is repeated in the NT, so there is nothing preventing me from having fellowship with Christians who believe that we should follow what is taught in the NT. We can all be unified in agreement on things like the Trinity, that we should follow Jesus, that we should believe in him, and that we are justified by grace through faith, though we can have different perspectives on what that means. There is much value that can be learned form people from other denominations and I can strongly disagree with someone about many issues while still learning much of value from them.
