How the Teaching Was Lost

Christians and Jews read the same Hebrew Scriptures. Christians add the New Testament, written almost entirely by Jews who kept the Torah. And yet on food, on clean and unclean, on the holy days, and on what holy even means, the church has reached conclusions the apostles never drew.

The usual explanation is a kind one: sincere people read the same book and see different things, every tradition has its own emphasis, and each should follow his conscience.

There is truth in that. But it does not explain why so many readings, in so many countries, moved in the same direction, away from the commandments the apostles kept. Scripture itself gives a sharper answer, and it begins with the teachers.

When the Teachers Stop Teaching

The prophets named the failure:

Ezekiel 22:26 Her priests have done violence to my Torah, and they have profaned my holy things; between holy and common they have not separated, and between the unclean and the clean they have not made known; and from my Shabbat they have hidden their eyes, and I am profaned in their midst.

This is the distinction of Leviticus 10:10, met again and again in this part of the book, and the priests had stopped teaching it. Ezekiel also saw a day when it would be taught again:

Ezekiel 44:23 And my people they shall teach the difference between holy and profane, and they shall make them know between the unclean and the clean.

Malachi 2:7 For the lips of a priest should keep knowledge, and they should seek Torah from his mouth; for he is the messenger of the LORD of hosts (tzevaot צָבָא tsaw-baw').

Hosea 4:6 My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge; because you have rejected knowledge, I also will reject you from being priest to me; and you have forgotten the Torah of your God — I also will forget your children.

The people were destroyed not for a lack of sincerity but “for lack of knowledge,” because their teachers had forgotten the Torah.

Picture a family that moves to a new country. The parents speak the old language at home, but the children answer in the new one. The grandchildren understand a few words, and the great-grandchildren cannot read their great-grandmother’s letters. No one decided to forget. The language simply went unused, and within a few generations it was gone. When a teaching stops being practiced, the knowledge goes the same way.

How Early It Was Lost

History shows how early the Gentile church lost it.

Around the beginning of the second century, a writing called the Epistle of Barnabas explained that when Moses forbade the pig, he did not mean the animal at all, but only that believers should not associate with men who behave like swine. The food laws became allegories and the actual commandment was dropped, though Isaiah still says of those who eat the flesh of swine, “together they shall come to an end” (Isaiah 66:17).

Ignatius of Antioch, writing to the church in Magnesia in the same years, said that it was absurd to speak of Yeshua the Messiah and live as a Jew.

In 325, after the Council of Nicaea, the emperor Constantine wrote to the churches that they should have nothing in common with the Jews in setting the date of their own Passover feast, the Pascha.

The contrast with Ezra’s day is stark. Ezra’s people “separated themselves … from the uncleanness of the nations of the land” (Ezra 6:21). Within a few centuries, Gentile churches had separated themselves as well, but not from the uncleanness of the nations. They had separated themselves from the Torah and from the Jewish people who kept it.

Not Practiced, Not Understood, Explained Away

For nearly two thousand years, most of the people reading the Bible have been Gentiles who did not live by its laws of clean and unclean. They read about clean and unclean, holy and common, without ever practicing the difference in their own bodies, kitchens, and homes.

What is never practiced is soon not understood, and what is not understood is soon explained away. Each nation explained it through what it already had: its own dishes, its own feasts, its own philosophy, and its own church culture. A verse about food was read in one country through one national table and in another country through another, until interpretations multiplied and the plain sense of the Hebrew and Greek receded behind them.

This is how the lens described in Chapter 35 came to be smeared: not in a day, but over centuries, one unpracticed commandment at a time.

Yeshua had already named the result:

Matthew 15:7-9 Hypocrites! Rightly did Isaiah prophesy about you, saying: 'This people draws near to Me with their mouth and honors Me with their lips, but their kardia καρδία kar-dee'-ah(heart, soul-domain) is far away from Me. But in vain do they worship Me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.'"

In Chapter 26 of this book we saw Yeshua defending the commandment of God against the tradition of the elders. Gentile churches built traditions of their own, and His words about “teaching as doctrines the commandments of men” fit them as well.

The Letters That Are Hard to Understand

Peter saw this coming, and he saw where it would happen:

2 Peter 3:16-17 as he does in all his letters when he speaks in them of these matters — there are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other graphai(written-scriptures). You therefore, beloved, knowing this beforehand, take care that you are not carried away with the error of the athesmoi(lawless) ones and lose your own stability.

Peter is speaking of Paul’s letters. Not one of the verses opened in this part of the book says to eat what God said is not food. Yet Romans 14, 1 Corinthians 10, 1 Timothy 4, and Colossians 2 are exactly the places where readers without the Torah have bent Paul into saying it.

Peter also names the error. The Greek word, rendered athesmoi in the verse above, is athesmon ἀθέσμων ath'-es-mos, from athesmos ἄθεσμος ath'-es-mos, meaning without thesmos, without an established law: lawless. Peter warns the beloved not to be carried away with the error of those who are without law, and so lose their own footing. That is the danger of reading Paul without the Torah that Paul kept.

The Way Back

The way back is not new, for Nehemiah’s people walked it, as Chapter 35 showed.

They gathered as one and asked for the book. They read it as it is written, and those who taught set the sense so that the people could understand. They found what they had forgotten and did it at once, separated themselves from uncleanness, and confessed. And then they rejoiced, because “the joy of the LORD is your stronghold” (Nehemiah 8:10).

That is the miqra qodesh מִקְרָא־קֹדֶשׁ ko'-desh to which God calls His people: a holy convocation gathered around the written word, read in its own languages, by a cleansed and holy people. That is why this book exists.

None of this is a road to salvation by works. We are made right with God by grace through faith in the Messiah’s blood. But the people He has made right are called to be holy, and holiness begins where Daniel began, with what goes into the mouth.

What Part Three Has Shown

Food is what Scripture calls food. The Torah has two branches of uncleanness, and the New Testament carries both into the church. Peter never let anything unclean enter his mouth. Mark 7 is about hands and Acts 10 is about people, and every verse used to say “eat anything” says something else when it is read in its place. The pig was useful, but being useful did not make it food. Yeshua walked in the temple at Hanukkah (John 10:22-23), and Isaiah 66:3 still sets “swine’s blood” among the abominations. The holy table and the holy word are still holy, and the goal of it all is one word, cried three times before the throne.

Beneath all of it lies a question this book has not yet answered: if God’s people were called to be holy and the commandments still stand, why were they given at all? The closing chapters of this book let the Torah answer for itself, beginning where the Torah itself begins its answer, with blessing and curse.