How did we get from Acts to Christendom?

The assembly described in Acts of the Apostles is a Torah keeping community of shared resources, the ‘churches’ of Christendom are no such thing having their roots in Rome not in Jerusalem.

It was a long struggle against the overwhelming might of the Roman rulers and their growing hatred of anything Jewish, and the assembly of Acts was very Jewish.   Over time, the gentile influence became profound, and with that came dilution.

At the core of life is the scriptures, particularly the Old Testament scriptures, but when the New Testament scriptures are taken out of their Old Testament context then a new religion is born.

This is what happened and within a few hundred years a completely different understanding grew up, and understanding based not on Torah, but on the writings of Paul.

Paul kept Torah, and wrote about Toraic things, but he wrote in a way that assumed that his readers too knew and kept Torah, When Paul visited far flung communities, he first met with Jews, with Torah keepers and taught them the ‘back to the Torah’ message of Yahushua.   So his readers knew the context of his messages.

But those who knew became swamped by those he did not know, and the messages tended to be delivered in Greek not Hebrew.   So a religion was built upon the basis of the Greek translations of Paul’s letters.   Letters read in the language of pagans and interpreted in pagan trained minds, minds which could very easily understand the idea that a human sacrifice (of Jesus) was required for forgiveness of sin.

By the time we get to Constantine the decision becomes political, the need to unite people in a “one people, one empire, one emperor”  orientated religion; his universal catholic ‘church’ a blend of all religions into one.

And Satan was full of glee, he had twisted Yah’s truth into his own tool

But Yah’s Torah was still there for the few prepared to seek His truth. Yah is not interested in those who worship men, his interest is in those who love Him and keep his commandments.

Satan, through Constantine, created a religion for men and their obsessions with ‘sinful’ acts and the punishment of those acts.    It was an elitist feudal type system which lasted a thousand years or so, until the printing press put the scriptures into the hands of all people, and they began to question.

But by the time the ‘back to the bible’ move took hold, understanding of the Hebrew writings was lost, and people had to start a long journey back to understanding, to the putting of Paul back into its Old Testament context.

Paul is difficult to understand, because he was a Torah scholar and assumed his readers understood and kept Torah, take the Torah out of Paul and you get evangelical Christianity.