In Defiance of God:
Antisemitism in the Church

by Donna Diorio

Something happens to me in the night while sleeping when at times my spirit is engaging in a Holy Spirit download. Because I wake up several times every night to go to the bathroom, sometimes I recognize the Holy Spirit has been showing me things that I did not realize as I took them in while awake. So many times God brings me to understand things better while I sleep! When I return to bed  my thinking is directed toward these things, and now I’m awake and consciously participating seeing the issue in a new way. It won’t be long before I fall back to sleep, but the download of understanding Spirit to spirit continues.

I don't mean this to sound spooky, it is just difficult to put in words, but I know God is untangling some things in my mind so I can understand the reality better. That may be why I do most of my writing in the first few hours each morning.

Such a time happened Wednesday night when God was speaking to me to clarify some things about the Church and Judaism. Thursday morning the very first post I saw in my Facebook newsfeed was related to the misunderstandings that God was putting His finger on in my overnight sleep. This is what He has called me to speak about on behalf of Israel, so it is not a surprise to me that He would even minister to me in my sleep about it.

It began with a statement: The APOSTOLIC body of believers in Jesus was formed and sent out into the whole world from Jerusalem, Israel - not Rome.

It is good to have a healthy respect and honor for the early Church fathers, and also for the sage commentators of Judaism. BUT neither of them have the authority of Word of God. Messianic Jews may find many good things in rabbinic commentaries, but commentaries by the rabbis are NOY the Bible Where any commentary departs from the Bible, it is just like every other contemporary biblical commentator teaching error, those views must be ignored. Do not receive it. Their words were not inspired by the breath of God.

Likewise, the early Church fathers may have many wonderful commentaries of the Bible, but do not think for a second they are infallible in interpretation. Just because a viewpoint of biblical meaning was expressed in the early generations of the Church does not mean it is sacrosanct. In fact, the distancing of many of the early church fathers from the fathers within the body of Jewish believers means that the Christian commentators deprived themselves of the Hebraic idioms and common knowledge among the Jews that is contained in the bible. It is a book written by Jews from Genesis to Revelation with very few exceptions! When we don’t know the story behind many things written in the Scriptures, our own imaginations fill in the knowledge gap. That was as true for the Christian early Fathers as it is for us today.

By the time of Nicea in 325 AD, the Church had already completely disengaged from the Apostolic Jeiwhs body of Israel. At Nicea is where they made the break official. While there are many good things in the creeds and rituals of the early church - this disengagement from the Jewish part of the body is not one of them. The Nicean Council sought to sever the Church from its Jewish roots and establish a unified church under Roman influence. They officially separated Easter from Passover obscuring the prophetic picture of Jesus as the Passover sacrificed Lamb, and  following the Jewish calendar and biblical holidays was rejected. The Church was to have a distinctly Gentile, non-Jewish identity focus. These are the foundations of the Church assumption that we have replaced Israel as God’s Chosen People. These positions ignore a plentiful amount of God’s Word that promises Israel He is never going to do that. 

Although he is a controversial in the Catholic church Malachi Martin was a Vatican historian. In a book he published in 1983, Martin wrote about a journey a contingent of Israel Jewish believers made to Rome.  Their purpose was to appeal to the Roman church to restore the financial assistance that the Apostle Paul had established among the churches for the support of the impoverished Israeli Messianic body. Rejected among their own people much like they are today, they were denied the support of the rest of the Jewish community and financial donations were needed from the Church to help them survive and continue to minister the good news of the Messiah to their people.  

The Churches financial support of the Israeli Apostolic body of believers is the reason for my ministry today. What God began to show me in 1990, and has continued to show me in the scriptures, is to be restored in our time. I cannot un-see that precedent that Paul set among the churches and we Christians cannot continue to ignore what God has told us to do. But there is a smug sense of superiority among Christians against the body of Jewish believers. I don’t believe the whole Messianic body of one million or more Jewish believers in Yeshua have everything perfectly right, but that makes them no different from the estimated 2.3 to 2.6 billion Christians worldwide. God only knows how many fractured versions of Christian belief and practice that are! But the superiority many Christians have toward the magnificent work of God in restoring Jews to Himself through faith in Yeshua, that is nothing to smirk over!

The pope Silvester must have done just like many Christian ministry leaders still do today – took one look at the eight poor, journey worn leaders who had traveled from Israel and dismissed them as unsuccessful at ministry. What a contrast they were to the grandeur of the church at Rome.  Martin writes that what really concerned them about the Israeli contingent was that some of them were Desposni.  Some of those eight men were actual blood descendants of Jesus' own family. The pope refused their request for financial help to be restored and sent them away. Martin writes, “The vital interview was not, so far as we know, recorded, but the issues were very well known, and it is probably that Joses, the oldest of the Christian Jews, spoke on behalf of the desposyni and the rest.

Martin writes, “That most hallowed name, desposyni, had been respected by all believers in the first century and a half of Christian history.  The word literally meant, in the Greek, “belonging to the Lord.”  It was reserved uniquely for Jesus’ blood relatives.  Every part of the ancient Jewish Christian church had always been governed by a desposynos, and each of them carried one of the names traditional in Jesus family—Zachary, Joseph, John, James, Joses, Simeon, Matthias, and so on. But no one was ever called Jesus.  Neither Silvester nor any of the thirty-two popes before him, nor those succeeding him, ever emphasized that there were at least three well-known and authentic lines of legitimate blood descent from Jesus’ own family.” 

The pope’s refusal to restore the Christian contributions that the Apostle Paul had set up in the first century for the unity and assistance with the Israeli body of believers came in 318 AD. The Nicaean council was held in 325 AD to make the break from the Jewish part of the body of Christ official. (Source for the Malachi Martin material is from The Decline and Fall of the Roman Church. 1983.)

That was the Church's break with the Israeli Jewish believers. In our day, God is stirring up a remnant of Christians who will restore to the practice Paul set up. I fully believe Paul was setting the precedent that he foresaw would be a need that the churches could supply. He didn’t ask just the wealthy churches he had oversight over to make contributions. In fact his letters indicate some of the poorest churches responded desiring to give back to the Israeli body of believers. The church is not sitting in that place anymore. We do not grasp the “duty” we have that Paul referred to in Romans to help with the needs of the Israeli Messianic Jewish body.  But God is removing the blinders today. The veil of blindness is being removed from Jewish eyes increasingly and coming off of Christians who have been held too long in the error of disengagement from the Jewish believers.

Now in my early education into Jewish thinking I read of the Christian persecution of Jews in Michael Brown's book, Our Hands Are Stained with Blood. And I also read of how the early church persecuted the Jews that been scattered by Rome into exile from Israel. One writer especially opened my eyes about these things is Daniel Gruber who wrote The Church and the Jews.

The first time I ever heard Messianic theologian Daniel Juster, Ph.D teach a series live, it was on a Messianic view of Church History. I was expecting to hear one thing but what I heard was Juster giving praise to early church fathers and the many greats down through history. Before that I had never heard a Messianic presentation of church fathers that covered both their errors concerning the Jews, but also the great revelation they brought forth for the whole body. That is important. If you can’t do that, you don’t have the heart of God on all of His people.  I was touched thoroughly because as Juster spoke about Martin Luther h began to wept over how such mighty good had come from Luther, and how it had fallen into such a spew of hatred against Jews that even Hitler found it useful for justifying the Holocaust.

Martin Luther's problem was in starting off speaking well of the Jews, but because they did not respond by coming to faith, he began to despise and hate them. Luther did not understand that Jews coming to faith is in God's hands, not in missionaries' hands, and it is in God’s timing. The "times and seasons" belong to God. (Ecclesiastes 3:1, 1 Thessalonians 5:1, and Acts 1:7).

The Apostle Paul wrote specifically to the Church about the times and seasons when the Jews would respond to their Messiah in Romans 9-11. In Ephesians 2:15 Paul wrote of God's plan about how that was going to be happen, when believing Jews and Christians were unified in Yeshua/Jesus as "one new man" — a unity akin to the marriage of a God-based husband and wife with no blurring of the lines of their identities. This is a oneness that does not erase the distinctive difference in Jew and Gentile, or a man and a woman. In case you haven't noticed, we are not there yet. 

Presently we are standing at a place where antisemitism is rising up all around the Western nations, the very nations that were enlightened by Christianity but are now being infected by Islamist domination, indoctrination and propaganda. Alarmingly we see it rising in the American Right...it has been in the American Left for decades. 

Sadly it is even filtering down to great Christian teachers because there is too little understood about what God's desire is (to unite the Christian body with the Messianic Jewish body). One is not made to submit to the other, but there is a mutual submission to each other that is made in the same sense as a godly husband and wife make to each other to fulfill God's plan for their marriage.

This is the same principle that God is leading us into in these days and here is a warning for you: this unity is NOT OPTIONAL. If you will not follow where God is leading us to come together, you may discover to your dismay that you have made yourself a goat to be separated from the sheep who will willing follow Jesus into this relationship of unity, love and working together of the Church and Messianic Israel. 

Not just Israel, but Messianic Israel — those are the Jews who live in Israel — a planting of God to bring in the spiritual harvest of "all Israel" (Romans). They are to be aided in their ministry before God by the Church that willingly enters into joy with the plan for God for the spiritual restoration of Israel.

Christians played this role in the restoration of the State of Israel as prophetically depicted in the Ezekiel vision of the Valley of Dry Bones. BUT NOW CHRISTIANS ARE CALLED INTO A MUCH MORE INTIMATE role of unity with Messianic Israel.  We stand with the "living stones" of Israel who are bringing "all Israel" to faith by the testimony of Yeshua in their lives. They MUST have our help to do that.

Will you hear or will you hate instead?