And another hello to everyone in “Circle-land” today.

I wanted to just pass on the below conversation especially for the benefit of those of you who have discussed Messianic Judaist issues with me in the past.  For context, in my treatise on Messianism, I made the following statement: 

Instead of beginning with the New Covenant apostles to build their understanding of the New Covenant, Messianics … either ignore or else try to box the New Covenant apostles into their prophetic framework. But there are serious problems with this.….Lacking apostolic class answers for refuting Paul and Hebrews, intellectual honesty demands that Messianics deny the validity of the apostles’ writings if they are not willing to accept them at face value. 

Well, just when I thought I had heard it all, a new reader wrote me from Australia yesterday troubled over one such Messianic Judaist who has done just what that intellectual honesty demands—namely, to come out and openly deny Paul’s writings as false and to identify him as a false apostle.

Please be edified by this conversation as it reveals that Messianics who dare to assert such a thing are not really assailing Paul. They are assailing the Holy Spirit Himself in His competency to accurately deliver God’s message of salvation to the Church at large throughout this entire age.

Be blessed.

Chris Anderson

www.firstloveministry.org

From: robin
Sent: Friday, January 24, 2014 7:13 PM
To: littleflock@netzero.net
Subject: Greetings

Hi Chris

My name is Robin and I am based in Australia. I follow your website and it has been given me plenty of deep insights. I have thought of writing to you many times but got distracted and never got around to doing so. I attend a Pentecostal church and am a born again believer aspiring to be conformed to image of Christ.

There are couple of websites that I regularly follow and yours is one of them.

One of the main reasons I am writing is to get your opinion on something that I have read recently - that disturbed me a bit. This is around the prevalent writing now that the Apostle Paul was a false apostle who was introducing his own religion which is against what Christ was preaching.

While I have seen arguments on both sides, I wanted to get your opinion on it. I have been praying to God to guide me in this matter and I trust he will.

I know you have a busy ministry so please don’t feel burdened into replying.

In Christ.

Robin

From: littleflock
Sent: Friday, January 24, 2014 8:09 PM
To: robin
Subject: RE: Greetings

Thank you for writing Robin.

I have never heard of this prevalent writing you speak of. Without knowing more about who is saying this I will only say the following:

1.       If Paul is a false apostle, then the Bible is a false book seeing that the vast majority of the New Testament is written by Paul. It would also mean that Peter was a false apostle because Peter considered Paul to be a true apostle. And if all this were true, then apparently the Holy Spirit was incompetent in His ability to clearly raise true discerning apostles at the foundation of the church and to leave the true scriptures from such apostles for believers for an entire age. And now we are to believe that after an entire age of deception upon the Christian church the Holy Spirit is only now suddenly revealing finally that Paul was a false apostle??? If the Holy Spirit couldn’t see to it that the New Testament scriptures were given to us uncompromised from the beginning, on what basis would we be able to believe that He is capable of now telling us the truth about Paul by whoever is making this claim?

2.       If the Bible is a false book, or at least the New Testament is because Paul was false and Peter was incompetent to know any better, then on what basis is there any reason to believe in Christ through the incompetency of their testimony?

3.       The only people I can conceive of who would say such a thing about Paul are Jews and so-called Messianics who have absolutely no use for Paul’s teaching, the same kind who rejected Paul originally. But other than that, I cannot begin to guess who is saying this or why.

If you can shed any more light on the issue, I might be able to offer more……

Blessings,

Chris Anderson

First Love Ministry

From: robin
Sent: Saturday, January 25, 2014 12:08 AM
To: littleflock
Subject: Re: Greetings

Hi Chris

Thank you for the prompt reply.

Here is an extract of the logic of why they think Paul, is false apostle. One of the sites is :-

http://www.judaismvschristianity.com/paulthe.htm

Extract from site below:-

Paul and the Ephesians

Now, look at what was said to the church that we know Paul had been involved in... Ephesus. Among the things that Yahshua commended the Ephesian church for doing right, is this quote:

"I know your works, your labor, and your patience, and that you cannot bear those who are evil. And you have tested those who say they are apostles and are not, and have found them liars." Rev. 2:2

Yes. I have no doubts Yahshua was referring to Paul and his companions, and that his claim of apostleship, as well as his doctrine, were false! Hang in there and consider all the facts with me for a minute. Here are four of them... with the silver bullet coming shortly after.

1. Paul's doctrine on the foreknowledge of God is not only groundless (because he had to abuse Scripture to support it), it is blasphemous,
because it outright accuses God of unrighteousness. (See previous chapters)
2. We have record of Paul claiming to be an apostle to the Ephesians.

"Paul, an apostle of Yahshua by the will of God, To the saints who are in Ephesus," Ephesians 1:1

3. We have no record of anyone else claiming to be an apostle to anyone anywhere, not even to the Ephesians.
4. Paul and his doctrine had troubles being accepted in Ephesus.

"And he went into the synagogue and spoke boldly for three months, reasoning and persuading concerning the things of the kingdom of God. But when some were hardened and did not believe, but spoke evil of the way before the multitude..." Acts 19:8,9

Remember, this is recorded from Luke’s point of view and he believed Paul's doctrine was "the Way". Notice that those who rejected Paul are men of the synagogue and not atheists or pagans. If these men had stood up in front of the synagogue and said, "Paul's doctrine is flawed. He is a false apostle, and a liar", Luke would no doubt have seen this as "speaking evil of the Way".

If these four reasons are not enough to seriously call into question Paul's status as an apostle there is one more. It is a most interesting quote from Paul's own pen that finally seals the fate of his supposed apostleship. It comes from his second letter to Timothy, written during the same Neronian persecution in which John was given the Revelation. This letter is believed by many scholars to contain the last recorded words of Paul. Here he makes a short statement of lament that seems to have gone unnoticed... the implications of which are devastating to Paul if one is able to hear everything that is being said. Paul makes this statement to Timothy.

"This you know, that all those in Asia have turned away from me." 2Timothy 1:15

Asia! All of them! Rejecting Paul! And when he says, "This you know", it sounds like this must have been relatively common knowledge at that time. Asia! The very place that Yahshua told John to write, where his seven churches were! And they were alive, and obviously had been established for some time. Paul did not say that Asia had rejected Yahshua. Obviously they hadn't rejected Yahshua if there were thriving churches there that Yahshua wanted to address through John. Instead Paul said that all Asia had rejected him personally! This is also corroborated in the book of Acts where men from Asia accuse Paul of teaching against the Law, and bringing an Ephesian friend into the temple.

And when the seven days were almost ended, the Jews from Asia, seeing him in the temple, stirred up the whole crowd and laid hands on him. crying out, "Men of Israel, help! This is the man who teaches all men everywhere against the people, the Law, and this place: and furthermore he also brought Greeks into the temple and has defiled this holy place." (For they had previously seen Trophimus the Ephesian with him in the city, whom they supposed that Paul had brought into the temple.) Acts 21:27-29

Try to grasp the profound significance of all this. Here we have in the book of Revelation the words of Yahshua commending the Ephesian church for rejecting someone who claimed to be his apostle, while Paul is the only person other than the twelve original apostles to have claimed to be an apostle... and we know he has made this very claim to this same Ephesian church. At the same time, Paul laments himself of the fact that he has been rejected by them! How could it NOT be Paul and his associates that Yahshua had commended the Ephesian church for rejecting? Could it be much more obvious?

Regards

Robin

From: littleflock
Sent: Saturday, January 25, 2014 2:20 AM
To: robin
Subject: RE: Greetings

Just as I suspected…..a Messianic Judaist.

What is interesting is that this man has set himself up as a judge of the scriptures themselves, a judgment based in pure human reason and speculation. Also interesting is that he believes Luke was deceived. So much then for the validity of Luke’s gospel too.  His explanation of Peter’s stated support for Paul’s ministry is utterly wishful as he has no way to credibly deny what is obvious from the plain intent of Peter’s mind. The fact is that if Paul truly had been a false apostle, all the other apostles would have known it and would have condemned him openly because his writings were that public and provocative throughout the known world. 

Are we to believe that not one other [scripturally affirmed] writer of the times themselves from John to Peter to James to Jude to Luke had either the discernment or bravery to identify what would have been the greatest heresy facing the true “Jewish church” in the form of Paul??? It just astounds me how puny men of reason come along generations and centuries after the scriptures have been laid in and accomplished their worldwide ministry to pontificate in judgment on them and their writers.

If what this man is saying is true, and not even the original other founding apostles and scripture writers had the discernment to see Paul for who he was as a fraud, but this man does, shouldn’t he have some kind of testimony of power through the Holy Spirit at minimum equal to that of any of these writers whose discernment he criticizes and whose fraud he allegedly exposes?

Where is the Elijah class power of this supposed Baal exposer? Where is his worldwide influence through the building of churches to the true Judaistic name of Yahshua? Where is His power to heal and deliver as the first apostles including Paul all demonstrated? Where is HIS authoritative commissioning revelation from Christ Himself as all the other apostles claimed to have? Without such a power of the Spirit to affirm his belated message of Paul’s fraudulent apostleship, who is he that anybody should listen to him????  

If you read all that this man has to say, everything is based in pure speculative reason. He has no intra-scriptural authority from the minds and intents of the scripture writers themselves for anything he is saying, but he has to rather discredit the writers of scripture like Luke. His “trump” proof linking Jesus’ commendation of the Ephesians in Revelation to Paul’s lament at the end of Timothy is founded on a hair-thin circumstantial conclusion that depends on unnamed “scholars” having agreed to a certain time proximity of Paul’s writing to that of Revelation –something utterly unprovable. [edit note: there is also a far cry between being “forsaken” as Paul asserts to Timothy and being “tried and convicted” in the way Jesus refers to the Ephesians in Revelation. Paul was a seasoned precisional arguer. Had he been tried and convicted of false apostleship, he would have referred to it as such just as he did regarding his trials before Caesar, etc. He would not have merely said to Timothy that he was “forsaken.”]   

What you really have here is a man who is committed to the untenable proposition of holding to both Christ and Judaism and is reduced to tortured conjecture against the scriptures themselves to make that happen. I don’t even know why one would even bother to do this. He would be better off just affirming his Judaism and denying Christ as Jews now do.

All else I wrote you before stands in confirmation to what I am saying here. Messianics are desperate at all costs to discredit Paul and the Book of Hebrews.  I have written about this in my treatise on Messianism at the website. But I have never seen anyone go as far as this man in actually denying the validity of the New Testament scriptures to do so—something I said Messianics really needed to do if they were going to be honest about things. At the same time, I am surprised by nothing and so could only expect that there would actually be fools like this among the Messianic-Judaistic ranks who would deny the New Testament scriptures.

After 2000 years you have a choice—either believe in God’s competence in having constructed the New Testament scriptures and appointed its anointed authors and the fruit of the Spirit in the lives of all who have embraced their writings from that day to this---or you can believe this unanointed man and his few followers and their human calculations about the invalidity of the New Testament scriptures and its writers.

I know what the Holy Spirit has done in my life through the totality of the New Testament scriptures as well as the story of what He has done throughout the earth by them for 2000 years.

For me, there is no choice.

Many blessings,

Chris Anderson