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          THE PROBLEM OF MESSIANIC JUDAISM

          PART 8

           

          THE TRIUMVIRAL SPECTRUM: PAUL, PETER AND JAMES

           

           

          With Paul’s ascension to the role of point man for the Transcendent gospel, the polarized energies of Messianic faith under Jerusalem’s oppressive cloud and the Law-free Transcendent faith away from Jerusalem came to condense around specific apostolic personalities. This condensation formed along a spectral line of relationship among three specific apostles: Paul, Peter and James.

          The friction associated with this apostolic polarization became increasingly pronounced as the viper spirit of Messianic Pharisaism continued its relentless infection of the Messianic church with little perceivable opposition from the Jerusalem apostles. Thus the remaining conflicts of the ever parting visions of Yeshua in the first generation church become played out through the relationship of these three men.

           

          Paul

          Paul becomes the spokesman for the vision of pure grace, which is the vision for the Transcendent Son of God unsullied by human trappings. But his conversion is extremely awkward for the Jerusalem apostles, making his gospel more so.

          The Jerusalem apostles must grow to accept Paul as their brother despite his past role as the bitterest persecutor of their Yeshua; and then they must receive him as an apostle even through he never walked with them during Yeshua’s ministry. These factors all but guaranteed friction when he dared to take “their” Yeshua outside the bounds of their humanly grounded vision for Him.21

          Based from Antioch, Paul spends almost all his ministry life in foreign lands, dying at Rome. He hardly sees Jerusalem or Judea again after his first two-week visit there shortly after his conversion.22 In the end (and to this day), Paul’s ministry is received almost entirely, but not exclusively, by Gentile origined believers in Yeshua. But he is not received in Jerusalem—at least not for what he truly believes—then or now.

           

          James

          On the opposite end is James. A shadowy figure throughout Acts, James remains a die-hard Messianic to the end. His view of Yeshua never graduates from the Son of Man to the Transcendent Son of God. Though a very devout worshipper and a peaceable man (as history tells it), he nonetheless remains a spiritual babe all his life. James never leaves Jerusalem to go help fulfill Yeshua’s transnational commission. In fact, history says he rarely left the temple—remaining attached to the system of worship doomed by the very Son of Man he worships.

          Of all the apostles, James is the most natural for holding to the Messianic view of Yeshua, and the easiest target for the subtlety of the viper spirit. This is because James was the literal physical brother of Yeshua. It’s important to know James was not one of the original Twelve. 23 Rather, as one of Yeshua’s original unbelieving brothers, James converts rather late in Yeshua’s ministry, possibly not until he witnesses Him after the resurrection.24

          Characteristic of one spending his life under a spiritual fog, James lives in the background of the Spirit’s testimony of the spread of Transnational worship.25 He remains a friend of the Pharisees, bringing no correction to their spirit, though he does not become one. It is through that friendship that the viper spirit secures and maintains its poisonous grip on the Jerusalem church. At last, his own friendship26 with the party of the vipers proves fatal as he is martyred by them at the temple about AD 62.

          The last recorded conflict along the Transcendence / Messianic vision line in Acts will occur as a silent one between Paul and James about 4 years before James’ death, and a dozen years before Jerusalem’s fall.  

           

          Peter

          Peter becomes the perennial man in the middle the duration of the first generation conflict over Yeshua—at least until he finally leaves Jerusalem. As the one for whose faith Yeshua targetedly prayed, Peter comes to be regularly torn between the Spirit’s transcendent force impelling his vision heavenward, and the force of his human Messianic vision from days gone by, aggravated by the Jerusalem cloud and the intimidating influence of the Pharisee “converts.”

          Peter stays based in Jerusalem but travels occasionally to other lands. The measure of his willingness to leave Jerusalem becomes the measure to which he encounters the freedom of the Transcendent Yeshua, yet also the measure to which he invites himself into conflict between the two forces.

          In his willingness to travel, Peter becomes peculiarly trapped between the Messianic influence of James with the Pharisees at home, and the Transcendent influence abroad of the Spirit first (at Caesarea) and later Paul (at Antioch) when Paul becomes the Holy Spirit’s transcendent arch representative.

          Eventually Peter fully converts to the Son of God, and, speaking warmly of him, acknowledges Paul’s authority for conveying the Transcendent gospel. (History tells us Peter and Paul eventually labored together in Corinth and Rome.) Peter ultimately leaves Jerusalem permanently, dying also at Rome, the location of his imprisoned Transcendental brother Paul, and not in the location of his Messianic brother James.

           

          &&&&&&&&&&

          Understanding this apostolic spectrum leads us to the watershed event bringing the Transcendental / Messianic conflict to its open and still unresolved expression.

           
          NEXT – PART 9: THE ANTIOCH CONFRONTATION AND THE JERUSALEM COUNCIL


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          21 The only explanation for the Spirit’s ordering of these hindering factors in His appointed vessel can be that He wanted to insure the only way the other apostles could migrate from a Messianic to a Transcendent view of Yeshua was by faith—not by any persuasiveness on Paul’s part.

          22 After his initial 2 week visit to Peter three years after his conversion, Paul makes no more than 4 trips to Jerusalem: to deliver the famine relief offering; the Jerusalem Council; at the end of his 2nd missionary journey; and at the end of his third journey leading to his imprisonment in Rome. Every one of these visits is brief, and all but one (the third) are marked by discord. (Some see Paul’s visit to Peter and James in Gal. 2 as one unconnected to the Jerusalem council (Acts 15), in which case he would have had 5 visits. But I treat them as one connected event.)

          23 Some believe James was not the physical brother of Yeshua, but was his cousin, being James son of Alphaeus (indeed one of the Twelve), Alphaeus being the same as Cleophas, related to Mary mother of Yeshua.

          24 How James was accorded the office of a leading apostle is unknown, though it likely reflects how highly influential the Messianic vision was in affecting early leadership decisions: “Obviously, if James was Yeshua’s brother, he ought to be an apostle,” the thinking may have gone.

          25 It is interesting, if not significant, that given his prominent leadership position in Acts, there is not a single mention of the Holy Spirit’s ministry in connection with him in Jerusalem.

          26 Assuming that the James who wrote the Book of James is this same apostle James, it is ironic that the man who wrote against being a “friend of the world” (Jms. 4:4) was himself a friend of Pharisees whom Yeshua referred to as the world (Jn. 15:18-19). In that event, one wonders just who James had in mind as “the world.” Are these the Spirit-inspired words of a man who knew not what he was writing nor therefore lived up to it?