Against Modern Judaizers

put Shane Schaetzel (text original in English, Published on 12/15/2021

Is the celebration of Christmas pagan?
And is the celebration of Easter also pagan?
How about worshipping God on Sundays? Surely that's pagan, isn't it?
Is it all a grand conspiracy? Are the historic churches of Christendom secretly trying to simulate ancient pagan worship while deceiving us all into believing that it honors Jesus Christ?
These are the types of questions that permeate our modern culture, and what they represent, collectively, is a direct and blatant attack on Christianity.

The aim behind these attacks is to undermine our Christian culture, to fracture it, to Balkanize it, and to replace it with something more distinctly “Jewish” in appearance.
While I could examine the flaws behind each specific attack on each individual issue (as I have done in the past), I think there is a much larger, or more encompassing, problem at play here: what all these individual attacks really mean is Judaization.
I tell you that the modern Church, just like the early Church, has a significant problem with Judaization, and we are seeing this happening here, with each and every attack made against traditional Christianity and traditional Christian culture.

Jewish rituals

The biblical definition of “Judaizer”"is A Christian who attempts to bind other Christians to the Mosaic Law of the Old Testament. And it is probably the oldest Christian heresy.
We first learned about the Judaizers in Acts 15, which records how certain Jewish Christians (that is, Jews who converted to Christianity) told non-Jewish Christians, or Gentiles, that they needed to be circumcised in order to remain Christians.

Circumcision is the initiation ritual in the Law of Moses of the Old Covenant.
A man cannot be a practitioner of ancient Jewish religion or modern Judaism unless he is first circumcised, and it is the first of many steps along this path.
It doesn't end with circumcision... that never happens: circumcision is only the first step; what follows is keeping kosher, worshiping on the Sabbath day (Saturday), and observing the Mosaic festivals (Passover, Pentecost, Trumpets, Atonement, and Booths), as well as the Maccabean festival of Hanukkah.
In other words, circumcision is an initiation ceremony into a whole way of life, a Jewish way of life.

As one can imagine, this caused a great uproar in the early Church, leading to the Church's first ecumenical council, known as the Council of Jerusalem, again recorded in Acts 15.
I encourage you to read the account for yourself, in whatever Bible translation you prefer.
I will simply mention the following highlights:

In the fifteenth chapter of Acts, verses 1 to 5, we learn about such a dispute in the Early Church: the Judaizers argued that Gentile Christians could not be saved unless they first became practitioners of the old Mosaic Law, and this would begin with circumcision.
When Paul and Barnabas came to Jerusalem to discuss this with the elders of the early Church, they were immediately confronted by the Judaizers among the Christians in Jerusalem, who very boldly said: “"Unless Gentiles who convert to Christianity are circumcised, they cannot be saved."”.
Acts 15:5 It specifically states that these Christians were ethnic Jews who still belonged to the sect of the Pharisees.

Acts 15:6-21 It recounts the proceedings of the Council of Jerusalem in detail.
The apostle Peter specifically reminded them that he himself preached to the Gentiles and did not place such a burden on them.
Those familiar with the Acts of the Apostles will recount Peter dealing with the Gentiles in chapter 10, where he received a vision of many unclean animals, and the voice of God telling him to “"to rise, kill, and eat"”.
Peter himself gives his interpretation of this vision in his subsequent actions: the unclean animals represent the Gentiles, and "eating" is not an order for Peter to break his Kosher dietary habits, but rather to begin associating with the Gentiles, bringing them into the Church as Christian brothers, without placing the demands of Mosaic Law upon them.

Acts 15:22-35 It recounts the Council's final decision to allow Gentiles to enter the Church as Gentiles, without requiring them to keep the Law of Moses.
A letter was sent to Gentile Christians with the following instructions:
(1) Judaizers have no authority in the Church in Jerusalem, you can ignore them;
(2) listen to Paul and Barnabas instead;
(3) to abstain from participating in idolatry;
(4) do not drink animal blood;
(5) do not eat bloody meat (from strangled animals) and
(6) not to engage in sexual immorality.
That was it.
The Council of Jerusalem did not impose any additional obligations on non-Jewish (Gentile) Christians, and we will see Paul dealing, again and several times, with the Judaizing heresy in his New Testament epistles.

The bottom line is: Christians can be ethnically Jewish or ethnically Gentile.
Your race or ethnicity — or even your culture — is irrelevant.
It is forbidden, however, to impose the Law of Moses on Gentile Christians in any way, and Christianity should not be an ethno-religion, replacing Gentile cultures with Jewish culture, but rather a universal faith for people of all races, ethnicities, and cultures.

The ancient Greeks had a word for this universalism. It was an adjective called katholikos (καθολικός) and it translates as "universal," meaning not tied to any particular race, ethnicity, or culture.
That's where the word "católico" (catholic) comes from in Portuguese.
Acts 15 defined Christianity as a katholikos (or “universal”) faith for all people, in which Gentiles do not need to adopt the precepts of the Law of Moses, or Jewish culture, to be good Christians.
The word katholikos (καθολικός) was first recorded in 105 AD by Ignatius, bishop of the early Church in Antioch and direct disciple of the apostle John, in his Letter to the Smyrnaeans.
Ignatius was martyred that same year in the Colosseum in Rome, attacked by lions.

This brings us to another word that you won't find in the Bible or in the writings of early Christians, but was later coined to succinctly describe what early Christians were doing in the first centuries of Church history. That word is

Inculturation

Inculturation It describes the process of absorption of Christian cultures as it spread from one place to another in the ancient world, and the idea behind it is based on the events recorded in Acts 15.
Instead of destroying Gentile cultures with religious precepts that demand a culture that adapts to them—which is exactly what the Pharisees did (Islam also does)—Christianity absorbs a culture and, so to speak, “baptizes” it, preserving what is good and wholesome (or at least harmless) about that culture, while eliminating things that are idolatrous or immoral.

This is how Europe was built. This is also how Russia was made.
It is also how the Christian cultures of the Middle East and North Africa were formed before being destroyed by Islam.
More recently, we have seen the principle of inculturation applied to the Americas over the last 500 years, and now we are only beginning to see it applied to sub-Saharan and Far Eastern cultures.
Inculturation, based on the principle established in Acts 15, is the way Christianity baptizes and redeems different Gentile cultures, preserving them and transforming them into a tapestry that is called "Christendom".

Of course, the question arises: What gave the apostles the authority to do this?
This brings up another word not found in the Bible, but it describes a very biblical concept called... supersessionism.
This is a commonly misunderstood Christian doctrine, as many Christians believe it means that Gentile Christians have "replaced" the Jews as God's chosen people.
This is a drastic and completely incorrect simplification.
What this really means is that the New Covenant in Christ has replaced the Old Covenant in Moses, establishing that there is no longer, metaphorically speaking, Jew or Gentile under the New Covenant, which is open to anyone and you don't need to change your ethnicity or culture to be a part of it.
You certainly don't have to keep the Law of Moses.

The idea here is that Jesus Christ perfectly fulfilled the Law of Moses and nailed it to his own hands on the cross.
He, being the Word of God, is the author of the Law of Moses, and He, being the Messiah (Christ), is also the fulfiller of the Law of Moses.
He did not destroy the Law, he fulfilled it, so the rest of us would not have to do the same: the Law of Moses remains, but fulfilled in Jesus Christ, as its author and finisher.
The rest of us fulfill the Law of Moses by placing our faith and trust in Jesus Christ, who is our propitiation before God the Father.
The Law of Moses is complete in him and is no longer necessary, except perhaps to be loosely followed by ethnic Jews as a reminder of Christ's fulfillment, and there are records of the apostle Paul doing this in Acts 21:17-26.
As for non-Jews (that is, ethnic Gentiles), the leaders of the early Church strictly forbade Jewish believers from attempting to Judaize them.
So, with all that in mind, now come the...

Modern Judaizers of the 21st Century

Who are they?
They are Christians, just like the Judaizers of ancient times, believers in Jesus Christ who have a great misunderstanding about what it means to be Christian, only this time, they may or may not be ethnically Jewish.
The definition of "Judaizing" is attempting to make non-Jews follow the precepts of the Old Covenant or the Law of Moses.
This is not the same as Jewish Christians (or Hebrew Christians) who simply wish to maintain their Jewish customs within their own families as a cultural connection to their ethnic group: this, in itself, is a personal matter and, by definition, is not Judaizing.

Modern Judaizers are Christians, whether Jewish or not, who try to convince other Christians that, in order to please God, they must observe various aspects of the Law of Moses (Old Covenant).
Each Jewish group has its own particular agenda:
For some, it's about worshipping on Saturday (the Sabbath) instead of Sunday;
For others, it's about observing the Jewish holidays of Hanukkah instead of Christmas, or Passover instead of Easter;
For some, it's about wearing Jewish clothing or celebrating Jewish liturgy;
For others, it is simply a matter of using Hebrew words to refer to God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and things of a Christian nature.
For many, it's a combination of all these things.
Almost all of them, however, have one thing in common: they attack and defame the traditional celebrations of Christmas, Easter, and Sunday worship.
These are the people who usually launch elaborate conspiracy theories to support their claims, theories about the supposed "pagan origins" of these Christian traditions.
Many of them are terribly oversimplified, and some of them are simply wrong.
I won't go into those errors here, as there are too many to explain.

These are modern Judaizers, and they are not very different from the ancient Judaizers, as they continue to fail to understand the basic apostolic concept of Acts 15, where Christianity is a universal faith (katholikos) that is built upon the inculturation of Gentile cultures and the replacement of the Old Covenant.
It is not, and never intended to be, a faith that mirrors the Law of the Old Covenant of Moses or even modern Judaism.
The Judaizers were wrong in the first century and also in the twenty-first century.
The apostle Paul was very strict with them in the New Testament, never missing an opportunity to rebuke and correct their errors.
We should, likewise, learn from their example.

TRANSLATOR'S NOTES

Shane Schaetzel presents himself as: a Catholic Christian, published author, columnist and blogger, Knight of Columbus of the 4th degree, faithful to the teaching profession.
Despite any other possible theological disagreements, I decided to translate this entire article because it is extremely relevant to the disheartening reality of Judaizing influence swelling within Brazilian evangelical ecclesiastical organizations.
In fact, since I am not yet aware of any valid argument that could justify the Halloween (and since I couldn't find them in the publication I translated), I am making it public that I deliberately chose to omit both references present in the original text.

Thank you for reading this far, and I truly need any help you can offer: comments, shares, and reactions help spread this content, which was produced with the intention of contributing to the edification of the Body of Christ in the world.

Having said all this, and considering all the events happening in the world, allow me to wish you a Christmas focused on the Lord Jesus Christ, for only in Him is there true freedom and peace.