The End Time Church: From the Cathedrals to the Catacombs

By Dan L. White

Copyright ©2018 by Dan L. White, all rights reserved.

Scripture quotations are from the World English Bible (WEB) which is in the public domain.

Chapter 55

Getting Rid of the Rabbis

“Rabbi?”

In a Messianic meeting, I once heard a lady ask the “rabbi” a religious question. He said he didn’t know the answer, but he would look it up later. Then I wondered —

Why couldn’t she look up the answer herself?

I guess the answer to that is — Because he was the “rabbi.”

Rabbi!

A prestigious position, an exalted title, a religious ruler. Even Christians who should know better sometimes like to follow “rabbis.”

Or should I say “rabbanim?”

“Rabbi” article on Wikipedia, 1/24/19
While speaking about a superior, in the third person one could say ha-rav (“the Master”) or rabbo (“his Master”). Later, the term evolved into a formal title for members of the Patriarchate. Thus, the title gained an irregular plural form:  rabbanim (“rabbis”), and not rabbay (“my Masters”).

Well, it’s all Balonay…

When the real Rabbi showed up on earth, the rabbis and chief priests joined Rome to get rid of Him. Then they thought their problems with Him were over.

Nope. Not over.

After Peter told a lame man to walk —

Acts 4
1) As they [Peter and John] spoke to the people, the priests and the captain of the temple and the Sadducees came to them,
2) being upset because they taught the people and proclaimed in Yeshua the resurrection from the dead.
3) They laid hands on them, and put them in custody until the next day, for it was now evening.
4) But many of those who heard the word believed, and the number of the men came to be about five thousand.

15) But when they had commanded them to go aside out of the council, they conferred among themselves,
16) saying, “What shall we do to these men? Because indeed a notable miracle has been done through them, as can be plainly seen by all who dwell in Jerusalem, and we can’t deny it.
17) But so that this spreads no further among the people, let’s threaten them, that from now on they don’t speak to anyone in this name.”
18) They called them, and commanded them not to speak at all nor teach in the name of Yeshua.
19) But Peter and John answered them, “Whether it is right in the sight of God to listen to you rather than to God, judge for yourselves,
20) for we can’t help telling the things which we saw and heard.”

That’s what people do with rabbis. They listen to them, rather than to God. Peter and John wouldn’t do that.

So the rabbis continued their battle against Yeshua by attacking His flock. But that flock did spread farther among the people, as the rabbis feared. The flock grew.

But what happened to the rabbis?

The religious rulers — and Christ’s biggest adversaries — were the priests, scribes and Pharisees.

Matt 27
41) Likewise the chief priests also mocking, with the scribes, the Pharisees, and the elders, said,
42 )“He saved others, but he can’t save himself. If he is the King of Israel, let him come down from the cross now, and we will believe in him.
43) He trusts in God. Let God deliver him now, if he wants him; for he said, ‘I am the Son of God.’”

Priests —

The priesthood was begun by God with the first high priest Aaron. In Christ’s time, John’s father Zechariah was a Godly priest but the chief priests — the high priest and those close to him and the priestly party of Sadducees  — were corrupt.

Scribes —

Scribes were copiers and students of the Hebrew scriptures. Ezra was a priest from the line of Aaron, and he was said to be a scribe in the law of Moses.

Ezra 7
6) this Ezra went up from Babylon: and he was a ready scribe in the law of Moses, which Yahweh, the God of Israel, had given; and the king granted him all his request, according to the hand of Yahweh his God on him.

10) For Ezra had set his heart to seek the law of Yahweh, and to do it, and to teach in Israel statutes and ordinances.

The Hebrew word for scribe means to mark, and the scribes did a meticulous job of copying and protecting the Hebrew scriptures. Ezra humbled himself to obey that law. Later scribes did not but, with their knowledge and position, exalted themselves.

Pharisees —

The Pharisees were separated by their ‘purity,’ and they created an almost endless stream of religious rules, to separate themselves. “A member of the society of Pharisees was called chaber; those not members were called “the people of the land”; compare Joh 7:49, “this people who knoweth not the law are cursed”; also the Pharisee standing and praying with himself, self righteous and despising the publican (Luk 18:9-14),” Fausset’s Bible Dictionary, “Pharisees.”

The law that the Pharisees prided themselves on knowing was the “oral law,” which was written down in the Talmud and Mishna.

“The Mishna lays down the fundamental principle of the Pharisees. “Moses received the oral law from Sinai, and delivered it to Joshua, and Joshua to the elders, and these to the prophets, and these to the men of the great synagogue,”” Fausset’s Bible Dictionary.

Yahweh gave the written Law through Moses. The “oral law” was added to the written law, in direct violation of the written Law, which said not to add to or take away from it. Christ upheld the Father’s Law and rejected the Pharisees’ laws and traditions.

The chief priests, scribes and Pharisees, the religious rulers of the Jewish people — the rabbis — led their nation in rejecting the King of the Jews. But right before his execution, Yeshua had given this warning.

Luke 23
26) When they led him away, they grabbed one Simon of Cyrene, coming from the country, and laid on him the cross, to carry it after Yeshua.
27) A great multitude of the people followed him, including women who also mourned and lamented him.
28) But Yeshua, turning to them, said, “Daughters of Jerusalem, don’t weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children.
29) For behold, the days are coming in which they will say, ‘Blessed are the barren, the wombs that never bore, and the breasts that never nursed.’
30) Then they will begin to tell the mountains, ‘Fall on us!’ and tell the hills, ‘Cover us.’

Forty is the number of trial in the Bible. Forty years passed from that time until 70 AD, when the daughters of Jerusalem did weep. Jerusalem fell, the Temple burned, and a million or so Jews were slaughtered by their chosen king, Caesar of Rome.

John 19
15) They cried out, “Away with him! Away with him! Crucify him!” Pilate said to them, “Shall I crucify your King?” The chief priests answered, “We have no king but Caesar!”

At Yeshua’s death in 30 AD, the earth turned dark and trembled.

Matt 2
45) Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land until the ninth hour.
46) About the ninth hour Yeshua cried with a loud voice, saying, “Eli, Eli, lima sabachthani?” That is, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
47) Some of them who stood there, when they heard it, said, “This man is calling Elijah.”
48) Immediately one of them ran, and took a sponge, and filled it with vinegar, and put it on a reed, and gave him a drink.
49) The rest said, “Let him be. Let’s see whether Elijah comes to save him.”
50) Yeshua cried again with a loud voice, and yielded up his spirit.
51) Behold, the veil of the temple was torn in two from the top to the bottom. The earth quaked and the rocks were split.
52) The tombs were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised;
53) and coming out of the tombs after his resurrection, they entered into the holy city and appeared to many.
54) Now the centurion, and those who were with him watching Yeshua, when they saw the earthquake, and the things that were done, feared exceedingly, saying, “Truly this was the Son of God.”

The blackout lasted three hours, the earth quaked hard enough to split rocks, and the veil in the Temple was torn in two.

In today’s English, veil often means a covering over a woman’s face, so thin she can see through it. The Temple veil was not like that! That veil — the curtain between the Holy Place and the Holy of Holies — was about sixty feet high and thirty feet wide. Jewish commentary said it was as thick as a man’s hand span.

Only God could rip that curtain.

The high priest alone went behind that curtain into the Holy of Holies, only once a year on Atonement. When God ripped the veil, the Holy of Holies was opened. The high priest had lost his job. Those priests still served for another forty years but ultimately Caiaphas and his kind were replaced by Christ.

Look at all the things that happened forty years before the Temple was destroyed in 70 AD.

Besides the darkening, the earthquake, and the torn curtain, jewishroots.net quotes the Talmud about another miraculous event of that time.

“Interestingly, one of the signs that Israel was to be forgiven, when represented by her High Priest on the Day of Atonement was that they would tie a scarlet thread where it could be observed, at the start of the holiday and by the end of the day the scarlet thread would change in color from scarlet to white, showing all Israel her sins had been forgiven.

For forty years before the destruction of the temple the thread of scarlet never turned white but it remained red.” Talmud- Mas. Rosh HaShana 31b http://jewishroots.net/library/miscellaneous/high_priest_corruption.html

That red thread was not a good sign.

Alfred Edersheim in his well known book, The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah, chapter XV, wrote of four independent testimonies of miraculous events at that time, forty years before the Temple fell in 70 AD.

“…[New Testament account] records the rending of the Temple-Veil in two from the top downward to the bottom; as the second, the quaking of the earth, the rending of the rocks and the opening of the graves. . . while the rending of the Veil is recorded first, as being the most significant token to Israel, it may have been connected with the earthquake, although this alone might scarcely account for the tearing of so heavy a Veil from the top to the bottom. Even the latter circumstance has its significance. That some great catastrophe, betokening the impending destruction of the Temple, had occurred in the Sanctuary about this very time, is confirmed by not less than four mutually independent testimonies: those of Tacitus, of Josephus, of the Talmud, and of earliest Christian tradition. The most important of these are, of course, the Talmud and Josephus. The latter speaks of the mysterious extinction of the middle and chief light in the Golden Candlestick, forty years before the destruction of the Temple; and both he and the Talmud refer to a supernatural opening by themselves of the great Temple-gates that had been previously closed, which was regarded as a portent of the coming destruction of the Temple.”

The Jewish Talmud, Yoma 39b, describes the Temple gates opening by themselves this way.

“Forty years before the Temple was destroyed . . . the gates of the Hekel [Holy Place] opened by themselves, until Rabbi Yohanan B. Zakkai rebuked them [the gates] saying, Hekel, Hekel, why alarmist thou us? We know that thou art destined to be destroyed . . .”

Josephus, who wrote of the candlestick in the Menorah going out and of the large Temple gates opening by themselves, was a Jewish historian who lived through the fall of Jerusalem. He described the gate opening in his book Wars of the Jews.

”Moreover, the eastern gate of the inner, [court of the temple] which was of brass, and vastly heavy, and had been with difficulty shut by twenty men, and rested upon a basis armed with iron, and had bolts fastened very deep into the firm floor, which was there made of one entire stone, was seen to be opened of its own accord about the sixth hour of the night. Now, those that kept watch in the temple came thereupon running to the captain of the temple, and told him of it; who then came up thither, and not without great difficulty was able to shut the gate again. This also appeared to the vulgar to be a very happy prodigy, as if God did thereby open them the gate of happiness. But the men of learning understood it, that the security of their holy house was dissolved of its own accord, and that the gate was opened for the advantage of their enemies. So these publicly declared, that this signal foreshewed the desolation that was coming upon them” (IV,5,3).

Jerome, c. 347-420, is best known for the Vulgate, a Latin translation of the Bible. In a letter to Hedibia, Jerome wrote that the Hebrew Gospel of Matthew said that a huge lintel in the Temple fell (Littell’s Living Age, 1857.) Edersheim, in his book cited above, wrote “it would seem an obvious inference to connect again this breaking of the lintel with an earthquake.” A lintel is a horizontal structural support that spans an opening. When the stone lintel fell — thirty feet long and weighing thirty tons — that was a big event. Not just because of the noise, but because it may have bounced the rabbis out of the Temple.

“Forty years before the destruction of the Temple, the Sanhedrin was banished (from their meeting place in the Chamber of Hewn Stones) and sat in the trading-station (on the Temple Mount but not in the Temple),“ (Talmud, Shabbat 15a).

Ernest Martin, now deceased, is well known for a theory that the second Temple was not on the Temple Mount but was in the City of David. Excavations in the City of David since Martin’s death have shown that to be apparently impossible. However, in an earlier book Secrets of Golgotha, Martin insightfully speculated on why the Jewish rabbis left the Chamber of Hewn Stones in the Temple.

“If an earthquake of the magnitude capable of breaking the stone lintel at the top of the entrance to the Holy Place was occurring at the exact time of Christ’s death, then what would such an earthquake have done to the Chamber of Hewn Stones (a vaulted and columned structure) no more than 40 yards away from where the stone lintel fell and the curtain torn in two?

There is every reason to believe, though the evidence is circumstantial, that the Chamber of Hewn Stones was so damaged in the same earthquake that it became structurally unsafe from that time forward. Something like this had to have happened because the Sanhedrin would not have left this majestic chamber (to take up residence in the insignificant ‘Trading Place’) unless something approaching this explanation took place.”

The Sanhedrin had to move out of their meeting room in the Temple, and Jerome said that the nearby lintel was broken. No record exists of the Romans forcing the Sanhedrin out, which would have caused a rebellion among the Jews. The rabbis and priests certainly would not have voluntarily moved out of the Temple. To go from the Chamber of Hewn Stones in the magnificent Temple to the “Trading Place” where ordinary commerce was done was like moving from Westminster Abbey to a flea market. So it seems likely that the lintel broke because of the earthquake at Christ’s death; and because the lintel broke, the Sanhedrin had to move out of the Temple.

Martin reaches this conclusion about the earthquake and broken lintel expelling the Sanhedrin: “If this is actually what happened (and I have no doubt that it did), we then have a most remarkable witness that God the Father engineered every action happening on the day of Christ’s trial and crucifixion. It means that the judgment made by the official Sanhedrin against Jesus within the Chamber of Hewn Stones, was THE LAST JUDGMENT ever given by the official Sanhedrin in their majestic chambers within the Temple! It would show that God the Father demonstrated by the earthquake at Christ’s death that the sentence of the Sanhedrin against Jesus would be the last judgment it would ever make in that authorized place!”

What does all this show about the Jewish religious rulers?

God was done with them dudes.

God did not continue the human priesthood.

Heb 7
23) Many, indeed, have been made priests, because they are hindered from continuing by death.
24) But he, because he lives forever, has his priesthood unchangeable.
25) Therefore he is also able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through him, seeing that he lives forever to make intercession for them.
26) For such a high priest was fitting for us: holy, guiltless, undefiled, separated from sinners, and made higher than the heavens;
27) who doesn’t need, like those high priests, to offer up sacrifices daily, first for his own sins, and then for the sins of the people. For he did this once for all, when he offered up himself.
28) For the law appoints men as high priests who have weakness, but the word of the oath which came after the law appoints a Son forever who has been perfected.

The priesthood continues, not in flawed humans, but in the Messiah.

Further, as discussed in Chapter 37 of this work, “Ruin, Ruin, Ruin,” God did not continue the human kingship, either.

Eze 21 English Standard Version
(25) And you, O profane wicked one, prince of Israel, whose day has come, the time of your final punishment,
(26) thus says the Lord GOD: Remove the turban and take off the crown. Things shall not remain as they are. Exalt that which is low, and bring low that which is exalted.
(27) A ruin, ruin, ruin I will make it. This also shall not be, until he comes, the one to whom judgment belongs, and I will give it to him.

Acts 15
13) After they were silent, James answered, “Brothers, listen to me.
14) Simeon has reported how God first visited the nations, to take out of them a people for his name.
15) This agrees with the words of the prophets. As it is written,
16) ‘After these things I will return. I will again build the tabernacle of David, which has fallen. I will again build its ruins. I will set it up,
17) That the rest of men may seek after the Lord; All the Gentiles who are called by my name, Says the Lord, who does all these things.

The throne of David fell to ruin and continues only in the Messiah. It will not be until He comes, and the Father will give it to Him then.

Now, if God did not continue the human priesthood, and if He did not continue the human kingship, would He continue the institution of the rabbis? Did Yahweh continue using the Pharisees as religious rulers?

No way.

God set up the priesthood, beginning with Aaron. He did not want His people ruled by kings, but when the people demanded a king, He accepted their kings, for a while. But the rabbis, scribes and Pharisees? There are no Bible commands setting up the rabbis. They set themselves up.

The human priesthood is gone. The human kings are gone. And the human rabbis are —

Gone.

After having Yeshua killed, the rabbis continued their battle against Him by attacking His flock. That flock grew. So what happened to the rabbis?

When the Son of God died, the earth quaked, the veil in the Temple ripped, and the rabbis had to move out to the flea market. Forty years later, the women of Jerusalem wept, and the most blessed of them were those who never bore children, as the city fell, the Temple burned and the Jews perished.

The rabbis and Pharisees were kicked out as religious rulers. God forever uses His Son as High Priest, coming King, and righteous Rabbi.