The history of the Messianic Community (Church) is a fascinating thing. We imagine, because we want it to be so in our own world of uncertainty, for everything back in those early days of Christianity to to be 'whole' and to to be 'cohesive' - we want something so sure that we can model our own time on or to use it to build a spiritual foundation on. We approach it like children to a devoted parent, or pupils to a respected mentor.

Forty years ago, when I met Yah'shua (Jesus) and was born-again, I truly believed that if we could somehow return to the simplicity of the first centuty qodeshim (saints, set-apart ones) that all our contemporary perplexities would vanish away, competing denominations would cease, and we could in effect restore that ancient community, have a unified doctrine and experience something of the power, wonder and love that those ancients had. (Of course, I overlooked their conficts). It was what led me, initially, into those churches and organisations who claimed to have 'got it all together'. They were cock-sure that they were right and that everyone else was wrong. But as you looked closely at their own histories you could see how they themselves had gone through a tremendous evolution of thought, doctrine and practice and could not have been what they claimed. It took me a long time to come to the painful realisation that no matter what man gets his hands on, no matter how 'spiritual' he may appear to be, then like Midas he changes all he touches. And the history of Christianity is truly messy at times, not at all even or clean.

And it isn't simple either. When I first converted I was irresistably drawn to the Johannine writings - the gospel, letters and revelation of the apostle John. It's a reason I taught them academically back in Oxford days. I 'got' them, I understood them, and I felt so very much at home with them. They made sense to me. I shuddered when I read Paul, though. I could not understand him, and though so many claimed they did, and tried to explain him to me, they not only disagreed with each other but they did so with an almost intellectual violence at times. I stayed away from Paul for a very long time, not trying to fathom him, but just skimming off bits here and there to help me construct my own initially Johannine-based view of the Besorah (Gospel).

This was the time when the Ruach (Spirit) moved the most strongly in me, when I enjoyed such a liberal outpouring of revelation. It was, in many ways, one of my most productive time, even if it wasn't very refined. And then, in the late 1990s, I came across David Stern and the Messianics and I was engaged by their passion for Torah. I had found a new heaven to graduate in. John had spoken to the poetic, romantic and mystical, but now the Torah was speaking to the orderly, Prussian side of my being. I became messianic around 1997/8, meaning I started submitting to all the mitzvot (commandments) I could understand and changed my lifestyle accordingly - observing the sabbath, the festivals, Kashrut, and studying the Torah in depth. The Ruach (Spirit) opened new doors for me and started showing me a different kind of 'depth' and reality to the one I had known in the Johannine school. The Messianic Scriptures (New Testament) opened up in a new way. Now I was with James, Peter, Jude, the writer of Hebrews and, though I didn't know it yet, a part of Paul too. The years sped by and the spiritual well eventually started running dry, and I knew that once more I had to 'love on' and find the next missing 'something else' that I was still searching for. But where was it?

All that was left was Paul, and I balked. And I balked for all sorts of reasons, not least because many of the Protestant readings of his writings seemed to be anti-Torah and I wasn't sure how to deal with that. I also knew it would be hard work - very hard work - and I was pretty sure I would not enjoy it. After all, I hadn't enjoyed it before. N.T.Wright was right when he described Paul, in conversation with Richard Hays (which I transcribed a couple of days ago), as "a high octane intellect working with huge and complex ideas but expressing them dynamically, densely, powerfully; so we go on gripping them and being gripped by them. Intellect and spirituality - love of God being poured into our hearts, like he wants to set this to music - passionate." What a brilliant assessment by one of the world's leading theologians and a passionate genius in his own right! I knew that this was the man to help me grapple with the extraordinary apostle. He had the 'bigger picture', the overall sweep, of this incredible ancient. I am still digesting his works today.

I have been immersed in Paul for the last 4-5 years now and I'll be honest it has been very hard work and at times back-breakingly, intellectually and emotionally tedious. It has made my brain hurt and my heart has got frustrated trying to get handles on the man's soul. I had to learn to think in a completely different way to John and to Moses - the Pharisee way - because Paul is very different. He was a Messianic Pharisee. The breakthrough started happening about 1-1½ years ago when several lights started going on simultaneously and I began having more and more 'aha' moments. Paul started coming alive. Loose ends started getting tied together. He started making sense as soon as I started letting go of Protestant vocabulary and letting the text speak for itself in its original setting. Yet five years on, I still feel a novice with this study of Paul, Christianity's first theologian and probably the most brilliant theologian of all. I still feel like a child plumbing his depths. And he's not a bit like us...and by us, I mean Westerners, even though we've tried to westernise him by putting him alternatively in a bottle of chloroform to anethestise him (so he doesn't overwhelm our pea-brains) and then acetaldehyde to preserve and keep his dead body intact so we can dissect his motionless corpse and gaze at it on a molecular level with an electron microscope. But you can't slow Paul down to your own sluggish speed - you have to keep up with him, and to do that you have to be alive in the Ruach (Spirit); and you can't freeze him in time to analyse him because movement is the only way you'll ever grasp him (or indeed anyone). You have to walk with him as the Ruach (Spirit) worked in him while understanding his environment. This is how I, as a minister, study my Bible.

Godfrey Rust describes poetically what we in the West have done to Paul and others like him - the Western Catholics and Protestants have literally castrated him:

"Where the apostles (fortunate of men
to understand Your mysteries!) had then
only You, Holy Spirit, to draw on
we have concordance and the lexicon,
such commentaries and textual critiques
that kept our curates occupied for weeks
as verse by verse they plumb divinity.
The angels, awed, stand dumbly by as we
religiously apply the apparatus
(each new translation failing to placate us),
prod at our secrets, first this way then that,
as schoolchildren dissect a classroom rat
until Atonement dies before our pens
like blood under a microscopic lens
and Love, before which once we dared not speak, becomes a mistranslation from the Greek.

Lord, all Your gifts are worthy, and forbid
that fruits of scholarship should be kept hid,
but subtle is the pathway to disaster
when all the scholar's study is his master.
O Thou who prayed to keep us from temptation
save us now from our imagination
lest -- thinking in our ingenuity
it's You who falls beneath our scrutiny --
we file and reference till we can recall
only the doctrine, not the All-in-All
and let You Lord (it will not save our necks)
be crucified again, by card index.

That's why we need a John, who is not 'into' theology in the same way, in addition to a Paul. He doesn't write like Paul at all because he's witnessing to a different kind of person altogether. He is aiming at Greeks, not Hebrews. And to understand Paul you must do Torah and understand Torah. Paul was saturated in Torah - that was his bread-and-butter before he was converted. I believe that is why Yahweh wanted me to leave Paul to 'last', and I'll explain what I mean by that in a moment.

One thing I soon came to understand with Paul was that his writings were a very different kind of 'scripture' to the rest of the Messianic Scriptures (New Testament) and even the whole Bible. You can't begin to compare them. Moreover, it was clear to me (and I have known this for some time) that Paul never dreamed that his letters would become Holy Scripture. He never in his wildest imagination believed that centuries later people would pour over his writings dissecting every sentence, phrase and word, or that they would be trying to squeeze meaning out of them as one would squeeze a lemon. Indeed, they weren't even intended to be read like that because you can't dissect poetry and passion all mixed in with high academese.

Yet the Latinised Reformers in particular fell in love with Paul and thought they had understood him. They put him on a pedestal and re-interpreted Catholicism, which was all they had known for a thousand years. The Reformation is Paul's Gospel, in a strange sort of way (because that's only a half truth), what he referred to on three occasions as "my gospel" (Rom.2:16; 16:25; 2 Tim.2:8), not meaning that he had a different gospel from the other apostles but that he had a view of it that was both similar and yet uniquely personal. It was his inspired interpretation of it. And the Reformers certainly had a 'view' of Paul - an essentially Catholic Augustinian one - that was very different from his own. We all have 'views' or 'persepctives', based on our cultural upbringing...and that's the major problem. That's why history is so important, and why we must 'do' it, and do it well.

Paul wrote no treatises or discourses in which he set it all out for us in an orderly fashion, at least none that have survived. What we have is a 'pot pourri', a 'liquorice assortment' or a kind of 'mixed salad' of deep theology all thrown together during pitches of feverish excitement and mystical rapture. He was like King David in some ways too, thowing in invective, sarcasm and homour in abundance, not something you'd expect to find in a 'holy book'. So there is an element of the Psalms in his writings as well. This was no Book of Hebrews-type theological discourse, no systematic Book of Revelation, no scientifically ordered and disciplined Gospel of Luke or Acts of the Apostles. This is Paul, artist and theologian having an impassioned discussion or debate with diverse converts from Greco-Roman pagan backgrounds with loads of unique problems! Paul does what no other Bible writer ever did - he argued in the same way that he had grown up listening to the religious leaders of his day arguing and debating. No wonder apologists and people who love to argue and have verbal fights love him! He's the meat of the street evangelist toughing it out with hostile listeners.

If Paul had his own view or perspective of the Besorah (Gospel), then so did John...and Peter...and James. Yesterday I had a bit of an epiphany, and though I have been trying to get 'in' to this now for some weeks, it didn't happen until then - I found my way back into the Johannine spirir and reconnected, as it were, with a long lost friend. I had come round full circle. And then it came to me. I drew three overlapping circles and in them, respectively, I wrote 'Messianic', 'Pauline' and 'Johannine'. And they slotted together as it were, like three aspects of a single Emet or Truth. It was then I realised that Yahweh had purposefully caused the Messianic Community (Church) to branch off in three directions, not to separate, but to overlap, with epicentres, as it were, in Rome (Paul), Ephesus (John) and Jerusalem (Peter/James). This was how Yahweh has going to preserve the fullness of the Besorah (Gospel) in the face of apostacy which He knew was coming and always knew it would come. Thus any future restoration - a genuine one, that is - would have to be a threefold event:

I then drew another three overlapping circles and in them I wrote 'Gnosticism', 'Marcionism' and 'Kabalism' - the three counterfeits sent by Satan to overwhelm the three true aspects of His Emet (Truth). How correct N.T.Wright was when he said that "all history is mapwork". So too, I venture to suggest, is theology. I'll talk about these counterfeits at another time.

John's epistles are the oldest portions of the Messianic Scriptures (New Testament) so they paint a picture of what the Messianic Community (Church) looked like at the end of the first century. The apostle must have been in his 80's or older and all the other apostles were long since martyred. He alone of that happy band was still alive, even after what must have been a terrible time as an exile and effectual prisoner on Patmos island. He had even survived being boiled alive in oil, so Tertullian tells us, preserved from harm like Daniel in the flames and the three boys in the lion's den. You would have thought that as the last of the special witnesses that he would have had a virtual god-like status amongst all the believers and been welcomed with open arms by audiences eager to hear his testimony.

Not at all. The Messianic Community (Church) had changed. When John was on Patmos receiving a vision of that great and final apocalypse which we call the Book of Revelation, Yahweh showed him that only seven congregations were still in the emet (truth), all of them were in Asia Minor (what is modern day Turkey), and all were struggling with diverse problems threatening their continuing existence too. In the post-apostolic period we are told by Clement of Rome (not the Clement of Alexandria) that the Corinthian congregation, a heavy burden on Paul's shoulders in his days, had a renaissance but soon became subverted by inexperienced and fleshy the youth to collapse into the metaphorical ashes.

So really we should not be at all surprised by the contents of his third epistle and final surviving composition, and chronologically the very last book of the Bible. We don't know where this congregation was, but I am guessing within reach of Ephesus and the limited range of the octogenarian that John almost certainly was. But we know its pastor was a man by the name of Diotrephes. This congregation was not at all like the ones that Paul had ministered to maybe two or three decades before, nor, I suggest, was the Messianic Community (Church) as a whole the same way it had been when the apostles were out blazing the mission trail on fire with the Ruach (Spirit). The flame had diminished and with its diminution, the light of the Besorah (Gospel) began to start going out. And as I mentioned, the Corinthian Assembly went through major changes.

In those early days there were essentially two kinds of ministry:

• 1. The settled or static ministry, that of the local congregation, led by elders and deacons. This kind of ministry did all its work in one place and within one congregation, much in the same way most Protestant churches function today; and

• 2. The mobile or travelling ministry, an itinerant ministry, consisting of apostles, nevi'im (prophets) and evangelists. These ministers moved throughout the whole Messianic Community (Church), much as Protestant evangelists do today. Their authority was universal and not confined to any one place or congregation.

But by the end of the first century, when John was writing his epistles, things were changing. Early at the beginning of the second century, no doubt after the last apostle's natural death, there was a book known as The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles (better known to some of you as the Didaché) which is the earliest book of congregational order that we possess. Remember, John has passed on and the Messianic Community (Church) is changing. It might interest you to know that NCAY was influenced by this book in our formulation of the Liturgy of the Master's (Lord's) Supper as it's the earliest known liturgy that exists. In their version of the Eucharist, the text says:

"But allow the prophets to hold the Eucharist as they will" (Didache 10.7).

The first generation apostles were dead and gone but not the nevi'im (prophets) - the Messianic Community of the post-apostolic fathers was not cessationist like modern Baptists and other traditional Protestants even if it was heading in that direction. (Cessationists believe the majuor gifts like prophecy, revelation, tongues, etc. ended when the apostle John died). Now, though there were still nevi'im (prophets), their influence and popularity were waning as we read further from the Didaché:

"Concerning the prophets and apostles, act thus according to the ordinance of the gospel. Let every apostle who comes to you be received as the Lord, but let him not stay more than one day, or if need be a second as well; but if he stays three days, he is a false prophet. And when an apostle goes forth let him accept nothing but bread; but, if he asks for money, he is a false prophet" (Didache 11.3-6).

This tells us that there was a second generation of apostles but that not only were they less popular than the first generation of apostles who had known the Saviour in the flesh, but that the offices of 'navi'/'prophet' and 'apostle' appeared at times to be blurred, so one could maybe speak of them as 'prophet-apostles'. Not only that, but they were more restricted. The first apostles would spend months with new congregations, and were eagerly sought after, but not these - two days was apparently enough for them! So from the Didaché we learn that the second century prophets brought their own problems. Whether the nevi'im (prophets) themselves were of low quality, or the fault was with the assemblies, or both, is not clear. Certainly if they were anything like todays 'prophets' from Pentecostal and Charismatic churches, I wouldn't want to have them around for long. But who can say?

One particular problem, which comes into sharp focus in the 3rd Epistle of John, is that there was a clash between itinerant and the settled ministry. The stronger the institution of the settled congregation became, the less it liked the invasions of nomadic nevi'im (prophets) and apostles, especially when these wanderers told them what to do. And after years of authority the wandering nevi'im (prophets) and apostles found it hard to understand why they were no longer welcome.

Now I am sharing this interesting piece of history with you not only to demonstrate that what John writes about in his third letter is what we would have expected (thus validating the scriptures as authentic), but to remind you of how important sacred history is to our study of the Bible so that we interpret it right. If Mormons, for example, read 3 John as it is they would soon realise that their overly institutionalised and centralised church organisation is nothing like that of the apostolic or post-apostolic Messianic Community (Church). Diotrephes would have been excommunicated by them in a flash. Indeed, what we have in Mormonism is more like what developped later in Catholicism some generations afterwards.

This clash between a local assembly and the travelling nevi'im (prophets) and apostles is the situation we have in this letter. Let's quickly read it through now:

"The elder, to my dear friend Gaius, whom I love in the truth. Dear friend, I pray that you may enjoy good health and that all may go well with you, even as your soul is getting along well. It gave me great joy to have some brothers come and tell about your faithfulness to the truth and how you continue to walk in the truth. I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in the truth. Dear friend, you are faithful in what you are doing for the brothers, even though they are strangers to you. They have told the assembly (church) about your love. You will do well to send them on their way in a manner worthy of Elohim (God). It was for the sake of the Name that they went out, receiving no help from the pagans. We ought therefore to show hospitality to such men so that we may work together for the truth.

"I wrote to the assembly (church), but Diotrephes, who loves to be first, will have nothing to do with us. So if I come, I will call attention to what he is doing, gossiping maliciously about us. Not satisfied with that, he refuses to welcome the brothers. He also stops those who want to do so and puts them out of the assembly (church).

"Dear friend, do not imitate what is evil but what is good. Anyone who does what is good is from Elohim (God). Anyone who does what is evil has not seen Elohim (God). Demetrius is well spoken of by everyone - and even by the truth itself. We also speak well of him, and you know that our testimony is true. I have much to write you, but I do not want to do so with pen and ink. I hope to see you soon, and we will talk face to face. Shalom (peace) to you. The friends here send their greetings. Greet the friends there by name" (3 John 1-14, NIV).

The aged John is of the 'old school', the first generation of apostles, indeed its last survivor. In 3 John 5-10 John pleads for the welcome and support of those wandering nevi'im (prophets) and apostles, who have given up everything to undertake this itinerant ministry. He pleads that they should be welcomed and supported and helped on their way. But in verses 9 and 10 we read of Pastor Diotrephes who wanted nothing to do with these wanderers, he would not receive them, and he would actually debar them from the assembly, including John himself! Diotrepehes, who represents the settled ministry, finds these wanderers a nuisance and a disturbance. Yet there is a member of this congregation called Demetrius (v.12) who seemed to be prepared to accept the old apostolic order.

So in 3 John we see the tail end of the old apostolic order giving way to the settled, cessationist order that we find in the non-charismatic-type churches of today....not, I hasten to emphaticallty add, that the apostles and nevi'im (prophets) were anything like to today's wild and lawless charismatics! Though Pentecostals and others welcome those they call 'prophets' and 'apostles' such are not usually welcomed in cessationist churches though, of course, evangelists are still are common among all of them.

The Messianic Communmity (Church) was changing rapidly in the last days of the apostle John - the old order was dying out and before very long the wandering or travelling evangelists had disappeared from the scene altogether. The local ministry became the backbone of the structure of the Messianic Community (Church), just as it is today in the traditional Protestant, Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches...and even amongst the Messianic synagogues.

Beaking the backbone of this de-apostlised and de-prophetised Protestant milieu is nigh impossible because fossils are not flexible structures like living organisms and will shatter if you try to bend them. This respective inflexibility, and flexibility, is revealed prophetically in the Tanakh (Old Testsament) as the real difference between Judah and Ephraim (Israel), respectively - Judah is compared to fired clay (that can only be shattered) whereas Ephraim (Israel) is still like wet clay (that can be remade into a new potter's vessel).

Radical reformation isn't popular and the Remnant has to be radically reformed if it is to be reshaped into the vessel that Yahweh wants. You'll not be able to reform traditional cessationist and continuationist churches enough to turn them into the Remnant that Yahweh insists upon. But just as there was Demetrius in John's day still willing to receive Yahweh's apostles and nevi'im (prophets) of new, so there will be a latter generation of Demetrius' willing to do things Yahweh's way. These, however, will come out of today's cessationist and continuationist churches because these churches won't reform - they are like fired clay, unwilling to change and will, in the end, only crack and shatter when the new Sukkot anointing comes.

It has not been esay for me to share this vision because people find their security in old settled ways. But the first generation of believers was not settled - it was on the move. There was a dynamic between the local and travelling ministry which fed off each other as was always intended. But equally important to that was the reality of the threefold interaction between the 'Torah' life, the 'Johannine' mystical life, and the ecstatic 'Pauline' grace-based life. These three have still not properly come together because believers are stuck in their individual churchy ruts.

Only yesterday I was shocked and saddened to see a messianic insulting an evangelical believer calling him a "swine-eating Christmas-keeper" in a discussion on the 'Greater Exodus' (or 'Second', 'Last' or 'Final Exodus' as we call it). The evangelical showed this arrogant messianic much grace and tried to reason with him but the childish and snobbish response he got back was, "I don't argue with lawless pagan christians", a perfect example of Torah being pitted against grace when they are supposed to operate together under the headship of grace. Satan won that battle, not the graceless messianic and not the lawless evangelical (even if he acted more in the Ruach/Spirit), but both were blind. And I won't even go into Johannine mysticism which would doubtless have been attacked as 'occultic' by both! (I have heard Calvinists like Sproul mock anything smacking of the intimate, personal or relational because they mostly base their salvation and worth on abstract, dead-letter theological ideas...twisted Pauline ones, in their case).

Now I don't know how Yahweh is going to break this barriers down between the three broad types of believer whose 'gospel' in isolation is defective and distorted. I believe only a supernatural work of the Ruach (Spirit) can do it, catalysed, directed and sustained by discipleship programs such as we at NCAY aim to provide. You do need all three spheres, as we have tried to present to the Body in so many different ways over the years, as with our well-known presentation of the Complete Believer who must be an evangelical, a messianic and a humanist all wrapped-into-one:

I'm saying much the same thing today, only in a slightly different way. The thing is, when you bring these three spheres together you get something both similar and yet very different to each of the individual spheres themselves, or their representitives in the Body of Messiah. And the complete sphere is vastly bigger than the sum of its three parts! The overlap is the really interesting part, because it's there that the balance and wholeness come. Then you will once again have a first century apostolic believer only this time he will have the fullness of the Sukkot anointing and not the preparatory Shavu'ot or 'Pentecost' anointing, to equip him for the Final Gathering and the Last Exodus. I hope to live long enough to see this get underway and to find brethren and sisters bold and daring enough to jump into this work!