Our Point of Origin – Our Starting Point
This article is ultimately about labels – the choice between defining ourselves by a label and glorifying it, or defining ourselves by the Message we live, and glorifying the Message instead.
Massoritism is a modern denomination within Talmidaism, or The Way. The word “Massorite” therefore describes a modern religious identity; it is not the name by which the earliest followers of Yeshua identified themselves, nor do Massorites try to claim that there was ever any ancient ‘Massorite’ denomination from which we have descended.
The modern Massorite community began in 1998, but our true spiritual inspiration lies much further back – our true foundation is way, way back. We look towards the earliest Galilean followers of Yeshua in the early 1st century: the men and women who actually heard him teach, who lived within the Second Temple Judaism of his own time, and who attempted to put his teachings into practice. If we had to choose the most fundamental description of our identity, it would therefore not be “Massorite”, but Followers of the Way. That is our primary label, and our most cherished identity.
This is an important distinction, because our purpose is not primarily to reconstruct any later historical sect, whose central beliefs, practices and teachings changed over the course of a century. Our purpose is to recover, as faithfully as we can, the Way that Yeshua himself taught while he was alive, and to replicate the kind of life he intended his followers to live.
Here’s a sci-fi parable to illustrate the difference between the two approaches: Far in the future, long after humans have become extinct, two Space Aliens walk into a bar, both members of the ‘Human Appreciation Society’. One belongs to the faction which proclaims loud and proud, “We are the original Humans! The Humans are back!” The other belongs to a faction that quietly says, “We are trying our best to live like the original Humans”. The first alien builds an artificial chronology to show an unbroken line of biological descent from humans to his faction; the second alien studies how the original humans lived, and tries to be like them.
Why Return to the Historical Yeshua?
Every religious teacher can become surrounded by layers of interpretation after their death. As generations pass, followers explain their teacher’s words, communities develop particular traditions, controversies arise, and new circumstances require old teachings to be interpreted in new ways. Eventually, it can become difficult to distinguish the original teaching from the interpretations that accumulated around it in later sects.
Yeshua is no exception.
We therefore believe that it is important to begin with the historical human Yeshua: the Jewish prophet, chosen and sent by God, who lived in the Galilee and Judea during the Second Temple period. We seek to understand what he himself taught while he was alive, within the Jewish world in which he actually lived, rather than beginning with theological systems that developed three or four generations later, and then superimposing those systems back onto him.
This is in no way an attempt to diminish the importance of all those who came after Yeshua – not at all; they too are our common spiritual ancestors. It is simply a matter of chronology. If our purpose is to follow Yeshua, then Yeshua himself must be our primary point of reference, not later historical sects, or what they taught about him.
Our question is therefore not merely, “What did later followers believe about Yeshua?” and then faithfully align with their beliefs. It is more fundamentally, “What did Yeshua himself teach, and how would his very first followers have understood those teachings?”
The First Followers of the Way as Our Spiritual Heritage
For Massorites, the very earliest Galilean Followers of the Way have a particularly cherished and treasured importance. They were the people closest to the beginning. They are the people we are trying to emulate. They are our primary identity, our primary ‘label’. They are the ones in whose footsteps we walk, not those of later sects. We are not anchoring ourselves in any 2nd century sect, in order to replicate their beliefs; we are grounding ourselves in the 1st century, in the ministry of Yeshua itself, and in the first Galilean followers he taught.
They heard Yeshua’s teaching before the passage of generations had created layers of interpretation and theology around it. They understood his words within the Jewish culture, Scriptures, customs and expectations of their own time. They saw how he lived, heard the questions he answered, witnessed the situations in which he taught, and attempted to follow his example.
We therefore look to them, not because we believe that everything done by every individual in the first century must be reproduced today, but because they, the first Galilean Followers of the Way, provide our nearest historical window into what it meant to be a disciple of Yeshua when the Way was still new.
Our aspiration is, in a sense, to place ourselves imaginatively in their position. We seek to emulate them, and replicate their mindset and belief-system.
If we had been Galileans standing among Yeshua’s first listeners, what would we have heard? What would we have understood him to be asking of us to do or become? What kind of relationship with our heavenly Father would his teachings have led us towards? How would those teachings have affected the way we treated our neighbours, our families, the poor, the stranger and our fellow Followers of the Way? What kind of solutions to life would his teachings have given us? And how do we apply all that today?
These are the questions that lie behind our interest in the reconstruction of the historical human prophet Yeshua, and of his Galilean followers who heard his preaching when he was alive.
However, historical reconstruction is not our final objective. Faithful discipleship is.
Not a Return to the Second Century, but the First
This also explains why Massorites do not see our task primarily as reproducing the beliefs of any particular sect that existed a whole century after Yeshua, and so never heard him speak.
The ancient Ebionites are historically fascinating, and their existence is valuable in legitimising our common cause; modern Ebionites are cherished fellow Talmidis within the Congregation of the Way – they are our sisters and brothers. We have no need to disparage them or to deny their place within the wider history of Talmidaism. Our difference is simply one of emphasis, and in the different questions we ask.
Where a modern Ebionite approach may naturally and justifiably ask about what is historically recorded of the ancient second-century Ebionites, and about what they believed, and what lifestyle they practised, who they were, and how their identity can best be understood, and about being faithful in emulation of them, the Massorite approach begins much further back.
We ask what the historical Yeshua himself taught when he was alive (did he himself think he was the messiah, did he act anything like the accepted job-description of a Jewish messiah, what was his ultimate mission and purpose, what were his authentic Jewish and prophetic teachings, did he live and die as a prophet), and we then ask what his earliest Galilean followers would have understood themselves to be doing in following him (bringing the kingdom of the messiah? or working for the Kingdom of God)?
None of that is meant to be a criticism of Ebionites – please don’t see it that way. It is simply put forward as an honest description of the different questions being asked in the two different traditions. All of us must be honest and accept that both our traditions have suffered a hiatus of at least 1400 years, and neither of us can claim an uninterrupted, continuous lineage.
For us, the second-century communities are already one step removed from the source; that gap is just too unsatisfying. They lived long after Yeshua, and therefore represent a later interpretation of the Way, rather than its point of origin.
Our earnest desire is to go as close to that point of origin as historical evidence and investigation allows.
From Understanding to Living
There is, however, little value in reconstructing the historical Yeshua merely as an academic exercise.
We do not want simply to know what Yeshua taught. We want to live what he taught.
The purpose of recovering his original message is to enable us to become the kind of Followers of the Way that Yeshua himself intended. We want his teachings to shape our conduct, our values, our relationships, our worship of our heavenly Father, and our understanding of our responsibilities towards other people.
This is why Massoritism is ultimately more concerned with a person’s mindset and way of life than with whether we carry the label “Massorite”.
A person may encounter Massoritism without ever having previously heard the word. They may have studied the Miqra and the prophetic teachings of the Jewish Yeshua, and arrived independently at many of the very same conclusions. When they encounter Massoritism, they may simply recognise that there are other people seeking to walk the very same Way.
In such circumstances, the label does not create the identity. Our shared commitment to the Way comes first. Living an authentic Way and teaching that Way to others, matters more to us than standing behind an attested historical label from the 2nd century, and proclaiming the return of that label to the world.
“Massorite” is useful inasmuch as it is a contemporary name for a particular modern expression of that commitment to the Way, but the deeper identity remains that of a Talmidi – a Follower of the Way. Whereas some modern people might seek to reproduce a 2nd century sect precisely, we are trying to emulate the faith of Yeshua’s first Followers of the Way – the first disciples.
The Calling of a Shaliach
This leads to another important concept from the Jewish world in which Yeshua lived: the shaliach (‘apostle’ or ‘emissary’).
A shaliach had a very specific job-description that most modern people are unaware of. A shaliach was an agent or representative sent to act on behalf of another person. The ancient Jewish principle concerning such a representative expressed the extraordinary seriousness of the commission itself: the representative was meant to carry the authority and message of the one who sent them so closely and faithfully, that receiving the representative was, in an important sense, just like receiving the teacher who sent them (cf. Mt 10:40, Lk 10:16a).
Conversely, the son or daughter of an apostle is not automatically an apostle; the one upon whose head an apostle has laid their hands is not automatically an apostle – in both cases, the moment you start teaching a message different to that of the original teacher, the apostolic line is broken and nullified. Only if the offspring or the ordained person speaks the message of the original teacher faithfully and without amendment, they alone are apostles.
An apostle (shaliach) is chosen and sent by the original teacher, and has to faithfully transmit the teachings of that teacher without changing anything, so that if you hear the apostle, it is as if you were hearing the teacher himself. If a shaliach deviated from the instructions or the explicit message of the original sender, the agency was immediately nullified, and they ceased to be a shaliach.
This gives us a powerful model for what it means to transmit Yeshua’s message. Admittedly, no one today can be personally chosen, appointed and sent by Yeshua, but a modern religious teacher today can try to transmit his message faithfully. We can try to be representatives and ambassadors of his authentic teachings.
If we claim to represent Yeshua, then our responsibility is not to invent our own message and attach his name to it – if we did that, it would be a man-made message, not a prophetic one. Nor is it to preserve merely the opinions of people who lived generations after him. Our responsibility is to understand his message faithfully, and then live and communicate it faithfully.
The closer our understanding is to what Yeshua actually taught, the more faithfully we can represent him.
And the more faithfully we live those teachings, the more faithfully we can become his shlichim — apostles of the actual Way he himself taught.
“If You Hear the Apostle, You Hear Yeshua”
This gives particular significance to Yeshua’s teaching concerning the relationship between a teacher and those whom the teacher sends.
The aspiration is not that people should hear a Massorite and simply think, “This is what Massorites believe.” The higher aspiration is that what they encounter in a faithful representative should be recognisably the message of Yeshua himself.
That is a very demanding standard.
It means that, whatever our personal opinions or ideas, they must not be confused or interchanged with Yeshua’s teachings, or presented as Yeshua’s teachings. Our cultural needs and personal preferences must not be presented as commandments given by Yeshua. Later theological developments must not be quietly attributed to him. And our own personal shortcomings must not be allowed to distort the Way we claim to represent.
To become a genuine shaliach therefore requires humility. We are not the source of the message, Yeshua is – and ultimately, YHVH is, as the One who called and appointed him to be a prophet, a mouthpiece of God.
Our task is to listen attentively as disciples, understand with humility, live faithfully, and transmit that Way.
The ideal is captured by the ancient principle: if you hear the shaliach (the apostle / the emissary), it is as though you were hearing the one who sent the shaliach.
For us, that means striving to live in such a way that when someone encounters a Massorite, they encounter something recognisably shaped by Yeshua’s own teachings while he lived.
Returning to the Beginning
Our interest in the historical Yeshua is therefore not nostalgia for the ancient world, nor an attempt to claim superiority over any other Talmidi denominations. Not at all.
It is a humble and selfless attempt to return to the beginning.
We want to look past the centuries of overlaid theological development, and ask what can reasonably be recovered about the Jewish prophet Yeshua who actually walked the dusty Galilean roads, taught among his weary people, and called others to return wholeheartedly to the Way of YHVH.
We therefore look towards those earliest Galilean Followers of the Way who first heard him, in order to take on their mantle, because they provide the closest historical example of what it meant to respond to Yeshua’s teachings, long before later generations transformed the religious landscape.
From them we take our inspiration, but our ultimate allegiance is not to them. Our allegiance is to the Way they themselves were following, and ultimately to YHVH, our heavenly Father, whom Yeshua faithfully served.
We do not seek to become carbon-copy replicas of people who lived a century after Yeshua. We seek to become worthy Followers of the Way who, like those first Galileans, having heard the teacher, are determined to live according to what the teacher taught.
That is why the label “Massorite” is ultimately secondary – incidental almost. The name may identify us in modern times, but it is the Way that defines us.
And our hope is that, by faithfully recovering and living Yeshua’s original message, we may become worthy shlichim (apostles) of that message – so that when people hear us teach the Way, they do not merely hear the opinions of another modern denomination, or of any sect that came a century after him, but that they encounter, as faithfully as human beings can transmit it, the message that Yeshua himself entrusted to his disciples. The end-goal of Massorite scholarship regarding the historical Yeshua is therefore to become worthy Apostles of Yeshua.
Humility Among all Followers of the Way – all Talmidis
We should resist pride and condescension. Our labels should not establish a hierarchy of spiritual worth. Whatever continuity of teaching or inspiration we may discern, we cannot honestly turn any label into a claim of uninterrupted institutional succession. For that reason, all Talmidis would do well to approach one another with humility and fraternity. We are all, in one sense, recovering something that was lost to history, and none of us possesses an unbroken institutional chain reaching back to the first Followers of the Way. We stand in the same boat: all of us are equally separated by centuries from our spiritual forebears; all of us are equally dependent upon the surviving testimony of Scripture and of historical records, seeking to live faithfully according to YHVH’s Message and the teachings of the Prophet Yeshua.
A person does not become a more faithful Follower merely by carrying an older-sounding name, nor does another become less faithful because such a name is not part of their spiritual identity. The true question is not, “What name or label do you bear?” but rather, “How faithfully do you live the Way?” Pride in a label only divides those whom the Way should unite; humility allows us all to recognise our fellow Talmidis as brothers and sisters, who are travelling towards the same God, even where our particular traditions and conclusions differ.