[aron]

I apologize to our readers, I should have given scriptural references earlier. (Not everyone has read the same verses that I have). I should have said that Peter (Acts 10:14), Paul (Acts 16:3; 21:26) and James (Acts 21:18-20) all continued to keep the law after coming to saving knowledge of Jesus Christ as Lord. And it is my interpretation that this is because they were Jews, and Jews kept the law, whether or not they believed into the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The issue at hand in the NT was, whether the gentile converts would also have to keep the law - and the answer was, unequivocally, 'no'.

To anyone who thinks there is no difference between Jew and Greek in the NT, then why did Paul have Timothy circumcised? To anyone who thinks there is no difference between male and female in the NT, why did Paul tell women to be silent in church? If there's no difference between slave and free in the NT, why did Paul tell slaves to obey their masters? If you try to take 'no difference' literally, then you have to ignore certain verses that show apparent difference. Which I choose not to do. I think it's important to consider all verses as equal relevance. We can't have certain 'crucial' or 'proof-text' verses that 'show' our points, while ignoring other verses that show, or at least suggest, something quite the opposite.

Suppose a Chinese person believes into the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. Suppose that Chinese person continues to observe the Chinese New Year (CNY). Does that invalidate their faith? No, of course not. But if you wanted to persecute the Chinese believer, you could cite Galatians 4:10: "You are observing special days and months and seasons and years!" (NIV) Is that applicable? No!

But what if a Chinese insisted that CNY observance was necessary to be in the One New Man (I mean, how can we all be one unless we observe the same holidays, right? Logical!) Suppose the CNY was held forth in some 'gospel' as a basis of salvation. Then some ignorant non-Chinese was seen observing the CNY, trying to be saved, and suddenly Paul's word in Galatians 4:10 is applicable. In this case, observing as a requirement is wrong.

Likewise, the 'Judaizers' were not Jews who practiced their Jewish life, law-keeping and all, but those Jews who insisted that non-Jews should become law-keepers as a requirement of Christian salvation. In that case, Paul's remonstrations make sense. Once you understand it, it's really not complicated. The NT writers were law-keeping Jews, and the first non-law-keepers 9gentiles) didn't show up until Acts 10. Until then, they were all law-keepers. And there is no part in the NT where the law-keepers stopped. The issue was, making law-keeping as a requirement of salvation. That was the Judaizing.

But what happened centuries later was a reverse 'Judaizing' - where the church Fathers wrote, "You cannot be a Christian and a Jew". What nonsense. Paul was a Jew. Peter was a Jew. James was a Jew. John was a Jew. But the gentile church fathers banned Jews from church. Then they fell to fighting among themselves, schisms, etc. But in my view it started with kicking the Jews out of church.