Hebrew Gospel Pearls #25 – Preserving “the Good Jesus”

You are listening to Hebrew Gospel Pearls with Nehemia Gordon and Keith Johnson. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon's Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

Nehemia: When Yeshua says, “One letter will not be cancelled from the Torah,” He had this reality he was living in, that there were people checking every single letter and matching it to what was in the Temple.

Keith: Yes.

Nehemia: And so, he comes along and says, “One letter and one nekuda, one dot, will not be cancelled, for all will be sustained.” We’ll talk about that in the Plus.

Keith: Welcome to Hebrew Gospel Pearls episode number 25. Twenty-five plus 25 makes 50, 25 public, 25 Plus. Nehemia, we’re at the number 50, this is significant.

Nehemia: It’s the number of completion. Can we stop now?

Keith: Completion? Let me tell you what folks, we are actually at a place of significance, and I need to take a personal privilege, Nehemia.

Nehemia: Uh-oh.

Keith: You’ve been awesome, as we’ve been looking at what we’ve been doing up to this point, there have been some, what I call historical monuments that we have to at least bring to the surface. One of them is that in this episode, episode 25, we’re going to be looking at Matthew chapter 5 verse 18.

Nehemia: Okay. I’m excited!

Keith: He’s going to be excited. And folks, let me tell you one of the reasons I’m going to be excited. It was Matthew 5:18 where Nehemia actually brought a pearl that literally changed my whole approach to the Hebrew Gospel of Matthew, because if this pearl is true, it just gave me an inspiration to want to go deeper.

But before we get to that, I want to give you a few minutes to work with me. Now, we didn’t talk about this in advance, this is one of those deals where I’m just going to ask you to respond.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Keith: When I was working on the Red Letter Series – I want to take my time to explain this, sometimes people get mad, “You’re promoting your thing!”

Nehemia: What’s the Red Letter Series? Can they find that at NehemiasWall.com?

Keith: No, this is exclusively at BFA International, and its F-R-E-E, free, but one of the reasons that I’m so excited about it is because of you. You did something for us, and in episode 19 folks – by the way I brought my cards – episode 19, I’m going to put the cards on the table. Don’t miss episode 19, episode 19! I’m going to put the cards on the table. But Matthew chapter 5 verse 18, Nehemia, you have consistently, for as long as I’ve known you, continued to bring up the Hebrew Gospel of Matthew at significant times.

The first time you brought it up – I love telling this story – was early in our relationship; do you remember when you first brought it up? And why you first brought it up? Do you remember?

Nehemia: I think I do.

Keith: Okay, I’d like you to tell the story.

Nehemia: You tell it, go ahead.

Keith: Okay, so you called me on the phone. What were the rules? I don’t mind telling this again, because we’ve got new people that are listening. We had a couple of rules.

Nehemia: Let me give the background. There is this very painful history that the Jewish people have of interacting with the Christian world, in which Jews lived as a minority in Christian countries. There was this constant pressure, and sometimes the pressure was through violence, sometimes it was through different forms of a financial inducements.

Keith: Trickery.

Nehemia: All kinds of different things, coercion, where the Christians tried to convert the Jews. I grew up with these stories. I grew up with this… It’s interesting, for me there was Daniel in the lion’s den, because he refused to worship the idol, and there were the Jews who jumped to their deaths during the First Crusade, which first attacked… they say, “Why go all the way to the Holy Land? We’ve infidels among us, the Jews.” And they stopped in the Rhineland, where the major Jewish communities of Europe were, and wiped them out, and there were Jews who jumped to their deaths off of the castle wall rather than convert to Christianity, because from their perspective it was idolatry.

To be fair, certainly at the time, in the 11th century, we are talking about literal statues that they were being asked to kiss and bow down to. And I’ll talk to a lot of Christians, and they’ll say, “Oh no, well that was the Catholics.”

Keith: Yeah.

Nehemia: But for the Jews, that was the experience that we went through, and they didn’t say, “We’re Catholics,” they said, “We’re Christians.” They didn’t do it in the name of the Pope, they did in the name of Jesus. And so for Jews there’s this very painful baggage of interacting with Christians that they either want to force you to convert or trick you to convert. So, when we first started interacting, I was warned by my Jewish friends and family.

Keith: Very close people to you.

Nehemia: Very close people, “Don’t have anything to do with him, this is just a scam to convert you to Christianity.”

Keith: Stop, one second folks, “don’t have anything to do with him”. Who? The Methodist?

Nehemia: The Christian.

Keith: The guy who… in 2002, we went through a process of study, and you came up with two very specific rules that were conditions on you and I doing any study together.

Nehemia: So, the first rule was… and let’s back up again a little bit. Jews have by tradition 613 commandments. I don’t know what the real number is because the Torah doesn’t count them, but they like to say there’s 613. From my perspective, or not just from my perspective, from the Jewish perspective, Christians have one commandment, and that commandment is “go out and make many disciples, and baptize them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost”. And there’s other things too, like Paul’s “don’t let your hair grow too long”. There are other things, but there’s really one major commandment which is called the Great Commission. Jews don’t have the Great Commission. The Great Commission for Jews is, Yehovah says in Leviticus 19, “I am holy; therefore, you be holy.”

Keith: Yes.

Nehemia: Then you can serve as an example to the world, but then they have to make that decision on their own, it’s not that you have to go out and change them, God will change them, and you can facilitate that by serving as a good example or a bad example. So, Christians have the Great Commission; we as Jews don’t, and so rule number one is: you don’t try to convert me, and I don’t try to convert you. In a way that was kind of one sided because I never had a desire to convert you, that was never part of my heritage, or approach.

Keith: I’ve got to confess something, so I used to be an Evangelist. I don’t know if you knew that, I’ve been around the world.

Nehemia: I thought you were still an Evangelist.

Keith: No, I’m talking about…

Nehemia: You once showed me the card, and it said you were literally a card carrying evangelical, something or another.

Keith: No, that was saying that I had the card, I’d go to hospitals, marry, bury and baptize. I used to be an Evangelist, I’d be invited to different places, different parts of the world, where you go and preach, and give the Four Spiritual Laws and call an altar call. I was good at being an Evangelist, Nehemia, and you took away my ability to evangelize when you said the first rule.

Nehemia: At least to me.

Keith: And here’s why that was a big deal – because if I think I’m an Evangelist, and you tell me I can’t do that, then I think, “What do you mean? You’re not going to let me…” And I agreed to that rule, and I’m glad that I agreed to that rule for a number of reasons, we’re going to go forward. What was the second thing that you said?

Nehemia: The second rule is, we could talk about anything in the Tanakh, but don’t ever talk to me about Jesus or Yeshua. And really, it was another way of expressing the first rule, because what I was warned is, “Yeah, he’s going to tell you he’s not going to try to convert you, but then he’s going to start telling you about how beautiful and lovely it is to invite Jesus into your heart.”

Keith: Yes!

Nehemia: And so really, it’s kind of a loophole that he’s going to try to push Jesus on you, so I said, “Alright you guys are worried about this,” my Jewish friends and family.

Keith: “I’m going to give him two rules.”

Nehemia: “We’ll have two rules, and everybody will be safe.” We’ll have our little safe zone, with coloring books and puppies.

Keith: Yeah! We have this beautiful relationship Nehemia, and I have to say it again, you have been a dear friend for all of these years, and with those two rules it was no conversion, none of that Jesus stuff, no New Testament stuff, no Gospel!

Nehemia: How’d that work out?

Keith: And then the epic phone call came.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Keith: I’m going to let you say what the epic phone call was.

Nehemia: So, I had been studying this Hebrew version of the Gospel of Matthew…

Keith: Secretly, Nehemia.

Nehemia: Not really secretly. It started out when Michael Rood came to me with this textual problem.

Keith: Tell the story!

Nehemia: And I used all the tools that were available to me, I said, “Alright maybe this is a textual criticism issue here.” I wrote a book about it, The Hebrew Yeshua Versus the Greek Jesus, but this is years before I wrote the book, I said, “Okay, let’s look at all the different manuscripts.” At the time I didn’t have photographs of the manuscripts, but there were lists of what the different variants were, meaning what the differences are in the manuscript, there was nothing there that helped in the Greek. Then I found out about this Hebrew version.

Keith: Yes.

Nehemia: And I did my little study on Matthew 23, and then I realized, “Wow, what else is in this Matthew in Hebrew? It looks like nobody’s studying it.”

Keith: That’s right.

Nehemia: “It’s been completely ignored, certainly by the academic establishment of the New Testament studies,” and so I thought, “alright I could study this on my own,” and I started to do that. As I was reading things, I realized I could see all this information, but I don’t know what the questions are. I need someone who is coming at this text as a – and I’ll use the term a Canonical text – I’m coming at the text like I could be reading Shakespeare or I could be reading more like the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Keith: Right.

Nehemia: Well, the Dead Sea Scrolls are very important to me as a Jew. They’re part of the ancient heritage of the Jewish people, they’re written in the Hebrew language, but when I read the Book of Jubilees, that’s not the Bible for me.

Keith: Right.

Nehemia: So I thought I need someone who, in order to do this with full integrity, I need someone who can read this as their text.

Keith: Sacred text.

Nehemia: I’ll use the word sacred text, that’s what I was thinking for sure, someone who could read this as their sacred text and ask questions that would never occur to me, and also of course give answers. And I thought, “Well, I can’t do that with your typical Christian because they’ll just try to convert me.” And I’ll give you a secret that you might not know about.

Keith: Okay.

Nehemia: Before I contacted you, I contacted some Messianic Jews in Jerusalem and I asked to read with them this text.

Keith: You’ve never told this before.

Nehemia: I haven’t.

Keith: You actually contacted other people before you contacted me?

Nehemia: Absolutely.

Keith: Lamah?

Nehemia: And we tried studying the text with them, I tried studying the text with them, and there was no… it’s hard to explain – it was like I was speaking to people who were in a trance. In that, I’m like, “Okay, what does this mean? What are the different possible explanations?” All they could do is bam, bam, bam, conversion, conversion, conversion, and I’m like, “No, no, no, I understand you want to convert me,” but here’s this man who taught these things 2,000 years ago, and this might be as close as we can get as a glimpse of what the original Hebrew would have been like. It’s not the original manuscript, it’s copies of copies, and it’s been transmitted, but we can try to get a glimpse of some of the flavor of what he taught, and it was just conversion, conversion, conversion. And I’m like, “Well this is going nowhere, because we’re not having a conversation.”

Keith: Yeah.

Nehemia: They’re talking at me, we’re not having a dialogue. Who can I have a dialogue with?

Keith: Let’s get Mikey, he’ll eat anything. Do you remember that commercial? Let’s get Mikey he’ll eat anything!

Nehemia: I actually recently looked at that commercial, because that’s how I remembered it, and my wife remembered it differently, and it said, “Let’s get Mikey he hates everything.” Isn’t that what it was? She’s nodding her head, it was, “Let’s get Mikey, he hates everything,” and then he eats the Chex, and he likes it, and they’re there like, “Wow Mikey, he likes the Chex.”

Keith: Jeez, Mikey!

Nehemia: But I also remember, “Let’s get Mikey, he’ll eat anything,” it’s the opposite, and it makes more sense the opposite – if he eats everything why give him the cereal nobody wants? But if he hates everything, and he likes the cereal, wow!

Keith: Mikey, he likes it! Now it makes sense! The commercial makes sense!

Nehemia: Yeah, it makes a lot more sense. I remembered it your way too.

Keith: But Nehemia this makes sense that you’re telling us something that I’ve never heard before.

Nehemia: Yeah, so I actually met with a group of people.

Keith: What?

Nehemia: Like four or five Messianic Jews in Jerusalem, and we were having these conversations, trying to read the Gospel of Matthew.

Keith: Oh, my goodness.

Nehemia: It was like I was talking to robots because they were just spitting out, spitting out, spitting out, these almost cliches to try to convert me, and I’m like, “Can’t we just read what the text says without you trying to convert me?” And they really couldn’t. I’m not saying that’s all Messianics, but the folks that I was talking to, one of whom I was actually friends with for a number of years before that, it was just maybe in their DNA in some way. And look, I understand they had this passion and love for Yeshua that they wanted me to embrace as well, I understand that, and I can even respect that, but that’s not why we got together. We got together to try to read and understand this text. They brought the perspective of a sacred tax, but let’s deal with the text, not what your conversion agenda is.

Keith: Right.

Nehemia: And they weren’t able to do that. After a few sessions I’m like, “Yeah, this is a waste of everybody’s time,” and that’s when I contacted you, and I said, “Can we suspend one of the rules and study Hebrew Matthew together?” It’s one of the things that’s blessed me in my life more than anything else.

Keith: So Nehemia, I’m now going to tell you something that I’ve never told you.

Nehemia: Oh no! Kill the camera!

Keith: Kill the cameras! This is what we’re doing! What’s that called? The moment of…

Nehemia: It’s like when they do live television and they’ve got a button they can press, so there’s eight seconds…

Keith: Eight seconds if he cussed.

Nehemia: Edit it out! Here we go.

Keith: So, we’ve been studying, we started with A Prayer to Our Father: Hebrew Origins of the Lord’s Prayer, it’s a book that’s available at Nehemias Wall. You know, they always do this thing with the editors, they put in the banners, “These books are available at NehemiasWall.com,” and they never say BFA International, but we’ve got a new editor now. I called the editor; why? Never asked why. “Hey editor, make sure you say A Prayer to Our Father: Hebrew Origins of the Lord’s Prayer – also available at BFAInternational.com.”

Nehemia: About that… but anyway, go on.

Keith: So anyway, we wrote that book together, we travelled together, we went around the world together, but something happened, and that is we started studying that. We went to the depth of one passage. We did the prayer, now Nehemia, to this day I memorized that prayer in Hebrew, there’s an actual audio that’s on both websites where I get a chance to do that, we have music…

Nehemia: What I love about that is people can click on the word shebashamayim, and hear Keith say, “shebashamayim.”

Keith: “Shebashamayim.”

Nehemia: “Yitkadesh.”

Keith: “Yitkadesh.”

Nehemia: Otherwise, people who don’t know Hebrew hear it, and it sounds like this jumble of words. I love that we set up the thing, I hope it still works.

Keith: It still works!

Nehemia: You press the button, and you hear the individual word as well.

Keith: Again, we could have stopped there, and done the book, the book was translated into Chinese, we went to China, come on folks it’s all over everywhere, go to BFA International, go to Nehemias Wall. Okay we did that. The next thing was… don’t look at the clock Nehemia!

Nehemia: I’m looking at the clock! I’ve got all these notes we have to get to! Go ahead, it’s fine!

Keith: This is so important, folks.

Nehemia: Matthew 5:18! I want to get to it!

Keith: Okay, so we did all of that.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Keith: Then you called, we said, “Okay, we’re going to go further,” we did more, we did more, we did more. Now, Hebrew Gospel Pearls, Hebrew Gospel Pearls – because of the pandemic, I finally had you captured. You are so busy, you have so much going on, in this traveling, doing the things you’re doing, there’s some things under this that I’m not going to talk about right now, that I think are significant at the highest level.

Nehemia: Are you talking about the big reveal?

Keith: No, not the big reveal, I’m not going to do that.

Nehemia: Okay.

Keith: But let me just say this, it’s coming, it’s coming folks. As I was working on 5:18 in the Red Letter Series, that’s what we’re trying to get to – 5:18 in the Red Letter Series. I was in China, you called, and it was like the phone call when you called and said, “Let’s study the Hebrew Gospel of Matthew.” You called and said, “Keith, I heard you’re doing the Red Letter Series,” I was in China, and I said, “How did you hear that? Were you on my website? How did you know?” “People are talking.” And then you said, “Keith, maybe we should study some more again?” And I’m telling you, at that point everything changed. At the moment that you said that, I got a phone call from someone who called to challenge me about why I was studying the Hebrew Gospel of Matthew in the Red Letter Series, the words of Yeshua, and they were angry… they literally, back and forth, back and forth. At the time I’m having that argument you called to say, “Should we continue to study together?” Then I hear about something I want to share with people right now. This is significant.

Nehemia: Okay.

Keith: There was a shipwreck, Nehemia.

Nehemia: A shipwreck?

Keith: Off the coast of Namibia in South Africa, we were in South Africa, and right next to South Africa there is a country called Namibia. I’ve actually been there, I’ve actually been to this place, at the coast of Namibia, beautiful. And at a diamond mine, there was a lagoon that they created, and they’re searching for their diamonds…

Nehemia: What do you mean? They created a man-made lagoon?

Keith: A lagoon, yes. And as a result of looking for their diamonds, they see something that’s out of place. What do they see? They see metal, and they see wood, and they see other things. They call an archaeologist and say, “Hey listen, we’re finding something that’s not diamonds.” The archeologist comes and says, “Oh my goodness, this looks like something from the 15th, 16th century.” They stop the diamond mining, they called the owner of the diamond mine and say, “We need two weeks, give us two weeks to dig in this area.” He says okay, he gives them two weeks, they pull water out, et cetera, et cetera… Nehemia, they find a sunken ship.

Nehemia: Wow.

Keith: And in the sunken ship they found a number of things. One thing, $13 million of Portuguese gold coins.

Nehemia: Wow.

Keith: Tusks of elephants, wood, but they also found something else that are called copper ingots. Have you ever heard of a copper ingot?

Nehemia: I have.

Keith: You know what it is? What’s a copper ingot?

Nehemia: So, an ingot is where you smelt metal, and then you prepare it to be used in let’s say casts, or forged into something else, so you prepare it as an ingot, and actually in Biblical Hebrew it’s called a tongue, because it’s shaped like this kind of elongated thing. For example, when it says that Abraham bought the Ma’arat Ha’machpela, the Cave of Machpelah in Hebron, Hevron, from Ephron the Hittite, he paid him 400 shekels of silver. That wasn’t 400 coins, because they didn’t have coins, coins were invented sometime around 700BC, this is over 1000 years before that. So, it was ingots of silver that he weighed out, and 400 shekels was a weight, it’s like saying 400 pounds or 400 kilos, and they weighed out these ingots.

Keith: Yes.

Nehemia: That was the way that they would transport units of silver, gold, or this case, copper. Basically, the raw material that they used for smelting.

Keith: So, they find 44,000 pounds of copper ingots in this boat.

Nehemia: Wow.

Keith: The archaeologists come, everything stops, they find the gold, they find the ingots, they find the tusks, they find it all. Now for the name of this ship, a Portuguese ship in 1550 that was lost off the coast of Namibia on its way to India.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Keith: Au Bom Jesus, “The Good Jesus”, that was the name of the boat.

Nehemia: Really?

Keith: They say, I need to read this, this is from the Red Letter Series, Nehemia.

Nehemia: Okay. At BFA International.

Keith: This is from the Red Letter Series, as a free member you can go all the way to episode 18. It says this, in other words, why were they able to preserve what was on this ship? “As one of the archaeologists said, ‘Marine organisms may like wood, leather book covers, peach pips, jute sacking, and leather shoes, but copper really puts them off their food, so a lot of stuff survived the 500,’” say 500.

Nehemia: 500.

Keith: “Years at the bottom of the sea, which should have not been done. All this adds up to an extremely unusual situation which led to truly excellent preservation…” say preservation.

Nehemia: Preservation.

Keith: “Of a unique site.” Now, I put the article in there, I’ll let the people go there, they can read it.

Nehemia: So basically, what I’m understanding is copper has some kind of anti-bacterial effect?

Keith: Yes, they don’t like the copper.

Nehemia: And it preserved everything around it.

Keith: Yeah.

Nehemia: Okay. Because I was thinking, all that copper they found, boy I bet they wished that was gold.

Keith: No, no, no.

Nehemia: But you’re saying the copper actually preserved it.

Keith: The copper preserved it. Now, the Hebrew Gospel of Matthew, as I’m arguing with someone saying, “Why are you studying that manuscript?” I’m thinking about the Jewish scribes that were the copper. I’m thinking about a couple of the Christian scribes that were the copper. That, in other words, that copper kept all of the ability to want to destroy, destroy, destroy… they were the preservation. Nehemia, let me say something – you are the copper.

Nehemia: Okay.

Keith: I’m telling you.

Nehemia: I want to be the gold!

Keith: I’m the gold, actually, I’ve got to be the gold.

Nehemia: Fair enough.

Keith: No, no, I’m just kidding. Nehemia, what this process has done and shown to me is that I have struggled, people have yelled at me, they have cussed at me, they’ve said, “Keith you’re going to be converted,” back and forth, back, and forth. I will not give up the opportunity to study with you. I believe you are a scholar of scholars. I believe you’re a genius, you’re a walking encyclopedia. I am honored every time, from the time I’ve met you, to this point, but I’ve had an agenda.

Nehemia: Uh-oh, here we go!

Keith: I have had an agenda, here it comes, there’s always got to be something under this. What I’ve wanted to have happen is for that copper that has preserved the good Jesus, the one, the Yeshua, the one that’s teaching, that you and I have been blessed by.

Nehemia: That was the name of the boat – did you see what you did there? Nice.

Keith: The name of the boat was The Good Jesus, and here’s what I’ve struggled with, what I’ve struggled with in my past, is that people have taken the good Jesus and made all sorts of theological rules and regulations and gymnastics, so that when I sit down with you, if I just take my English Bible and I’ve got my evangelism in my mind, I’ve missed the opportunity to get to the gold, to the pearls. And what you and I have done Nehemia, for 50 episodes, is to give people a chance to see language, history and context. Now, I don’t know whether it’s going to continue or not, but I want to tell you – my agenda has been for the world to see what I’ve experienced with you for 20 years.

I kept saying to myself, “How are we ever going to get this guy? How am I ever going to get this guy?” The pandemic, the pandemic finally slowed you down enough so that we could show others what you and I have done. I think I’m the most blessed man of all.

Conversion? We can talk about conversion. You and I walking together, Jew and Gentile, studying the words of Yeshua in the original language, history and context – it doesn’t get any better. That led to 5:18, now I’m going to calm down, and let you share with them what you shared with me in 5:18.

Nehemia: Okay.

Keith: Thank you for the personal privilege, thank you for listening. This guy is a blessing, I believe you’re a copper ingot.

Nehemia: I’m a copper ingot?

Keith: Preservation, baby!

Nehemia: I’m a tongue of copper. Alright Matthew 5:18, let me read it in the Hebrew.

Keith: Yes.

Nehemia: Here we have some slight differences between the manuscripts, and let’s see if we have any major ones here? They’re not really major, there’s some pretty minor things here. He says, “Be’emet ani omer lachem,” “in emet, in truth, I say to you,” “ki od shamayim,” is one version, but “Ad sheyamushu shamayim va’aretz,” “until the heavens and earth are removed,” “ot achat, unekuda achat lo tevutal,” or titpatel, in some, “meh ha’Torah oh meh’Neviim shehakol yitkayem.” “In truth I say to you that until the heavens and earth are removed,” one “ot”, “one letter,” “unekuda achat,” “and one dot will not be cancelled from the Torah or the Prophets, for all will,” “yitkayem,” “will be fulfilled,” or literally “will be preserved, will stand”.

Keith: Preservation.

Nehemia: Preservation, wow.

Keith: Why would I get so excited about that? One, you said to me back then, this is years ago.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Keith: You said, “Keith, in the Hebrew Gospel of Matthew, it has these two words.”

Nehemia: Yeah.

Keith: And that’s why you actually sent me this original, because I wanted to see it for myself.

Nehemia: A photocopy of the original, but yeah.

Keith: A photocopy of the original, I’m sorry, a photocopy of the original. But why were those two words such a big deal?

Nehemia: In Hebrew, the consonants are written as 22 letters, and then we have a series of dots and dashes which are called nekudot, or nikud, which means dots, or pointing, dotting, and those dots provide the vowels. It actually not just the vowels, it’s things that in Hebrew we call vowels, we call them nekudot, dots, but there are things that are beyond vowels.

For example, the difference between a Shin, and a Sin is whether the dot’s on the right side of the letter or the left side of the letter. Whether the letter is pronounced Buh or Vuh, or Kuh or Khuh, and that applies to six specific letters, if they have a dot they have a hard sound, if they don’t have a dot they have a soft sound. So that’s not technically a vowel, but it’s part of the nikud or the nekudot system, the dot system; it’s called dots.

So, when you read this in Hebrew, “ot achat,” and look – dots can be anything but when you hear about ot, which is letter, alongside dot, well, that’s the dot system, that’s the vowels. So really this should be translated, literally it’s, “one letter and one dot will not be cancelled from the Torah or the Prophets,” but that means one letter, or one vowel.

Keith: Somebody’s got to challenge this. Nehemia…

Nehemia: They should challenge us.

Keith: Yeshua’s speaking way back in the 1st century – there were no Masoretes. Nehemia, are you saying that Yeshua’s reading a Masoretic text and it’s got vowel markers? What are you saying?

Nehemia: Well, I guess we need to define what the Masoretic text is, for those who don’t know.

Keith: Absolutely.

Nehemia: And it could mean different things in different contexts. The text that we have of the Bible in Hebrew, that is the Tanakh, the Old Testament, is called… the standard text is the Masoretic text. It comes from the word masora; masora means transmission. In other words, in English we’ll say, I guess it’s not English, it’s Latin, the Textus Receptus, the Received Text. The masora is the transmitted text.

Keith: Yes.

Nehemia: And that is the standard text. It doesn’t matter if you open up your BHS Bible over there, printed by Germans in Stuttgart, or you open up the Jerusalem Crown, printed in Jerusalem, Israel. Every one of those texts will be 99.999% identical. They’ll be identical in the consonants, the vowels, and the accents. There will be slight differences here and there that, if you’re an expert, you can identify them, some of those have to do with the name. But it doesn’t matter – any text basically that’s been printed from 1524, when they made the second great Rabbinical Bible, up until today, is going to be virtually identical, and in fact, if you open up any manuscript that was written by hand going back at least 1,000 years, it’ll be nearly identical. And that’s called the Masoretic text.

Now one of the features of the Masoretic text is there is this obsession, and I think it’s correct to call it an obsession, with every little feature of the text.

Keith: Yes.

Nehemia: What do I mean by that? Let me give you an example. And how are we doing on time here? Wow.

Keith: We’re good. No, no. It’s okay, it’s okay.

Nehemia: There’s so much depth to this, so let me give you an example. There are a number of places in the Tanakh, in the Masoretic text. Let me back up – when we say the Masoretic text, this is as opposed to the non-Masoretic text. The non-Masoretic texts would be, for example, some of the manuscripts found in the Dead Sea Scrolls. I did a teaching on this, an interview I did with the top expert in the world, Professor Emanuel Tov, called the Bible of the Dead Sea Scrolls, or something like that. He has this category he calls QSP Plus, which is Qumran Scribal Practices Plus, and there you have, for example, 1Q Isaiah A, the first Isaiah scroll from Qumran, is not a Masoretic manuscript. It has major differences from the Masoretic text. What do I mean by major? It’s not that major, but it’s differences in the details.

Keith: Yes.

Nehemia: And sometimes it’s differences even in the level of words, and on some occasions, like when you get to Jeremiah, it could be very significant differences. But most of it is differences of what we call orthography. What do I mean by orthography? The rabbis had this idea, they started out with this – God doesn’t waste our time, and God doesn’t just speak the way we speak. When I speak, I can repeat myself, and I say “um” or “ooh”, or if I’m speaking Hebrew, I say “eh”.

Keith: Ehhh.

Nehemia: I want to eh, tell you, eh… So, the Jewish approach – and especially the Rabbinical approach – was that every single letter had significance.

Keith: Yes.

Nehemia: To the point where there were rabbis who elaborated entire homilies, entire explanations, of whether a word was spelled one way or another. Let me try to give an example of this. In English we have words that could be spelled multiple ways, and that depends on whether you’re American or you’re British. The example I love is the word color, C-O-L-O-R in America, and in England they say C-O-L-O-U-R. So the Rabbinical approach is – well, if it’s spelled with a U, the U has the numerical value of such and such, and that represents this entire thing, and they can even derive laws and practices based on the spelling.

A famous example is that there are these three extra letters, and by extra letters I mean letters that you could have done without, they don’t change the meaning. Those letters, Mem-Yud-Mem they spell out the word water, and the rabbis derive a certain ceremony from these letters in Leviticus 23, I believe it is, or maybe its Numbers 28 or 29, I don’t remember. And you have to understand – in languages up until modern times they didn’t have standardized spelling, so famously Shakespeare spelled his name a half a dozen different ways, in his own writings. He didn’t know how to spell his name?

It’s not that he didn’t know, there was no standard way of writing his name. It really could be written in different ways. It’s kind of like the Hebrew word Hanukkah, I’ve seen it written CH, just with an H.

Keith: One K, two K’s.

Nehemia: One N or two N’s, and one K, or two K’s. It’s not that one of those is wrong, it’s not an English word, so we don’t have a standardized spelling for it. And so, really until printing there wasn’t a standardized spelling for Hebrew, for English, for Latin. There were certain standards; an example I love is the word Sukkot. Sukkot can be spelled legitimately in four different ways, and there’s an example in one verse in Genesis where it’s literally spelled two different ways in the same verse, and that doesn’t change the meaning, it’s just two different ways to spell same thing.

So the rabbi would say, if you spelled it this way versus that way, that we have some hidden meaning that’s meant to be encoded there. I don’t believe there’s a hidden meaning encoded there, but the presupposition for that approach is that the spelling has been fixed, not for that word across the text, but that word in that specific verse, in that specific part of the verse, so that when they reproduce the Bible, every single Bible should have the word spelled this way in this verse and that way in the other verse. Now, why is that important? It tells us that by around the year – I think we can say by the destruction of the Temple, 70 AD, based on Rabbinical sources, that the text of scripture was fixed down to the letters.

Keith: Yes.

Nehemia: And what we learned from the Dead Sea Scrolls is that there’s a category of manuscripts which scholars call Proto-Masoretic text. What does Proto-Masoretic mean? It means Masoretic before we thought the Masoretic text existed, the early form in the Masoretic text, it exists at a time before it should exist. And how do they know about the Proto-Masoretic text? Because we can see that the text has been corrected in some of these Dead Sea Scrolls. And how do we know it’s corrected? They write a little letter above the line, they make little changes, changes that don’t change the pronunciation, don’t change the spelling, they are entirely about “that word has to be spelled this way in this verse, and it’s not spelled that way so we’re going to fix it”.

So what that tells you is that the Hebrew text that we have of the Bible already existed in the time of Yeshua.

Keith: Yes.

Nehemia: And it was already considered by at least some Jews to be a text that was fixed down to the very letters, even where it was a matter of spelling. I’ll just give an example – the name Yehoshua, Joshua, the name of Jesus, which is in Hebrew is Ye-ho-shu-a. Yehoshua could be spelled Yud-Hey-Vav-Shin-Ayin, that’s the normal spelling of the word, or it could be spelled Yud-Hey-Vav-Shin-Vav-Ayin. Now, what is the difference in meaning between Yehoshua with two Vav’s or one Vav? No meaning whatsoever.

For example, in Deuteronomy chapter 3 verse 21, it’s talking about Joshua the son of Nun, and Moses’ has commanded him at that time, and there it’s Yehoshua with two Vav’s instead of one Vav, even though 99% of the time it’s with one Vav. The idea was that in every single place where we have a certain spelling, it has to be reproduced that way. Now, to some extent that was an ideal, it wasn’t always so easy to do.

So what the Masoretes did, these group of scribes who lived around the year 600 to 800 AD, is they came up with a system of proofreading notes. For example, in this verse in Deuteronomy 3:21, if Yehoshua is spelled in an unusual way, with an extra Vav, they would write in the margin “maleh”, or lamed, lamed would mean unique, if it was unique, meaning la it, there’s no other place where it’s like that, or if it was an unusual way, they’d write maleh, which means full. That’s the category, an extra Vav, or an extra Yud – it’s not really extra, but if you have more than you need to have, then it would be called maleh. So, they fixed it with these Masoretic notes.

So far, what we’ve explained, that’s like understanding the Hebrew Bible 101.

Keith: Do me a favor for my friends that are listening, my public friends. My public friends, I want you to check one verse, just for those of…

Nehemia: Yeah.

Keith: But wait a minute, wait a minute. Did Yeshua actually say that word? Genesis 30 verse 32, would you go to Genesis 30 verse 32? I love this story. And tell me what word is used in Genesis 30:32, “Let me pass through your entire flock today, removing from there every speckled,” it says in English, “and every spotted sheep. And the spotted and speckled among the goats.” What’s the word?

Nehemia: The word is nakod, which is the same root, same word, we have here, nekuda.

Keith: Yeah.

Nehemia: Which is a dot; nakod is “dotted”.

Keith: So in other words, these sheep, and goats, they had vowel points on them, right?

Nehemia: Well, no, they had dots.

Keith: What I mean is they had dots.

Nehemia: They had spots.

Keith: They had spots. So here’s why I want to say that Nehemia.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Keith: I that I want people now to experience 5:18 the way you and I have studied, at the deeper level.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Keith: I want people to experience what you’re about to share with us. Now, I’m not trying to be cute here.

Nehemia: This is actually huge; we’re going to talk about the vowels.

Keith: Folks this is. And listen, to my friends that have been listening, 50 episodes of public, go back and listen to them again. At the Red Letter Series, we have episode 1 through 18 free, you can go and see everything we’ve done with the Red Letters of Yeshua, in the Red Letter Series, but now we’re going to move to the Plus section. And in the Plus section Nehemia, literally I want to take my jacket off and go sit back with Lynell, and watch you burn! What I mean is, I just feel like you’ve got so much to say.

Nehemia: That was the background, we’ll get to the exciting part now, this is really a key discussion because I get this all the time. “Nehemia, the Masoretes, they made up those vowels. We don’t read Hebrew with the vowels, we read Paleo-Hebrew, there’s no vowels!” Well, every language by definition – every spoken language, I should say – has vowels.

Keith: Yes.

Nehemia: The only exception in human experience of a language that potentially doesn’t have vowels, would be sign language.

Keith: Yes.

Nehemia: You could literally have a sign language where everything is pictoral – that might not be the right technical term – but where you’re expressing things without vowels potentially; in reality they do spell things using letters. But a spoken language has to have vowels, otherwise you can’t speak. Now, before we get to that, I just want to bring something about Genesis.

Keith: Absolutely.

Nehemia: That verse in Genesis that you brought.

Keith: Oh, you’re going to use the verse?

Nehemia: No, it’s just, really, it’s a cool point.

Keith: Yeah.

Nehemia: Genesis, so here Yeshua’s saying, “not one letter,” that’s the first word, “or,” and the other word is, “nekuda,” “dot.” Let’s leave that for the Plus section, the nekuda, the dot, the vowel.

Keith: Okay.

Nehemia: But the letters, here’s how important letters are. Here we have in Genesis 30:32, Jacob makes a deal with Laban, and he says, “I’m going to pass through, and then every lamb,” or every seh, which is a young lamb or a young goat “that is nakod, which is dotted, that’s going to have the status where I’m going to be paid, I’m going to get that, that’s going to be mine.” Then we hear later that Laban keeps changing the rules. And what does he do? And you miss this, I think, in English. Is it spotted? Or is it speckled? Or bespeckled? Or brindled? Or whatever these terms are, he’s using these cute terms, but in Hebrew it’s a difference between Nun-Kuf-Daled, nakod, and Ayin-Kuf-Daled, akod. Akod and nakod, they sound very similar. So imagine you’re Jacob, and you said “Okay, here’s our deal – you get all the animals that don’t have any spots on them,” because the wool is worth more if it’s uniform in color, “and I’ll take all the lower-value stuff, the nakod stuff.”

And later, Laban looks around and he sees all these dots on the animals, and he said, “Okay, you can have all the akod stuff.”

Keith: He changes the rules!

Nehemia: He changes the pronunciation, he changes the Nun to an Ayin, and what he ends up doing is ripping off Laban and deceiving him. I think this is a profound picture, that if one letter changes in the word of God, you can completely change the meaning.

Keith: My goodness, my goodness.

Nehemia: And I think that’s what Yeshua’s saying. I mean, what Yeshua is saying is like mind-blowing. Before we had the Dead Sea Scrolls, what Yeshua said might not have made that much sense, because you could have said – they did say this, “The Masoretes made up that text in the time of Yeshua,” and I’m not even talking about the vowels, I’m talking only about the constants, the word ot there.

Even if you take it in Greek, it’s one jot or one tittle, it could be understood there, “it’s one iota, one Yud, and one kariah is the word, which is a diacritical mark, we’ll talk about that when we get to the vowels. But one Yud, the smallest, little stroke, it’s a small stroke of the pen, and there were definitely Yuds in the time of Yeshua, and some people understand that as the little serifs that you had on the letters. We’ll bring a source that talks about that.

Even on that level, even from the Greek, what Yeshua said was hard to understand before we had the Dead Sea Scrolls. Now that we know about the Proto-Masoretic manuscripts, and we can see text from the time that predates Yeshua by 200 years – or his birth, at least – we can see that they were correcting texts according to some master version.

Keith: Yes.

Nehemia: And where did that master version sit? We have the sources that talk about this. There was a guild of scribes called the Temple Courtyard Proofreaders, and the rabbis – some of these rabbis quite frankly were kind of like these ancient Jewish accountants, and what do I mean by that? The discussion there in the Talmud about these scribes is during the time of the Temple, who paid for the salary of the Temple Courtyard Proofreaders? It’s kind of like, “Oh, by the way, there was this thing called Temple Courtyard Proofreaders,” because we’re talking about how they get paid, and we’re talking about financial matters, and they’re remembering where those funds came from. But from that we learn that there was this guild of scribes, where you would bring them your scroll of Isaiah that you wrote, and they would go through and they would check every letter and say, “Uh-oh, you’re missing a Vav here, you’ve got an extra Vav there, you’re missing a letter here.” They would try the best they could to match your text to this master text that existed in the Temple.

Keith: Nehemia.

Nehemia: So, when Yeshua says, “one letter will not be a cancelled from the Torah,” he had this reality he was living in, that there were people checking every single letter, and matching it to what was in the Temple. And so he comes along and says, “one letter and one nekuda, one dot, will not be cancelled, for all will be sustained.” We’ll talk about that in the Plus.

Keith: On your computer, you’ve got some stuff that you’re going to show us.

Nehemia: I can’t wait!

Keith: I cannot wait! Folks, here’s what we’re going to do.

Nehemia: I’ve been waiting 25 episodes for this!

Keith: We’re going to squeeeeze everything out of him for the next two episodes, I’m very excited about it, we’re about to go to the Plus. Nehemia, when I first met you, I asked for four things, I need to know consonants, vowels, accents, and Masoretic notes, and in effect, what you’re really talking about here other than the accents, we’re talking about three of those, really, because the Masoretic notes are where you’re talking…

Nehemia: Right, and here with the notes, maybe they weren’t written down.

Keith: Right.

Nehemia: But you definitely had somebody in the Temple, a whole guild of scribes, who had a scroll that was the master copy, we’re told there were actually three copies, and you bring them your Bible, and you pay them some money, and then they would check every single letter. So, when Yeshua says, “one letter will not be abolished, one Yud will not be abolished, until all is fulfilled,” it doesn’t actually mean that, we’ll see what it really means!

Keith: Wait till we get to that! We’re going to talk about that!

Nehemia: He had this reality that the text was fixed down to that level, maybe not every copy, right? We have the Qumran-type scrolls, the QSP Scrolls, we’ve got what’s called Proto-Samaritan Scrolls, but these Proto-Masoretic manuscripts existed in his time even before his ministry on earth, and this is what it’s talking about. Our text today is the text that Yeshua was talking about.

Keith: Now folks, here’s the deal, I’m going to make this really clear. Those that are public, keep listening, listen to what we’ve done before. Fifty different public episodes at Nehemias Wall and BFA International. We then have the Plus section.

Nehemia: I think it’s 25 public and 25 Plus.

Keith: Twenty-five, I’m sorry, I got so excited! That 50 number, there’s a total 50 that we’ve done, so 25 public, 25 Plus. You can go to NehemiasWall.com, you can get all of the even numbers of the Plus episodes.

Nehemia: Now which one is this episode? This is episode 25, right?

Keith: Is this 25?

Nehemia: Yeah, 25. So go to NehemiasWall.com, and become a Support Team member and join me there. I’ve had people who are in technology say to me, “Support Team? Are you saying there’s a problem with my computer and you’re going to help me fix it?” No, no. The reason I call it Support Team is I really look at the people who support my ministry as being part of my team. I couldn’t do this without you folks. I’m not doing this alone – you are part of my team that allows me to do this, and the image I have is, I called it Nehemias Wall, Nehemiah’s Wall.

Nehemiah was this figure who came to rebuild the wall of Jerusalem, and he couldn’t do it on his own. He walked around the wall on his own and he said, “Boy, this is more work than any one man could do.” He asked the people for help, and they stood there famously, with the sword in one hand and the hammer in the other hand, or the trowel in the other hand, so they could defend themselves from their enemies, and also build the wall, build the wall, build the wall. Build the foundation – not just the foundation of their faith, but build up that wall to create the city of God, and I can’t do it without the people.

They’re the people standing with me on the wall. And then there are some people who aren’t just standing with me on the wall, but they’re holding those trumpets, so when they see the enemy coming, they go, “Tudu, tudu, tudu!” and they’re warning the people, they’re spreading the message, because that’s what the trumpeter does.

We have the image in Ezekiel of the watchman, he sees somebody coming, the enemy army, and he blows the shofar. It’s not Nehemiah who’s blowing the shofar, he needs all those people to help him, and that’s kind of how I feel, that I couldn’t do this without you folks. I need your help. Please join me, become part of my team by supporting my ministry, and there are some amazing studies including Hebrew Gospel Pearls episode 25 Plus.

Keith: There’s a question I have for you Nehemia, this is actually happening in real time.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Keith: Is there anything exciting you’re going to be showing in this Plus? I mean, why would they want to do that? Why would they want to come and…

Nehemia: So, we are going to talk about the second keyword. We talked in the public episode about every letter, we didn’t even talk entirely about every Yud, or every letter, we didn’t even finish that. I want to show some manuscripts that show some of the variation there, but what we’re going to talk about is the vowels.

Keith: Okay, excellent.

Nehemia: What does he mean by nekuda? What does he mean by dot? There are actually several possibilities, some of which I have never had a chance to share before. I’m finally going to get to explain it. And this is actually really important, because I’ll get a lot of people who will attack things that I’m teaching, it’s a very popular thing to do, they’re like, “Oh, Nehemia’s teaching something? Bam, bam, let’s attack what he’s doing.” And very often it’s what’s called the straw man. A straw man argument is where you don’t want to argue with what somebody actually says, maybe because you don’t know it or you don’t understand it, and so you create the straw man, you create this artificial thing where you say, “You know, Nehemia says this ridiculous thing, isn’t he stupid?” Well, I never said that. I never said anything like that.

Look, we had a guy on Facebook, he comes on and he says, “I can’t believe Nehemia is so unscholarly, he says that every letter today in Hebrew is the exact pronunciation that existed in ancient times.” Have I ever said that? I literally said we don’t know how it was pronounced in ancient times! I said, “We don’t actually know for a fact that the letter Mem was pronounced M, maybe it was pronounced T, we don’t have any evidence pointing to that.” But what evidence do we have? All I could do is deal with the evidence I have. And so that’s a straw man argument. So we’re going to have an opportunity in the Plus section to tear down the straw man and explain what it is I actually say.

Keith: Yeah.

Nehemia: And what Yeshua could have meant in the 1st century.

Keith: Now, here’s the really good news folks. When the cameras are off Nehemia’s going to say, “I did what?” He just promoted this on Nehemias Wall for episode 25. Actually, episode 25 is at BFA International Plus.

Nehemia: Don’t wait for 26!

Keith: So here, this is great news! Listen folks, let me tell you what’s just happened. So what you’re going to do is you’re going to go to BFA International.

Nehemia: No, no, no!

Keith: Become a Premium Member, you get access to all of the Plus episodes, a whole bunch more, but let me say something also to those that aren’t going to do that. Go to BFA International front page, Hebrew Gospel Pearls, Red Letter Series, the first 18 episodes are for all free members. Nehemia, thank you for promoting this, I’m so excited waiting.

Nehemia: I always said math wasn’t my strong point!

Keith: Come up, meet us at the Plus section, we are so excited, we took a little extra time, this is special, you guys, and I want you to see what I’ve experienced for years. Nehemia has got information, inspiration, and revelation, please come to the Plus episodes and let’s keep studying! Would you pray?

Nehemia: Yehovah, Avinu shebashamayim, Father in heaven, I am so grateful that Your word has come down to us, You who preserves every letter and every dot.

Keith: Yes.

Nehemia: You who has spoken to us, the Creator of the entire universe decided He had a message for us lowly humans, and we get to read that message and study that message and interact with You, and have this relationship with You through this love letter that you’ve written for Your children.

Keith: Yes.

Nehemia: I am so grateful to have this opportunity to share that love letter with the world. Amen.

Keith: Father, thank you so much for all of our friends that have been listening, all those that are asking the question should they continue to study, Father, I pray that You’d inspire them and motivate them. Father, also for those that have been supporting both ministries so that we can even share with those who don’t have the ability, that they’re able to share premium, able to share with people who can’t get there. Father, you have brought some faithful study partners, and we are so, so, so blessed. Thank you for the technicians, thank you for the editors, thank you for every aspect, the research, everybody that put their hands to this, thank you so much for it, Father. I am blessed that I’ve gotten a chance to know Nehemia since 2002, and our relationship continues to grow, and even as we’ve gone deeper into the Hebrew Gospels Pearls, Father, we’re finding common ground, wherein we find those concepts that are fixed in the book that he and I found common ground in, Your Tanakh. So, we ask Your blessing in Your name, Amen.

Nehemia: Amen.

You have been listening to Hebrew Gospel Pearls with Nehemia Gordon and Keith Johnson. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon’s Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

We hope the above transcript has been a helpful resource in your study. While much effort has been taken to provide you with this transcript, it should be noted that the transcript has not been reviewed by the speakers and its accuracy cannot be guaranteed. If this teaching has been a blessing to you, please consider supporting Nehemia's research and teachings, so he can continue to empower people around the world with the Hebrew sources of their faith!