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Jewish Roots Institute Class Schedule

Fall Semester 2010
Monday Evenings starting Sept 13

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6:30pm - 7:30pm
(Required for New Students)
Jewish Roots of the Christian Faith
Explore the earliest interconnection between Christianity and Judaism, the departure of Christianity from its Jewish foundation, and the resultant misunderstanding, intolerance, and hostility between the two groups. 6:30pm - 7:30pm
Twelve Historical Facts to Understand the N.T.
7:30pm - 8:30pm
The Jewishness of Jesus
Provides conclusive support that the first-century Church was indeed a ?denomination? of Judaism, and that Jesus, Paul, and other Church leaders were Jewish in their approach to kingdom living. 8:30pm - 9:30pm
Messianic Concepts of the 1st Century
An in-depth look at what the Jews were expecting in their Messiah, the biblical foundation for those expectations and the various messianic figures in Jewish history who presumed to fulfill those expectations.

Tuesday Evenings starting Sept 14

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6:30pm - 7:30pm
Geography of the Bible
A study of the geology, geography, history and biblical significance of the terrain of the Holy Land. 7:30pm - 8:30pm
The Untold Story of Church History I
Traces the origins and development of the Christian Church, from the time of Jesus through the Reformation. 8:30pm - 9:30pm
The Rabbis, The Talmud & The New Testament

Download our Flyer with the class information on it. Please post it on bulletin boards, give to your friends, hand out in Christian bookstores and at church. Click here for the flyer in pdf format.

Archived Class Schedule

The Jewish Roots Institute offers diplomas, Bachelor of Arts and Master's Degrees in Middle Eastern Studies. Non-degree students are welcome to audit courses for personal growth and learning.   Return to Jewish Roots Institute Home page from Jewish Roots Institute class schedule

Hope

Messianic Jewish Institute of Kansas City

(an accredited degree program)

Winter/Spring Semester

Begins January 11 & 12 

(13 week classes)

Here is the schedule of classes for this upcoming semester in less than 2 weeks.  Please invite others to attend classes (friends, family, co-workers, pastors, rabbis, etc.).  We depend on you spreading the word about the classes.

Schedule of Classes

Mondays:

6:30 – 7:30 Introduction to the Jewish Roots of the Christianity 

This is our premier and pre-requisite course. We will answer the question, “How did a small Jewish sect in the First Century become a predominantly non-Jewish religion and what got lost in “the mix”? This is a serious course that investigates how current Christian self understandings are far from their original sources in historical Jewish terms as contemporary Christian values and spiritualities will be reviewed for personal spiritual growth and responsibility.

6:30 – 7:30 To be announced

7:30 – 8:30 The Jewishness of Paul 

Paul is said to have presented a Gospel of “Faith” that supersedes the seeming failure of the covenants made with Israel, the Jewish people. In doing so, Christianity has defined itself in contradistinction to everything Jewish as if Paul rejects the “Law” for grace. This class taps into the New Perspective on Paul and restores the fidelity and faithfulness of this extraordinary Rabbi and Yeshua follower. We will explore a Paul that is hardly identified in Christian tradition. Paul the Jewish theologian is the missing link to understanding that the God of Israel was acting in history through the Jewish Messiah. His task was to formulate halacha for the Gentiles who “were apart from the covenants of Israel (Eph. 2:11)”.

8:30 – 9:30 Jewish Festivals and Holy Days 

Too often these topics are treated in “catchy” ways in Messianic teaching circles. They are not just “fulfillment” motifs pointing to the Messiah. We will examine the order of the cosmos as God acts in history and discover the wonder of the “heavens declaring the glory of God” in recreation acts. In doing so the calendar of Biblical (and additional) Jewish Holy Days frames the witness of God in the earth through the calling of the Jewish people to carry the oracles of God through their observances. We will mine scriptures with remarkable detail as to the opportunities afforded all followers of Him in establishing and building great expectations and benefits in the Holy Days.

Tuesdays: 

6:30 – 7:30 The Pharisees (you never knew)!

This is one of our most distinct classes, visiting a group that is mostly either misunderstood in traditional portrayal or simply are relegated to an adversarial “opponent” of Yeshua. Yet, Yeshua taught what they taught and lived mostly the way they lived. You will come to understand that this was an “in house” intra-Jewish relationship. Also, we will see how the Pharisees actually represented “the best” of what came to later be formed as Rabbinical Judaism (though a distinct formation in history beyond the Pharisees). Without studying the Pharisees, much of the teaching of Yeshua has little context in the religious debates among Judaism of the First Century.

7:30 – 8:30 Jewish Culture 

First Century Jewish culture was contextualized in a particular sociological, religious, political and historical world. Hebrew words had meaning in context. As well archaeological surveys of sites in Israel are helpful to place the Gospel in its setting. What role did the Judaisms of the day, as well as Roman influences create Jewish variations. This will be a journey class through various topics that establish the setting for what is customarily called the New Testament. The rich Jewish heritage is the heritage of the earthly life of Yeshua.

8:30 – 9:30 Hermeneutics Though we have the ease of opening our Bibles and encounter its words, little teaching is provided for Christians (and even Messianics) as to the principles of interpreting the text in a consistent and accurate way. We will learn how to approach the Bible through the many disciplines that are necessary so as to grasp the authority of what it is saying. Too often today, people determine what it means by how they experience it to be true. This leaves God's people in disunity and self authenticating religious persuasions. It results in spiritual independent contractors that ”go with God” and yet do so as separate individuals in their Biblical identities. God speaks through His word, but is He double minded? Every text has a single meaning meant to call all of God's people to a mutual accountability. It might be applied individually but it is not for “private” interpretation. We will also look at the principles of interpretation used by the Gospel writers and Paul, drawing form Jewish principles current to the First Century.

Registration:

We do not require pre-registration and invite all visitors to attend the first week as an open house. 

Check out our web site www.jewishrootsinstitute.org for fees. 

PLEASE NOTE THAT WE ARE CONSDIERING DISCOUNTS BASED ON HOW MANY CLASSES YOU REGISTER FOR. Also, our courses described are a preliminary schedule subject to change. 

Rabbi Jerry Feldman

http://www.adatyeshuakc.com

Be of Good Cheer

DNA not enough?

The Alphabet of Life

By: David Klinghoffer
The Jerusalem Post July 7, 2009

DNA are three letters full of paradox. What they represent remains little understood by the public, yet they are on everyone's tongue. Amid the chatter of popular culture, the truth gets lost that DNA is one of the most powerful clues we have of the existence of a spiritual reality, maybe to the existence of God.

An acronym for deoxyribonucleic acid, DNA refers to the form taken by the biological information that directs the production of proteins and other cell components. In 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick famously described its double-helix shape. The information thus encoded, the genome, influences how a living organism's body gets constructed, though how far this goes, and how it works, are questions that remain obscure.

We talk about DNA as familiarly as we do the USA. The idea that your genes determine your susceptibility to diseases and addictions is a stock theme of popular health discussions. On TV cop shows, law-enforcement officials are constantly using DNA to solve cases, whether new or "cold" - as real police do.
...
But all this is trivial compared to the largely unheralded insight gained from the Human Genome Project, completed in 2003. The insight is disturbing. It is that while DNA codes for the cell's building blocks, the information needed to build the rest of the creature is seemingly, in large measure, absent.

Consider the Hox "master" genes that supposedly determine the spatial configuration of the front and back ends of creatures as diverse as frogs, mice and humans. As British physician James Le Fanu writes in a fascinating new book, Why Us? How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves (Pantheon), Swiss biologist Walter Gehring showed that "the same 'master' genes mastermind the three-dimensional structures of all living things... The same master genes that cause a fly to have the form of a fly cause a mouse to have the form of a mouse." The physically encoded information to form that mouse, as opposed to that fly, isn't there. Instead, "It is as if the 'idea' of the fly (or any other organism) must somehow permeate the genome that gives rise to it."

Such an understanding, of nature driven by a force outside nature, was dominant in biology before Darwin. Baron Georges Cuvier (1769-1832), director of Paris's Musee d'Histoire Naturelle, held that there was an unknown biological "formative impulse," an organizational principle of some kind that directed the formation of diverse kinds of life.

The concept goes still further back. Much further. What Cuvier called the "formative impulse," was called God's "wisdom" by the rabbis. The Bible teaches, "The Lord founded the earth with wisdom" (Proverbs 3:19).

WITH DNA, there is, in one sense, less there than meets the eye. But in another sense, there is much more. For if DNA can't entirely account for the way bodies are put together, there remains something deeply suggestive about the fact that curled at the heart of every cell there lies a code. How did it get there?

A staple of media coverage of DNA is the story, repeated endlessly, about some scientist or other who's the latest to synthesize molecular precursors of DNA (or its genetic partner, RNA), thus purportedly showing how biological information could have arisen on Earth unaided. The problem with these demonstrations is that they always depend on intelligent guidance, that of the scientist in his lab, thus suggesting the very opposite lesson of the one intended.
[MORE]

The Difference

"Islam is a religion in which Allah demands you send your son to die for him; Christianity is the faith in which God sent His Son to die for you."
John Ashcroft, former US Attorney General

The Dollar and Prophecy ...

... from Pravda?

All-seeing eye curses US dollar

21.01.2009 Source: Pravda.Ru

From the very beginning the U.S. dollar has been having some kind of destructive influence on the world's financial system. The people, who created first U.S. dollar notes, placed some mystical signs and symbols on them. The financial crisis
may force the USA to issue a new currency because of those signs.
...
Symbols

Any changes in the U.S. currency system will lead to changes in other countries. The signs, the symbols and even the size of U.S. dollar notes indicate the terrifying role that the dollar may play soon.

Everyone is aware of the sign depicted on the back of the 1-dollar-note - the all-seeing eye. Many sacred books including the Koran say that one of the distinctive features of Antichrist include the following: "It has one eye which looks like a grape berry."

The fact that the width of the note makes exactly 66.6 millimeters (Satan's number) may seem to be the most striking one. It is worthy of note that the all-seeing eye appears on Ukraine's 500-hryvna note too.

SOMALIA: Christian Aid Worker Beheaded for Converting From Islam

Monday October 27, 2009

Anti-Christian violence spills into Kenya as Somali Muslims attack in Nairobi.

NAIROBI, Kenya, October 27 (Compass Direct News) – Among at least 24 aid workers killed in Somalia this year was one who was beheaded last month specifically for converting from Islam to Christianity, among other charges, according to an eyewitness.

Muslim extremists from the al Shabab group fighting the transitional government on Sept. 23 sliced the head off of Mansuur Mohammed, 25, a humanitarian aid worker, before horrified onlookers of Manyafulka village, 10 kilometers (six miles) from Baidoa.

The militants had intercepted Mohammed and a driver, who managed to escape, earlier in the morning. Sources close to Mohammed’s family said he converted from Islam to Christianity in 2005.

The eyewitness, who requested anonymity for security reasons, said the militants that afternoon gathered the villagers of Manyafulka, telling them that they would prepare a feast for them. The people gathered anticipating the slaughter of a sheep, goat or camel according to local custom.

Five masked men emerged carrying guns, wielding Somali swords and dragging the handcuffed Mohammed. One pulled back Mohammed’s head, exposing his face as he scraped his sword against his short hair as if to sharpen it. Another recited the Quran as he proclaimed that Mohammed was a “murtid,” an Arabic term for one who converts from Islam to Christianity.

The Muslim militant announced that Mohammed was an infidel and a spy for occupying Ethiopian soldiers.

Mohammed remained calm with an expressionless face, never uttering a word, said the eyewitness. As the chanting of “Allah Akubar [God is greater]” rose to a crescendo, one of the militiamen twisted his head, allowing the other to slit his neck. When the head was finally severed from the torso, the killers cheered as they displayed it to the petrified crowd.

The militants allowed one of their accomplices to take a video of the slaughter using a mobile phone. The video was later circulated secretly and sold in Somalia and in neighboring countries in what many see as a strategy to instill fear among those contemplating conversion from Islam to Christianity.

Unconfirmed reports indicated that a similar incident took place in Lower Juba province of Somalia in July, when Christians found with Bibles were publicly executed. Their families fled to Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya, and such killings are forcing other Christians to flee to neighboring Kenya, Ethiopia and Djibouti.

Somalis Attacking Somalis

Somali refugees to Kenya include Nur Mohammed Hassan, in Nairobi under U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees asylum. In spite of the protection, two weeks ago five Somali Muslims broke into Mohammed Hassan’s house and beat him and his family, he told Compass.

“On Oct. 14 five Muslims entered my house around 10 o’clock in the night and forced us out after beating us indiscriminately,” Mohammed Hassan said, adding that the youngest of his eight children suffers from a liver disease. “Thank God the police arrived immediately and saved our lives. For two days now we have been sleeping outside in the cold. We have been receiving police security, but for how long will this continue?”

Mohammed Hassan now lives in Eastliegh, Nairobi with his wife and children. He had fled Mogadishu after Muslims murdered his sister, Mariam Mohammed Hassan, in April 2005, allegedly for distributing Bibles in the capital.

“We are nowadays no better than our fellow Somali Christians inside Somalia who are killed like dogs when discovered to be Christians,” Mohammed Hassan said. “We are not safe living here in Eastleigh. The Muslims killed my sister in Mogadishu, and now they are planning to kill me and my family.”

[Read the Rest]

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