Hi, I’m Timothy…
From a young age, I ate matzah on Passover, built a sukkah with my father for Sukkot, blew the shofar on Yom Teruah (Rosh Hoshanah), and ate homemade hamantaschen on Purim. My family read the weekly Torah Portion nearly every Saturday, and we did our best to “keep the Sabbath holy.”
No, I’m not Jewish. Instead, I was a “Torah Observant” Christian.
My family believed in Jesus (we called him Yeshua), yet we also believed that the Torah (the Hebrew word for the first five books of the Bible) contained instructions that we were still obligated to observe. Commands that included the Seventh-day Sabbath, avoiding “unclean” foods, and keeping the annual Feasts outlined in Leviticus 23.
Most Christians believe that Christ came to “fulfill” the Torah and usher in the New Covenant, thereby removing the requirement for believers to observe these practices. However, for the past 30-50 years, the Torah Observant or “Hebrew Roots” movement has been challenging this notion. Torah Observant teachers promote the idea that the Christian Church lost its way in the centuries after Christ and stopped observing God’s Torah, in part because of the influence of Gentile anti-semitism and paganism.
This is the belief system that I grew up being taught, and I believed it too. I knew many of the most common objections that “mainstream Christians” would try to challenge Torah Observance with, and I knew which Bible verses to use to refute them. I knew all the pagan history behind Christmas and Easter, as well as how sun worship had infiltrated the early Church through the Emperor Constantine and Roman Catholicism.
But then I read C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity, and it set me on a path I did not expect. At the beginning of that book he likens the Christian faith to a house with many rooms, which symbolize the many different churches and denominations. The hallways between the rooms represent what he calls “Mere Christianity”. These are the basic Christian beliefs that all Christians adhere to; essentially the lowest common denominator for what it means to be a Christian.
He makes it clear that he is not going to try to convince anyone which room is the correct one, but he does not want anyone to come away thinking that “Mere Christianity” is a substitute for entering one of the rooms.
“[I]t is in the rooms,” He says, “not in the hall, that there are fires and chairs and meals. The hall is a place to wait in, a place from which to try the various doors, not a place to live in. For that purpose the worst of the rooms (whichever that may be) is, I think, preferable.”
Something about this analogy struck a chord with me. Even though I believed that Torah Observance was true, there were still questions I had about it. There were parts of my faith that I felt the need to go deeper into. I needed to not just profess it, but to really know why I believed what I believed. Even though I knew the basics of what I believed about God, I still felt that I was “in the hall”.
I read the book in 2021, but it wasn’t until 2022 that I really started to dig deeper and do some research. What I found bothered me.
Everywhere I turned, whether I looked at things Biblically, historically, or just from a purely logical perspective, Torah Observance started to seem less and less credible. Biblical arguments that I had thought were convincing fell apart when confronted with context that I had previously missed. Many historical claims that I had believed wholeheartedly turned out to be nothing more than 19th-century myths. To make it even worse, the Torah Observant teachers that I listened to in an attempt to account for these problems frequently perpetuated the same bad arguments and historical myths.
Ironically, in my attempt to find answers to the few questions I had about Torah Observance, all I found were more questions and a growing concern that Torah Observance was an untenable theological position.
This made me uncomfortable, because if Torah Observance wasn’t true, then what was? Did the Baptists have it right, or the Methodists, or maybe the Lutherans? To be quite honest, I didn’t even know very much about what these different churches believed. I had been Torah Observant almost my entire life, and the thought that the truth was somewhere else was bewildering.
However, the more I researched, the more it became inescapable: Torah Observance is simply not the truth. It was not the faith passed on by the Apostles, and it was not a belief system held by any Christian group until the 20th century.
At this point, I started to shift my research away from investigating Torah Observance. If the beliefs that I had previously held were false, then I needed to find out where the real truth was.
At first, I planned to simply study the teachings of each major denomination, compare those teachings to the Bible, and then determine which denomination contained the most truth. A simple enough idea in theory, but incredibly naive and hopelessly impractical.
At some point, I decided that I would read the Early Church Fathers and see what they believed. After all, wouldn’t the disciples of the Apostles (many of whom were martyred) know something about what Christ actually taught? At the very least, they would know more than me!
I had read snippets of the Church Fathers’ writings prior to this, as well as sections directly pertaining to (and refuting) Torah Observant issues, but that was about it. I was not prepared to find that the teaching and practice of the earliest Christians more closely aligned with the Catholic Church than any Protestant Church I looked at.
At the beginning of my research, I shrugged off the Catholic Church’s claim of being the “one true faith” as laughably absurd. As far back as I can remember, I believed that the Catholic Church was hopelessly corrupt and even satanic. I had heard many conspiracy theories about all the horrible things the Catholic Church had supposedly done throughout history, and so the idea that it was some “infallible church” just seemed silly.
However, when I investigated them I found that many of the accusations leveled against the Catholic Church just can’t be substantiated historically. Christmas does not come from Roman paganism, Constantine did not found the Catholic Church, the Pope did not change the Sabbath, etc…
Eventually, I came to the point where I had to admit that the Catholic Church is one of the most hated and slandered institutions that has ever existed. This led me to soften my position towards them and actually try to evaluate their doctrinal claims fairly.
Much to my chagrin, I had to admit I had been lied about that as well. The more I actually engaged with Catholic doctrine fairly (as opposed to burning strawmen) the more it seemed reasonable, and the more it seemed to align with what I was reading in the Church Fathers.
I never wanted to be Catholic. The caricature that I had been taught about Catholicism had never made me desire to be a part of it. But after a lot of studying, a ton of praying, and constantly begging God to “Show me the truth!”, I couldn’t fight it any longer. I guess one can only resist God’s grace for so long!
So that’s basically my story! I was Torah Observant, but after a lot of prayerful study I realized that actually God was calling me to his One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. A Church that I believe he has protected from error and guided into all truth.
I started this blog to help people who may be where I was. I want to address the myths and misinformation that are spread by many Torah Observant teachers, as well as provide thought-provoking pushback to many of their teachings.
I do want to make it clear (in case it wasn’t already) that I am not unbiased when it comes to this topic. I believe that the Catholic Church is the one, true, Church of Christ. I believe Peter was the first Pope, and I believe all the Bishops, Priests, and Deacons today for successors to the apostles. I also believe that the Eucharist actually becomes the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Jesus Christ.
I approach everything I write about from a Catholic perspective, but this does not mean that I don’t try to be as objective as possible. If you feel I’ve made an error about something, feel free to call me out on it. Iron sharpens iron, and faulty argumentation doesn’t aid anyone in the pursuit of truth.
If you’ve made it to the end of this, thank you! I hope my blog edifies and encourages you as you continue growing in Christ!
May God Bless You!
