Welcome to the Messianic History series! We'll start with the story of Professor Franz Delitzsch - as the grandfather of modern Messianic Judaism and chief translator of the best and most widely-used Hebrew New Testament, his story is a who's who of nineteenth-century Jewish believers in Jesus. I...

In this second chapter in the story of Professor Franz Delitzsch we'll cover his marriage, the loss of his parents, and his move to two other cities, all of which spanned his 30s to mid-50s. During these productive years Delitzsch came out with the Keil & Delitzsch OT commentary and a 600-page bo...

After 23 years of exile the King returned home to Leipzig to raving reviews and wild popularity. It was then, at the height of his power and shortly before the completion of his greatest masterpiece, that tragedy struck - two of his sons died and a third began his dark descent to become the Rever...

The Delitzsch Hebrew New Testament wasn't the first on the scene. The London Society's version of 1817 was based on the very first Hebrew New Testament translated by Elias Hutter in 1599 for his gorgeous Polyglot Bible. It was criticized by many including Delitzsch for limiting itself to the voca...

In the previous chapter in this historical series we looked at the first edition of the London Society's Hebrew NT and you met some of the movers and shakers in the baby Hebrew Christian movement. In this chapter you'll meet the six men behind the next two editions including the greatest Hebrew g...

Only one Hebrew New Testament has been cantillated so it could be sung - the third version of the London Society, translated by Ezekiel Margoliouth and Dr. Biesenthal. In this vignette you'll see how this iteration was an improvement and meet Ezekiel and his son David, the Arabic Professor at Oxf...

Raphael Hirsch became a household name as Dr. Joachim Heinrich Biesenthal, the greatest Hebrew scholar of the 1800s. An academic giant, he was personal friends with the best grammarians, textual critics, philosophers, and church historians of his day - men such as Gesenius, Heidenheim, Vatke, Heg...

The scholarship of Dr. Biesenthal was spectacular. He contributed Hebrew grammars, dictionaries, and lexicons written in Hebrew, Latin, and German and produced critical editions of several books of Tanach. He told the story of early Christianity from Talmudic sources and revealed how Christian d...

Dr. Biesenthal exposed many ancient Jewish texts that had been suppressed because they pointed to Yeshua. These texts taught that Messiah was the Holy One who spoke with Abraham, that he would come riding on a donkey to suffer for the sins of the world as per Isaiah 53 and become the mediator thr...

Dr. Biesenthal wasn't just a great Hebrew scholar - he was also a powerful storyteller who did much to define the Hebrew Christian movement. He retold the story of Yeshua from suppressed Jewish texts, which we'll continue looking at here. He also told the story of that first generation of Jewish ...

Imagine being Jewish and not knowing anything about Yeshua of Nazareth except garbled hearsay. Then you read the New Testament and encounter him, but you still don't know what came after the book of Acts. Dr. Biesenthal stepped in to tell that story and give a generation of Jewish believers the h...

Dr. Biesenthal defended historical Christianity and Judaism and made the early Hebrew Christians proud to be both. He pointed out many Jewish elements in the early Church including the reading of the Law and Prophets, Passover on the 14th, ritual hand washing, facing Jerusalem to pray, and belief...

If the Early Church and Synagogue were on social media their relationship status would have been "complicated". Dr. Biesenthal tackled these tensions in his history of the early Yeshua movement - not only bringing forth suppressed texts about Messiah, but also presenting stories from the Talmud a...

Dr. Biesenthal unearthed stories from the Midrash suggesting that the Messiah would not meet Israel's expectations. Instead, the Temple would be destroyed and Messiah himself would mysteriously disappear on a centuries-long journey - first to hell, and then to Rome and the other great countries a...

Delitzsch and Salkinson were the Coke and Pepsi of Hebrew New Testaments. In this first conversation about the Salkinson-Ginsburg version we'll look at the human side of Isaac Salkinson - his childhood pain as an orphan and wandering years in Eastern Europe, education and missionary work in Great...

Isaac Salkinson wasn't just a Hebrew Christian missionary - he was a member of the Jewish Enlightenment and the best translator they had, rendering classical works like Shakespeare into biblical Hebrew. He was also a father figure to Peretz Smolenskin, the fiery editor of the widely read Haskalah...

Christian David Ginsburg was the greatest Hebrew scholar Britain ever produced. After Isaac Salkinson's sudden death he paused his monumental work on the Massorah to finish the translation and prepare it for publishing. In this first conversation we'll start with Ginsburg's contribution to the Sa...

Dr. Ginsburg's rise to power began in the Liverpool Society where he not only demonstrated his brilliance in multiple lectures which went on to be published as books, but also showed himself to be very human by helping out however he could. In addition to hours-long lectures on the Karaites, Esse...

C. D. Ginsburg came into his own in Liverpool, the big brawny and bustling New York of Europe. In a city where money was everything Ginsburg made the Hebrew Bible his everything and grew up like a root out of dry ground. In this talk we'll look at Dr. Ginsburg's brilliant inaugural address to the...

The Moabite Stone was big news when it was first discovered in the late 1860s. Dr. Ginsburg not only translated this spectacular archaeological find, but was also quick to publish an intensely detailed but readable book about it. As the Moabite stone became a household name, so did C. D. Ginsburg...

George Eliot wrote her seventh novel about "Daniel Deronda", an English gentleman who meets a dying young visionary named Mordecai who believes that Deronda has been divinely called to lead the Jewish people back to Israel. He objects that he isn't even Jewish, only to discover that he is...and t...

She was a scandalous Victorian novelist and ten years his senior. He taught her Hebrew. She taught him how to deal with the critics when he became famous. He sent her the rough draft of the article that made him famous. She kept him from suicide. He became the fiery young martyr in her greatest n...

Emanuel Deutsch came as a harbinger a century ahead of his time. In his wildly popular 1867 article on the Talmud he dared to point out that the New Testament was written by Jews, showed how early Rabbinic writings paralleled and even supplemented the Gospels, and in one stroke reconciled the old...

He held no titles or office and had no power, but he changed the world by changing minds. He was humble, helpful, and lived for years in obscurity. We don't know what he looked like except that he was Jewish. He wasn't physically attractive and never married, but he loved children and they loved ...