RaptureChrist Newsletter
February1, 2014

What is ortho doina?  According to the Free Online Dictionary, a doina is a folk song which tells the life and struggles of a people throughout its history.  If you look up the word ortho, it means right or straight.

According to Aryeh Kaplan, It is a positive commandment for every Jew to write a Torah or have one written for him. It is thus written, "Now write this song for yourselves" (Deut 31:19). Since it is forbidden to write portions of the Torah separately, this commandment is an injunction to write the entire Torah.

The verse in question says:

Deut 31:19
Now therefore write ye this SONG for you, and teach it the children of Israel: put it in their mouths, that this song may be a witness for me against the children of Israel.

This is an important Bible verse. It is used by Jews to say that we must write God's words and memorize them.  For this reason, the Jews have been a literate people for thousands of years. They all learn to read and write.

In the time of Christ, all men in the synagogue knew how to read and write and were familiar with the Tanakh.  This is because they had all been forced to write a Torah scroll when they were young.

All Torah scrolls must be perfect, and if there is even one error, you must throw the Torah scroll out. Kaplan also mentions how important it was to copy perfectly every character in the Torah:

In order to fulfill this commandment, one must write a letter perfect Torah. If the Torah contains the slightest error, even in a variant spelling, it is not valid for the fulfillment of this commandment, ...therefore, the most scrupulous care was taken to copy the Torah, letter for letter.

Yeshua our savior was the son of a carpenter, but as we mentioned before, that did not make him any less as far as knowing the Torah, as all Jewish people knew how to read and write.  Every Sabbath day, Yeshua would go to the synagogue.  It was common  practice, for the members of each synagogue, to periodically stand up during Sabbath or in the festivals and read the Torah. This was the religious custom of Jews over thousands of years.

Luke 4:16-18
He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written: The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised,

Not only was this common man able to read the Torah, but He was the fulfillment of those words of Isaiah... Yes, God anointed Yeshua to preach the gospel, to heal us, to make us free, and to give us everlasting life.

John 7:14
Now about the midst of the feast Jesus went up into the temple, and taught. And the Jews marveled, saying, How knows this man letters, having never learned?

They refer to this Bible verse in an attempt to say Yeshua was illiterate. Well, that is not so. At age 12, He was already in the temple talking about God with the doctors of law.

Luke 2:46-47
after three days they found him in the temple, sitting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing them, and asking them questions. And all that heard him were astonished at his understanding and answers.

In reference to the apostles being illiterate, scholars use this verse: 

Acts 4:13
Now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were unlearned and ignorant men, they marveled; and they took knowledge of them, that they had been with Jesus. 

Peter and John were unlearned, as they had no formal training, but the apostles could read and write and so could other Jews. Look at what Yeshua says when addressing a crowd:

Mark 12:10
Haven't you READ this passage of Scripture: "'The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone;...

Many of Yeshua's disciples were not simple people. Harry A. Gaylord says that Matthew was a tax collector who needed to keep records in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin for the Roman Empire. Luke was a physician and  had extensive knowledge. Doctors not only needed to diagnose and treat the sick, but write extensive reports. Certainly, the idea that Yeshua's disciples were all poor illiterate fishermen is a fallacy. In fact, this is an attempt to try to discredit the fact that the New Testament was written by literate Jews.

Jews were reading the Torah every Sabbath in the Synagogue for thousands of years. Tim Hegg mentions Joshua and Nehemiah as examples of Israelites reading the Torah to the people in ancient times.

They were not illiterate, but far from it. Literacy was a lot more common in the Roman Empire than in the later dark ages. Witness the Library of Alexandria in Egypt with over 100,000 volumes.

It is a fact that the Greek language used by Paul,  a Pharisee instructed by Gamaliel, (Acts 22:3) is far more erudite than the common language used by Matthew or Mark. Peter refers to this when he says that the writings of Paul are difficult to understand and that some twist to their own destruction.

2 Peter 3:15-16
And count the patience of our Lord as salvation, just as our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, speaking of these things in all of his letters. Some of his comments are hard to understand, and those who are ignorant and unstable have twisted his letters to mean something quite different, just as they do with other parts of Scripture. And this will result in their destruction.

These "Christian" scholars are not Christians; they are hypocrites attempting to discredit God's word, but Yeshua says:

MATT 18:6
If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to fall into a trap, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.