My “Testimony”

I prayed the sinner’s prayer when I was twelve years old, just after seeing the series of movies made by Mark IV Productions (A Thief in the Night, A Distant Thunder et cetera). I was baptized at the age of fifteen, having spent my first three years reading the Bible (in King James) and learning to challenge adults in their thinking regarding the Bible. I started to learn Greek at the age of seventeen and went to Bible College at eighteen, with intentions of going into ministry. I was there for three years before I left Christianity (as the result of a long inner struggle) and began my trek into Judaism. After three years of study at the local synagogue, I converted in 2003 and came to Israel for the first time in 2004. I held onto my belief in God throughout those years and believed in the revelation of the Torah up until last year. I no longer believe that the Torah was inspired by a divinity or given on Mount Sinai. I no longer believe that there was an exodus in which over a million Israelites left Egypt. I’m rather sold on the position that the Torah was majorly composed in the time of Josiah, king of Judah – probably by his scribe Shafan in collaboration with the priest Hilkiah (Jeremiah’s father).

I still spend a lot of time reading the Bible and make all efforts to improve my understanding of it. However, I do not come at it from the devotional perspective that religious folks do. I come to it with questions about what was happening at the time, what the purpose of the text is, whether or not it would actually have happened as written or if it’s been conflated, etc. I find it extremely interesting reading the Torah through the lens of Josiah’s kingship. That’s changed much of how I understand the Torah.

How did I experience my religious life? I assume as most do. I went through different periods in my life. I learned early on from writers like Jack Van Impe and Tim LaHaye, learned to hate the things that “God” hates (making arguments against homosexuality and abortion, which have been the popular attacks in recent years), devoted a lot of time to studying what the Bible says about the end of the world, attempting to get the kids at school to open up to talks about the Bible, making sure that my Bible sat on my desk throughout my classes and tearing it open as soon as the bell rang to devour something new. I spent most of my time reading the books of Paul over and over, highlighting and underlining key phrases that I wanted to remember, looking up the cross-references in the margins of my Bible and drawing connections in my mind between various parts of the Bible. My religious life was centered on devotion to the Word of God.

I attended various churches, because my family moved a lot. My family was Baptist, but I attended more charismatic/Pentecostal churches when I could make the choice on my own. My baptism was performed by the minister of the United Pentecostal Church. The last time we moved before I graduated high school (my sophomore year), I met the preacher at the Christian Church and we became friends. I wasn’t aware of the major differences between the Pentecostal Church and the Christian Church until I started joining in with their youth group and we eventually got to issues of doctrine. When the preacher told me that Dispensationalism and Rapturism were “heresies,” I about flipped out! Anyway, at the age of seventeen, this was my biggest paradigm shift – finding out that all the “end of the world” books I’d read until then were filled with invention and falsehood. I was simply floored… and perhaps this is what I never recovered from and what allowed me to question other things at a later period in my life.

There’s more to my story than this, as with most people. But, I think that’s enough for now and will have to suffice. As it is now, I believe absolutely nothing of what I learned at home and in church. It’s all gone now.