My Jewish friend Davy was a big, lovable sort of guy with a perpetual five o’clock shadow and a penchant for free-thinking arguments. Some of the most important of those to him had to do with the Jewish roots of our shared faith in Jesus. He was convinced that the Jewish people were not replaced by the church in God’s plans for redeeming the world.

In those days, I was new to my belief in Jesus but had just begun a master’s degree program to study the Bible and theology. I didn’t yet know much about Jewish culture or the Jewish character of the New Testament, but to me, Davy’s ideas were intriguing and persuasive.

Unfortunately, he had a much harder time persuading our pastor.

I saw them talking after church one Sunday, and Davy later told me the pastor insisted that “the Church,” is the new Israel. In other words, since people who believe in Jesus are now counted as God’s chosen people, the promises God made to Abraham no longer really apply to his literal descendants. I didn’t know enough at that time to challenge the pastor about it, but it didn’t sit right with me. Not to mention, I felt very defensive about it for Davy’s sake!

That question became one of the key mysteries I wanted to unpack in my graduate studies. As I got deeper into the New Testament, I began to sense that the idea of “the Church” itself—and its relationship to Israel—was more complicated than most people seem to know.

A few years after graduating, I noticed something in our Christian terminology that may contribute a lot to the confusion. The problem is, I think, it is not widely known where the term “church” actually came from.

The Origin of the Word “Church”

The English word “church” has a confusing backstory. Etymologically, it comes from a fourth-century term that referred to a church building.1 In English translations of the New Testament however, church usually translates the Greek word, ecclesia, which is not a building, but a group of people.

Ecclesia means the called-out ones. In ancient Greece, it was a citizen assembly in a city-state like Athens—people were called out from their homes to assemble and make civic decisions.

I’ve seen a lot of Christian teachers take this at face value, making it sound like the New Testament authors borrowed this Gentile term to refer to what they saw as a wholly new entity: the Church.

That lends itself to the common claim that the Church started at Pentecost in 33 AD. In Christian lingo, Pentecost refers to what happened during the Shavuot celebration in Jerusalem after Jesus’ resurrection. The disciples—who were all (or virtually all) Jewish at that time—were assembled together in a large room near the temple and filled with God’s Holy Spirit.

There is something singular happening when the Spirit descends on Jesus’ followers.

Many Western Christians, since at least the Middle Ages, have called that the birth date of the Church.2 Certainly, there is something very fresh and singular happening when the Spirit descends on Jesus’ followers. However, there are two potential problems with calling Pentecost the Church’s birthday:

1. The New Testament does not make that claim. The arrival of the Holy Spirit is a highly significant and transformative event. But the New Testament does not say that something called “the Church” has just appeared where nothing of the kind existed before.
2. Ecclesia is a word from the Tanakh (Old Testament). The New Testament writers took it from the Septuagint, which is the old Greek language translations of the Tanakh. There the word translated a very important concept in the Bible: the idea of the assembly/qahal (קָהָל) of Israel.

The Assembly/Qahal of Israel

The Tanakh uses the word qahal when God’s people are gathered before him at pivotal moments in their history. Like when they came together at Mount Sinai (Deuteronomy 5:22; 9:10; 10:4; 18:16) or when they assembled for the dedication of Solomon’s temple (1 Kings 8:14; 8:22; 8:55). In both of those events, some Gentiles were among the believers (Exodus 12:38, 1 Kings 8:41–43).

The writers of the New Testament were first-century Jewish people who were steeped in the Scriptures. It seems most likely that they intentionally used the word assembly (ecclesia / qahal) to mark the continuity between what God had done in the Tanakh and what he was now doing through the Messiah. It seems to me that in the logic of the New Testament, the assembly of believers at Pentecost is the assembly of Israel, renewed once again before God through the Messiah and newly filled with God’s Holy Spirit.3

The people of the nations could be united in their assembly through faith in Messiah.

That’s why it was so confusing to those first followers of Jesus when Gentiles started coming in droves to Messiah, but they eventually concluded that it made sense (Acts 15:1–29). The people of the nations could be united in their assembly through faith in Messiah, who was, after all, the king of the whole world.

A New Thing or an Old Thing?

You could call that early assembly of followers in Messiah a new thing—as the Apostle Paul seems to do in Ephesians 2:11–22. The Pentecost event is the fulfillment of prophetic hopes for radical renewal (Ezekiel 36:24–36, Isaiah 4:2–6, 66:22–23), and it is the start of a new era in the ongoing story of redemption.

You could also call it an extension of the existing assembly of God’s faithful people—as Paul seems to do in Romans 11:13–24. The assembly of believers in Messiah is rooted in a story that stretches back to that first assembly of God’s chosen people at Sinai and beyond (Romans 4:16–18).

It seems to me that today we need to be reminded more of the continuity between Sinai and Pentecost. However, it’s even better if we’re able to hold both sides of the coin in our minds.

The deeper meaning of the word “church,” is somewhat obscured under layers of language and layers of Gentile-Christian culture that have accumulated over the ages. The good news is that our Messiah does not share our confusion! He knows his people that he has lovingly called, both Jewish and Gentile. He gathers us into a united assembly before Him, one body. And he continues to invite people of all nations to put their trust in him.

Endnotes

1 The English word “church” is derived from a Greek term that was never used in the New Testament. Believers in Jesus of the fourth to fifth centuries would use kyriakon oikon, “the Lord’s house,” to describe their buildings (a new thing since they’d previously met in homes). And that got shortened in old English to kyrk, which we now pronounce, “church”—kirk in German.

This confuses the idea of whether “the church” is a people or a place. And many educated pastors have to keep reminding their congregations that “church is a people, not a place.”

2 The historical picture is somewhat complicated. The Eastern Orthodox Church never really thought of Pentecost as the Church’s birthday, because theologically the church existed before the foundation of the world. I haven’t been able to find an example in the early church writings where Pentecost is identified as the birthdate of the church, though you can see the church leaders’ thinking moving in that direction.

3 In a sense, you could say that it was a new assembly of Israel before God in the sense that you could probably say that Sinai and the institution of Solomon’s temple or any other instance of the assembly in the Tanakh was “new.” And that’s the most likely sense meant by Jesus in Matthew 16:18. But that’s very different from saying it was a new kind of thing, much less than suggesting that it is a community that has no inherent connection with the qahal when it appears in the Tanakh.