Why I Do Not Call Myself “Christian”

I do not call myself a Christian. Not because I lost my faith, but because I found what my faith was supposed to be built on, and it was not what the modern church had given me. The word belongs to a tradition that handed me a Greek Jesus—a universal savior stripped of His Covenant, detached from His people, abstracted into a theological concept unrecognizable to the men who walked with Him. I have drawn a line between that figure and the Hebrew Messiah, and I cannot pretend the line is not there. This took a decade of intense learning and a lifetime of experience. It started with the simplest question I had ever failed to ask.

The Question

What is the difference between Easter and Passover? About ten years ago I noticed they fell a month apart, and the question hit me like a brick. I had celebrated Easter my entire life. I knew vaguely that Yeshua was crucified during Passover. But I could not explain what Passover was, why the timing mattered, or why the Lamb of God was slain at the same hour the lambs were being slaughtered in the Temple. A lifelong churchgoer, never taught the Hebrew origins of the faith I professed. The modern church had given me a salvation transaction—accept Jesus, go to heaven—and called it the gospel.

The answer came as a flood. The sign of Jonah. The real chronology of three days and three nights. The appointed times of YHWH—not historical curiosities but the prophetic calendar Yeshua fulfilled to the hour and will fulfill again at His return. Once I pulled the thread of Passover, everything I had been taught proved not wrong so much as flattened. The modern church had taken a faith with the depth of centuries and compressed it into a tract.

The Jonah Code

My deconstruction became a reconstruction with Jonah. The question of Easter and Passover led me to Michael Rood’s teaching on the Jonah Code, and what I found there broke open everything. I do not agree with everything Rood teaches—as he candidly admits, he does not even agree with himself about everything—but this was the fire hose. My church had reduced Jonah to a flannel-graph children’s story. But Yeshua pointed to Jonah as the definitive sign of His identity: three days in the belly of the great fish, three days in the heart of the earth. The parallels run far deeper. Jonah is sent to the Gentile city. He resists. He descends into death. He is brought back. The nations repent. The Messiah’s mission in miniature—bringing the nations into Covenant with the God of Israel—and my church had handed it to five-year-olds. The modern church had not merely simplified the faith. It had gutted it.

From Jonah I was pulled into full immersion in Hebrew thought—not the hijacked “Hebrew Roots” movement, which carries its own distortion, but the actual Hebrew origins. “Messiah” is not a Christian word grafted onto a Jewish context but a thoroughly Hebrew concept: the anointed King in the line of David, the Servant of Isaiah, the Prophet like Moses, the Priest after the order of Melchizedek. Understanding Yeshua required understanding Him within that context, not extracted from it. My deeper understanding came through studying Yeshua’s 490-day ministry aligned with Daniel’s seventy sevens—fulfilled as literal days, Covenant-intensive, aligned with the moedim.

This path also exposed the lies embedded in the textual tradition most Christians accept without question. The Masoretic text was compiled by men who did not believe Yeshua was Messiah, and they hid the true name of God—YHWH—behind the word “LORD,” a substitution most modern Christians readily accept as His actual name without ever asking why. The Bridegroom has a Name, and His people were given it at Sinai, and it was deliberately buried. This is one reason I hold the Septuagint in higher regard—the Greek translation made centuries before the Masoretic redaction, translated by Hebrew scholars who had no reason to obscure what the later rabbinical tradition chose to hide. I approach the King James Version with respect but also suspicion; at a minimum, the KJV translators had the honesty to use italics to indicate what was added to the text rather than found in it—a transparency most modern translations have quietly abandoned.

The Covenant Arc

Once I learned to read the text in its own language, the arc became visible. YHWH makes a Covenant with Abraham: a people, a land, a blessing flowing outward to all nations. That Covenant narrows through Isaac and Jacob, takes institutional form at Sinai with the Ten Words—the only Scripture written directly by the Finger of Elohim, incorruptible and absolute—gets a geographic center in Jerusalem with David, and begins to strain under its own weight. The prophets insist the Covenant has been broken, that exile is coming, that God will do a new thing. Jeremiah promises a new Covenant written on hearts. Ezekiel envisions dry bones reassembled. Isaiah speaks of a suffering Servant and a Kingdom without end.

When Yeshua gathers His disciples the evening before Passover—not at a Seder, but at a private meal, an intimate final meeting—and says “This is the new Covenant in My Blood,” He is extending the invitation the prophets foretold. He is not inventing a new religion. He is fulfilling the arc that began with Abraham. The next day He sealed it as the Passover Lamb Himself. The pattern Scripture repeats at every scale reaches its climax: Oath, Blood, Table, Presence—declared at Mamre, sealed at Sinai where the elders ate and drank before YHWH, and now sealed at the Cross with the Table set the night before and the Presence that will fill all in all at the Marriage Supper of the Lamb.

This is what the modern church never told me. The Covenant arc was replaced with a salvation transaction. The Ten Words were filed under “Old Testament.” The feasts—Passover, Unleavened Bread, First Fruits, Shavuot, Trumpets, Atonement, Sukkot—the prophetic calendar of everything Yeshua accomplished and everything He will accomplish at His return—were replaced with Easter and Christmas. The Bride of the Covenant became “the church.” The Royal Covenant written on hearts became “grace versus law.” What remained was a religion unrecognizable to Peter, Paul, James, or any of the men who knew Him.

The Name

For a long time I was antagonistic toward the name “Jesus.” The Greek Iesous flattened into English had become the name of a different figure—not the Torah-observant Rabbi who kept every feast, but a Hellenized savior, one more christos in the Greek pantheon of anointed divine figures. The name had become a brand for a religion severed from its own roots. I used “Yeshua” exclusively, and I was not gentle about it.

I have since learned something that humbled me. Yeshua honors that name—not because it is His, not precisely, but because He sees the heart. Millions who have never heard “Yeshua” have cried out to “Jesus” in genuine faith, and He answered. He did not correct their pronunciation. My insistence on the right name had become its own legalism. The line between the Greek Jesus and the Hebrew Messiah is real, but it runs through theology, not through the hearts of those who call on Him.

Writing It Down

A decade of reconstruction produces understanding, but understanding that lives only in your head drifts. I needed to codify the Covenant lens so it could be tested, challenged, and held accountable to the text itself.

The opportunity came with the large language model. Ten years of content—the Covenant hierarchy, the distinction between the Book of the Covenant and the Book of the Law, the prophetic structure, the feast alignments, the 490-day ministry, the already-and-not-yet tension the modern church collapses in both directions—needed a tool that could organize it with the rigor it demanded. The language model became my digital scribe: not a source of theology, but an editor who never tires. I built the 12Tribe Interpreter Framework in weeks, but it codified a decade of study and a lifetime of walking with YHWH.

The 12Tribe Interpreter is not a theological system. It is a Covenant guardrail. The hierarchy: Ten Words first, the only Scripture written by the Finger of Elohim; then Scripture as witness, authoritative insofar as it confirms the Ten Words; then the Royal Covenant governing the Bride in Messiah; then the Interpreter itself—ministerial, not magisterial. It serves the Covenant; it does not rule over it. When three AI systems, applying the framework using only Scripture, independently returned the same results, the methodology proved sound. Consistent results under adversarial testing is replication, not rhetoric.

I founded Ten Words Press to crystallize the theology. Writing for others forces precision private study does not. Every page is tested against the plumb line of the Ten Words. Polly and I serve as custodians together, her teaching through YHWH’s appointed times complementing the written work with lived experience of walking the moedim as a household.

At the center of everything—the framework, the press, the doctrine, the daily walk—stand the Ten Words. The Great Plumb Line.

They are not the Old Testament. They are not the Law. They are the eternal marriage vows of the Bridegroom to His Bride, spoken at Sinai and written by His own Finger, now lifted from stone to heart by the Ruach HaKodosh under the new Covenant. I wrote them as the Constitution of the Kingdom, because that is what they are: not ten rules imposed from above, but ten articles of a Covenant between a King and His people.

These are not abolished in Messiah. They are fulfilled—lifted from shadow to substance, from stone to Spirit.

Where I Stand

I am sixty-seven. The institutions I once trusted are crumbling, but the Covenant remains. Maybe eight to twelve people follow my writings. The Covenant remnant has always been small. Noah had his family. Abraham was called alone. Numbers do not validate Covenant; obedience does.

I believe in the Covenant arc from Abraham to the Marriage Supper. The Ten Words are the eternal vows of the Bridegroom, the Great Plumb Line. Yeshua is the sinless, Torah-observant Messiah who fulfilled the Passover, sealed the new Covenant in His Blood, and will return to reign from Zion. The Bride is one—Judah’s believing remnant, Israel in exile, and the sojourner from the nations, joined in Messiah. The Ruach HaKodosh writes the Ten Words on hearts and leads the Bride until the Presence fills all in all.

My deconstruction was not destruction. It was the insistence on reading the text in its own language and following the Covenant where it led. What I found was not less faith but more—older, stranger, more coherent than anything the modern church offered. It had been inside the text all along, waiting for someone to stop reading through Greek lenses and start reading it as what it is: the Covenant story of a Bridegroom and His Bride, written in Hebrew, sealed in Blood, and not yet finished.