The roots of Hebrew Roots

For Amy Guenther, the shift to Torah observance was swift and unexpected. About a decade ago, one of her friends started creating Facebook posts suggesting that Christians should be keeping the laws laid out in the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. “She would say things like, ‘Christian, Jesus didn’t die so you could not do sabbath,’ and, ‘Jesus didn’t die so you could eat a ham sandwich,’” Guenther recalled.

Guenther, a Baptist-educated nurse and mother of three, had been raised to believe that following the laws of the Hebrew Bible was like “stomping on the grace of the cross”—a solid way to earn yourself a one-way ticket to hell. And although she wasn’t particularly close with this Facebook friend, Guenther became somewhat obsessed with saving her from eternal damnation.

In preparation for a confrontation with her, Guenther started a notebook of the “debatable passages” such as Matthew 5:17–20—“I have come not to abolish but to fulfill” the law—that she’d seen used to promote the Torah’s relevance for followers of Jesus. She started using an interlinear Bible so she could verify the meaning of Hebrew words, and she read the entire Bible, looking especially for the place where God changes the sabbath from Saturday to Sunday.