Verse 19 has Peter saying, “Repent and turn to God so that your sins may be erased”. Now there is more to this verse that we’ll get to in a little while. But first, I’d like to point out that if you use a KJV Bible that same verse reads like this: KJV Acts 3:19 “Repent ye therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out.....” The CJB says “turn to God”; the KJV says “be converted”. We’re going to pause now and take a detour to examine yet another common Christian doctrine that needs to be retired. And it is the doctrine that says becoming a Christian means to convert. This little word convert has enormous implications; and it has much to do with the wall of separation that has grown between Jews and Christians. And I’ll tell you the bottom line up front before I explain the matter more thoroughly. Peter’s call is not to convert; it is to turn. The dictionary says that to convert means to change in form, or to metamorphose. To become something other than you are. But to turn means: to rotate, swivel, or pivot. I hope you heard the rather large difference in meaning and outcome of the two terms convert and turn. One means to become something else entirely; the other means to change direction. So what is it that a person is supposed to do when we repent and come to Jesus: become something else entirely? Or to change direction? The Greek word being translated is epistrefo. And remembering that what is being expressed is Hebrew thought coming from Peter’s Jewish mind, then we need to grasp that the Greek we have it in is effectively a translation. By the way: I’m not claiming that Acts was originally written in Hebrew. I’m saying that while the original written text is Greek (so far as we know), the thought and culture and language of the Bible character Peter is Hebrew. So epistrefo appears to be attempting to translate the Hebrew word shav, which means to turn back. The issue that has arisen from this intellectually incorrect KJV Bible choice to use the word “convert” stems from an agenda that the Catholic Church held that indeed one had to metamorphose like a caterpillar to a butterfly to become a Christian. Or, even more so, I say, from a cat to a dog. And doubly so for Jews. For a Jew, to convert to Christianity first and foremost meant to stop being a Jew and start being a gentile. This was no misunderstanding, nor did they mean something different than what we mentally picture when we envision conversion. It is precisely what the Church leadership intended since the thinking was that Christianity is a gentiles-only religion; and this doctrine of conversion is deeply imbedded (although often invisibly just below the surface) in most of mainstream Christianity even if Christians regularly don’t recognize it for what it is. Words have meaning. Words create mental pictures that lead to assumptions and conclusions that we make often without consciously realizing it. And while I don’t know what we’d do without the written word of God, on the other hand, unless one is versed in the original languages what all of us read from are translations. But that’s only the beginning of the issue of extracting meaning from words. The meaning of words changes over time. Some English words used in the KJV Bible translation don’t necessarily mean what we take that same word (In English) to mean in the 21st century. Goodness, during my lifetime there are many English words that I used in my childhood that have completely different meanings today. And there are English words that exist today that didn’t when I was a youth. So for you who have followed Seed of Abraham Torah Class over the years, you know that one of the basic tenets is that we must try to understand what those words written in the Bible meant to the authors, meant to the people those authors were directing their inspired words towards, in their time and in their ancient Middle Eastern cultural setting. This historical reconstruction is crucial to extract proper meaning from the words we read in Scripture. What must also be admitted is that some of those ancient Hebrew concepts have been tragically misunderstood (and at times misrepresented) and so mistranslated into English words that give us the wrong impression of their intent, but do fulfill certain theological agendas. There are a few Biblical words, though, that have more impact on our Christian theology, doctrines and philosophy than others and one of those key words is the term “convert” or “conversion”. And while we have found this English word used in the KJV and a handful of other Bibles, in our study today of the Book of Acts chapter 3 verse 19, this is also true as the word “conversion” applies to the Apostle Paul. And I propose to you today that this word “conversion” needs to be removed from our Believer’s vocabulary and removed from our Bibles as concerns redemption, repentance and salvation because it isn’t actually there and doesn’t belong being inserted there. Conversion gives us an entirely wrong impression about what it was that Peter and Luke had in mind in Acts, and what Paul did in reaction to his experience with Christ, and what he expected of the disciples that they all made on behalf of Messiah. The traditional scholarship over the past several centuries has concluded that the 1st generation Christian community after Yeshua and the Apostles had already become a distinct religion separated from Judaism. Basically the idea is that Peter was in process of rejecting Judaism in favor of Christianity, and Paul already had, and along with it he had decided to condemn as worthless servitude any attempt for new Believers to follow the Law of Moses that was the very heartbeat of the Biblical religion. The term that was coined by later Christian leaders to describe what this well studied Jewish Rabbi Sha’ul did in his extreme change from being a follower of Judaism into an anti-law anti-law Christian, was “conversion”. Paul was a convert we are told. But what does being converted mean? A.D. Nock says that conversion means a deliberate and great change is involved, whereby the old was wrong and the new is right. And in indeed that is the crux of Christian doctrine to prove that Peter and then Paul decided that their Hebrew Judaism that obeyed the Torah was wrong, and this new religion called Christianity that abolished the Torah was right. In the mid 1970’s a Bible academic named Krister Stendahl (Who was actually at the head of religion in Harvard.) urged his fellow scholars to drop the term conversion and instead use the word “call”. His contention was that this English word more accurately portrays to the modern mind what was true: and it is that Peter and Paul did NOT see themselves as no longer part of Judaism or as Jews who abandoned the Law and the Torah. The word “call” softened the contrast between the Judaism that these two Messianic leaders had been practicing and this new and spreading movement that made Yeshua of Nazareth the focus. In other words, for Peter, Paul, and all the disciples what they came to practice after their personal experiences with Christ was really a type of Judaism, not a new anti-Judaism religion. Of course there was push back against Mr. Stendhal from the institutional Christian community that wanted there to be not merely a sharp contrast, but rather a complete break, between Torah-based Judaism and this new Christianity. And this thought process is based on the idea that Paul converted from Judaism to Christianity. It means that he discovered that the traditional Torah-based religion of the Hebrews was wrong, and now he would follow the new Christianity that in his day had no holy book whatsoever. After all, it is historical fact that there was no New Testament until around 200 A.D., some 150 years (a century and a half) after Paul’s time. So if Peter and Paul (and of course the other disciples) “converted”, then why do they continue going to the Temple in Jerusalem, and making sacrifices there? If they converted, why does Paul continue to engage in the vow rituals of first allowing one’s hair to grow, and then cutting it and offering it at the Temple upon conclusion of the vow terms? Why do they all continue to engage in the Biblical Feasts ordained in Leviticus?