Julio Dam
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Julio Dam (born April 23, 1940) is an Uruguayan Messianic Renewed leader living in Asuncion, Paraguay, South America.
Dam is the spiritual leader of "Beit Shalom," a Messianic Renewed congregation in Paraguay, where all of its members are Jews by faith, although many of them are not ethnic Jews and were members of Christian congregations before joining it. He has popularized the term "Renewed Covenant," instead of "New Testament", from the original Hebrew in Jeremiah 31:31-33 which says "Brit ha Chadashah." There are now other Beit Shalom messianic synagoges in the interior of Paraguay, and two in northern Argentina.
He has written five books in Spanish and a Messianic translation of Matthew in English. In addition, he has written over thirty English articles on Messianic Judaism, the differences between it and Christianity, and what he proposes as the true origin of Christianity. He also writes a weekly commentary of the Torah in Spanish. He is currently translating the Epistle to the Romans from a Hebrew-language and cultural perspective.
His has taught seminars in New York, Los Angeles, Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina, Puerto Rico, Guatemala, and Mexico in the last few years on subjects such as "The Truth about the Pseudo-Messiah/Antichrist", "How to develop a close relationship with Elohim/God", "The Truth about Romans", and "Advanced spiritual weaponry and deliverance."
As well as English and Spanish, he speaks Hebrew, Yiddish, and some French and Italian.
Unlike most other Messianic leaders, Dam is strongly opposed to the notion that Messianic Judaism has anything in common with Christianity, which he considers to be a paganized corruption of the Judaism that Yeshua intended to complete. A harsh critic of Christian translations of the Bible, Dam has alleged that many of them have deliberately obscured the Jewish nature of its message. The King James Version (KJV), he claims (against all evidence), was translated not from the original languages, but from Luther's German Bible, and blames Luther (an antisemite) for "the many antisemitic falsifications of our KJV."
In Messianic circles, Dam is widely considered an extremist, and many Messianic leaders give him a wide berth.
External links
The Beit Shalom Homepage (http://www.beitshalom.org/)