Artists For Israel International

A Word From Me

I, Phil Goble, am in a wasteland — a voice crying out in the wilderness — a wasteland called Crown Heights, Brooklyn, where everyone is a darshan (preacher) and no one is a darshan. But how can the Crown Heights Messiahists be saved without faith? And what is faith but adherence to the Word? And how shall they hear the Word without a preacher? And how shall they believe and be saved unless a preacher is sent?

You say, "I don't listen to non-Jewish preachers, and I don't believe in lady preachers." My only argument with you is to say that I would be in hell if I had not had a non-Jewish preacher and a lady preacher. For my entire youth the preacher in my life was my born-again mother. Then, when despite her preaching, I had completely corrupted myself in a "far country" called Beverly Hills, my mother sold all that she had and went on what would be the journey of her life to rescue her prodigal actor son — to drag me to hear another preacher named Myron Taylor so I could be saved. And how was I saved? By the "foolishness of preaching" (1 Corinthians 1:21).

Preachers are tested by their audience, so you may be weighing this in your mind right now, whether to click out of this website, "since ye seek proof of Messiah speaking in me, which to you-ward is not weak, but is mighty in you" (2 Corinthians 13:3).

This is the proof you seek. My mother sacrificed all she had, and her sacrifice was not in vain. My Savior saw her sacrifice and said, "So noted." And He did indeed speak through the preacher my mother found, Myron Taylor, and the Holy Spirit wooed me and convicted me with many tears, and I heard the κήρυγμα — the proclamation cried by a κήρηξ, a herald. The proclamation went something like this: Phil Goble, for you, at the age of 28, it has become right now for you the Latter Days; it is right now your last chance to escape, and right now you must accept that your Savior has been born, has lived, has ministered, has died for you personally, and has stood up alive from the grave as Judge — and that the Holy Spirit had come to convict you of sin, of God's righteousness, and of the coming judgment, and that you must right now turn from sin and receive the Father's offer of forgiveness, the Holy Spirit, and salvation.

That was the κήρυγμα I heard. And as in 1971, so in the beginning all the Jewish "Iva Goble's" and "Myron Taylor's" of the First Century Meshichistim Yidden went everywhere preaching the Gospel. The Orthodox Jewish Bible renders it: "And those having gone forth preached the Hachrazah (Proclamation, Kerygma) everywhere, [while] Adonoi was working with them, confirming the Besuras HaGeulah through the accompanying otot (signs). Omein." (Mark 16:20)

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Chronology & Biography

Born in Princeton, Indiana, May 2, 1943

1. Parentage and Early Life

In a transitory and cult-false-prophet world, Earl Goble could trace his ancestry back eleven generations to England. Through his father Earl Goble, Phil is a direct descendant of Thomas Goble, who migrated to America in 1633, about five years after the birth of John Bunyan, and settled in Charlestown, Massachusetts, during the Puritan Great Migration fleeing King Charles I — only an hour's drive from Plymouth, and just thirteen years after the Mayflower landed. Ten generations later, Phil's father began working for the Public Service Electric Company as a lineman. He and his wife Iva, with their firstborn Nicholas, were able to rent a house on Trussler Street in Oakland City, Indiana, before buying one on Madison Street, where Phillip, or Phil, grew up. From the age of nine, Phil became determined to study acting and find fulfillment as an artist.

2. Early Adulthood

After graduating high school, Phil traveled a hundred miles to Bloomington, Indiana, where he began studies as a Drama major at Indiana University. He finished both the Bachelor's and Master's degrees and made his way to Hollywood, California, where his professional acting career began before the camera and on stage. But one fateful day, on Hollywood Blvd, in the Readmore Bookstore, he happened to open the newly published New English Bible and began to read the Scriptures for the first time. Deeply stirred, within a few weeks he was a graduate student again, enrolled in seminary in Pasadena, California. It was now 1971, and he knew there was a holy call on his life and he had to answer it. Romans 9 speaks of the divine purpose in pursuance of election based not on works but on "Him that calls" — and this is of greatest importance to him, and to you, to make this calling and election sure.

3. Preparation for Service — Two Miraculous Motel Rooms and Two Supernatural Car Rides

As soon as he began seminary, when not in the classroom or the library, Phil found himself preaching two or three times a week in the open air in the little village of Westwood, a couple of blocks from UCLA. Most of his audience were Jewish UCLA students who would stop to inquire or debate. It was at this time that he began very slowly and painstakingly translating into English part of the Bible — not realizing he was embarking on a forty-year project, THE ORTHODOX JEWISH BIBLE, in English, Yiddish, and Hebrew — while studying books on Orthodox Judaism. The first book he found in a Jewish bookstore in the Fairfax area of Los Angeles, The Vocabulary of Jewish Life (Hebrew Publishing Company, New York), became very precious to him. During this time he was filled with the Ruach Hakodesh, and many miracles began to happen. One day in 1973 he took a tape recorder and several suitcases of books and checked into a motel, where a stream-of-consciousness inspiration came upon him, and he dictated his first book, Everything You Need to Grow a Messianic Synagogue, edited by Donald McGavran in the weeks leading up to McGavran's keynote at Billy Graham's Lausanne Conference on World Evangelization. Published in 1974, it was read by thousands of believers and Messianic Jews worldwide, who were multiplying exponentially in the seven years since the Six Day War (Luke 21:24,29-31).

One of the miracles of this time was a vision regarding messianic synagogues in Florida — today there are more messianic synagogues in Florida than in most places in the world. But then, in 1975, there were none.

No sooner did Phil arrive in Miami Beach to start planting messianic synagogues than he had a supernatural experience walking along the Atlantic Ocean. The Ruach Hakodesh impressed on Phil to speak to a man standing about twenty feet out in the water, submerged up to his neck. A short time later Phil found himself riding around Hasidic Brooklyn in this man's 1975 black Cadillac, touring a vast and wonderful world of Yiddishkait. The man — a Jewish media personality and celebrity in New York, WEVD Radio's Art Raymond — knew all the Hasidic and Orthodox Jewish Who's Who in New York and Israel, and was G-d's instrument to inspire Phil for ministry in New York City, even indirectly giving him the idea of writing a play presenting Rav Sha'ul (the Apostle Paul) as a theatrical stage character — the historical chasid of all chasidim that he was.

However, when the brief tour of Hasidic Brooklyn was completed and Phil arrived at LaGuardia Airport to fly back to Miami Beach, something stranger happened: he was infused with a great spiritual burden of sadness and sorrow that can only be grasped by those given a heart to fathom Romans 9:1-3. At the airport, a Messianic Jewish leader, Richard Briefstein, met Phil, weeping copiously as he described a prophetic vision — an Inferno in Brooklyn. In the vision, with no one noticing or caring, the Hasidic neighborhoods of Brooklyn were on fire — whole Yiddish-speaking Jewish shtetl neighborhoods burning, no fire truck responding, no believer caring, though these were the Moshiach's own unsaved relatives perishing in the flames of hell's eternal holocaust. After a long time of weeping, Phil got on the plane, shattered, weighed down with a great Isaiah 66:24 burden* that would be with him for the rest of his life.

It would be 31 years later that, with several other Evangelical ministries, 79,000 DVDs would be mass-mailed to these Brooklyn neighborhoods, and 41 years later that the Four Spiritual Laws and the Complete Yiddish Bible would be translated into Hasidic Yiddish. Nearly fifty years later, on Yom Kippur, Monday, September 25, 2023, the Hasidic Yiddish Bible was archived and licensed by the YouVersion App — over one billion installs worldwide — fulfilling what Richard Briefstein's vision had urgently begged: "Though the vision delay, wait for it, for it will certainly come and will not delay." (Habakkuk 2:3)

Resuming the chronicle of pioneer messianic synagogue planting in Miami Beach: by 1978, with three messianic synagogues established in Florida but totally penniless and in great depression, all seemed hopeless. On Monday night, September 4, 1978, walking on I-95 with only 23 cents in his pocket, no wallet, no home, no place to sleep, a car suddenly stopped — a supernatural ride, like the 1975 black Cadillac. This car brought Phil to The Wishing Well Motel in Boynton Beach, Florida, where a free room from the L-rd awaited, along with a spiritual experience that would set his course for the next two decades. He left the motel with the L-rd's business card, which read: "Your wish will come true at the Wishing Well Motel." In rapid fashion the L-rd supplied what the card had promised: theatres across America, Canada, and Israel; a professional Broadway director; the play's publisher, Tyndale House Publishers of Wheaton, Illinois — the same publisher that released the book version of Mel Gibson's Passion film — and THE RABBI FROM TARSUS screenplay, production company, distributor, film crew, and film director. Word, Inc. of Waco, Texas produced the VHS Home Video, seen by hundreds of thousands, including new productions by professional actors in Australia, South Africa, and around the world.

4. The Idea Unfolds

While these performances were being prepared and staged, a steady stream of books followed: Everything You Need to Grow a Messianic Yeshiva, How to Point to Moshiach in Your Rabbi's Bible, and others. A study of the Babylonian Talmud, the Jerusalem Talmud, and the Shulchan Arukh brought clarity to the need for a new translation of the Bible into English, as well as Aaron Krolenbaum's 1949 Yiddish Translation in Triglot for "Shulchan Arukh" Orthodox and Hasidic Jews. For this purpose, a new not-for-profit organization, a Bible School, and a Bible Society were founded in New York City: ARTISTS FOR ISRAEL INTERNATIONAL (AFII, P.O. Box 2056, New York, NY 10163), along with a theatre with its raison d'être to promote Biblical Judaism through the arts and media.

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* Footnote: "neither shall their eish (fire) be quenched and they shall be dera'on" (Daniel 12:2 says dera'on olam, inferring Everlasting Gehinnom).

Full Chronology, 1943–2026