CHRISTIANITY BETWEEN THE OLD and NEW TESTAMENT -- continuation of "Search for the Real Parents of My Soul!"

CHRISTIANITY BETWEEN THE OLD and NEW TESTAMENT – 

continuation of “Search for the Real Parents of My Soul!”

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© October 1, 2014

WHAT WAS GOD’S WAY ANYWAY?   

Prior to and during the Maccabean Revolt, the outwardly Hellenistic priests and their followers supported Antiochus Epiphanes.  The lay teachers and the Sanhedrin, as a whole, supported the Maccabees. 

The major result of the Maccabean victory was the total discrediting of Hellenism in Judea.  The High Priest was given to Hasmonean (Maccabean) family, which had itself descended from minor priests.  It was no longer popular to be an outright Hellenist.  Instead, there was a discernible trend to the roots of Judaism and a desire to return to God’s Way.  But whatever religious unity there was in the euphoria of victory, it was short lived.

The struggle now was finding the answer to what was God’s Way as Hellenism had clouded that issue as several generations had been immersed in the Hellenistic culture and tradition.  There was the written word of the Bible (Old Testament), of course, but the Jewish people were conflicted on how to apply the Bible’s teachings to the various mundane events and daily problems of life. 

The Jews, remember, had just emerged from a period where the teachings and practices of God’s Law had been forbidden.  Compounding this, an era of some eighty years had preceded this during which Hellenism had made great inroads into the daily life and mindset of the Jewish people.  Moreover, there had been no organized body directing Jewish religious life.

Hundreds of years before, Ezra, Nehemiah and other priests and Levites assisting them had “read in the Book in the Law of God distinctly, and (had given) the sense, and caused them to understand the reading” (Nehemiah 8:8).  Through the ages, God’s servants have been responsible to show the people, he is saying, how God’s Law applied to their situations in their daily lives. 

This responsibility had never been a prerogative of someone who wanted to choose the ministry, the priesthood or the rabbinate as a vocation.  This responsibility was only for those whom God specifically had chosen.  Put another way, those who had the calling. 

In ancient Israel, under the Old Covenant, God chose the priests, the priests didn’t choose God, assisted by the Levites for the purposes of teaching “the Word.”

PRIESTS OF THE OLD COVENANT

From the very dawn of history, people have sensed a need for those individuals, who despite having received a mission in very different ways, act as God's mediators and converse with Him on behalf of others. Certain men were made responsible for offering prayers of supplication, sacrifice and expiation to God in the name of the whole people. The obligation to render public worship to God, to recognize Him as the Supreme Lord and First Principle, to be directed towards Him as the Ultimate Goal, to give God thanks and to win over His benevolence has never been lost sight of although in many periods and places the consciousness of this obligation has been darkened.  The Hellenistic period of Israel is such an instance.

"Lord, Father of Holiness... in the Old Covenant the grades of priesthood became ever more perfect by means of holy signs... when you gave the High Priests, elected to rule the people, companions of a lesser order and dignity to help them as collaborators..."

It was a priest of the Old Covenant, Zechariah, father of John the Baptist, who solemnly announced the imminent arrival of "the rising Sun to visit us, to give light to those who live in darkness and the shadow of death, and to guide our feet into the way of peace" (Luke 1:78-79).

This provides background and prelude to the entering of one of the most misunderstood groups in the Old and New Testament, the Pharisees.

ENTER THE PHARISEES

Following the Maccabean victory, there were many priests who were ready and willing to resume their ancient, God-given covenant as priests and teachers and expounders of the Law.  But there were also lay teachers who had made notable contributions to the Maccabean cause at a time when many priests were outright Hellenists and loyal supporters of Antiochus Epiphanes.

Lauterback writes that the lay teachers “refused to recognize the authority of the priests as a class, and, inasmuch as many of the priests had proven unfaithful guardians of the Law, they would not entrust them the regulation of the religious life of the people” (Lauterback, 1951).  It was these lay teachers who organized themselves into the party of the Pharisees.

The Pharisees were at various times a political party, a social movement, and a school of thought in the Holy Land during the Second Temple Period (B.C. 530 to A.D. 70) when the Second Temple of Jerusalem existed, beginning under the Hasmonean Dynasty  (B.C. 140 to A.D. 37) in the wake of the Maccabean Revolt.  After the destruction of the Second Temple in A.D. 70, Pharisaic beliefs became the liturgical and ritualistic basis for Babbinic Judaism commonly known simply as Judaism.

Many of the priests had indeed become Hellenized as charged by the Pharisees.  This did not necessarily give the lay teachers the right under the Law to usurp some of the Priests “God given authority.”  Yet, they insisted on following the way that seemed right to them (Proverbs 14:12; 16:25).  But wrongs did not make a right in that day any more than they do in our day.

THE SADDUCEES

Conflict between Pharisees and Sadducees took place in the context of much broader and longstanding social and religious conflicts among Jews, dating back to the Babylonian Captivity and then compounded by the Roman conquest. 

One conflict was class between the wealthy and the poor, as Sadducees included mainly the priestly and aristocratic families.  Another was cultural between those who emphasized the importance of the Second Temple with its cultic rites and rituals, and those who emphasized the importance of the other Mosaic Laws.  A fourth conflict, which was specifically religious involved the different expectations of the Torah and how to apply it to the current Jewish life.  Sadducees recognized only the Written Torah and rejected doctrines that emanated from the Oral Torah and the Resurrection of the Dead.

The Pharisees believed that in addition to the written Torah recognized by both the Sadducees and Pharisees, and believed to have been written by Moses, there exists another Torah, consisting of oral laws and traditions transmitted by God to Moses, orally and then memorized and passed down by Moses and his successors over the generations.   The Oral Torah functioned to elaborate and explicate what was written.  The Pharisees asserted that the sacred scriptures were not complete on their own, and therefore could not be understood without the complement of the Oral Torah.  How significant a group are we talking about?

Historian Josephus (A.D. 37 – 100) was himself a Pharisee, and estimated the total Pharisee population prior to the fall of the Second Temple at 6,000.  He claimed the Pharisees had the backing and good will of the common people in contrast to the Sadducees. 

Pharisees claimed Mosaic authority for their interpretation of Jewish Law, while the Sadducees represented the authority of the priestly privileges established since the days of Solomon, when Zadok, their ancestor, officiated as High Priest.

Josephus use of the term “common people” suggests that most Jews were just peoples implying that they were independent of the main liturgical groups.

The New Testament also makes common references to the “common people” indicating that Jewish identity was independent and stronger than these groups. 

In the epistle to the Philippians, Paul of tarsus claims that changing liturgical sects in the Diaspora had occurred while still identifying oneself as Jewish or Hebrew, “circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the Law.  I am a Pharisee.”  That said the position of Paul of Tarsus and Judaism is still disputed. 

Pharisees have become more notable to Christians inasmuch as there are many references to them in the New Testament.  There is the conflict between Pharisees and John the Baptist and with Jesus of which more will be said later. 

There are also many references in the New Testament to Paul of Tarsus being a Pharisee.  However the relationship between Early Christianity and Pharisees was not always hostile – reference to Gamaliel often cited as a Pharisee leader who was sympathetic to the Christian cause. 

With regard to the Sadducees, no one questioned the right of the priests to officiate in the Temple.  That was not the problem. 

The priests pointed to in Deuteronomy (17: 8-13) were given the authority to teach and to decide questions pertaining to religion and not the lay teachers.  To protect and sustain this authority, priests and their supporters organized themselves into a party of the Sadducees, which was taken from Zadok, the High Priest in Solomon’s day.

As mentioned earlier, the Sadducees as a whole were wealthy and therefore powerful.  This and their previous support of Hellenism caused the common people not to trust them.  Josephus tells us, “The Sadducees are able to persuade none but the rich, and have not the populace obsequious to them, but the Pharisees have the multitude on their side” (Antiquities of the Jews, XIII, x, 6).

LAY TEACHERS JUSTIFY THE PEOPLE’S ERRORS

Yet, the main reason for the popularity of the Pharisees and the rejection of the Sadducees was neither the group’s tainted past in Hellenism nor the wealth of the priests.  It was more basic.  It was in the teachings of the Pharisees that resonated with the people.

During the period of religious anarchy under Hellenistic rule, the continuity of official teachers of the Law had been broken.  Hellenism had corrupted the Law replacing it with beliefs that were antithetical the Jewish experience.

Consequently, when the Maccabean War came to an end, and some teachers did consider returning to God’s Law.  Lauterbach writes:

Many new customs and practices for which there were no precedents in the tradition of the fathers, and not the slightest indication in the Book of the Law, were observed by the people and considered by them as a part of their religious laws and practices” (Lauterbach, 1951).

The people had adopted many customs and ideas of Hellenism which were in truth clearly pagan.  Perhaps the best example of this is the belief in the immortality of the soul previously mentioned.

“The difficulty was to find a sanction in the Torah (The Law) for the new customs and practices which had established themselves in the community” (Herford, 1933).  The teachers should have shown the people they were sinning (Isaiah 58:11).  Instead, lay teachers chose to justify these customs and practices and assimilated them into their instruction to rally the support of the people.  This should not seem strange.  It was done in the Jeremiah’s day (Jeremiah 23: 21-22) and in Isaiah’s day (Isaiah 30:10), indeed, the practice is common in our own day.

It is worthy to note that the earliest surviving historical record of these lay teachers as Pharisees comes from Josephus, who was a Jewish-Roman historian. 

Josephus describes four schools of thought or four sects that divided the Jews in the 1^st century A.D. 

The other schools were the Essenes, who were apolitical and emerged as a sect of dissident priests.  They rejected the Seleucid-appointed or the Hasmonean high priests as illegitimate, the main antagonists of the Pharisees.  Others associated with the anti-Roman revolutionary groups were the Sicaril and the Zealots.  Then there were also the Early Christians in Jerusalem and the Therapeutae in Egypt (Apostle Paul as a Pharisee: Acts 26: 5, Acts 23: 6. Philippians 3: 5, Acts 5: 34-39).     

PAGAN CUSTOMS THAT COME TO BE CALLED JEWISH

Yes, the Scriptures plainly states, “Learn not the way of the heathen” (Jeremiah 10:2).  Consequently, the lay teachers taught that the new customs and traditions were not really pagan, but were actually Jewish!

They reasoned, “It is hardly possible that foreign customs and non-Jewish laws should have met with such universal acceptance.  The total absence of objection on the part of the people to such customs vouched for their Jewish origin, in the opinion of the teachers” (Lauterbach, 1951).

These teachers told the people that it simply was not possible for them, being Jews, to have inherited any heathen customs or practices. 

They further taught that since the customs were “Jewish,” then they must have been taught by Moses himself.  This is no different than today when churchgoers by the millions assume that the original apostles observed Sunday services, and celebrated Easter and Christmas when they clearly had no such ritualistic customs or practices at all.

Lauterbach writes:

Accordingly, the teachers themselves came to believe that such generally recognized laws and practices must have been old traditional laws and practices adopted by the fathers and transmitted to the following generations in addition to the written law.  Such a belief would naturally free the teachers from the necessity of finding scriptural proof for all the new practices (Lauterback, 1951).

More precisely, they claimed that these customs, since they were not written in the Old Testament, must have been handed down orally from Moses by word of mouth.

There is no evidence that these traditional laws, these oral laws, were from either Moses or the prophets; alas, no reference in the Scripture that Moses gave the Israelites any oral or traditional laws transmitted to posterity along with the written Word. 

The Bible states just the opposite.  It plainly says that Moses committed the whole law to a book:

“And it came to pass, when Moses had made an end of writing the words of this law in a book, until they were finished” (Deuteronomy 31:24).

There is no such thing, then, as an “oral law of Moses.”  If that is so, why such insistence that such a law exists? 

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NEXT: Oral Law Gains Acceptance