It is from the New Testament that the ordinary Christian reader gets his ideas about the Pharisees. There is mention in the Gospels of frequent encounters between Jesus and the Pharisees; and the Epistles of Paul contain much severe comment on the Pharisaic conception of religion. No one, who desires to understand what the Pharisees themselves meant by their religion, can afford to pass by, without careful examination, these records of unfavourable criticism; and he must enter upon such examination not by any means with the preconceived intention of confuting the critics or of agreeing with them, but simply for the purpose of getting to know why there was such criticism, and what truth lay on each side in the controversy. With this object, I shall devote one chapter to the study of the opposition between the Pharisees and Jesus, and another to that between Pharisaism and the teaching of Paul. Incidentally, it will be possible to find room for various points which bear upon what has been said in the foregoing chapters.
It will be admitted that to discuss the relation of the Pharisees to Jesus is to tread upon delicate ground; for, whatever Jesus was, the place which he holds in the thought and reverence of Christians is shared by no one else; and it is less easy to say the right thing when he is regarded as a party in a controversy than when he is contemplated as in himself supremely great. It is less easy, because the controversy was one in which sharp and bitter things were said on both sides; and to regret that they were said, and still more to suggest that they were said without sufficient warrant, is to cast inevitable reflections on those who said them. It is easy to say that the Pharisees were wrong—that is only what is expected of them; it is another thing to say that Jesus was wrong, that even he did less than justice to his opponents, and, in his intercourse with them, showed upon occasion qualities which were extremely human but not obviously divine. I yield to no one in my reverence for Jesus; he is, to me, simply the greatest man who ever lived, in regard to his spiritual nature. Some may think that too little to say of him; others may think it too much. I do not stay to argue the point; I only wish to make clear, beyond any misunderstanding, my own position. What I have to do at present is to deal with the fact that between Jesus, being such as I have indicated, and the Pharisees, there was an opposition of thought and principle too great to be resolved into harmony; and I wish to study that opposition, so as to judge fairly—that is, without prejudice one way or the other—the real meaning of it. If, on the one side, the verdict is expressed in the phrase, "Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites," on the other it is summed up in the assertion, to be found in the Talmud, "Jesus practised magic and led astray and deceived Israel" (b. Sanh. 107b). To say offhand that one of those assertions is true and the other false is merely to beg the question. It is more to the purpose to understand how it came about that they were said. That such a statement should be made about Jesus is to Christians hard to endure. They feel it to be unjust and untrue. That such a statement should be made about the Pharisees is to Jews hard to endure. They feel it to be unjust and untrue. They are the weaker party, and they have the right to be heard.
In view of the sharp contrast expressed in the two sayings just referred to, it might seem that the Pharisees and Jesus had nothing in common. And indeed the final breach was inevitable and irreparable. Religion as the Pharisee conceived it could not come to terms with religion as Jesus conceived it. As to that I will say more presently. But it is well to bear in mind, and even to emphasise, the fact that there was nevertheless a considerable amount of common ground between them, much more than is usually supposed. With a great deal of what Jesus said about God, and about man's relation to Him, no Pharisee would feel disposed to quarrel, or, so far as the evidence goes, ever did quarrel. The discussions in the Gospels did not turn, for instance, on the question whether Jesus should or should not have referred to God as the Father in Heaven, or whether forgiveness was God's sure answer to repentance. No Pharisee ever challenged him on either point, or on many another of the directly religious and ethical sayings which he uttered. A Pharisee could not so have challenged him without disowning his own religion. Modern Jewish historians not unnaturally lay much stress upon the similarity between the teaching of Jesus and that of the Rabbis, at all events the best of them; and that similarity cannot be denied, whatever may be the explanation of it. Moreover, it is not merely a similarity of phrase, though no doubt in some cases it is nothing more. That proverbial sayings should be used alike by Jesus and the Rabbis is not wonderful. Such were, for instance: "It is enough for a disciple to be as his master" (b. Ber. 58b); "With what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again" (Sot. i. 7); "Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof" (b. Ber. 9b); "Physician, heal thyself" (Ber. R. xxiii. 4), which Jesus himself mentions as a familiar proverb (Luke iv. 23).
These were part of the common stock of daily speech, and are no evidence either for or against a similarity between the ideas of Jesus and those of the Pharisees. But when Jesus said, "Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand," he was referring to what was already familiar to his hearers, and had been, long before John the Baptist had begun to deliver his message. And when the Sermon on the Mount was first spoken, it was not all strange and new to the hearers. The general character of the sayings there grouped together is thoroughly Jewish; so much so that one could hardly imagine a Greek saying them. There are differences, certainly, between the sayings contained in the Sermon on the Mount and the Rabbinical parallels to them; and for some of them no Rabbinical parallels can be found. But, take it altogether, the Sermon on the Mount would seem to a Pharisee to be very like what he believed already. Even the Lord's Prayer would not be wholly new. Certainly some of its phrases can be paralleled in the Rabbinical literature; though no less certainly there are others which cannot. For the prayer as a whole, there is no parallel in Jewish sources—a very significant fact. But "Our Father which art in Heaven" is Jewish; so also, "Hallowed be Thy name. Thy Kingdom come"; "Give us this day our daily bread"; "Forgive us our debts"; "Deliver us from the evil." I am not sure about "Lead us not into temptation." And if "Thy will be done" means the same in the Lord's Prayer as it meant when uttered in Gethsemane, there is no parallel to it in Jewish sources.
This carries us into the very heart of the religion of Jesus. And in regard to these fundamental beliefs there was no disagreement between him and the Pharisees. I am perfectly well aware that the Rabbinical parallels, even those most complete, are found in literature which is later than Jesus, and I shall rightly be challenged to show on what ground I hold that these later Jewish dicta represent the beliefs of the Pharisees in the time of Jesus. I do not agree with Jewish scholars who say that Jesus borrowed them all from the Rabbis of his time. A man of such independent thought as Jesus certainly was, would hardly need to go in search of such ideas, as not having them already himself. It is inconceivable that Jesus should never have thought of calling God "Our Father in Heaven" until Hillel or Shammai had instructed him to do so. The point scarcely needs to be laboured. I put on one side altogether the theory that Jesus was indebted to the Rabbis of his time for the beliefs, and the verbal forms of them, which he shared with the Pharisees.
But with no less decision must the theory be rejected according to which these various beliefs and phrases were borrowed from Jesus. If they had been, i.e. if Pharisees who heard Jesus say these things had adopted them as their own, and even to some extent made them current in their own religious teaching, it is perfectly certain they would never have been allowed into the Talmud. Suppose, for instance (which is what a great many people suppose), that Jesus had been the first to use the phrase, "Our Father which art in Heaven," so that to Jewish ears that had been entirely unknown until he used it. In that case, the origin of the term would have been perfectly well remembered; and the feeling against Jesus in Pharisaic circles was far too strong to allow, for a moment, the use of a phrase known to have been coined by "the Sinner of Israel." The earliest occurrence of the term in the Mishnah, so far as I know, is at the end of chapter ix. of the treatise Sotah; and there the person who uses it is R. Eliezer b. Horkenos. This particular Rabbi is very well known. He lived at the end of the first century of our era. He got into trouble on one occasion; and the reason of his trouble, according to his own admission, was that he had unwittingly praised something that was told him, and which he afterwards learned was a saying of Jesus. He was filled with horror at the thought that he could ever have approved anything which had emanated from that teacher. Now R. Eliezer himself was probably too young to have seen and heard Jesus; but his old master, R. Jo?anan b. Zaccai, was a contemporary, and must have witnessed the tragedy in Jerusalem. If Jesus had invented the term, "Our Father in Heaven," that fact would be well within the knowledge of R. Eliezer, and he would have cut off his right hand sooner than have used the phrase. Instead of that, he used it with devout intention: "Who is there on whom to lean, except our Father who is in Heaven?" It was a phrase which expressed the ground of trust in God. And neither to himself nor to anyone else did it occur that he was using a phrase either recent or suspicious in its origin.[4]
All this goes to show that there cannot have been any borrowing from Jesus on the part of those who recorded in the Talmud sayings similar to his, or who used phrases implying similar beliefs. It is just conceivable that slight and unimportant sayings of his might have been picked up and made current amongst the Rabbis. But that phrases so important and so numerous as those which are offered as parallels to the teaching of Jesus, should have been borrowed from him, is, to anyone who knows the Talmud at all, a sheer impossibility.
There remains, accordingly, this alternative, that such phrases represent what was familiar to and accepted by both Jesus and the Pharisees, as ground truths about which there was no dispute. Jesus did not explain, as he had no need to explain to his hearers, why he called God the Father in Heaven. He took it for granted that they knew whom he referred to and what he meant. And no Scribe ever asked him to explain his meaning. It is clear that, wherever it came from, the term "Father in Heaven," as applied to God, was not new in the time of Jesus. It was part of the common stock of religious ideas, a natural element in the Jewish religion of that time. When and how it first came into use I do not know. It is not found, in so many words, in the Old Testament or the Apocrypha, though there is a broad hint of it in Isa. lxiii. 16, "Surely Thou art our Father, etc." If it be (and who will deny that it is?) one of the great watchwords of spiritual religion, then observe that it can only have come into use in the time between the Maccabees and Jesus; and no other source for it can be deemed so probable as the Synagogue, the home of the religion of Torah.
And much the same argument applies to the rest of what can be shown to be similar in the religious ideas of Jesus and those of the Rabbis. They cannot have been borrowed from Jesus. They were known in his time because he gave utterance to them, and was not challenged for doing so. They were known and devoutly believed by the Talmudic Pharisees; there is no indication of their being a novelty. They must therefore represent substantially what was held and believed by the Pharisees in and before the time of Jesus.
It may, of course, be argued that Jesus put a deeper meaning into the common terms than the Pharisees did. But this is extremely difficult to prove; and merely to say that he did is to beg the question. Who would venture to say that all Christians put precisely the same meaning upon the common terms which they employ, or that a given term will not mean to a deeply spiritual Christian much more than it would to a shallow and frivolous one?
I do not contend that all the Pharisees, or any of them, were the equals of Jesus in spiritual depth, just as I would not contend that all Christians, or any of them, were his equals in that respect. But there is certainly no warrant for saying that all Pharisees understood the common phrases of their religion in a low and narrow sense, as compared with the sense in which Jesus understood them. To say that "Our Father in Heaven" meant for the Pharisee only that God had chosen Israel to be His own people, and that the name Father "did not in the Jewish theology lead to a deeper insight into the nature of God as Love," is one of the flagrant misrepresentations with which Weber's book abounds (Weber, p. 150). There may have been Pharisees to whom the phrase meant nothing more; there certainly were Pharisees to whom it meant that God was near to each one of His children, in love and mercy and personal care. That the Pharisee thought of God only, or even mainly, as distant and inaccessible, or as a taskmaster whose service was hard, is a baseless fiction. Even, then, allowing that Jesus, by the depth and power of his own spiritual nature, did read into the common terms of Jewish religion a fuller meaning than had been previously found there, he nevertheless used those terms because they served to carry that meaning, as they stood and without alteration.
We have, then, reached this position, that both Jesus and the Pharisees shared in common a Judaism expressed in the terms of a spiritual Theism, developed in the Synagogue and the home, and learned there alike by the Pharisees and by Jesus. It was certainly not the creation of the Scribes, qu Scribes, so that Jesus, or anyone else, would need to have sat at the feet of some Gamaliel in order to learn it. It was the spiritual inheritance of the Jew, into which he entered by natural piety, and from which neither the simple and unlearned nor the Scribe versed in the subtleties of the Halachah was excluded. I shall have more to say about this in the concluding chapter.
Such, then, was the common ground which Jesus shared with the Pharisees. We have now to study the opposition between them, which finally drove them apart in irreconcilable antagonism. The true nature of that opposition, the cause and ground of it, did not appear at the outset. Indeed, it may be questioned whether either the Pharisees or even Jesus himself ever fully and consciously realised the inner meaning of it. That the Pharisees knew why they distrusted, feared, and finally helped to destroy Jesus, is true enough. And Jesus expressed, in the plainest terms, the ground on which he denounced the Pharisees. But whether on either side the real significance of the struggle was clearly seen, is to my mind doubtful. Jesus may have seen it. I do not think the Pharisees did, or ever have done, from that day to this. To bring out that meaning, or what seems to me to be that meaning, will be the point to which I shall lead up in the remainder of this chapter; and with that in view I shall survey the main incidents of the controversy as they are recorded in the Gospels.
The appearance of Jesus as the successor of John the Baptist, taking up his message and proclaiming it with a force of his own, was enough to draw immediate attention to Jesus, and to incline men to give him a favourable hearing. This is to put the matter from the point of view of the people in general, and the Pharisees in particular, who were in possession of a settled religion, and to whom Jesus was an unknown man who had to make his name. That he preached repentance, and proclaimed the near advent of the Kingdom of Heaven, would be only a reason for listening to him. No Pharisee, nor any other Jew, with the national history behind him, would question for a moment that God might at any time raise up some messenger to proclaim His will. What else had the prophets been, in the old days? And had not John the Baptist been much like one of them? That John, and after him Jesus, had called his hearers to repent, was no reason whatever for resenting his boldness, or for denying his right to speak. It was the natural thing for a prophet to do; as, in much later times, it is natural for a revivalist to convict his hearers of sin, and lead them to the mercy seat. They do not resent being called sinners, and are only grateful for the glad tidings of the mercy which saves them. So with the Pharisees; there would be no disposition on their part to find fault with Jesus for coming forward as a preacher of repentance, let alone a herald of the Kingdom.
The point at which distrust of, and uneasiness about, Jesus first entered the minds of the Pharisees, is probably indicated by the saying that "he taught as one having authority, and not as their Scribes" (Matt. vii. 29).
To the conservatism which is commonly found in the adherents of a religion long established and settled in its ways, there was added in the case of the Pharisees a special veneration for the principle of traditional authority. If at first they merely noticed that Jesus was very independent, and wanting in the deference which was due to the sages and elders of his people, they could not fail before long to discover that this was something more than unconventional freedom of speech and manner. If he had kept to his preaching of repentance, and the announcement of the Kingdom of Heaven, that might pass; but he spoke of other things besides repentance, and put forward views of his own as to what the Kingdom implied. It would seem that he was assuming the position of a teacher of religion in general, since he touched upon subjects which were not specially connected with his mission. To the Pharisees he appeared as a sort of unregistered practitioner, if the comparison may be allowed. Much of what he said they could not but agree with; but how came he to say it? Some things they did not agree with, and what right had he to set up his own opinion against the teaching commonly received and held? So they began to ask, "Whence hath this man this wisdom?" and "by what authority doest thou these things?"[5]
Christians are accustomed, and rightly, to regard it as one of the marks of the greatness of Jesus that he did speak out of his own mind and heart, as having his authority within himself. But I am trying to put the case as it presented itself to the Pharisees, looking at it from their own very different point of view. There was not amongst them any office exactly corresponding to the position of a clergyman or a minister. They were all laymen; and if the priests had special functions, that was only in connection with the ritual of the Temple, and not with the giving of religious instruction. After the Temple was destroyed, the priest was only distinguished from the rest by certain privileges of precedence, and certain disabilities: he had no ministerial function as leader of a congregation. Neither in the time of Jesus nor after it were the Pharisees a priest-ridden community.
Of far greater importance than the priest was the Scribe: but the Scribe was only a layman. He was not consecrated to a sacred office, and to that extent set apart from the rest of his fellow-men: he was indeed chosen and appointed by those who were competent to do so, but, in regard to what he might or might not do, he was in just the same position as any Pharisee who was not a Scribe. What distinguished him from the rest of his brethren was that he made it his special business to study the Torah, both written and unwritten, and to qualify himself to be a teacher of it. His proficiency was recognised and vouched for, by those who were already accepted religious teachers, by some form of ordination. To become a Scribe was not so much to take orders as to take a degree, though that is not an exact parallel.
I have explained in the preceding chapter the way in which the Torah was regarded as the embodiment of the full and final revelation which God had made to Israel. It was the source of all knowledge, the supreme authority, the regulator of all action. It included within its range the whole duty of man, his entire relation to God and to his fellow-men. The written Torah was contained in the Pentateuch. The other canonical books of the Old Testament were to be read in the light afforded by the Torah, and to be valued for the help they gave in illustrating its meaning, making clear what had been left obscure in the Pentateuch. That there could be any contradiction between the secondary scriptures and the Pentateuch was in theory impossible. And when in the case of certain books, namely, Ezekiel, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs, contradictions were alleged, the alternatives were to explain away the contradiction or to reject the books from the canon. The books were retained, by an exercise of dialectic subtlety which is graphically indicated in the statement that a certain Rabbi burnt the "midnight oil" to the extent of three hundred barrels, in his studies to reconcile the book of Ezekiel with the standard of the Torah (b. Shabb. 13b).
The unwritten Torah was the explication of what was implicit in the written Torah, the unfolding into fuller detail or greater clearness of what was barely suggested in the Scripture. Evidently, therefore, to know what was contained in the Torah, i.e. what God had revealed, it was needful to know the unwritten as well as the written Torah, the former even more perhaps than the latter. And this could only be done by learning and remembering what had already been taught and accepted as a valid interpretation by previous teachers. A Tradition of the Elders was a necessary result of a religion of Torah. If a Pharisee were offered some religious teaching or were invited to do some action as a religious duty, he would ask (supposing it was new to him), "Is this Torah?" And he would not be satisfied until he had been shown that it was. The proof would be, either that it had already been taught by such and such a recognised teacher, or that the instructor, being himself a recognised teacher, assured him that it was so. This was the constant, and even necessary, form in which instruction was given in the meaning of Torah. And it should be carefully observed (a point which is not usually understood) that this method of Tradition by no means excluded individual initiative or progressive development of thought on the part of those who handed on the Tradition. There was no finality in the Torah; the diligent and devout student of it was always discovering something new, and if he could show (as he usually could show) that his new truth was in the Torah, that was an addition to its known meaning, while yet the Torah remained unaltered in the infinite richness and fulness of its contents, the perfect and divine revelation. I have shown that progressive development was most marked along the line of the Halachah. But there was even more of free speculation, individual initiative of research into spiritual things, though there was less of methodical advance, along the line of the Haggadah, as will be explained more at length in the fifth chapter. But there also the method, or rather the form, of Tradition was the one mainly used, presumably as being that which gave greatest security for the validity of the results obtained. The Pharisees in the time of Jesus, no less than the Rabbis of the Talmud, were well able to think for themselves, and in fact did so, upon religious as upon other questions. And the reason why they uniformly employed the method of Tradition was not that they were hidebound slaves of custom, but that their religion was the religion of Torah. As the Torah was not a burden, so the Tradition of the Elders was not a constraint. Christians may, and usually do, think that the burden and the restraint must have been felt. But that is only because the religion of Christians is not a religion of Torah; and one who is accustomed to the conditions and conceptions of the former, is not likely to appreciate, and seldom tries to understand, the conditions and conceptions of the latter. Equally, of course, one who has grown up in the habit of thought congenial to the religion of Torah does not easily appreciate and may seriously misunderstand the manifestations of religion, in thought and speech, where the Torah is not the controlling element.
When, therefore, the Pharisees became aware that Jesus was one who "taught as having authority, and not as their Scribes," they were confronted with a fact which they were not in a position to understand, to the meaning of which they had no clue, and which could only appear to them as a contradiction of their own principles. It would be extremely perplexing to them to know what to make of Jesus, and how to deal with him. What he said seemed to be good; but was it Torah? It might be; but how could they know that? Some of it, of course, they were familiar with—the common terms of the spiritual Judaism to which reference has already been made. But some things were new. Their own accepted teachers, the Scribes, had not taught these things, i.e. had not declared them to be Torah. Jesus was not a Scribe. He did not say, "This is Torah because I have learned it from so-and-so." And, not being a Scribe, he was not competent to declare it as from himself. How could they receive his teaching, without being unfaithful to what they already believed? And if they were unfaithful to that? It should be constantly remembered that the religion of Torah meant to the Pharisee the whole of religion, all that was possible of communion with God, and not merely of obedience to precept. Within its characteristic form there was room for all of that spiritual Theism which, as has been shown, the Pharisees had in common with Jesus. If he did not hold that spiritual Theism under the form of Torah, they did; and it was in its essence much the same for both. They did not know that the form of Torah, with its corollary of Tradition, was not necessary to the retention of the religion which brought them close to God in love and obedience, in joy and trust. And it seemed to them that they risked the loss of all that, if they tampered with the conception of Torah, or listened to one, however persuasive and however eloquent, who taught "not as their Scribes." If this was the point of view from which the Pharisees regarded Jesus, when they began to make closer acquaintance with him, then it is easy to understand how their feeling towards him would be something much deeper than mere petty jealousy or the prejudice of stupid bigotry. No doubt there was some of that. Inability to understand can express itself in ways which are mean and contemptible, as is seen in religious polemic in every age. The Pharisees had no monopoly of ignorant spite. But what I contend is that the attitude of the Pharisees towards Jesus will bear a much higher interpretation than mere arrogant jealousy against an unauthorised intruder. It was a repugnance towards teaching which they could by no means bring within the frame of their religion, and they could not imagine any other frame for it; it was a shrinking fear of a teacher who, with holy and good words and deeds, seemed yet to be leading them away from the only ideal they could recognise. And leading not only them but also the people, who were less able to guard against the danger, and who, as they observed, "heard him gladly," and even "hung on his words listening." A religion so deeply wrought into the souls of the best part of the nation as the religion of Torah had been since the days of Ezra, so strongly held, so passionately loved, so marked in the individuality of its features, could not enable those who clung to it to unlearn the ways of their fathers, and to adapt its contents to a new and unfamiliar form. The religion of Torah, for all that it had much in common with the religion of Jesus, could never pass over into the form which he gave to his religion. And although Christians may say it was "blindness" on the part of the Pharisees, they are not justified in saying that it was also "hardness of heart," which made them shrink from Jesus.
The occasions upon which they came into conflict with him were probably numerous; but the following may fairly be taken as representative of the rest:—Healing on the Sabbath; the question of divorce; the argument about Corban. Along with the first may be included the defence of his disciples for plucking the ears of corn on the Sabbath. And as a supplement to all may be taken the long invective against the Pharisees in Matt. xxiii. Whether this list follows the chronological order I do not know, and for the purpose in hand it does not matter. The difference in principle is not affected by questions of date.
It will be noticed that I have not included the question of the Messiahship of Jesus. Of course the Pharisees, like everybody else in Israel at that time, speculated whether Jesus was "he that should come," or whether they were to "look for another." But they did not directly challenge him on that point, as they challenged him on the points I have already named. Their challenge about the Messiahship was indirect. Their position would be that a man who set himself against the Torah could not be the Messiah. Conceivably the Messiah might in some respects supersede the Torah, but he could never oppose it. And when Jesus was driven to declare that in certain points the Torah did not represent divine truth, it was from that moment impossible that the Pharisees should recognise him as the Messiah, and inevitable that they should regard him as a dangerous heretic. This may explain why the Pharisees did not ask him, in so many words, whether he was the Messiah or not, and also did not offer objections to any supposed claim to that position made by him or on his behalf. The question was only put to him directly by the High Priest at the trial, and therefore not by the Pharisees at all. And it is scarcely likely to have been put then as a challenge to argument; it was much more an attempt to get evidence on which to convict him out of his own mouth. Jesus was condemned and executed on a more or less political charge, for which the question of Messiahship provided a useful basis; but he was really rejected, so far at all events as the Pharisees were concerned, because he undermined the authority of the Torah, and endangered the religion founded upon it.
That Jesus really did so is beyond dispute. His final position was one which could not be reconciled with recognition of Torah as the Pharisees regarded it. But it may well have been, and I think it was, the case that he was only gradually driven to this position, and that when he began his ministry he was not conscious of any discrepancy between what he was teaching and what the Torah implied. That is presumably what he meant when he said: "Think not that I came to destroy the Torah and the prophets; I came not to destroy but to fulfil" (Matt. v. 17). His quarrel, at that time, was not with the Torah itself, but with the Scribes and Pharisees, as being unsatisfactory exponents of it. "For I say unto you, That except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no wise enter the Kingdom of Heaven" (Matt. v. 17, 20).
There is here no opposition between the conception of Torah and that of life under the Kingdom of Heaven. Jesus also regarded the Torah, at this time at all events, as being the supreme and final revelation that God had given to Israel. To fulfil it was not merely to obey its precepts but to make one's whole life, in thought, word, and deed, respond to that divine influence. And Jesus maintained that the Pharisees did not go the right way to attain that end. He himself came to fulfil the Torah, by making that complete response to its influence, and by showing how it could and ought to be made. Any notion of getting rid of it after having once and for all satisfied its claims, belongs to a circle of ideas of which it is safe to say that Jesus never dreamed.
But yet, if the explanation here offered be correct, it is evident that what he still supposed to be Torah, and the religion of Torah, was not so in fact. He had grown up with the conception of Torah, like any other devout Jew; and he did not at once become aware that what he conceived religion to be was something that could not be expressed in terms of Torah. The Pharisees perceived the discrepancy sooner than he did; and while he found another form for his religion, they adhered to the old form because that was what they knew, and they could not comprehend anything different. To them, what he was doing was not reconstruction or amplification or exaltation of the old religion, but destruction of it. And, so far as the conception of Torah was concerned, they were quite right. Torah and Jesus could not remain in harmony. The two were fundamentally incompatible. And the Pharisees, being determined to "abide in the things they had learned," viz. Torah, were necessarily turned into opponents of Jesus.
This cleavage showed itself only gradually; and what forced it on the consciousness, first of the Pharisees and then of Jesus himself, was shown in the several occasions of dispute, where appeal had to be made to first principles.
I take first the case of the cure of a sick man on the Sabbath, as it is recorded in Mark iii. 1-6: "And he entered again into the synagogue; and there was a man there which had his hand withered. And they watched him, whether he would heal him on the Sabbath day; that they might accuse him. And he saith unto the man that had his hand withered, Stand forth. And he saith unto them, Is it lawful on the Sabbath day to do good, or to do harm? to save a life, or to kill? But they held their peace. And when he had looked round about on them with anger, being grieved at the hardness of their hearts, he saith unto the man, Stretch forth thine hand. And he stretched it forth, and his hand was restored. And the Pharisees went out, and straightway with the Herodians took counsel against him, how they might destroy him." It is evident that the narrator of that story did not love the Pharisees, and it would not be unreasonable to take a heavy discount off it on the ground of prejudice. But we may leave all that out of account. Jesus challenged the Pharisees to say whether, according to the Torah, he might or might not cure the man on the Sabbath. If he got no answer, it was certainly not because they had no answer to give. They would say, "Why do on the Sabbath what could be done on another day, if the doing of it would break the Sabbath? The Torah says that the Sabbath is to be kept holy; and this is done by refraining from certain kinds of action, in themselves perfectly right and proper. We believe that the right way of fulfilling the Torah—doing the will of God—is to do so-and-so. And we believe that in order to save life, when it is in danger, it is the will of God that we should break the Sabbath, in any way that may be necessary. But that we should not break it for any less urgent cause. Here is this man with a withered hand. He is in no immediate danger. Certainly it is a good thing to cure him. But why not have cured him before? And if his cure should stand over for a day, is that so great a harm to one who has been some time in that condition that the Sabbath must be made to give way to it?" That is the sort of answer that the Pharisees would make. Of course, the rejoinder is ready to hand, that to do good is right on any day, Sabbath or no Sabbath. But that is not the point. The challenge of Jesus was, "Is it lawful?" i.e. "Is it in accordance with Torah?" And the Pharisees were perfectly justified in holding that it was not in accordance with Torah. If Jesus interpreted Torah in a different sense, that was his affair; and they would not be the more disposed to agree with him if it be true that he "looked round about on them in anger." His action was in effect an attack on Torah, whatever his intention might be.[6]
The question of Sabbath-breaking was raised in another form in the incident described in Mark ii. 23-28, and elsewhere. This is chiefly of importance because it is made the occasion for the declaration that "the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath." The action of the disciples in plucking the ears of corn on the Sabbath was challenged by the Pharisees. Jesus defended it by an appeal to Scripture, the relevancy of which is not obvious, and by the declaration just quoted, which is only a valid defence if it means that the Sabbath can be put aside by man for his own convenience, however slight the occasion. The Pharisees would certainly agree to the declaration about the Sabbath (it is found, b. Joma 85b), but they would not admit the interpretation which Jesus put upon it. They would say that the Sabbath was a divine institution, intended for the benefit of man; and that, while for grave reason it might be sometimes right to break the Sabbath, yet that was not left to the caprice of anyone who chose to break it. If that was allowed, the blessing of the Sabbath would be gone and the divine intention frustrated. From the point of view of Torah, no other answer was possible. And Jesus, in his treatment of the Sabbath, by dispensing with the obligation of the hitherto customary observance of it, was disclosing the fact that he did not now look at the matter from the point of view of Torah.
How far he was conscious of this divergence, or rather, when he became aware of it, can hardly be determined. But in the controversy with regard to divorce the divergence became unmistakable. The controversy was strictly not about divorce in itself, but about the attitude of the Torah towards divorce. Jesus condemned divorce (Mark x. 2 fol.). Whether he allowed the one exception or not, his general condemnation of the practice is not open to question. But the Pharisees also condemned divorce. They could not abolish it, but they sought to restrict what had been the immemorial freedom of the husband to put away his wife at his pleasure. It is often urged against Hillel and Akiba that they allowed divorce for frivolous reasons, and Shammai is praised because he would not allow divorce except for unfaithfulness. Neither the blame nor the praise is justified or even called for. The only difference between Hillel and Shammai on the subject was whether the Torah allowed divorce for trivial reasons, or restricted it to the one grave reason. It was a question of interpretation of the authority recognised alike by Hillel and Shammai. It was not a question of the private opinion of either of them upon the ethical character of divorce. If Hillel and Akiba had seen their way to interpret the Torah in accordance with their own ethical judgment, they would certainly have done so. And, in fact, the Talmudic treatment of the subject is in the direction of making divorce difficult, and of giving protection, where possible, to the wife against the caprice of the husband. But in face of the fact that the Torah, the written Torah, expressly allowed divorce (Deut. xxiv. 1), not even Hillel and Akiba could establish the contrary view.
So far as the condemnation of divorce on its own account was concerned, the Pharisees would be in agreement with Jesus, though probably not to the extent of admitting no exception, supposing that Jesus himself went so far. The point of controversy was in regard to the Torah as bearing on the subject. This is clear, because Jesus himself appealed to the Torah. He asked the Pharisees, "What did Moses command you?" And it appears that what he was thinking of was the passage, Gen. i. 27, "Male and female created he them." But the Pharisees quoted against him the express command, Deut. xxiv. 1, "Let him write a bill of divorce, etc." So that here there was Torah against Torah. The Pharisees would say, "We agree with you that divorce ought, so far as possible, to be restricted and avoided; but, nevertheless, we cannot condemn it outright, because the Torah, which is God's own teaching, expressly allows and even enjoins it. But you, who do condemn it outright, how do you reconcile that with Torah?" Jesus answered that the permission to divorce was a concession made to human imperfection, and that the real intention of God was expressed in the passage in Gen. i. 27. But that answer implied necessarily that the written Torah was, in this one case at all events, not divine and perfect, since it contradicted itself. And such an answer was fatal to a recognition of the supremacy of Torah, as the Pharisees understood it. To them, the fact that Jesus had, in this one instance, definitely repudiated the divine authority of Torah, would outweigh the fact that upon the subject of divorce itself they were to a large extent in agreement with him. The result of the controversy would be a deepened impression, alike on the Pharisees and on Jesus, that his standpoint was not that of Torah, and that his ground principle was irreconcilable with theirs.
Another phase of the opposition between Jesus and the Pharisees is shown by the incident described in Mark vii. 1-23, of which the catchword is "Corban." The Pharisees and Scribes ask Jesus "why his disciples did not follow the Tradition of the Elders, but ate their bread with unwashed hands." Jesus turned upon them and charged them with making void the word of God by their Tradition. "For Moses said, Honour thy father and thy mother; and, He that speaketh evil of either father or mother, let him die the death. But ye say, If a man shall say to his father or mother, That, wherewith thou mightest have been profited by me, is Corban, that is to say, Given to God, ye no longer suffer him to do aught for his father or his mother; making void the word of God by your Tradition; and many such like things ye do." Now, even if the charge brought against the Pharisees were true, that they would not allow a man to be released from a vow in order to honour his parents, they would not thereby be "making void the word of God by their Tradition." On the contrary, they would be upholding it. For, while Exod. XX. 12 says, "Honour thy father and thy mother," Num. xxx. 2 says, "When a man voweth a vow unto the Lord, or sweareth with an oath to bind his soul with a bond, he shall not break his word, he shall do according to all that proceedeth out of his mouth." No provision is made for annulling vows, except those of a wife by her husband or her father under certain conditions. The practice of annulling vows generally was introduced by the Rabbis, and they admitted that it had no direct sanction in Scripture. If, therefore, in the case of a man who had made a vow to the detriment of his father and mother, they refused to release him, they would be upholding Scripture against their Tradition. True, Scripture would be opposed to Scripture; but the responsibility for that rested on Moses, not on them; and the practice of annulling vows would have the effect of removing that contradiction, and was perhaps so intended. However that may be, the charge against the Pharisees of making void the word of God by their Tradition would not be borne out in this instance, even if it were true that they refused to release a man from a vow of the kind described.
But the assertion that they did so refuse is contrary to the express statement of the Mishnah, which is the codified Tradition; and is moreover entirely at variance with the spirit of Rabbinical ethics in regard to respect to parents. The crucial passage is M. Nedar. ix. 1, and it runs thus: "R. Eliezer says, 'They open a way for a man on the ground of honour to his father and mother.' The Wise forbid. R. Zadok said, 'Before they open a way for him on the ground of honour to his father and mother, they should open it for him on the ground of honour to God. If this were so, there would be no vows.' The Wise agree with R. Eliezer, that in a matter which is between a man and his father and mother they open a way for him on the ground of honour to his father and mother." Two cases are here distinguished; in the first, if a man makes a vow of any kind, he is not to be released from it on the ground that it would bring reproach on his parents to have such a rash and foolish son. He must be made to keep his vow. But in the second case, if a man make a vow upon a matter between himself and his parents, i.e. one which, if he keep it, will occasion injury or loss to them, then he is to be released from it on the ground of honour to his parents. The commentators on the Mishnah all agree in this interpretation, and there is no doubt as to the intention of the Mishnah. Moreover, there is no indication that there ever had been a different opinion, as if the statement now made in the Mishnah had taken the place of an earlier statement. There is no evidence that the Pharisees ever held or taught the doctrine attributed to them by Jesus, while it is contradicted in the most definite manner by the declarations of their own legal authorities.
The charge is all the more pointless because the Pharisees, whatever else they may have failed in, always showed the most devoted respect to parents. A more unfortunate ground of attack could hardly have been chosen than that which is taken in the Corban incident; and the Pharisees would not have had the slightest difficulty in repelling the charge brought against them. Whether the error involved in the account of the incident be due to the Evangelist or to Jesus himself, an error it remains. And it is not fair, on the strength of the New Testament text, however it came to be written, to hold the Pharisees guilty of denying that which they themselves expressly enjoin. That is the fact. How the misstatement[7] came to be made, I do not know and will not speculate. Of course this does not in any way affect the truth of the principle enunciated by Jesus: "There is nothing from without the man which going into him can defile him, etc." That marks, in practical effect, though possibly not in theory, a complete breach with Pharisaism, since the Torah did, in the most explicit manner, distinguish between clean and unclean, and did teach that outward things caused defilement. The Pharisees held by the Torah; Jesus, at this point, threw it over. Yet the Pharisees could and did say that the defilement was not caused by the outward thing itself, but expressed the will of God that certain actions and contacts should be avoided. Why He had so willed, they did not know nor inquire; enough that He had so willed, and included it in the Torah which He had given. If it be said, "So much the worse for a religion and an ethic which are based on Torah," the question is taken down to first principles, and will be answered variously according to the view held of those first principles. I only observe that the religion of Torah was hampered by the fact that it applied a sublime theory to material some of which was originally quite independent of that theory and unworthy of it; and the Pharisees were unable to recognise that fact, while doing their best, and a very splendid best, to overcome a difficulty of whose nature they were not, and could not be, aware.
The opposition between Jesus and the Pharisees finds its most emphatic expression in the long speech contained in Matt. xxiii., the keynote of which is: "Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!" It is sometimes argued that Jesus himself did not say all the hard things in that speech, but that they represent the hostility of the early Church towards the men who had destroyed her founder. That is possible; and certainly the Evangelists do not incline to a favourable view of the Pharisees on any occasion. But I do not feel free to evade the duty of dealing with that speech by availing myself of that argument. Moreover, I do not see anything to make it impossible, or even unlikely, that Jesus did say all those things. Having in effect broken with the religion of Torah, and being in the position of a man driven to bay, fighting, as the saying is, with his back against the wall, it is only human nature that he should so speak as to hit hard. And, if it were the case of any other man, who would take the words spoken under such conditions as expressing the calm and deliberate judgment of the speaker upon the persons addressed, or as weighty evidence of the truth of the statements made? I am not going to go through the various charges in order to estimate the truth or the exaggeration of them. I shall make no suggestions that perhaps the Pharisees in that time were very bad, though they were more respectable before, and, in a curious way, recovered their character afterwards. Nor will I admit that it was perhaps true of the rank and file, but that men like Hillel and Gamaliel and Jo?anan b. Zaccai were honourable exceptions. If it was true at all, it was most of all true of Hillel and Gamaliel and their compeers, because these represented Pharisaism in its perfection, and their religion was the religion of Torah in all its height and depth and length and breadth. Whatever could be truly said of Pharisaism, either good or evil, was true of the religion by which they lived.
I take all that sweeping denunciation as the final expression of irreconcilable opposition between Jesus and the religion of Torah. And I shall content myself with making a few observations upon the fact and the meaning of it. As for the term "hypocrites," the justice of the implied charge is not established by the fact that the charge is made. That hypocrisy is possible under the religion of Torah is undeniable; but there is certainly no necessary connection between the two. The Pharisees themselves were quite aware that there were hypocrites in their ranks.[8] The retort would be justified that hypocrites have been found amongst professing Christians also. But recrimination is not argument. The hypocrisy question is not really difficult to understand, if the explanation already given of the religion of Torah be borne in mind. The theory of that religion, when put into practice, necessarily involved the doing of many acts in a particular way. Even actions in themselves of little or no importance became important when the Torah directed a specific way of doing them. They were done as a fulfilment of the will of God upon that particular point; and His will was not fulfilled unless there was, on the part of the agent, the conscious intention of serving Him. The mere opus operatum was worthless. To the Pharisee, starting from Torah as his ground principle, the doing of a multitude of apparently trifling acts was the obvious way of putting religion into practice, and he rejoiced in doing them. But one who did not start from Torah as a ground principle would have no clue to the understanding of what the Pharisees did, or why they did it. If such a one took as his ground principle the immediate authority of conscience and his own direct intuition of God, and if he then judged the Pharisees by his standard and not by their own, then he would easily draw the conclusion that they were hypocrites, because he would see them treating as of great importance things which conscience would pay no attention to; and he would judge that men who could be satisfied to discharge the obligations of religion in such a way, must either be ignorant of what religion really is, or pretenders to a piety they did not possess. The religion of Torah lays itself open to the misconstruction which charges its adherents with hypocrisy. But, apart from particular instances where the charge could be established, the charge only shows how far those who make it are unable to comprehend the Pharisaic conception of religion. To urge that their conception of religion was defective is legitimate; to condemn them as hypocrites on the strength of a different conception of religion is not legitimate, no matter by whom it is done.
And this leads me to the conclusion of what I have to say about the opposition between Jesus and the Pharisees. The conflict was one between two fundamentally different conceptions of religion, viz. that in which the supreme authority was Torah, and that in which the supreme authority was the immediate intuition of God in the individual soul and conscience. The Pharisees stood for the one; Jesus stood for the other. The particular occasions of dispute, some of which have been noticed, mainly served to bring out this fundamental opposition; at all events that is their chief importance.
The conflict was unequal, because it was one in which an Idea was matched against a Person. The idea of Torah was sublime, and deserved all the devoted loyalty that was given to its expression and defence. But it was an idea, mediated in the consciousness of those who held it. Jesus was a living soul, with the spiritual force of a tremendous personality; and against him the idea of Torah could not prevail. This was the real meaning of the fact that he taught "as one having authority, and not as their Scribes." This was the ground of his claim to forgive sins, a claim which the Pharisees could only interpret as blasphemy (Mark ii. 7). And this appears in all his relations with the Pharisees, as the force which opposed them, and which they could neither comprehend nor overpower. They could not at the same time retain the conception of Torah as the basis of their religion and admit the authority of Jesus. They saw no reason why they should abandon Torah; they could not therefore do other than reject Jesus. And when the verdict of the Pharisees is expressed in the saying of the Talmud, already quoted, "Jesus practised magic and deceived and led astray Israel," that contemptuous dismissal shows how completely they failed to realise that what had opposed them had been the strength of a great personality. And I do not think that on the Jewish side this ever has been realised from that day to this. If the Pharisees had realised it they would have met him with arguments quite different from those which they did use; possibly they would have refrained from controversy altogether. As it was, they remained within the circle of religious ideas which they knew, and continued to find in the Torah the satisfaction of their spiritual wants—a real satisfaction of real wants, such as men might feel who were not hypocrites and impostors, but earnest and devout, and chiefly concerned to do the will of their Father in Heaven, in what they believed to be the way He desired.
If there was on the part of the Pharisees a complete inability to comprehend the religious position of Jesus, there was also on his part an inability[9] to comprehend the religious position of the Pharisees. If he had realised what Torah meant to the Pharisees, he might, and doubtless would, have desired to show them a "more excellent way," but he would not have taken the line which he did of denunciation and invective, since to do so would defeat his purpose.
This I believe to be the real truth about the inability of both the Pharisees and Jesus to understand each other, or, in other words, the impossibility of harmony between the religion of Torah and the religion of the individual soul, if I may so describe it. That incompatibility is fundamental. Christianity, in all its forms, is a religion founded on personality, one in which the central feature is a Person. And Judaism, at all events since the days of the Pharisees, is a religion in which the central feature is not a person, at all events not a human person, but the Torah. It is near the truth to say that what Christ is to the Christian, Torah is to the Jew. And alike to Christian and to Jew it is almost impossible to comprehend the religion of the other. Even Jesus could not do it. And if he could not do it, what wonder that his greatest disciple, Paul, in passing from the one conception of religion to the other, should have failed to carry with him into his new faith the remembrance of what the old faith had meant to him while he lived in it?
To the further consideration of this essential opposition between the religion of Torah and the Christian religion I shall proceed in the next chapter, when I shall deal with the criticism of Torah in the Epistles of Paul.
