If Christians usually get their ideas about the Pharisees from the Gospels, they learn their general conception of Judaism from the Epistles of Paul. And, when they find that the Judaism which he condemns is in fact the Judaism of the Pharisees, they combine their information, and rest content with the conclusion that alike in theory and practice the Pharisees were as far as they well could be from the Kingdom of Heaven. A verdict which claims the authority of both Jesus and Paul would seem, to Christians at least, to leave nothing more to be said, and to admit of no appeal. And in fact it has prevailed, and still prevails, in spite of all the efforts of the Jews to obtain even a hearing on the other side.
As, in the preceding chapter, I examined the relation of the Pharisees to Jesus, and tried to explain how it was that they came to stand to each other in such sharp antagonism, so in the present chapter I shall try to explain how it was that Paul came to represent the Pharisaic conception of religion in the way he did, and what grounds there are for saying that his representation does not correspond with the facts. Pharisaic Judaism is, or can be, perfectly well known; for it is written large in the Rabbinical literature, by men who were remarkably honest in setting down their faults as well as their virtues. It is there for anyone to study; and no one is entitled to say that the description of it given by Paul, or by anybody else, is accurate or not, until he has studied the thing itself. The fact that it can only be studied in books which are written in Hebrew and Aramaic (except so far as translated) does not exempt the student from the duty of reading them, if he really means to learn what is true in the matter. If he does not, then what is his opinion worth?
The Christian will probably say in reply: "Did not Paul himself know all about it? Was he not born and bred a Jew? Was he not a 'Pharisee of the Pharisees'? Had he not been 'zealous beyond those of his own age in the Jews' religion'? Was he not 'as touching the law blameless'? Who could be a better and more reliable witness upon the question what the Jews' religion really was?" Yes. And did Paul not abandon the Jews' religion? Did he not write about it long years after he had been converted to a different religion? And is it not common knowledge that a convert seldom takes the same view of the religion he has left as is taken by those who remain in it? If Paul, while he was still a Pharisee, had written down his thoughts upon the worth and meaning of Pharisaism, that would be valuable evidence indeed; and it would be interesting to trace the process by which he then made his way to another form of religion. As it is, what he says about Judaism is no evidence of what he felt it to be while he was in it, or of what those felt it to be who remained in it. And if, as is the unquestionable fact, his representation of it differs very widely from theirs, then we are not entitled to draw the conclusion that his presentation is correct, whatever the other may have been (a point on which few trouble to inquire). We have rather to account, if we can, for the very peculiar form which his presentation of Pharisaism took. I might, indeed, have left Paul out altogether from this book; because, in strict truth, there is nothing to be learned directly from him upon the question what Pharisaism really was. But, indirectly, there is a great deal to be learned; because, whether his conception of Pharisaism be correct or not, it serves to show how it appeared to a very exceptional man, looking at it from a point of view which was no longer Jewish. And to understand and estimate the changed appearance due to that alteration of the point of view, is to get to the heart of the difference between Judaism and Christianity.
For the purpose of this inquiry I shall take the Epistles bearing the name of Paul, at all events the four great ones, as being really his. I have not yet been able to persuade myself that any collections of fragments, pieced together and interpolated, could be so combined as to give the impression of a single great personality behind them. Paul may not have been either always consistent or always logical; but how anyone can read those letters, with their eager hurry of argument, their passionate outpouring of devout feeling, and still think that they are the composite patchwork of second-century nobodies, is to me a mystery. I shall therefore assume that what is written in those Epistles is what Paul wrote; that what he says about himself is true; and that what he says about Judaism, or anything else, is what he believed to be true when he wrote it.
The effect of what he wrote, at all events about Judaism, has been to inflict what Jews feel to be a cruel injustice on their religion. To Paul himself, I imagine, it can only have appeared to be the obvious and necessary statement of the result of his changed position in religion. He has left it on record that, through his conversion, he became a new man in Christ (2 Cor. v. 17). And one of the implications of that fact is that he should no longer be able accurately to reproduce in his mind what the "old man" had felt and thought and believed; he would retain only the distant memory of discarded things. If he wrote of the religion he had left, it would be, not of what once had been his, but of what he could only judge as an external thing, variously defective when seen in the light of his present religion.
Beyond the fact, then, that by his own account Paul had been before his conversion a zealous and consistent Pharisee, we do not know what his earlier opinion had been upon any subject whatever. He does not become known to us until after his conversion; and the writings from which we gain the knowledge of him were not composed till twenty years or more had elapsed since that event. Of his conversion he says very little; not enough to enable us to understand precisely what took place. It may well be, indeed, that he himself could never have stated in words, at any time, precisely what took place, or what, if anything, led up to the change. This much, however, is beyond question, that as a result of his conversion Christ became to him the central element in his religion. All his spiritual life depended on Christ. All his thought was conditioned by his idea of Christ. All the energy of soul which was his to give for the fulfilling of his ministry he ascribed to the immediate personal influence of Christ upon him. Christ was the all and everything of his religious life; and the lines upon which his subsequent career was laid out, so that he became the Apostle of the Gentiles, were marked out by his conception of the relation in which he believed himself to stand towards Christ. In some marvellous way, it seemed that Christ had entered and taken possession of him; with the result that he became the Paul whom we know.
There must have followed a process, whether short or long, by which he adjusted himself to his altered mental position, estimated the effect of the change upon his previous beliefs and ideas, and grasped the meaning of new and unfamiliar ones. For it goes without saying that his conversion widened the scope of his thought so as to bring many things within the range of his inward vision that previously had been unnoticed or not understood, as it also changed his estimate of what had been previously there. But of the details and the order of that process we know nothing. We cannot tell, for instance, whether it began with the settling of his attitude towards Judaism, or whether he was drawn first towards the idea of salvation for the Gentiles. We only know the results long after the process was completed, when he had shaped in thought a more or less consistent theory of divine providence, as shown in the history of the world.
The opening chapter of the Epistle to the Romans shows how profoundly he was impressed by the moral chaos of the Gentile world; but the fact is mentioned there only to give the explanation of it. For an explanation was needed. Such a state of humanity was in terrible contrast to the perfection which should have been found in those whom the all-holy God had made. Doubtless there were differences of better and worse between this man and that; but, judged by the standard of perfection, i.e. of complete harmony with God, all were alike immeasurably below what they ought to be. Not only the Gentiles, but the Jews also, came under this condemnation. Jews indeed were not guilty of the loathsome vices which made the Gentile life so horrible; but it was clear that, in regard to the standard of perfection which God desired in man, the Jews wholly failed to reach it. All the world over, through all the multitude of human beings, "there was none righteous, no not one" (Rom. iii. 10).
Yet the Gentiles, Paul argued, could have known, and even did know, something of God; but they disowned that knowledge, and "glorified him not as God, neither gave thanks; but became vain in their reasonings, and their senseless heart was darkened.... Wherefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts ... for that they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator" (Rom. i. 21, 24-5).
And the Jews knew well the will of God, for to them He had revealed it through Moses and the prophets; with them He had made His covenant, and had chosen them out of all the nations of the earth, to be a peculiar people unto Himself. How was it that they too fell so far short of what was required of them? Must it not have been (so Paul reasoned) because the divine Law[10] that was given them was the very means and occasion of sin? To fail in regard to one single precept was to break the harmony between man and God; and, when once that harmony was broken, there was nothing in the Law itself to restore it. By its multiplication of commandments, the Law offered so many occasions for the breaking of that harmony; and whereas it was "holy, and the commandment righteous and just and good," its ideal was one that no human effort could reach. Its effect was to multiply sin. Righteousness under the Law was impossible; meaning by righteousness the state of perfect harmony of man with God.
"But now," says Paul (Rom. iii. 21 fol.), "apart from the law a righteousness of God hath been manifested, being witnessed by the law and the prophets; even the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ unto all them that believe; for there is no distinction; for all have sinned, and fall short of the glory of God; being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Jesus Christ," etc.
Through faith in Jesus Christ there was offered to sinful man the means of attaining that righteousness—harmony with God—which had been vainly sought under the Law, or lost in the darkness of Gentile corruption. And this was evidently what God had willed from the beginning. Christ was the instrument, or the agent, by whom this divine purpose was to be fulfilled. And the meaning of what might seem to be the age-long delay of his coming was that God would "shut up all under sin, that he might have mercy upon all."[11]
Christ performed his divinely appointed mission by his death on the Cross, and his subsequent resurrection; having borne and discharged the obligation of the unfulfilled Law, and thereby released all, whether Jews or Gentiles, from the bondage of sin. Righteousness was now attainable through faith in Christ; and I presume that Paul meant by righteousness, harmony with God, resulting from such an attitude on the part of the believer towards Christ as that in which Paul himself stood towards him, in other words, a complete surrender of heart and will to Christ, so as to "put off the old man" and become "a new creature." Those who did this would thereby attain to perfect harmony with God, which is righteousness.
I do not stop to dwell upon the way in which Paul explained the fact that the offer of salvation was not universally accepted. For I do not forget that my task is not to expound the whole of Paul's theology, but to explain his view of Pharisaism. I leave out, therefore, all mention of election and reprobation, in order to come to the question how the Jews were dealt with in Paul's theory. For here he was confronted with the fact that the Jews had rejected Christ, and not only rejected him but killed him. In the most emphatic manner they had refused the means of grace which had been offered to them through him. They had, to that extent, frustrated the purpose of God in sending him. They, in common with the Gentiles, had been, as stated already, shut up under sin that God might have mercy on them. And they had spurned that mercy. How was that to be explained? "Did God then cast off his people?" Paul asked (Rom. xi. 1). Not so. "But a hardening in part hath befallen Israel, until the fulness of the Gentiles be come in" (Rom. xi. 25). All that God had willed towards Israel, and declared in the ancient Scriptures, still held good; but its fulfilment was delayed by the disobedience of Israel; and that disobedience was made to serve the purpose of God, in that by its means salvation should come to the Gentiles. The full development of this thought will be found in chapters ix. to xi. of the Epistle to the Romans, and need not be given here. It was Paul's way of getting over a formidable difficulty, namely, the obvious fact that the attitude of the Jews towards Christ was not at all what was to be expected, if his theory of the person and work of Christ were true. It must not be forgotten that the starting point of his theory was his own personal relation to Christ, as he felt it with an intense certainty which nothing could shake for a moment. That was his foundation of absolute truth; and that could not but be the clue by which he interpreted all that he beheld in the world, and read in the history of man. With his application of this clue to the case of the Gentiles I am not now concerned. But, in applying it to the case of the Jews, he was reasoning from premises which were not, and never have been, accepted by Jews. He represented the relation of man to God in terms of faith in, and communion through, Christ; so that, previous to the coming of Christ, both revelation and communion had been partial and defective. The Jews represented the relation of man to God in terms of Torah, in the knowledge of divine truth therein contained, and in filial obedience to God whose precepts were recorded in it. They found, on the lines of Torah, the ground of faith in God and present communion with Him; and while they always hoped to learn more of the contents of revelation—to be shown "wonderful things out of the Torah,"—and while they aspired to a closer walk with God, they never felt that the Torah needed to be replaced by any other means of revelation and communion, as being itself only partial and defective. To say of the Torah, as Paul said, that it was a means by which God had prepared the way for Christ, implied that it had only a secondary value on its own account. Indeed, it was rather harmful than helpful, if the effect of its working was to "cause the trespass to abound," and that effect was in no way justified by the alleged intention, on the part of God, that "grace might abound more exceedingly." A Christian, brought up on Paul, may see no difficulty in believing that the holy and righteous God could or would act in such a way. But to a Jew, brought up on Torah, it was impossible so to believe, and he would repudiate the suggestion with indignation; partly by reason of his reverence for God, and partly by reason of his own experience of Torah, and of spiritual life under it. Paul's theory might be valid for himself, but it was not valid for the Jew; and, arguing from his premises, he only described an unreal Judaism, such as it doubtless ought to have been if his premises had been true, but such as, in fact and experience, it certainly was not.[12] Paul, of course, was expounding Christianity; and he had no concern with Judaism, except to account to Christian readers for the very obvious difficulties which it placed in the way of his theory. His explanation of the meaning of Judaism is not a study of that form of religion on its own account, but the theoretical completion of his view of the work of Christ. If Christ came when he did, and if he fulfilled such and such a function in the drama of Providence, then the Judaism that was before him must have meant so and so, and must have been intended by God to produce such and such results. That seems to me to have been the real line of Paul's argument. And, as it started from his intense personal conviction of the inward presence of Christ, it is not wonderful that he should fail to see that the facts of Judaism did not at all correspond to his theory; or that he should assign to the Torah a function which, if put in practice, would have been fatal to the existence of Judaism long before Christ came. Paul argued on the religion of Torah from the postulates of the religion of Christ. But Torah and Christ are incommensurable terms; and Paul's presentation of Pharisaic Judaism is, in consequence, at its best a distortion, at its worst a fiction.
I shall presently offer reasons in support of that judgment, which is not a hasty assertion but a deliberate opinion formed after years of comparing the Judaism of the Rabbis with Paul's version of it. Before, however, going on to this further part of my task, I will pause for a moment to consider the difference between Paul's attitude and that of Jesus towards the Pharisees and their religion. In the main it is this—that Paul condemned Pharisaism in theory, while Jesus condemned it in practice. Paul held that the whole system was radically defective, and remained so whatever relative excellence might be produced under it in the lives and characters of those who submitted to it. He condemned it, though he had himself, as he said, been "as touching the Torah, blameless." Jesus, on the other hand, charged the Pharisees with certain specific sins and vices, such as hypocrisy, pride, self-righteousness, etc. And he did not expressly denounce the systematic religion of Torah as such, although, as has been shown in the preceding chapter, he did on certain points reject the Torah. The Pharisees themselves were quite aware that the faults he denounced were not unknown amongst them. The Talmud bears honest witness to that fact, in the passage so often quoted (b. Sotah, 22b), about the seven kinds of Pharisees.
The censure of Jesus admits of the possibility that some, at least, of the Pharisees were pious and good. And that Scribe, to whom Jesus said, "Thou art not far from the kingdom of God" (Mark xii. 34), did not cease to be a Pharisee by reason of the opinion he had expressed.
But Paul's condemnation of Pharisaism would include, not only that Scribe, but all of his nation in whom goodness and piety might be thought to have shown. And not only so, but these were by so much the more to be condemned in that they gave fullest expression to the principle of Torah. If the system was wrong, evidently those who most completely and consistently acted up to it were most deeply tainted with its error. Paul's universal negative challenges the contradiction of all the saints, martyrs, and heroes of Israel.
I go on now to support the statement made above that Paul's presentation of Judaism is at its best a distortion and at its worst a fiction; that, however regarded, it does not correspond with the facts. I shall have to show that the Torah was not such as Paul represented it to be, and that it did not have the effect which he ascribed to it, in the religious experience of those who lived under it. Also, that the Pharisee living under the Torah was not thereby debarred from such communion with God as Paul claimed for the believer in Christ; that, indeed, Pharisaism had nothing to learn in this respect from Christianity, at all events Paul's Christianity. What he offered to the Pharisees was either what they had already in a form which they preferred, or what they had not got and did not want. Upon these points I will proceed to enlarge during the remainder of this chapter.
That the Torah was not such as Paul represented it to be is a statement which is true, both positively and negatively. He ascribed to it a character which it did not possess, and he left out of his description features which it did possess, and which were essential to it. Paul always takes Torah in the sense of "precept," "mitzvah," ???? [Greek: nÓmos], not necessarily separate injunctions, but a collective expression of command, for which the term Law is appropriate. The divine will imposed this on Israel as the moral ideal, and, in demanding obedience to it, set up a goal that could never be reached.
The more the divineness and holiness of the Law was recognised, the greater must be the sin of disobeying it, the deeper the despair resulting from such disobedience. Righteousness, the harmony of the human will with the divine, was only possible by fulfilling the whole Law; to fail in a single point was to break that harmony, and thus to become unrighteous. The Law, with its multitude of precepts, only served to increase the occasions of sin, and plunge the sinner in a deeper despair. This is, in brief, Paul's view of the Law.[13]
It is safe to say that no Jew before Paul ever thought of the Torah in that way, or ever felt the despair which, according to this theory, he should have felt. Certainly, or let me say probably, no Pharisee ever completely fulfilled all the "mitzvoth" of the Torah; but I have never come across any Pharisee who was overwhelmed with despair on that account. And, if it be said that this only shows the blindness and conceit of the Pharisees, the answer is that even admitting that (which I do not admit), still the Torah did not in fact present itself to the mind of the Pharisee in the severe and threatening form which it wears in Paul's description of it. As, indeed, how should it?
It has already been shown, in the second chapter, that the meaning of Torah, as the Pharisee conceived it, was nothing less than the full revelation which God had made to Israel, partly by way of precept, partly by way of more general instruction in divine things. So far as the Torah was expressed in the form of precept, it offered so many occasions for serving God. Every "mitzvah" was an opportunity for doing some part of the divine will; and it was because God loved Israel that he had given these opportunities, whereby might be felt the joy of faithful service. The Pharisee laid the whole emphasis on doing as much as he could in that service; whereas, according to Paul, he ought to have laid the whole emphasis upon his own inability to do all that was required. He ought to have been burdened by guilt, and haunted by the despair of ever making his peace with the God whose commands he had failed to obey. Instead, he was full of joy that God had given him something that he could do for His sake, eager to do as much as he could; and though he failed or sinned, from time to time, he was "not utterly cast down," because he trusted that if he heartily repented God would forgive him, and take him back. The Torah was not a burden to the Pharisee, either by reason of the number or the difficulty of its precepts, or by the thought of the impossibility of completely satisfying its demands. And if there were ever a Pharisee in such a state of despair that he should cry, "O miserable man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" he would think of the Torah not as the cause of his anguish, but as the hope of his deliverance. And it was the Torah itself which kept him from ever falling into such despair; for it was God's own word of help and guidance, the record of His endless mercy, the revelation of His love. Paul would never have ascribed to the Torah such power to cause despair, unless he had ceased to feel towards it as a Pharisee would feel; and he ceased to feel so, because, in his mind, the place once filled by Torah was now filled by Christ. For him there remained of Torah only the shrivelled and misshapen corpse, instead of the once glorious and living form. The one is held up to reproach in the Epistles of Paul; the other is the object of endless praise, of reverent wonder, almost adoring rapture, in the literature of the Pharisees.
But Paul's view of Torah is not completely described by saying that he ascribed to it a character which it did not possess and an influence which it did not exercise. He leaves out of account features which it did possess, and represents the religion founded upon it as lacking in elements which in fact were no less present there than in his own religion. As already shown, Paul represents Torah exclusively as precept, ???? [Greek: nÓmos], whereas it comprised the whole revelation recorded in Scripture and rendered explicit by the valid interpretation of Scripture. It comprised, therefore, the knowledge of God Himself, of His providence and righteousness and fatherly love, also, of the way of communion with Him, the assurance of forgiveness to the penitent, "the means of grace and the hope of glory." All that belonged to his religion, the Pharisee found indicated in the Torah, somewhere; and it was his delight to learn what God taught him therein.
Now Paul's whole case rests upon the fact that there is no power in a commandment to help a man to fulfil it. The Law was, according to him, laid upon Israel with a demand for obedience, but with no power to ensure that obedience. The Law said, "Thou shalt"; but it gave no strength to the feeble will, however much it might shine with pitiless light upon the frightened conscience. Austere messenger of the will of God, it stood over its helpless slave, pointing indeed to heaven, but stretching forth no hand to lead him there. The Law being thus powerless to aid in the fulfilment of the divine command, there could be no righteousness under the Law, no harmony between the human will and the divine. Even if there ever had been such harmony, (and there had not been since the sin of Adam), there was no power in the Law to restore that harmony when it had once been broken. What the Law could not do, it was, according to Paul, reserved for Christ to do. Through faith in him came the power, not indeed to do what the sinner had failed to do, but to restore the broken harmony and reconcile man to God. That power was the direct influence of the living mind of Christ upon the human soul; and the effect of it was to set it free from bondage, so that it could of its own will turn to God. Paul here states, in terms of Christ, a profound truth, namely, that the human soul depends, for its power to will and desire the good, upon God; and that, without the means of communion with its divine source, the soul must languish and die. And Paul expounded this truth in terms of Christ, because in his own experience it was through Christ that the divine help had come to him; the force of a living personality which had set free his soul was that of Christ. To him it seemed that such was the only way by which the longed-for deliverance could be effected. Now the Law was not a person, a living spirit, but a command, a written word. And even the Torah, in its wider meaning, was still only a body of knowledge, a revelation, a complex idea; it was not a living spirit, that could give of its own life to a human soul. How, then, could there be, under the conditions of Torah, that imparting and receiving of divine influence by which alone the soul could be enabled to will the good, or even to live at all? Such seems to me to be the reasoning underlying Paul's conception of the powerlessness of the Law to save, its failure to impart righteousness.
But the Pharisee to whom that argument might be addressed would not have the slightest difficulty in meeting it. He would say, "Certainly there must be that divine influence upon the soul, the power imparted by one living spirit to another; else the soul cannot live or do any good thing. Certainly, also, the Torah is not a living spirit; it is only a body of truth, a revelation, a complex idea, or, if you will, a set of commands. But, what then? We look for help not to the commandment, but to Him who gave the commandment; not to the Law, but to the Lawgiver; not to the Torah, but to the wise, holy, and loving God, of whom the Torah is the revelation. We learn, from the teaching which He has given to us, to go direct to Him, pray to Him, trust Him, love Him, find help and strength from Him. He is our Father in heaven, always ready to hear His children, to forgive them when they repent of their sins against Him, and to deliver them from evil."
This is what any Pharisee would reply to Paul's argument about the impotence of the Law to justify. The difference between the Pharisee and Paul upon this point is, in appearance, very great; but, in fact, is very small. Both are agreed that there must be the imparting of divine influence to the human soul. With that influence, the quickening of the life of the soul by the divine power and inward presence, the soul is enabled to will the good and to love God. Without that influence it would perish. The Pharisee held that the divine influence was imparted direct from God to the soul, without any intermediary. It was not the Torah that imparted it, but God Himself. The Torah was given to teach him; having no power or life in itself, it revealed to him the divine source of power and life, and to that source he went.
Paul held that the divine influence was imparted to the soul through Christ; and his point, that it could not come through the Law, is true, but wholly irrelevant; for no one ever said that it could. The implication that it could come only through Christ may be relevant, but is certainly not true; for all the experience of Jewish piety is witness against it. When Paul, on the basis of his own experience, set up his doctrine of the function of Christ, in the relations between God and man, he did what he had every right to do; and he has earned the gratitude of all who have found salvation through the faith in Christ which they have learned from him. But Paul was not entitled to ignore the experience (no less genuine than his own) of those whose conception of religion he condemned. If all that they deemed essential to religion, not merely the idea of Torah, but the direct influence of the living God, had been included and stated in Paul's presentation of Judaism, then the comparison between the Jewish and the Christian conception of religion would have been more fair and equal; and if it did not appear that there was any marked superiority of the one over the other, there would at least have been the evidence that God is sought and found in more ways than one.
Enough, perhaps, has been said by way of general argument to show that Paul's version of Judaism is incorrect and defective. But it will be well, at this point, to indicate more particularly the evidence upon which I have maintained that Pharisaism is not the barren formalism that it is usually supposed to have been, nor the merely preparatory foil to Christianity, which is all that Paul could see in it.
There is first of all the general fact of the existence of the Jewish people in unswerving loyalty to the Torah, and in the faith and practice of the religion founded upon it—an existence and a loyalty maintained through centuries of bitter persecution at the hands of Christians. It is simply impossible that such a result could have been produced, if the religion, by which its adherents lived and for which they died, had been a soulless hypocrisy, a pious sham, or a futile delusion. If such could have been the case, then what better guarantee is there for the truth and worth of the faith for which Christian saints and martyrs have died and heroes fought? A corrupt tree cannot bring forth good fruit. And if the fruit be good, then, in the one case as in the other, the tree must be good. No adverse opinion of the Judaism which has suffered and survived, and which, be it remembered, is the Judaism of the Pharisees, can be justified in face of the witness of Israel to the faith once delivered to its saints.
There is further to be considered the fact that before the time of Paul, and indeed ever since, the Pharisees had for their spiritual nourishment the Scriptures of the Old Testament, including the prophecies and the Psalms. The study of these, and the constant use of them in the Synagogue, would have been uncongenial to men whose one concern was for hair-splitting casuistry, and would either have been discontinued or reduced to an unintelligent formality. It was neither. The Scriptures were the constant study of the Pharisee; and the worship of the Synagogue derived much of its power to minister to the needs of the worshippers, through its close dependence on the devotional outpourings of the Psalms, and the prayers which embodied the spirit of them. The Pharisee never for a moment thought that he was growing aloof from the Prophets and Psalmists of the older time; and while in the Torah, written and unwritten, he believed he had a fuller and more detailed knowledge of what God had revealed, it was still the revelation of the same God who had spoken to Abraham, who had shown His power by the Red Sea and on Sinai, who had inspired the Prophets and been praised in the Psalms. There may be legitimate regret that Israel cut itself off from all knowledge of and contact with the great literatures of Greece and Rome, and so missed the salutary influence of variety of thought. The Pharisees chose their own line deliberately in this matter; and when they saw what came of Hellenism, they might well feel that they had chosen rightly. But whether or not, if they did keep out the great Gentile literature—the "external books," as they called them,—they most certainly did "read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest" their own. And a religion that has absorbed into itself the ideas of the Hebrew Scriptures, a religion whose springs have been continually fed from that source, and whose ruling purpose was to serve and glorify the God revealed in those Scriptures, cannot have been, and assuredly was not, the hard and narrow formalism which its opponents have declared it to be.
These considerations have weight as evidence of what Pharisaism really was; and their weight has by no means been sufficiently taken into account; indeed, it has been ignored altogether in the commonly accepted estimates of the character of Pharisaism. Strong, however, as such general evidence is, I will further strengthen it by reference to the utterances of Pharisees themselves, taken from their own literature. And, out of many that I might choose, I will take such as bear more particularly upon the points raised in the strictures of Paul.
First, I will take the Pharisaic doctrine[14] of repentance and restoration, because it is on this that the antagonism of Paul is most pronounced, and the injury done by his method of treatment most serious. There is not in the Rabbinical literature a strict and clearly defined theological doctrine of repentance and restoration; but there is a general belief that the way of repentance is always open, by which a sinner may come back to God, and that God will forgive that sinner simply because he has repented. I will illustrate this by a few quotations from Rabbinical, that is, Pharisaical works.
In the Pesikta de R. Cahana (p. 165ª ed. Buber) the following occurs:—"The Holy One, blessed be He, said to Jeremiah (the prophet), 'Go and say to Israel, Repent.' He went and said to Israel ('Repent'). They said to him, 'Master, how can we repent? With what face can we come before God? Have we not angered him? Have we not provoked him? Those mountains and hills upon which we have worshipped false gods, are they not still standing?' Jeremiah came before the Holy One, blessed be He, and told Him. He answered, 'Go and say to them, If ye come to me, is it not to your Father in Heaven that ye come? For I have been a father unto Israel, and Ephraim is my firstborn.'"
Again, in the same work (p. 163b) R. Eleazar says: "It is the custom in the world that a man will insult his neighbour publicly, and afterwards seek to be reconciled to him. The other will say to him, 'Thou didst insult me publicly, and wouldst be reconciled between me and thee (i.e. privately). Go and bring those in whose presence thou didst insult me, and I will be reconciled to thee.' But the Holy One, blessed be He, doeth not so; but though a man stand and revile and blaspheme him in the open street, the Holy One says to him, 'Repent between thee and me, and I will receive thee.'"
A story is told (b. A. Zar. 17ª) of a man who was a particularly gross sinner, and who in the midst of his sins was struck with terror and remorse when it was said to him "Eleazar b. Dordaia will not be received in repentance." His frantic efforts to persuade some intercessor to plead for mercy on him are described in a passage too long to quote; but I translate the conclusion, which runs thus:—"Then he said, The matter hangeth only upon me (i.e. I must seek mercy for myself). He laid his head between his knees and groaned with weeping, until his soul departed from him; and there came a voice from heaven saying, 'R. Eleazar b. Dordaia is summoned to the life of the world to come.'" The purpose of that story is simply to teach that even the vilest sinner can repent, and that, if he does, he will be forgiven. It should be observed that the Talmud means by a sinner one who does definitely wicked actions—a sinner morally, not theologically. It should also be observed that, in the above story, the idea of an intercessor, by whom God might be moved to pardon, is pointedly rejected. The sinner does not plead either the merits of the Fathers, as might have been expected, or the merits of Christ, as according to Paul he ought to have done, if his peace with God were to be made. That he was forgiven, and that anyone in like case would be forgiven upon repentance, is the emphatic declaration of Pharisaic belief.
The Rabbis were fond of moralising upon the case of Manasseh, the idolatrous king; and the following passage contains one of the lessons they drew from it (j. Sanh. 28c). Manasseh, after he had been carried captive to Babylon and sat in prison there, said to himself: "'I remember how my father caused me to read in the house of assembly this verse (Deut. iv. 30), "When thou art in tribulation, and all these things shall befall thee, in the latter days thou shalt return to the Lord thy God and shalt hearken to His voice. For the Lord thy God is a merciful God; He will not fail thee, nor destroy thee, nor forget the covenant He made with thy fathers." Lo, I will say that, now. If God hear me, it is well; if not——.' But the ministering angels desired to shut the windows of heaven, so that the prayer of Manasseh might not ascend to the Holy One, blessed be He. For they said before Him, 'Lord of the worlds, wilt thou receive in penitence a man who has set up an image in thy sanctuary?' He answered them, 'If I received not him in penitence, lo, I bar the door against all penitents.' What, then, did the Holy One do? He made an opening beneath His throne of glory, and He heard his prayer. And this is what is written (2 Chron. xxxiii. 13), 'And he prayed unto Him, and He was entreated of him, and heard his supplication and brought him again to Jerusalem.'"
I have given these stories just as they stand, with their quaint and childish notions, because they reflect very clearly the fixed belief of their authors that man is not prevented from finding forgiveness and peace from God. He can always repent; and, if he does, God will always forgive him. That this belief makes possible a sort of easy presumption of forgiveness is a danger of whose reality the Pharisees were well aware; and they were careful to warn against it. But they never wavered in their belief that forgiveness did always follow on sincere repentance; and that no sinner need ever remain cut off from God by the barrier of his sin. The definite precepts of the Torah were divine commandments, certainly. But they did not make the Pharisee feel that if he disobeyed them there was no longer any hope for him, any possibility of ever finding his way back to the love of God. The passages I have quoted, and there are many others, and scores and hundreds of sayings about repentance which all teach the same lesson, are the utterance of Pharisees, of men who were steeped to the lips in Rabbinism, who gloried in the Torah, who delighted in the abundance of its precepts, and the consequent casuistry of the schools, and who felt in their hearts that love of God which they did their best to show forth by serving the Lord with gladness in the doing of His commandments.
However great be the difference between the Pharisee and the Christian in the form given to their respective conceptions of religion, the contents of their spiritual experience were to this extent alike, that for each there was, and is, the sense of personal relation to, and communion with, the Divine Being. For the Christian, at least for most Christians, the medium of that communion is Christ. For the Pharisee there is no medium; but there is, as the guide to show the way, and the light to shine upon it, the Torah. The Pharisee did not bring to his religious conceptions the penetrating power of analysis which has been applied by Christian theologians. There has never been a Pharisee who could have done what Paul or Augustine did in this respect, unless it was Maimonides. There will therefore not be found in Pharisaic literature the subtle distinctions of justification, sanctification, prevenient grace, etc., which abound in the great Christian writers.
But, none the less, the main terms are found, and the spiritual realities thereby signified were known in Pharisaic experience. Grace was known. The Holy Spirit was known. Faith was known. These and other of "the deep things of God" were objects of real experience and devout contemplation. Pious fancy played round them, and represented them in parable and allegory; but they were seldom if ever made the subject of close philosophical examination, nor were they formulated in defined doctrines.
Much is said about the Holy Spirit in the Pharisaic literature, without any attempt to make all that is said consistent. But, behind all such utterances, there is the unwavering belief in the direct communion of God with man. The Holy Spirit was naturally most often referred to in the case of the prophets, in whom its manifestation was most conspicuous. But its influence is implied in the fact of prayer, and is nowhere denied in regard to men in general. "Whatever the righteous do, they do it by the Holy Spirit." That is the utterance of a Pharisee (Tan?. Vaje?i, xiii. p. 110ª), and it is the key to the whole Pharisaic conception of the relation of man to God.
So, too, in regard to Faith, while the word does not appear so often on the pages of the Talmud as it does in the Epistles of Paul, the thing was an essential element in the religion of the Pharisees as it was in that of Paul. They never defined precisely what faith meant; it appears as a simple and unquestioning trust in God; and they thought about it after a simple fashion, without, however, being thereby shown to be wanting in it. "Great is faith," says a Midrash (Mechilta Beshall. ii. 6, 33b). "For Israel believed in Him who spake and the world was; and as a reward for believing in the Lord, the Holy Spirit rested on them, and they uttered a song: as it is written, 'They believed on the Lord.... Then sang Moses, etc.'" (Exod. xiv. 31; xv. 1). "And so you find" (continues the Midrash) "that Abraham our father did not inherit this world and the world to come except by the merit of faith, because he believed in the Lord. As it is written, 'And Abraham believed in the Lord, and He counted it to him for righteousness'" (Gen. xv. 6). R. Nehemiah said, "Everyone who receives even one commandment in faith is worthy that the Holy Spirit should rest on him." So even the Pharisees could appeal to the same Abraham, whom Paul called as a witness against them; and they did so with the most obvious sincerity, as having a perfect right to do so, and probably with complete ignorance that the Christian apostle had appealed to Abraham in support of his argument against their religion. And it was well done of the compiler of the Midrash to add the closing words of the passage I quoted; for I know of hardly any other saying which so illumines the inner side of Pharisaism as this, that "Every man who receives even one commandment in faith is worthy that the Holy Spirit should rest on him."
In all that I have said in the course of this chapter, I have had before me the purpose of showing what is true about the religion of the Pharisees upon those points which are affected by Paul's condemnation. True, Paul condemned it as a whole, as a system of thought and practice fundamentally and in principle contrary to what he regarded as the truth. But he only alleged certain features of Pharisaism as the sign and expression of its defect. He alleged its reliance upon the Law and its consequent non-reliance upon Christ. He drew certain conclusions from its alleged defects, and his conclusions have been accepted as valid ever since. I have therefore tried to show chiefly on these points what the Pharisees themselves thought and felt and believed; and have left out of notice other aspects of Pharisaism which were not challenged, and which might have been challenged with more reason than those which Paul actually chose. He might have made a strong case against the particularism of the Pharisees in comparison with the universalism of his own Gospel. For though it can be shown that the Pharisaic conception of religion did not exclude universalist ideas in regard to mankind in general, yet it can hardly be questioned that such ideas were but seldom touched upon and by no means conspicuous in the ordinary thought and debate of the Pharisees. Moreover, the Torah itself, which was to them so all important, was given only to Israel, and could serve only them as a means of salvation. If the Gentiles were to profit by it, they must do so in fellowship with Israel. And that made real universalism impossible, whatever might be the aspirations of this or that particular Rabbi. God offered the Torah, says the Midrash, to all the nations of the world; and all refused it except Israel. They had their chance, and rejected it. That is for Jews a not unnatural view, but it does not lead to universalism. Yet, if Paul had challenged Pharisaism on this its weakest side, instead of aiming his blows at an unreal creation of his own brain, he would not have been left unanswered. The Pharisees would have replied, "True, we have not grasped the idea of universalism in any effective way. But what does your own universalism amount to? Only to this, that amongst the elect, those whom you say God chooses out to be saved, the distinction of Jew and Gentile does not count. But neither for you nor for us is there any question of his actually saving all men. There is no real universalism at all. And there is this between us, that you tell of the wrath of God poured out on all mankind except the elect; you tell of Christ who in some way is the means of saving those elect; you hold that life in this present world is only a temporary captivity in an evil state from which there will be a speedy release at the coming of Christ in glory. To us there is no Christ; for we need none, except the Messiah, who shall come when God shall please, and who will do otherwise than he of whom you speak. But we need none to save us from our Father in Heaven, and none to persuade Him to forgive when else He would turn away. And this present life, in this present world, is to us not a vale of tears or a captivity in an evil state. It is the scene of our service of God. And that Torah, of which you have said such hard things,—you who once gloried in Torah yourself, and must have known, though now you have forgotten, how it was once "the light of all your seeing,"—that Torah is to us the guide of life, that shows us how in the small deeds of every day we can, if we will, do that which is pleasing to God. Yes, we fail sometimes; and as your own master said, "even if we did all the 'mitzvoth,' we should still be but unprofitable servants, having done only that which was our duty to do." Still, we serve Him with heart and soul, the best we can; and we count it nothing to have done only the mere act prescribed, without the intention of pleasing Him. We look to Him as our help and our shield, our Father and Lord, our strength and our redeemer. And He does not turn away from us. Go you and worship Him as you will; and if the Torah no longer says aught to you of what once it said, then seek the revelation of God elsewhere, and hear his voice in other tones. As for us we will "abide in the things we have learned, knowing from whom we have learned them." And so long as we are faithful to the trust that God committed to Israel, when He made him a nation, and gave him the Torah and raised up the prophets, and sent psalmists and wise men to teach their brethren, so long "may the Lord God be with us as He was with our fathers."
It is the Pharisee who has kept the promise of Israel; and to these latest days he keeps it still.
