Pharisaism, Its Aim And Its Method

rical

not surprising; for it was not in the nature of things that the adherents of the old religion should understand or be understood by those of the new, in the times when they parted company. And there has not been much attempt at mutual understanding in all the centuries since. Christianity could by no possibility have remained in union with Pharisaism; what Jesus began, and what Paul completed, was a severance as inevitable as it was painful. But it was painful because it was the dividing, not of the living from the dead, but of the living from the living. The Judaism of the Pharisees, from

ning of Pharisaism; but sympathy can show even to a Christian much of that meaning, and it is on the strength of that sympathy that I rest my hope of carrying out my present task. Briefly, I wish to show what Pharisaism meant to the Pharisees themselves, as a religion having a claim to be judged on its own merits, and not by comparison with any other. The knowledge thus obtained will throw light upon many passages

lear idea of who the Pharisees were and what they stood for, and a more just appreciation of them than is indicated by the word "hypocrites." I

l deal with the theory of Torah, and Pharisaism as the system intended to put that theory into practice. Then I shall consider Pharisaism in reference, firstly, to Jesus, and, seco

torical survey of the de

ist, Judaism was represented by Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, Apocalyptists, Hellenists; and all could claim a share in the inheritance of Israel. But the Sadducees had little reason to set up a descent from Ezra; and what was peculiar to Apocalyptists and Hellenists (two terms which of course overlap) was entirely unconnected with him. Pharisaism alone was the result of his work; and Pharisaism alone survived, to carry down through the centuries the spiritual treasure of Israel. Moreover, of all the elements in Judaism, Pharisaism is the one which was least affected by foreign influences. What it borrowed, from Greece or Rome, from Persia or Egypt, it fused into its own mould, or merely treated as unimportant curiosities; it never wavered for a m

zra in particular. But without some reference to that theory I cannot show what it was that Ezra did, and that the Pharisees carried on. If some of the stateme

of their fathers. Subjects of the Persian king, like their neighbours, they were exposed to dangers, both political and religious, against which they were ill able to guard. They had the Temple as the central point of their religion; but the Temple was no protection against the influence of contact with "the peoples round ab

tality of Israel was draining away, and he gave a lead, opened a new line of development, turned th

It was a case in which "diseases desperate grown, by desperate appliance are relieved." Ezra had it clear in his mind that if Israel was to survive at all, it must resolutely cut itself off from all possible contact with what was not Israel. It must become a closed corporation, a community occupying not merely a political but much more a religious and social enclosure of its own, within whic

there was nothing which could demand so hard a sacrifice as that which he would force upon them. Why should they not live in peace with their neigh

what that will was. The great declaration: "Hear, O Israel, the Lord thy God the Lord is one," was immediately followed by: "and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might." If Israel now asked how he was to do this, Ezra's answer was that God had taught him in the Torah, contained in the five books of Moses. Henceforth let Israel "observe to do all that is written in this book of the Torah." That solemn promulgation of the Torah, described in the book of Nehemiah, is the central point of the reformation of Ezra, whether it were only the Priestly Code which was then introduced or whether it were the Pentateuch substantially complete. What Ezra did was to set up a written a

perform there. If I say that Ezra was the second founder of the religion of Israel, I do not mean to imply that everything in the later Judaism owed its origin to him, still less that what survived from the pre-exilic Judaism was only what he endorsed and gave out again. The older religion had come down from a far-distant past; the ancient writings, prophetic, historical, legal, were witnesses of God's former dealings with His people; they still had the memory, as t

t from those principles; but nevertheless, if it had not been for Ezra there would have been no Judaism sufficiently alive to protest, or sufficiently vigorous to

st be someone whose business it was to study the Torah and explain its contents, and to show how the precepts it contained were to be applied to cases not directly provided for. Teaching of that kind, to the extent at all events of giving instruction in moral and religious duties, had been given from time immemorial, and mainly by the priests. And there were still priests who could, and probably did, perform the same function. But the case was now different when every Jew was expected to know the commandments of the Torah, and was directly concerned with their bearing upon his own actions. This new necessity of the time was met by the labours of a new class of men, viz. the Scribes (Sopherim). It is significant that Ez

" to which were attributed certain ancient institutions and sayings. That the statements in the Talmud about the Great Synagogue are all historically trustworthy is by no means the case. But the Rabbis who are responsible for those statements may well have been right in the main fact, though not in the details. The Great Synagogue, as they represented it, is clearly based upon the description of the assembly in Neh. x. And there is nothing to show that that assembly, or anything like it, became a permanent institution. But an assembly of some kind, a council of men "learned in the law," is the most natural form which would be taken by such a central authority as the system instituted by Ezra required for its successful working. It must remain an open question whether such a council was permanent, its members being chosen for life, or whether it was such an assembly as might be called together, ad hoc, from time to time, whether the number of its members was fixed, and on what conditions and by whom they were appoi

n of the Great Synagogue." That term represents the Sopherim acting together as a council to decide religious questions; a council not necessarily permanent, but called together from time to time as occasion might require. But it would be a council of Sopherim, not of all the leading men of the nation. The authority in public matters was, under the Persian governor, in the hands of the priestly aristocracy, whose interests lay in other directions besides that of the study of Torah. What was done by the Sopherim, and those with and for whom they worked, was done privately and without official sanction. The Rabbinical tradition which mentions the Zūgōth, or pairs, and calls one the Nasi and the other the Ab-beth-din, and

agogue: "Be deliberate in judgment; make many disciples; make a hedge for the Torah." It will be of use at this point to consider these sa

it thus: "Rabbi so-and-so said that the Men of the Great Synagogue had said, etc." There is no hint that the three maxims are anything else but an old tradition; and the fact that these and no more are ascribed to the Men of the Great Synagogue indicates, by its very moderation, some reason for so ascribing them. A capricious inventor would have attributed much more to so ancient an authority, in order to obtain for his inventions the sanction of high antiquity. There is really nothing improbable in the transmission, even from the time of Ezra, of these bare fragments of ancient teaching. Their contents are in keeping with this supposition; and, if they were a later invention, they nevertheless accurately describe what the men of Ezra's time must chiefly have had at heart. They are instructions to d

rim collectively agreed upon, for their own practice as interpreters and judges. Deliberation in judgment is the key to the casuistry of the Talmud, and in the main justifies that casu

shnah, Midrash, all imply the idea of teaching and learning-study as regarded either by the student or the instructor. In this larger relation, the minor one of discipleship to a particular teacher holds b

y the "hedge about the Torah" was the means taken to keep the divine revelation from harm, so that the sacred enclosure, so to speak, might always be free and open for the human to contemplate and commune with the divine. And, so far as the Torah consisted of precepts, positive and negative, the "hedge" was of the nature of warnings whereby a man might be saved from transgression before it was too late. The detailed mass of precept elaborated in the course of centuries, known as the Halachah (see Chapter II.) or rule of right conduct, and finally embodied in the Talmud, was part of the Torah itself made explicit, the divine teachi

learly understood, all the subsequent developments are easy to follow. I have not yet mentioned Pharisaism, except here and there in passing. But, given such a principle as is contained in Ezra's concept

on of Torah, on the lines of Ezra, was made the religion of the majority of the nation. And, while it was held with varying degrees of understanding and attachment, we may note that there were two institutions or usages which mark the points where the religion of Torah took deepest and strongest hold upon the national mind. These were the rite of circumcision and the observance of the Sabbath. I do not mean that circumcision had not been practised, nor the Sabbath observed, in times previous to Ezra, but that these became especially prominent after his time as the sine qua non of Judaism, essentials to be maintained at any cost. The institution of the Synagogue provided a means of developing the spiritual life of the people in a way that the Temple ritual hardly could and certainly did not do. And although, as long as the Temple stood, that was regarded as the most sacred shrine a

ideal, no one would maintain. In the nature of things the spiritual energy, which was mighty in Ezra, could not continue with unimpaired force through the centuries after he was gone. In fact, there is no one to compare with him in this respect until R. Akiba, at the end of the first Christian century. But it is far from true to say that the spiritual meaning of the religion of Torah, as above described, was lost sight of, or even greatly obscured, in the generations which succeeded Ezra. If that had been the case, there would have been no Maccabean revolt. For the tenacity of adhesion and the fierceness of resistance cannot be explained merely by blind loyalty to a tradition whose inner meaning was no longer understood and its

may have influenced the Jewish religion in some respects; but there was never any question of a secession from Judaism to the religion of Persia. Within the range of Judaism the worship of the God of Israel was the only worship; and while some might be zealous and others

ng had their representatives. Greek builders erected temples and theaters to be the visible symbols of a foreign religion, and of practices alien to Jewish ideas of morality. The Greek met the Jew at every turn; and the Jew would not have been human if he had been wholly unaffected by that close association. The brilliance of Greek culture made it attractive both on its good and on its bad side, its exquisite sense of beauty and its shameless gaiety of vice. Its natural fascination was incr

holly immune from it. Its effects were most conspicuous in the ranks of the wealthy and powerful, the nobles and the priestly aristocracy who came into closest relations with the court and depended most upon the royal favour. But H

a few who remained unflinching in their loyalty to the ancestral faith. That this was really the case, is shown by the fact that a special name was applied to those who thus rigidly adhered to the principles and maintained to the fullest extent the practices of Judaism as the religion of Torah. If they had been the majority of the nation they would not have needed or received any special name. These faithful few were the ?asidim, the Assideans of the Books of Maccabees. Thus Hellenists an

. The ?asidim only fought for their religion. It was dire necessity which turned them from passive resisters into active fighters. They joined Mattathias and his companions because only by fighting could the Torah now be defended, for whose sake hitherto they had been willing to suffer and die. Mattathias rebelled because the royal power was being used to u

ed that the ?asidim were the first to desire peace (1 Macc. vii. 13). And later on, when the Maccabean princes reaped the fruits of the wa

e Jewish people under the Maccabean princes. But the significance

as now at the head of the Jewish state a Jewish prince, able to hold his own against foreign powers. The religion of Torah was, nominally at lea

o the governing class. There was, therefore, again a movement towards a stricter interpretation of the Torah and a more thorough-going obedience to its requirements, on the part of a minority on the one side, to correspond with the movement towards what might be called "worldliness" on the part of a minority on the other side. These two extremes had names by which they were distinguished.

generation the teachers and expounders of the Torah, as there were always those who depended on the guidance of such teachers. The name of the Men of the Great Synagogue had passed out of use, as it was believed that the institution itself came to an end. But the Rabbinical tradition recorded the names of those who successively handed on the teaching in which the meaning of the Torah was unfolded, and its application to new conditions indicated. The line of this descent is through the Pharisees and not through the Sadducees. Not because the Sadducees did not care about the religion of Torah; but because the Pharisees, strange as it may sound, kept the religion of Torah as a living principle, capable of being adapted and needing to be adapted to fresh developments of religious life, while the Sadducees held to the letter of the original scripture, and refused innovations. The practical bearing of this appears in the fact that the Sadducees kept in their own hands, as long as they could, not merely the governing authority, but the judicial power in criminal cases. And t

ancient calendar, known as Megillath Taanith, marks the 14th Tammuz (July) as a festival, because on that day the Sadducean

ealous for the religion of Torah, and most thorough-going in the application of i

presenting all that was left alive of Judaism; but the name was no longer needed, and seldom if ever used. The Jewish remnant were n

es. The Essenes stand apart from the main body of the Jewish people; they were ascetics and recluses, of more than Pharisaic strictness (for asceticism was not a characteristic feature of Pharisaism either in pr

d by the Pharisees, and least drawn to them. Such would be not only the careless and indifferent, but also those who, for higher reasons, did not readily fall in with the Pharisaic system, or to whom religion as presented by them was not acce

Elders can be traced in the Mishnah up to the time of the early Sopherim, not far distant from Ezra; it is the thread which binds together the development, through ?asidim and Pharisaism, of the Jewish religion. And it marks the course of the main stream of Judaism far on through the centuries. The Essenes vanished. The Sadducees were swept away when the Temple was destroyed. It was the Pharisees who alone could or did weather that storm, and carry the divine treasure of the religion of Torah into safety. Already, in the time when Jesus was a boy, Hillel the Babylonian had applied his genius to the interpretation of Torah in ways which gave it a fresh power of ministry to spiritual wants. And when, seventy years later, the catastrophe came, the man was ready who should go forth from Jerusalem, and establish for the ancient religion a "temple not made with hands." Jo?anan ben Zaccai was that man. When he saw that the city was doomed, he went to the Emperor Vespasian, and made his submission to the force that could no longer be resisted (b. Gitt. 56b). The Emperor asked what he should giv

of them, was tortured to death, there were still left those who would carry on the tradition of their religion. These were young men who received ordination as Rabbis, when it meant death to be a Rabbi at all, if he should fall into the hands of the Romans. It is told (b. Sanh. 14a) of R. Jehudah b. Baba, that he took six of his disciples into a secluded spot and there ordained t

ut I add the few words necessary to round off the bare account

ich were doubtful, and thus framed a code of law for the guidance of all Jews. This collection is the Mishnah; and the text as we have it now represents, in the main, the code of Rabbi. There are, of course, interpolations and additions to it. There is another great collection known as Tosephta, containing a good deal of the same material; it is nearly contemporary, but it has never had the same authority as the Mishnah. The date of the Mishnah can be put at about the year 210. Rabbi died in 219. The Mishnah became in its turn the subject of study in the Rabbinical schools, and two fresh lines of tradition begin from this point, each of them starting with a disciple of Rabbi. One of them is the line of

ble of carrying on the work; and in Babylonia, though much more was done, a final completion was never reached. After the beginn

t has left upon the literature of the world. It is there, and not in the writings of those who did not understand its ideals or share its hopes, that its real meaning can alone be found. Those ideals and hopes first dawned in Jewish minds under the influence of Ezra. The Talmud is the witness to show how some of his countrymen, some of the bravest, some of the ablest, some of the most pious and saintly, and a host of unnamed faithful, were true to those ideals and clung to those hopes; and how, through good repo