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Tom
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ARTICLE
NAVIGATION: You are presently looking at Part 1.4  In this continuation of part I, Tom Lee's principal focus is in exploring the origin of some of the beliefs that later became important in the Christian tradition. The
Invention of Christianity and the Papacy The influence of the various Jewish sects… In the words of Rabbi Isidore Epstein in his book Judaism (Penguin 1959): "The Pharisees taught and interpreted the Torah, adjudicated in its name in all matters, religious and moral, and proceeded to adjust its ordinances to changed conditions, while all the time laboring with their countrymen for more faithful observance of the divine precepts and fanning in them the messianic hopes for the restoration of Israel to its ancient national glories and greatness, and the enthronement of the one and only God among the sons of men." They also sought loopholes in the Law; part of an ongoing dialogue with God, which continues to this day. Reported by Jane Kramer in the New Yorker; "Jewish culinary expert Claudia Roden remembers the excitement, in the richer precincts of Northwest London, in regard to the injunction in Leviticus 'anything in sea or river' when a board of rabbis announced the discovery of a vestigial scale on a baby sturgeon, and caviar went on sale."
It was not necessary for Gentiles to enter the covenant with Abraham by circumcision or the covenant with Moses by taking upon themselves the yoke of the Law. It sufficed that they govern their lives by the primeval laws given to Noah and principally to abjure the three major sins of idolatry, fornication and murder. They did not cease to be Gentiles, but were to be accepted as entitled to all the care and privileges of the stranger within the gates. The synagogues attracted not only Jews, but also many Greeks and Romans who found the belief in One God more reasonable than the pagan pantheon. The Trastevere district of the city of Rome was a populous Jewish quarter before the time of Jesus. The aim to enlighten the Gentiles was particularly dear to the Pharisees, rooted in the admonition in the third book of Isaiah: "Foreigners who have attached themselves to Yahweh to serve him and to love his name and be his servants — all who observe the Sabbath, not profaning it, and cling to my covenant — these will I bring to my holy mountain. I will make them joyful in my house of prayer. Their holocausts and their sacrifices will be accepted on my altar, for my house will be called a house of prayer for all the peoples." Origin of the mission to the Gentiles… It was from his strong Pharisaic background that St. Paul derived his deep desire to become a missionary to the Gentiles, so that when he had a vision of Jesus as the Messiah the mandate he received reflected what was already in his heart. The Pharisees' agents or assistants were the Scribes, or doctors of the Law. Qualified jurists they gathered around them disciples, and it was they who decided what details of conduct were required in order to give practical effect to the Law. Disciple and discipline are almost the same word. They spoke Aramaic, the Hebrew of the bible being a dead language no longer widely understood. Twenty-five percent of ancient Hebrew words have disputed meanings. Latter-day spoken Hebrew re-emerged with the Zionists of the nineteenth century. The Scribes and Pharisees were not priests with sacramental powers, but laymen whose eminence depended on their legal, religious and linguistic scholarship. The Scribes and Pharisees wielded powerful influence not only over public opinion but also in the Council, the Sanhedrin, at Jerusalem. Under the direction of the High Priest it controlled national religious policy and relations with the Roman occupying power. The dominant leaders in Jerusalem were the Sadducees (Zadokim), so named after their founder Zadok. They directed worship and commerce in the Temple and, Josephus confirms, openly collaborated with the Romans. A relatively small and select group, dominated by influential and wealthy men, the Sadducees were mostly landowners on a substantial scale. It was from the Sadducee ranks that the high priest was appointed, and most important were those who organized the many activities in the Temple, the ancient priestly clan known as Levites. Different interpretations of "The Law"… Incensed at the assertive self-aggrandizement of the Sadducees, the Jewish historian Josephus (37-95), himself a Pharisee and a former Jewish priest and general who went over to the Romans, tells us that many priests and Levites fled to the wilderness where they joined the sects of Zadokites and Essenes, distinct religious orders organized in camps and communities for the purpose of practicing the Law in purity. Like the Persian Zoroastrians, the Magi, the Essenes envisaged a final struggle between the forces of Light and Darkness. Those who lived in community remained celibate, but there were married adherents living in the cities, generally together in tight-knit communities, a model the early Christian's seem to have imitated. Qumran scrolls expert Geza Vermes said of them: "I noticed that as a rule no two copies of the same document were strictly identical. There were always some verbal differences. The order of the paragraphs varied. One text was longer than another. The documents were frequently revised by later editors. I concluded from this that plurality of the textual tradition preceded the unity to which we are accustomed in the transmission of texts. This applies to Biblical, non-scriptural and specifically sectarian (Essene) texts alike. This means that the ultimate unification of a textual tradition was due to the intervention of later representatives of doctrinal the intervention of later representatives of doctrinal authority (rabbis, Church) that could not tolerate variants in a text that was declared binding. In my view, this priority of the multiple as against the unified tradition relates to the text of the Hebrew Bible, rabbinic law, as well as to the New Testament." The Biblical texts evolved over the centuries from tightly interconnected layers of accumulated materials, re-used and re-cast from earlier sources, sometimes resulting in conflicting passages and different theological perspectives within the same book. In modern parlance, they cut-and-pasted earlier sources together. Below the layers of written text are the layers of history written by various groups of Jewish scribes; a history of successes and setbacks in changing cultural and ideological environments.
Many of the old priestly caste that preceded the Sadducees had been eliminated by the half-Greek Herod the Great and replaced by the king's appointees. By the first century CE the behavior of the Sadducee chief priests had become a scandal. They often bought the office of high priest from the Romans and were arrogant, avaricious and oppressive. A wicked priest features prominently in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Son of David… Among religious Jews it was believed that God would raise-up a new priest to whom the word of the Lord would be revealed, and that soon the righteous Son of David would appear. In the Israelite ceremony of accession the king was installed as "Son of Yahweh", adopted as son. And a successor of David was expected, who as "Son" of God would ascend the ancestral throne and establish the Davidic rule over Israel forever. When initially applied to Jesus, the title had nothing to do with Jesus' nativity but only with the legal and authoritative status awarded him by his followers. The messianic belief that foreign oppressors would be overthrown was acutely embarrassing to the pro-Roman aristocracy of priests and Sadducees, who supported collaboration with the Roman occupying power, represented by the governor of Judaea, subordinate to the Legate of Syria. The governor in return recognized the high priest as his intermediary with the Jewish people as a whole. Though the Sadducees were extreme nationalists, in order to bolster their own rule, they quite sensibly sought to suppress rebellion and dissident groups, in order to avoid the retaliatory actions with which the Romans would inevitably respond. The focus of the Sadducee's power was the Temple and the ceremonial sacrifices of animal flesh and blood, which seemed to them a great deal more important than the minute Pharisaic and Scribal discussions about how to interpret the scriptures, especially Mosaic Law. The Sadducees were fundamentalists who accepted the scriptures in their written form just as they were and rejected and denounced oral glosses. They feared both distortion of the ancient words and the undermining of their own political power. They dismissed all speculation about the Messiah as subversive; a plot aimed at more than twenty other sects of Judaism, proclaimed the coming of a messiah who would deliver the Jews from the evil of the Roman yoke. The Temple was in large part an abattoir and the whole sacrificial system had become an exploitative racket fixed up between the priests and the suppliers of sacrificial birds and beasts. They made a good percentage profit on changing coinage as well, only the image-free coins minted in Jerusalem being acceptable when purchasing sacrificial animals at the Temple. To the Sadducees, God was essentially a national God, the God of Israel only; to the Pharisees He was a universal God, the God of all mankind. The two parties had been, in the time of Herod the Great, active competitors for control of the State. By the time of Jesus' ministry most of the Pharisees had withdrawn from active politics, resigned to the belief that there was nothing acceptable under the Law that could humanly be done to rid their country of the Roman grip. It was the Pharisees' belief that the God of the Jews was the God of all men that laid the basis for eventual Papal claims to rule all men in the name of that God. Oral tradition, and life-after-death beliefs… The Pharisees (Perushim, separatists) brought into Judaism elements which exist either faintly or not at all in the Old Testament, claiming for themselves an oral tradition that they believed to be as valid as the written documents; a claim that Christian theorists and dogmatists would appropriate for themselves at a later date. The Old Testament says almost nothing about life after death, but the Pharisees taught a doctrine of the resurrection of the dead, which would happen when the Messiah came. In the Gospels, it appears this was Jesus' teaching also and he was as vague as the Pharisees about the details. It took the Christians three or four centuries to work out a .complete system of Heaven, Hell, and Resurrection. The post mortem alternatives, Purgatory and Limbo were not fully formulated until the twelth century. As Karen Armstrong has written: "It's really only Christianity and Islam that are obsessed with after life ... Religion is supposed to be about the loss of ego, not about its eternal survival." The Pharisees also believed in the existence of multitudes of invisible beings; the angels who were messengers and assistants of God, and the demons who were evil spirits dedicated to doing harm. In the words of Stephen Millhauser: "And then, lovely touch, the invention of an after life, a noisy eternity filled with the racket of rejoicing angels". The Jews were clearly borrowing from the Babylonian, Persian and Egyptian religions with which Judaism had been in close contact for centuries. Jesus seems to have taken for granted the Pharisaical doctrines on spirits. His ministry and miracles, as reported in the Gospels, present a world thronged with invisible beings. During Jesus' boyhood the leading Pharisees were divided into two main schools of Mishna, adding Greek reason to Jewish revelation. Founded about 35 BCE by the rabbis Shammai (c.50 BCE-c.30 CE) and Hillel (late 1st c. BCE-early 1st c. CE), both rabbis taught regularly in Jerusalem and attracted multitudes of disciples. These teachers concerned themselves mainly with questions of conduct, morality and the preservation of the Law. Two influential rabbis: Shammai and Hillel… Shammai's school, like the Zoroastrians, taught that souls would be purified of their sins by the fire of the Last Judgment, but Hillel's followers went further and said that following the Judgment they would come to a place of bliss. According to Alexandrian Jewish philosopher Philo, the Essenes had adopted the Greek notion of immortality and believed that souls no longer went, even temporarily, into the kingdom of the dead. Instead they were received immediately into heaven. Shammai was interested in the technicalities of the Torah, the impedimenta of the Law, especially property rights, while Hillel concentrated more on the spirit behind it. But he did abrogate the law of Deuteronomy (XV, I-II) requiring cancellation of debts every seven years. Asked to summarize the Torah, Hillel, in a famous phrase, said: "Do not unto others that which is hateful to you; this is the whole law". Hillel may have been an influence upon Jesus and as a boy he could have heard the sage's followers teach, if he was brought to any of the Festivals in Jerusalem, but the visit to the Temple when he was twelve, solely in Luke, may be apocryphal embroidery. Jesus' native country of Galilee was home to the militant Zealots, dedicated to helping along the work of the Lord by armed guerilla attacks. They advocated active resistance to unholy government, castigating the collaborating priesthood in Jerusalem, and regularly assassinated fellow Jews whom they believed to have supported or aided the Romans. The Zealots (from the Greek zelotes, meaning enthusiasts) also looked to the imminent coming of the Messiah. One of them, Simon the Zealot, was to follow Jesus, and the brothers James and John, the so-called Sons of Thunder, may also have been former members of this hot-headed and unforgiving group of patriots. The Zealot's reaction to Graeco-Roman influence was not unlike that of fundamentalist Muslims to what they view as the baneful influence of Western society upon their culture and countries, in the twenty-first century. Young Roman soldiers were probably as bewildered by the virulent opposition to their presence as young American soldiers and their allies were in post-Saddam Iraq.
The neighboring Samaritans, like the Jews, were in expectation of a prophet like Moses. They rejected rabbinic interpretation of scripture and confined themselves to the literal application of the Pentateuch, becoming more and more detached from the center of Jewish tradition. For Samaritans, Mount Gerizim, where Moses was said to have hidden the sacred vessels, was the most sacred of mountains. The true Temple could therefore only be established on Gerizim, and the Temple set up at Jerusalem was an act of Jewish apostasy. In the fourth century BCE, Manasseh, brother of a Jewish high priest, wed Nicaso, daughter of Sanballat, a ruler of the Samaritans. Jewish officials told Manasseh to end the marriage. To keep him, Sanballat built a replica of Jerusalem's Second Temple and made him high priest. In 1996, Israeli archaeologist Yitzhak Magen, excavating on Mount Gerizim in the West Bank, found the replica, burned by Judaeans in 113 BCE. It was beneath the remains of a Byzantine church. Discovered were coins, bones of sacrificial animals, an altar, religious inscriptions, a gold amphora, and a gate similar to a Second Temple gate described in a Dead Sea Scroll. The Samaritans… The Samaritans believed that the sacred vessels would be brought to light in an era when God's favor would be restored, an event to be initiated by the advent of the Taheb, the Restorer. Through him the Law given to Moses would be re-stated and universally acknowledged. The Samaritans were mixed-race descendants of Assyrian settlers who took over Samaria and intermarried with Jews when the area was conquered by the Assyrian king seven centuries before the Roman occupation. Pious Jews, including Jesus, avoided Samaritan territory, not just because of religious differences. Like most tribesmen anywhere the Samaritans set much store both by the principles of hospitality, and an eye for an eye. Jesus' attitude to Gentiles (mainly Latins and Greeks but effectively anyone not Jewish) was extremely uncompromising. His reputed description of them as dogs or swine expresses contempt and distaste. His mission was solely to his fellow Jews. The circumstances pertaining at the time of Jesus prompted him to believe that he might be the expected Messiah or his forerunner, and that a glorious restoration of the Jewish nation was at hand. Any Gentiles attracted to him or his teaching would have cared little for any claim that he was Messiah of the Jews, with its generally expected kingly role. His apparent healing abilities and evident spirituality as he preached faith in the One God and survival of earthly death seem to have been the principal attractions. In Matthew 7:28, Jesus speaks of what will happen to true disciples and to those who do not measure-up. The original Greek says that the crowds were frightened by Jesus' teaching; watered down in modern translations to "astonished," or, in the Jerusalem Bible "made a deep impression." Alexandria… Apart from Palestine, the main Jewish center was Alexandria in Egypt, where about a quarter of the population was Jewish. By about 280 BCE the Hebrew language was barely understood and it became necessary to provide the Greek-speaking Jews with a Greek version of the Hebrew scriptures. First the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament ascribed to Moses) was translated, and the translation of the rest of the bible soon followed. Known as the Septuagint in memory of the symbolic seventy elders who are said to have participated in the work, it is the oldest version of the Bible in any foreign tongue, and while primarily intended for the use of the Hellenized Jews, it found its way into many affluent pagan homes. It carried the message of Judaism to the heathen world, attracting in the process numerous converts from among both higher and lower classes. When Paul came to preach to the Greeks and Romans, he did not preach a totally strange creed. Literate pagans were already familiar with the Old Testament. Greek and Jewish communities lived side-by-side in a state of perpetual tension; and some time in the first century BCE the Alexandrian Greeks started a rumor that the god of the Jews had the form of a donkey, an idea inspired by the fact that the Jewish name of God, Yahweh, somewhat resembled the Egyptian word for donkey.  ARTICLE
NAVIGATION: You are presently looking at Part 1.4 PHOTO CREDITS:
The image of the Rising Sun used in the headline and footer graphics graphics
was taken by Ines Mad. Linz, Austria and sourced through stock.xchng.
What are your thoughts on this commentary? You can contribute to the discussion in our forum. ©2008 Tom Lee (Star Concepts LLC) 15633 N. 17* Drive, Phoenix, AZ 85023-3409 |
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