Legalism and Faith (4)
The Law in the Hands of the Pharisees
Development of the Pharisaic Traditions
(Bible Study - April 1999)
613 rules
Even without the golden calf incident, however, what would Israel’s future bring,
now that they had already become enslaved to the bondage of law? They had asked for rules,
and rules God gave them, 613 by their count. God wanted from them the fruits of
righteousness and faith, but He found only the wild grapes of rampant legalism and
unmitigated immorality (Isa. 5:2). The test of living by law failed horrifically.
By works of the law, flesh proved it could not justify itself.
What happened during the millennium-and-a-half of the law? How did Israel get from the debauchery of Sinai to the legalistic piety of the Pharisees? How did the Pharisees become the religious establishment of Jesus’ day? Where did they originate, and how did they develop their meticulous approach to religion? How did the Pharisees handle the law, and what did they find so offensive about Jesus? We ask these questions not so much to satisfy our historical curiosity, but to provide the necessary background to understand a key feature of the gospels.
The Sabbath battleground
We have said already the Pharisees provided a contrast to Jesus the Messiah (Tidings,
1/99). Everything he stood for in true righteousness, as the full manifestation of the
Father, they stood for in false piety and legalistic purity. Their Sabbath rituals stood
at the acme -- or shall we say the nadir? -- of their worship, so Jesus honed in on this
issue -- the Sabbath -- as his primary battleground for the gospel of grace.
To understand the meaning of this contest fully, we must first take a brief historical overview to reveal what motivated the Pharisees, and to understand how they operated religiously. We will look at the development of the Pharisees’ religion to realize the significance of the greatest theological contest ever -- Jesus vs. the Pharisees on the Sabbath. Just as we looked at the Law itself in its historical and theoretical context in our last article, we will now look at the Pharisees, and cast the contrasting darkness of legalism against the light of the gospel of grace.
A brief theological history of Israel
Israel served God through the law for approximately fifteen hundred years. Starting at
Sinai with two tablets of stone and ending in Jerusalem with the veil of the temple rent
in two, the law reigned as king but never had power to save. Apart from a few brief
reformations, it never ruled the spirit of Israel. But it did beget, over a period of
centuries, the greatest compilation of religious minutiae the world has ever seen.
During the judges
Had Israel lived ideally after God gave them the law, they would have entered the
land, lived faithfully in accord with its principles, and rejoiced in God’s blessings
and protection. Unfortunately, we don’t read anything close to that. After the
priests bore the ark in Jordan’s crossing and led the march around Jericho, then
what? How much do we really hear about the operation of the law thereafter? Very little.
The period of the judges could have been a time of peace, faithful worship and moral development for Israel. Instead, Israel’s repeated backsliding and whoring with the foreign gods brought them repeated periods of oppression. We read almost nothing about the operation, let alone the positive effects, of the law. Instead, Levitical leadership and national unity disappeared.
During the first few hundred years or so of Israel’s life under the law, they had no prophetic voice. They added no sacred writings, such as from a psalmist. They had no recorded worship. The law seems to have disappeared into a closet. Only in the spiritual oasis of the Book of Ruth, whose events probably occurred in the mid-Judges period, do we read about any significant recognition and utilization of the law. The first few hundred years in the land showed startlingly little acknowledgment of the law.
Under the monarchy
The law did better in the period of the monarchs. We read of a few reformations, notably
those of Josiah and Hezekiah. David, Solomon, and others wrote most of Psalms, Proverbs,
Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon. The prophets repeatedly referred to the law in calling
Israel back to the spirit of its worship. Although the overall piety of the nation
remained unacceptably low, at least God’s word had regained its status as a moral
standard and guiding light of the faithful. The Levitical priests maintained religious
leadership, and the prophets warned against mere formal worship without moral regeneration
(Psa. 50:13,14; Amos 8:5,6). Through the end of the monarchy, though, we know nothing of
any group of scribes or hyper-legalistic movement developing.
During the exile
The Babylonian exile provided the first venues for the development of the
Pharisees’ direct ancestors. Separated from their land and the temple, Israel’s
national identity verged on dissolution. The Bible alone defined the people, and
synagogues led by learned teachers arose.
In The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah, Alfred Edersheim gives a good account of Jewish activities in Babylonia during and after the exile. Compelled by a duty to preserve Torah, its teachings and its applications, those learned in scripture began, in a formal sense, the great era of oral tradition. They added and compiled oral laws and traditions. They defined, legislated, and taught. Their academic activities bolstered their status among the people as keepers of God’s law. Those who returned from Babylon (according to Edersheim’s sources, only a small percentage of their population returned) brought with them interpretations, laws, methods, and traditions. Even though they would come back to Jerusalem to rebuild the Temple, the spiritual center of Israel now had divided loyalties. The Temple and the oral traditions would eventually become the respective bases of the Sadducees and the Pharisees.
Although the Pharisees arose around the middle of the second century B.C., they would claim antecedence to Ezra, whom they would venerate as the first scribe (Ezra 7:6, 10, 21). Skilled in the law, a teacher and a leader in Israel, he created the role which Pharisees would strive to replicate for centuries to come. When Ezra and his fellow Levites read the law to the nation, they also gave the sense (Neh. 8:7-8). In the thinking of their followers, they had sanctioned the process of commentary and clarification and sanctified the process of oral tradition. First given by God to Moses, the succession of the law, according to the Mishnah (which is the division of the Talmud containing the codified oral law), then went to Joshua, the priests, and now, to the learned scribes (Mishnah, Abot, I:1:B). These scribes were first known as soferim, from sofer, "counter" because their punctilious methods included the very counting of the letters in the Bible. They were the custodians of the law, and to them fell the responsibility of maintaining its purity. For three hundred years, they ruled the religious life of Israel.
Levitical influence diminishes
At first, all the soferim were of Levi. Another group of learned laymen, also
skilled in the law and well versed in the oral clarifications and explanations, arose as a
parallel but largely independent movement. It was this sector of lay scribes that gave
direct birth to the Pharisees. Lay influence increased greatly during the time of the
Seleucid Empire (the Greek-based dynasty ruling from Syria) two centuries before the birth
of the Lord Jesus.
The Greeks oppressed the Jews, eventually leading to the Maccabean revolt. It was, however, this oppression that strengthened the Phrasisees’ position. Hastings’ Bible Dictionary, summarizing several ancient sources, tells how many of the priestly class, especially of the aristocracy, adopted Hellenism as a means to save their positions, and even their lives. They distanced themselves from the Pharisees, who espoused both patriotic and religious zeal. The priests, rejecting the oral laws and most of the canonically accepted Bible, maintained only a tenuous theological connection to Judaism via adherence to Torah only. This group, of course, developed into the Sadducees. They eventually lost much of their influence with the people, and the priesthood became largely political and symbolic.
Pharisees emerge as leaders
On the other hand, the lay soferim, mostly from the lay and non-aristicrotatic
priestly classes zealously maintained national identity through religion. They grew
stronger in opposing the Greek overlords, and won support from common people. They refused
any accommodation, preferring the honor of martyrdom to the corruption of Hellenism. A
thousand perished in a massacre when they refused to defend themselves on the Sabbath (Josephus,
Antiq. XII.6.2). Mattathias, father of Judas Maccabee, taught that the people should
defend themselves on the Sabbath, lest they perish entirely. They did so but only to
protect their religious freedom, not to acquire political independence.
The soferim believed the survival of their national identity depended directly on their adherence to the great oral traditions. Preservation of this revered body of teaching became their raison d’etre. The soferim accepted foreign hegemony as God’s will. If they could but practice the traditions of their fathers, they could live contentedly. If all Israel kept the law, they believed God would raise up a Messiah who would overthrow their dominators and restore their political Kingdom.
The name "Pharisee" came into use about 150 years before Jesus’ birth. Although scholars don’t know for sure who coined the term, we do know that the name means "separated ones." Whether signifying their resistance against Greek ways, or placed on them derisively by the Greeks or some Jews, the name reflected a key aspect of the Pharisees’ existence. Using the laws as protecting fences, they sought to separate themselves from all defilement, whatever its origin, Jewish or Greek.
The Pharisees regulated the religious climate and the people held them in much higher regard than the discredited Sadducees. They soon moved into the leadership positions of teaching, and they dominated the Sanhedrins, controlling the civil and religious judiciary. They entirely replaced the priests as the scholarly and legal interpreters of Torah and found favor in the eyes of people as the true defenders of the faith. Except for the political oversight of their foreign overlords, the Pharisees became the effective national rulers.
The Pharisees’ perspective
From the perspective of the Pharisees, the gravity of their conflicts with Jesus far
exceeded matters of scriptural interpretation. The battle over the law meant the battle
for the survival of their nation. They averred that Torah defined Israel, and that
the oral traditions protected the written word. Therefore, they valued their laws even
higher than Scripture, as evidenced by this teaching: "An offense against the
sayings of the scribes is worse than one against those of Scripture" (from the Talmud,
Sanhedrin, xi.3). Because they related to God as a lawgiver, they felt the highest
manifestation of Godliness came in living according to law. So they made ever more laws,
defining every aspect of daily life, and declared these injunctions as divinely
sanctioned.
Moreover, their recent forefathers had martyred themselves to maintain their national identity. Concurrently, the priests had defaulted on their duties as teachers and upholders of the law. Only the Pharisees’ vigorous adherence to the oral law separated Israel from the heathen roundabout. Thus they had an obsessive need to maintain the traditions handed down for centuries, for to them the preservation of oral traditional law meant the preservation of the nation of Israel and of God’s word. Hence spewed their vehement antagonism to the threat of the Gospel.
The basis of conflict
Although the conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees meant far more to the Pharisees
than just theological differences, these differences alone would have engendered major
strife. The principle, "Maintain purity through adherence to the details of the
oral law" fueled their theological engines. They had enormous respect for the
wise, the learned, the erudite. They prized casuistry and sophistry. Terms like
"precise definition," "careful scrutiny" and "further
clarification" frequented their expositions. They pandered to precedence,
ritual, and detail. They had thousands of specific rulings defining what "labor"
meant on the Sabbath. Practical issues, like cleansing a house of leaven before the
Passover, took on sometimes absurd dimensions. For instance, they argued at length what to
do if a mouse should enter a house during the Passover with crumbs of leaven on its
whiskers. Yet they saw in these trivial examples the process of debate, casuistry,
precedent, analogy, and derivative argumentation that defined the legal approach. Their
entire approach to religion depended on human logic, not faith. Legalism exalted self, not
God.
The Pharisees also exalted holy behavior, not righteous attitude. Separation from things unholy meant piety, and piety meant reward. They believed that if they avoided external evil, God would reward them now and in the life to come, because they had earned His approbation. The more separate, the more holy; thus they promulgated laws defining all the possible defilements to avoid. The more things they labeled unclean, the more laws they could follow, and the more holiness they could manufacture for themselves. However, they acknowledged not the inward reality of human sin nature. They vainly tried to swat away the mosquitoes, but they were dying of cancer.
Over against this, came the "unschooled" carpenter’s son from Nazareth. Without any links to Jerusalem and the rabbinical academies, he had no status (Mk. 6:2-3). Who was he to preach against the teachings of generations of scribes? How dare he dismiss the oral traditions? The Pharisees saw nothing more than another false messiah and a preacher of blasphemy.
The gospel of grace defied every aspect of the Pharisees’ legalism. It relied on an entirely different set of principles. Justification by grace instead of ritual holiness led the list. Above all, even above the completely different structure of religion, towered a larger issue. This issue comprised the identity of God. At the heart of our theology lies the fundamental question: Who is God?
The Pharisees envisioned God as the Supreme Lawgiver who rewarded those who kept His rules. However, this perverse perception hearkened back to Sinai when the people rejected direct communication with God as their Father and wanted only to deal with Him through the law (Deut. 5:23-27, Heb. 12:9, 18-22). The Pharisees couldn’t understand Jesus because he represented God as a concerned Father who graciously forgave His faithful, but innately unholy, children. At the root of the Pharisees’ problems with Jesus lay their entirely differing perception of God. Who but God’s only begotten Son would know Him truly? We will discuss this issue -- the perception of God -- as it relates to legalism and faith later in this series, if He wills.
Paul gave Israel credit for their zeal, but not for their knowledge of God (Rom. 10:2). The Pharisees had zeal exceeding all. Because they didn’t know God, their zeal created a system of self-righteousness. To look at the whole picture of history, however, the legalistic morass of the Pharisees was the only outcome available.
Once the dispensation of law attained, the only outcome would be more laws. Israel made the choice for legalism at Sinai, and legalism they got to the point where they could no longer recognize God or the Son He sent to them.
(To be continued, God willing.)
David Levin