Rethinking Pharisee and Paul
Pharisee - this has become one of the dirty words in our church terminology. We will ascribe the term 'Pharisee' to anyone in church who appears to be 'legalistic' and 'failed' to show grace and supposedly 'understanding' to the word of God. For many, a 'Pharisee' in church imposes a lot of 'laws' to his members and in his life which appear to replace Christ as the basis for salvation. In short, there are seldom people in church who have displayed a more complete understanding of who a Pharisee is and even less are willing to view them in a positive (or objective) light.
To be fair, most of our information about Pharisee is obtained from the harsh languages used against them in the book of Matthew. Before I continue, one has to bear in mind that the four gospels were written by the respective authors with a purpose in mind and they are not written to give 21st century Christians a comprehensive history and account of Jesus' life and the environment back then. It is perhaps even fair to say that most of us read our own contemporary world into the four Gospels and thus saw a Greco-Roman world with people using Whatsapp, Facebook and having access to CNN and CNA. Implicit in this allegation is this: we failed to study history and realise that history is essential in our Biblical interpretation (so please go and brush up in your history).
Coming back, the imageries of Pharisee in the book of Matthew is immensely negative. They appear as "vipers" (Matthew 3:7, 12:34, 23:33), "hypocrites" (23:23, 27), "blind guides" (23:16, 24), "murderers of prophets" (23:31), "keepers of the law who neglect "justice, mercy and faith" and "whitewashed tombs" (23:27). One can thus safely ask the question, given that Matthew (or for a matter of fact, the other Gospels) was written with a purpose, whether the Pharisees had been portrayed in an objective way. While I say that Matthew had been right with his allegations, he has purposefully structured his narratives to bring across his points and we can learn more about this group of people through the findings of extra-biblical historical evidence, together with what we can gather from the Scripture.
One thing we know is that among the different sects within the first century Judaism, the Pharisees emerge as the most prominent in the New Testament and in the reformulation of Judaism after the destruction of the temple. Rabbinic literature tends to uphold Pharisaic positions with regard to the application of the Torah and overturn Sadducean positions, suggesting that they view themselves as the students and heirs of the Pharisees.
Although the descriptions of the Pharisees in the Gospels and in Paul's epistles may be historically incomplete, the accounts leave an impression that the Pharisees treated all of life as a ritual. The Pharisees sought ways of adapting the old commandments of Torah, fitted for an agrarian economy and concerns, to an ever-changing world. They were driven by a vision for the whole people of Israel as a kingdom of priests for God, just as Exodus 19:5-6 declared Israel should be. They thus sought to apply the whole law to all of life, including the priestly codes, leading them to take great care for ritual purity, the washing of hands and vessels, the tithing of all the produce of the land, and keeping the sabbath according to their interpretations of what constituted work. For them, this was the way to live before God, fulfilling the requirements of the daily call to every Jew - the Shema, that the setting for law observance was the field and the kitchen, the bed and the street.
Hence, before we get too harsh on the Pharisees, one might want to pause and consider what this desire really means. In effect, it is really mirroring what Romans 12:1 commanded - to present our bodies as a living sacrifice as our proper and true act of worship (only that it may not be carried out as a response to God's mercy). In essence, they seek to live a life that seeks to honor and glorify God in all aspects of life. In some sense, this was indeed one of the key features in the book of Leviticus, that all aspects of life are holy and if we want to be God's people, we need to be holy in all aspects, not just in our religious lives. To push things further, the Scripture never regards our religious lives to be confined to the temple/church, but our religious lives (or the way we live out in accordance to our religion) are meant to be lived out in our daily lives, which was what the Pharisees sought to do.
So why should we be harsh to the Pharisees, a group of people who are so determined to fulfil the requirement of the Shema? Perhaps we need to consider one aspect, that the Pharisees considered the traditional interpretation and application of the Torah to hold equal authority with the written Torah itself. In other words, former judgements concerning how to apply Torah in given situations came to have the force of Torah itself. For this reason, the traditions of the elders were extremely important in their understanding of walking in line with God's law. This was a point of conflict with Jesus, who found that the clear teaching of the written Torah could be contravened by appealing to a tradition about Torah's application. For Jesus, the divine law could never be circumvented or subordinated on the basis of a teaching developed by human beings.
Hence, the importance the Pharisees attributed to their interpretations of the Law compromised the authority of God’s own revelation. To make matters worse, the genius of those interpretations was to distort the doctrine of grace by relaxing the divine standards. The very example used by Jesus in Mark 7:10–12 indicates that a rabbinic regulation—the Corban—made it possible for people to ignore the fifth commandment and feel justified in so doing.
To be fair, most of our information about Pharisee is obtained from the harsh languages used against them in the book of Matthew. Before I continue, one has to bear in mind that the four gospels were written by the respective authors with a purpose in mind and they are not written to give 21st century Christians a comprehensive history and account of Jesus' life and the environment back then. It is perhaps even fair to say that most of us read our own contemporary world into the four Gospels and thus saw a Greco-Roman world with people using Whatsapp, Facebook and having access to CNN and CNA. Implicit in this allegation is this: we failed to study history and realise that history is essential in our Biblical interpretation (so please go and brush up in your history).
Coming back, the imageries of Pharisee in the book of Matthew is immensely negative. They appear as "vipers" (Matthew 3:7, 12:34, 23:33), "hypocrites" (23:23, 27), "blind guides" (23:16, 24), "murderers of prophets" (23:31), "keepers of the law who neglect "justice, mercy and faith" and "whitewashed tombs" (23:27). One can thus safely ask the question, given that Matthew (or for a matter of fact, the other Gospels) was written with a purpose, whether the Pharisees had been portrayed in an objective way. While I say that Matthew had been right with his allegations, he has purposefully structured his narratives to bring across his points and we can learn more about this group of people through the findings of extra-biblical historical evidence, together with what we can gather from the Scripture.
One thing we know is that among the different sects within the first century Judaism, the Pharisees emerge as the most prominent in the New Testament and in the reformulation of Judaism after the destruction of the temple. Rabbinic literature tends to uphold Pharisaic positions with regard to the application of the Torah and overturn Sadducean positions, suggesting that they view themselves as the students and heirs of the Pharisees.
Although the descriptions of the Pharisees in the Gospels and in Paul's epistles may be historically incomplete, the accounts leave an impression that the Pharisees treated all of life as a ritual. The Pharisees sought ways of adapting the old commandments of Torah, fitted for an agrarian economy and concerns, to an ever-changing world. They were driven by a vision for the whole people of Israel as a kingdom of priests for God, just as Exodus 19:5-6 declared Israel should be. They thus sought to apply the whole law to all of life, including the priestly codes, leading them to take great care for ritual purity, the washing of hands and vessels, the tithing of all the produce of the land, and keeping the sabbath according to their interpretations of what constituted work. For them, this was the way to live before God, fulfilling the requirements of the daily call to every Jew - the Shema, that the setting for law observance was the field and the kitchen, the bed and the street.
Hence, before we get too harsh on the Pharisees, one might want to pause and consider what this desire really means. In effect, it is really mirroring what Romans 12:1 commanded - to present our bodies as a living sacrifice as our proper and true act of worship (only that it may not be carried out as a response to God's mercy). In essence, they seek to live a life that seeks to honor and glorify God in all aspects of life. In some sense, this was indeed one of the key features in the book of Leviticus, that all aspects of life are holy and if we want to be God's people, we need to be holy in all aspects, not just in our religious lives. To push things further, the Scripture never regards our religious lives to be confined to the temple/church, but our religious lives (or the way we live out in accordance to our religion) are meant to be lived out in our daily lives, which was what the Pharisees sought to do.
So why should we be harsh to the Pharisees, a group of people who are so determined to fulfil the requirement of the Shema? Perhaps we need to consider one aspect, that the Pharisees considered the traditional interpretation and application of the Torah to hold equal authority with the written Torah itself. In other words, former judgements concerning how to apply Torah in given situations came to have the force of Torah itself. For this reason, the traditions of the elders were extremely important in their understanding of walking in line with God's law. This was a point of conflict with Jesus, who found that the clear teaching of the written Torah could be contravened by appealing to a tradition about Torah's application. For Jesus, the divine law could never be circumvented or subordinated on the basis of a teaching developed by human beings.
Hence, the importance the Pharisees attributed to their interpretations of the Law compromised the authority of God’s own revelation. To make matters worse, the genius of those interpretations was to distort the doctrine of grace by relaxing the divine standards. The very example used by Jesus in Mark 7:10–12 indicates that a rabbinic regulation—the Corban—made it possible for people to ignore the fifth commandment and feel justified in so doing.
Nevertheless, while we often think of the Pharisees as very strict and “legalistic,” in an important sense their legal enactments made it easier for people to “obey” the Law. A prominent Jewish scholar believes that the Pharisees, in contrast to the idealistic prophets of the OT, appreciated the weaknesses of human nature and adjusted the impossibly high standards of the Law so as to take into account the realities of life. This insight is what made it possible for Pharisaic Judaism to survive the catastrophes of A.D 70.
Moreover, looking deeper into the belief system of the Pharisees, they believed in the resurrection of the dead and eternal rewards and punishment, and appear to have been comfortable with the developments in belief about angels and spiritual beings that had developed during the intertestamental period. This gave them common ground with the early Jewish Christians as compared to the Sadducees. They also held to a high view of divine providence. God's will and purpose guide the course of history. At the same time, they allowed for human freedom in response to God. That is one reason why it was rightly cautioned to be aware of painting the Pharisees as hypocrites, concerned only with appearances, or as legalists who replace devotion to God with minute rules. Both Jesus and Pharisaic sages criticise those who pursue religion for the sake of appearances or who lose sight of the one legitimate reason to keep the Torah, namely the love of God.
We will stop here and in the next post, we will examine Paul and highlight one aspect of his life, with relations to the Pharisees, which has often been overlooked and theologically misinterpreted.
Good post! Learnt a lot from this. Thanks bro.
ReplyDeleteI remember Paul, at one point, shrewdly identified himself as "a Pharisee, the son of a Pharisee" when put under trial by the Sanhedrin, and declared his conviction on a point that he and the Pharisees sitting on the Sanhedrin could agree with: the resurrection of the dead.
And there were believers from the party of the Pharisees who had become Christians, as seen in the council of Jerusalem.
I guess what is particularly striking is how close many of us Christians today become to the heartlessness of the rules. The Lord, after all, did affirm the authority of the Pharisees and teachers of the law as sitting in Moses' seat, and told his listeners to do everything the Pharisees and teachers of the law told them to do.
But then, He turned around and lashed the rulemakers themselves for not caring about those they were supposed to have been shepherding, and took them to task on placing their rules as equal to that of God's rules. "You lay heavy burdens on men's shoulders, yet will not lift a finger to help them."
I guess... for us today, we need to remember that while the Lord permits those He has put in authority, including church authority, to put additional rules and regulations to protect and guide His people - and He expects us to submit to our leaders' authority, doing whatever they tell us to do...
He also holds the leaders accountable for their heart for their people - or lack of. Do we fall back ultimately, on the Word of God as the final authority, or on our own traditions? And also, whatever rules/regulations there be - will we be shepherds, searching for the weak and broken, to help bind them up in the manner of Ezekiel 34:16?
Just some thoughts to add to your good post.
YA