Didn't Jesus do away with all the rules? part 8

Another thrilling installment in the Rev. Know-it-all’s “The Young Christian’s Guide to Halakhic Law.”

At the time of Christ, there were lots of interpretations of the law. The Herodians, the group gathered around the political structure of the Herod Family, seem to have had no trouble being flexible about religious law. Herod was so scrupulous about the law that the Emperor Augustus Caesar’s favorite joke was that it was better to be Herod the Great’s pig than his son.  He executed a number of sons on suspicion of treason. Pigs were safe around Herod. He kept kosher, except of course when politics demanded otherwise. 

There was a spring sacred to the Greek god Pan in the north of the holy land where Herod the Great built a shining white marble temple in honor of his patron, Augustus Caesar, Philip the Tetrarch son of Herod the Great and his fifth wife, Cleopatra of Jerusalem founded a city there and expanded the temple with their forbidden graven image. Pig sacrifices, to statues of Greek and Roman gods were fine, just not where anyone could see them.

There were the Sadducees who kept strictly kosher, but didn’t care if anybody else did. There were the Pharisees who thought that everyone should keep kosher, not just the priests. Then there were the am ha'aretz le-mitzvot, Jews who didn’t scrupulously observe kosher law am ha'aretz la-Torah, the dunces who didn’t study the Torah at all. Then there were the Essenes mentioned earlier and the other dead sea squirrels for whom kosher wasn’t kosher enough.  There is a charming Dead Sea Scroll, “Miqsat Ma’she ha Torah” (Some Works of the Law) which poses the serious theological question: If water is poured from a clay pitcher into a clay bowl, and the bowl is ritually unclean, can the uncleanness leap up the stream of water and pollute the clay pitcher, so that both must be destroyed? The Dead sea folks said yes, the Pharisees said no.  There were lots of different sects preaching lots of different interpretations the 613 commandments of the Torah. So again, what do clay bowls have to do with me? A whole lot more than you realize! 

Your kids may go off to school and meet other Christians who seem a lot cooler than Catholics with their no meat on Fridays, especially in Lent, their insistence on Sunday Mass and regular confession and all these other rules like no sleeping around at college, and no artificial birth control and no divorce and remarriage etc. They will quote St. Paul by saying that we are not saved by “…works of the law.” “Therefore no one will be declared righteous in God's sight by the works of the law.” (Romans 3:20) etc.  They will interpret this passage and such others as saying that we can do whatever we want if we have faith in Jesus. We are saved and can’t get unsaved. Gosh, I hope they’re right.

One of the great thinkers of the Reformation 500 years ago said, “Be a sinner andsin boldly, but believe and rejoice in Christ even more boldly... No sin willseparate us from the Lamb, even though we commit fornication and murder a thousand times a day.”  

If the Old Testament said we can’t eat pork, but now we can eat pork, why can’t we do what we want with whomever we want? Why do Catholics have all these rules if Jesus did away with the law? Why do we insist on obeying only ten of the commandments when apparently, there are 613 of them? Why have any law if we are not saved by a work of the law?

Next week, the thrilling answer. I hope.

Didn't Jesus do away with all the rules? part 7

Continued from last week…

It just occurred to me that before I get to Jesus, the Pharisees and us, I really should talk about the Essenes. They were a collection of Israelite sects that rejected the Jerusalem temple. There were a lot fewer of them than there were of the Pharisees and Sadducees. They lived in desert outposts as well as towns but practiced communal life and rigorous asceticism (strict penance), sort of the Opus Dei of their times. Some even seem to have practiced celibacy and voluntary poverty. Above all, they practiced frequent baptism (immersion) to the point of becoming water-logged. The term “Essene” (in Greek, theraputai, from the root word for healing) is discussed by a number of ancient authors. Josephus, Philo and Pliny mention them, and a lot of people assume they were one cohesive group. I suspect they were not. The Dead Sea Scrolls are a great source of information not about one sect called Essenes, but probably about the groups that came under the general heading of desert ascetics who had rejected the Maccabee/Herodian temple, the Herodian monarchy, and the Roman-controlled, politicized priesthood. 

What pray tell are the Dead Sea Scrolls? In November 1946, Some Bedouin shepherd boys discovered seven jars in a cave near the site of Khirbet Qumran. The boys hoped the jars might contain treasure, but were disappointed to find just some old and crumbling scrolls. They brought the scrolls back to their camp where the Bedouin tribesmen hung them (the scrolls) on a tent pole and they wondered what to do with them. They soon discovered that, in fact they HAD found treasure. Crazy infidels were willing to pay good money for these decaying bits of leather. This started a scroll rush in the Judean desert that continues until the present. The purchase and discovery of the first scrolls amid Middle Eastern wars and intrigue read like a spy novel.

Why were the scrolls hidden in jars in the desert? Jews, like Catholics are slow to toss sacred things into the garbage. Every Catholic home has a drawer full of old bibles, missals, broken rosaries, and statues that they are afraid to throw out.  (When a sacramental loses its purpose, it ceases to be that revered thing and may be thrown out. That’s the party line. I still have a drawer full of formerly holy stuff).  The Jews did and do the same thing. They put old scrolls in what is called a genizah. Perhaps we Catholics should call our holy drawer a genizah drawer. It would confuse people, and that can be great fun. A genizah in a Cairo synagogue went back to the eighth century providing a gold mine of Jewish history. The Qumran caves may have been a place to hide cherished documents from the invading Romans, or it might just have been a genizah. It matters neither way.

The Dead Sea Scrolls, also called Qumran Caves Scrolls are at the present, a collection of 981 manuscripts and fragments discovered between 1946 and the present (2017) in 12 caves near the ancient, now uninhabited but museum-ificated site of in the eastern Judean Desert near the northwest shore of the Dead Sea, apparently, the Scrolls come from the last three centuries before Christ and the first century AD.  About 70 percent of the scrolls are copies of Biblical manuscripts, including some of the Hebrew originals of the so called “Catholic books.” The remaining 30 percent are copies of the literature of the anti-establishment messianic sects. Some of these books are zany beyond belief!

A humorous anecdote. Being a professor has its perks. I was invited to a special showing of some of the Dead Sea fragments at a private museum showing. I could bring guests, so I invited my 10-year-old godson, a studious child. He asked in turn if he could bring his friend, a recently emigrated Pole. He asked the lad if he would like to see the Dead Sea Scrolls, to which the young man, whose English was not yet perfect, responded “Dead Sea squirrels? Vat are Dead Sea squirrels?”

Since then I have called the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls the Dead Sea Squirrels, inasmuch as they were pretty squirrely. Why are the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Dead Sea squirrels important? I believe that Christianity springs from them as much as from Judaism. They are an essential element of the milieu in which and the vocabulary by which Jesus, the unique Word of God, speaks to us even now. To understand what He was saying it helps to learn that vocabulary. Eusebius, a Christian historian of the fourth century, says in his History of the Church: “Those ancient Therapeutai (Essenes) were Christians, and their ancient writings were our Gospels.”

The similarities in practice and belief between the first Christians and these messianic sects are almost too many to count. For instance, the early Church in Jerusalem was led by a group of twelve, among whom Peter, James and John had a special preeminence. The “community” mentioned in the scrolls was led by a council of 12 people, in which with three priests had oversight. The very role of a bishop is taken from the messianic scrolls. Deacons and elders are standard Israelite and synagogue roles, but overseer, that is bishop, comes to us from the desert sectaries. I suspect that John the Baptist was a leader of one of these communities of Dead Sea Squirrels and that the line between the disciples of Jesus and the disciples of John was a bit fuzzy at some point. Papias bishop of Hierapolis in the very first century of Christianity says as much and I suspect that the Gospel of John is so different from the first three Gospels is that the Gospel of John the evangelist was aimed at the Dead Sea Squirrels and their arcane vocabulary, and, as Papias says, aimed particularly the disciples of John the Baptist, “These things have been written that you might know that Jesus is the Messiah.” (John 20:31)

More next week: (Oh dear, He’s off on another tangent)

A rabbi asks a priest a question... part 5

Continued from last week…

There were three pilgrimage feasts for which all Israel was expected to gather in Jerusalem. They were Pesach (Passover), which commemorated the deliverance of Israel form slavery in Egypt, Shavuot (Weeks or Pentecost), which commemorated the receiving of the Torah by Israel at the foot of Mt. Sinai and Sukkot (Booths) during which Israel would camp out for a week in lean-tos or tents to commemorate their wandering in the desert.

Jesus and his followers had almost derailed Passover by entering Jerusalem a few days before the feast. They entered in royal style declaring Jesus king and messiah and worse, they caused a riot in the temple. The Sadducees who controlled both temple and law courts at the time, had nipped things in the bud by having Jesus executed on the day before the Passover when people would be busy preparing and thus too preoccupied to riot. It would have worked perfectly except for that empty tomb.

Now came Shavuot, the feast Weeks, the next pilgrimage feast just fifty days after Passover. The city was again overflowing with crowds of the devout from all over the world.  The followers of Jesus the Nazarene chose this moment to strike. There was a commotion in the southeast quarter of the city. The followers of Jesus acted like madmen shouting in obscure babble like prophets of old claiming that they had been filled with the Holy Spirit of the Lord.

After a rousing sermon by the Simon Bar Jonah, called Peter, the gullible mobs had rushed to the Essene baths just outside the walls and had been baptized in the mikvehs in the name of Jesus who they claimed was still alive. It was Jesus and John the Baptist all over again. Thousands had participated in this charade. This sect of the Nazarene’s followers was now numerically as large as the party of the Pharisees and certainly larger than the sects of the Essenes and the Sadducees. Worst of all, the pilgrims would soon return home to their respective countries in the Hebrew Diaspora claiming that the messiah had come, and was Jesus of Nazareth. He had proved His divinity by rising from the dead. Things would never be the same.
They preached that observance of the rules of Torah weren’t enough.  All should be baptized. All should be converted.  Being born in the covenant wasn’t enough. There was nothing strange about the immersion in the waters of the mikveh. Israel had always practiced Baptism, a Greek word that simply meant immersion, but the immersion required by the Nazarenes was different. A mikveh is a bath required to regain ritual purity after contact with things that were considered unclean. A person had to be ritually pure to enter the Temple.  If one was not in a fit state to enter the temple for worship, one had to be purified by immersion in a mikveh. Sometime, more was required depending on the nature of the impurity, but it was always capped off with the cleansing bath of the mikveh.

These baptizing Nazarenes like Jesus and John were insisting on purification for everyone, without regard to the requirements of the law. All were unclean. This new washing would allow a person to enter the new temple, the temple not made with stones, the living temple of the Messiah’s body, His assembly, and to participate in the messianic  thanksgiving sacrifice of Jesus crucified and risen flesh, in the form of bread and wine.

The Temple of Herod was over. The messiah had restored the temple and these crazy people were claiming to be that temple. What they believed sounded like cannibalism, and worse still, they were repeating Jesus blasphemous claims of divinity.

All this was insanity. Where was all this in the Torah? The Torah never clearly mentions the messiah, much less a dying-rising, priest-king, divine and human messiah. It was a non-Torah fabrication perpetrated by uneducated Galileans. It was all the most outrageous foolishness and blasphemy and now it was on its way throughout the world.  How could any of this appeal to a reasonable person? Things went from bad to worse. These madmen met daily in the temple by the thousands for prayer and study, listening to the musings of yokels like Peter who had no right to claim the title Rabbi and here were thousands hanging on his every word.

John was another of the ringleaders, a kinsman of Jesus from a priestly family, well known to the Great Priest. He and Peter were on their way into the temple courts one morning for their usual gathering when a lame beggar who had been at the same temple gate for years caught their eyes. Peter said that he had no money, but would give what he had. He took the beggar by his arm, hoisted him to his feet and the faker started to walk. Anyone who went to the temple knew him and had believed him to be lame. Now he could walk. Had he ever really been lame? It didn’t matter. Now they were claiming miraculous powers like the Nazarene before them.

It had to be stopped. Pete and John were arrested. Gamaliel, ever the peacemaker, convinced the Sanhedrin to release them. He said that if it was from God, it could not be stopped. If it wasn’t from God, it would die of its own foolishness like so many other messianic movements before it. Why make martyrs?
Still, one could help it go away by means of a little intimidation. There was a young firebrand who claimed to be a Pharisee, who supposedly had studied at the feet of Gamaliel. He was called Saul from the Greek town of Tarsus.  He managed to organize a lynch mob that stoned one of the Nazarenes to death after a quick trial.  Perhaps Gamaliel’s wise counsel was not what the situation required.  Perhaps the time had come for harsher measures against this Nazarene nonsense.

This Saul bore watching. He could be useful.

Next Week: Saul of Tarsus betrays the Sanhedrin

A rabbi asks a priest a question... part 4

Continued from last week...

There were four principle sects of Israel at the time of Christ. The Sadducees, who were the political elite dominated the temple priesthood. They accepted only the first five books of the Bible, the books of Moses, called the Torah in Hebrew, the Pentateuch in Greek. There were also the Pharisees, who included all of Israel in the strict observance of the law, not just priestly elite. They were not clergy, but a political/religious party which was considered populist and liberal at the time. The Pharisees accepted the oral tradition in which the Talmud finds its roots. According to Josephus, the Jewish historian, there were only about 6,000 of them at the time of the Second Temple. The movement was large enough to have sub-movements within it, such as the schools of Shammai and Hillel, the former considered conservative, the latter liberal. In the Gospels we see some Pharisees opposing Jesus, and some protecting Him and the early Christian movement. There were the Zealots, radical separatist nationalists who we would call terrorists. There was also a group called the Herodians, about whom we know almost nothing. It is doubtful that they were a religious sect, so much as Hellenized (Greek-ified) Jews who were partisans of the Herodian monarchy. 

Finally, were the puritan baptizer groups, the most well-known of whom are the Essenes. Essenes seem to have been a faction led by priestly families. They had turned their backs on Judean institutions, believing that the Temple, the priesthood and the monarchy were corrupt. They followed their own calendar and their own rituals. For instance, they celebrated a Passover that did not include the sacrifice of a lamb in the temple. They had a whole body of apocalyptic literature that included a coming messiah and the reestablishment of the Davidic kingdom and the purification of the temple. It seems they expected two messiahs, a royal Davidic messiah and a priestly messiah from the tribe of Levi.

It is interesting to note the two-messiah expectation of the Essenes, in light of a similar expectation in Talmud of the Davidic royal messiah and the Josephite, suffering servant messiah. The “messiahs” would gather in the dispersed Israelites, as mentioned earlier, purify the temple, restore the priesthood and re-establish the Davidic monarchy, among other expectations, such as renewing the manna in the wilderness and bringing victory over the enemies of Israel and the establishment of universal peace. It is interesting to notice the use of the word Yehuda (Juda) is similar to its use in the Gospel of St. John.  John seems to disparage the Jews, though we would call him Jewish. The Damascus scroll speaks just as disparagingly of the princes and house of Judah, though by our standards they were Jews.
To this list of four, was added a fifth; the Nozri, or Nazarenes, followers of the self-proclaimed rabbi, Yeshua ben Yosef from Galilee who claimed both divine and Davidic descent. You probably call him Jesus of Nazareth. 

He had a meteoric rise and a meteoric fall. He appeared with His twelve students, mirroring the council of twelve mentioned in the Qumran documents. His preaching, sometimes apocalyptic sometimes practical seems to have included elements of both Essene and Pharisee theology. The gullible believed He had miraculous, healing powers. He talked about His plan to destroy and renew the temple, thus declaring Himself the messiah. When He paraded into Jerusalem and the crowds hailed Him as messiah, and then caused a riot in the temple, it was just too much. 

The Romans could tolerate just about anything, so long as you paid your taxes and did not riot. The Sadducees, who controlled the temple at the time, realized He had to go, if they were going to maintain the profitable status quo. Jesus was arrested by the temple guard, handed over to the Sadducees who in turn handed Him over to the Romans for crucifixion. This was an act abhorrent to Pharisees. The blasphemer was to be stoned according to the Torah, and even those Pharisees who wanted Jesus executed would never have turned a fellow Israelite over to a foreign authority for execution, but the Sadducees were in a bind. They had to prove He was not the messiah. How better than to have Him crucified, law or no law. After all, the book of Leviticus says “Cursed is he who dies hanging on a tree.” (Deuteronomy 21: 23) The Roman method of execution, a form of hanging, would prove this Jesus to be cursed, and thus not the messiah. That would end the nonsense. But it didn’t.
There is a passage in Josephus’ Jewish Antiquities, called the Flavian Testimony in which Josephus claims Jesus is the risen messiah. This was largely thought to have been completely added by Christians. Josephus never became a Christian as far as we know, and would not have claimed that Jesus was the messiah risen from the dead.  However, in 1971, an Arabic version of the Flavian testimony was discovered. It was from the 10th century “Book of the Title" by Agapius, the Arab bishop of Hierapolis, a source completely independent of Latin versions of Josephus. It confirms that the Flavian Testimony probably was original to Josephus, but in a neutral, non-Christian version.

 “At this time there was a wise man who was called Jesus. And his conduct was good, and he was known to be virtuous. And many people from among the Jews and the other nations became his disciples. Pilate condemned him to be crucified and to die. And those who had become his disciples did not abandon his discipleship. They reported that he had appeared to them after his crucifixion and that he was alive; accordingly, he was perhaps the Messiah concerning whom the prophets have recounted wonders.”

With the exception of the possibility of Jesus’ messiahship, there is nothing exceptional or non-historical about this passage. His disciples did report Him risen. Just a few years after Jesus’ death, Saul of Tarsus, who claimed to be a Pharisee, also claimed to have seen Jesus on the road to Damascus. Saul was a late convert to Christianity, having his Damascus road conversion probably 3 to 5 years after the death of Jesus. Twenty years later he is telling the Corinthian church that “…if the Messiah has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins.” (1 Cor. 15:17) The Agapius version of the Flavian Testimony is quite correct. They claimed He had risen from the dead and they filled Jerusalem with this nonsense. 

The problem was the tomb. The tomb was apparently empty and in plain sight. Jesus was not crucified and buried “on a hill far away” as the old song goes. He was crucified and buried in a quarry right next to the main western gate of downtown Jerusalem, the Gennath gate. It was directly beneath a grand bridge and entrance to the temple, marked today by Wilson’s arch, now a location of prayer for Jews. This bridge went from the upper city to the central western entrance to the temple mount. It was a convenient short cut from Jerusalem’s fashionable western hill to the temple, a great time-saver for the priestly class. The combination of the lower and upper roads would have made it the equivalent of an expressway interchange. 

The Romans didn’t waste a perfectly good crucifixion by hiding it on a hill far away. The wanted it where everyone could see it. Jesus was buried in a tomb adjacent to the execution site, and when that tomb turned up empty, it caused a stir. There it was: an empty tomb and perhaps some strangely singed burial cloths. The body must have been stolen. People don’t just rise from the dead, or so the Sadducees claimed. The frenzy just would not die down. Jesus’ followers kept claiming they had seen him repeatedly over the course of a month or so.  Things were getting out of hand, despite the best efforts of Annas, the high priest, and his family and the rest of the Sadducees party. Then disaster struck: Shavuot, when a new fifth faction was born!  

Next week: The Shavuot disaster