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

What have you got against Jews?

N.B. TO UNDERSTAND THIS YOU MUST KNOW THAT PHARISEE IS A NOBLE WORD. PHARISEES WERE AND REMAIN DEFENDERS OF THE TRUTHS OF JUDAISM IN A DIFFICULT AND HOSTILE WORLD.

Dear Rev. Know-it-all,

I just located your Father Know-it-all site. What’s with you and Jews? You talk about the decrease in the Jewish population of the Roman world, attributing it to conversion to Christianity, without mention of the two great Jewish rebellions which led to the death and expulsion of a large part of the Jewish population. This, of course, was followed by Christians obtaining political power with Constantine which wasn’t so good for Jews either. As I indicated in an earlier e-mail, I sense a pattern of unfavorable comments about Jews.

Yours,

Beth K. Nesset

Dear Beth,

Well, this is a first. I am usually criticized for being too semito-philic. What’s with me and the Jews? I think the Jews are very important to the culture, so I am always trying to fine tune my understanding of the history of a rather troubled relationship. I don’t know your ethnic and religious background, but would like to tell you a story.

I have a dear friend who is an ultra-orthodox rabbi. He likes me because I am orthodox, even if I’m not Jewish. His daughter was being married on a Sunday, and because I work Sundays, I couldn’t attend the wedding. So the rabbi invited me to Shabbos dinner to meet the in-laws. The groom’s uncle, a true Tsaddik, (righteous man) was there. He heads an anonymous charity for mothers in trouble. I was about to pour him a glass of wine, and I stopped myself because I realized that if it was yayin (wine) he couldn’t drink it if I had poured it. Were it mevushal, (cooked wine, or wine sweetened by a boiling process) it would be no problem if served by a gentile.

I said to the Tsaddik, “I don’t know if I can pour this for you. I have to see if it’s…”

He looked utterly flabbergasted and said, “I don’t know! I’ve never been in this situation before!!!”

He was astonished by the whole thing. He had never had a religious conversation with a gentile and certainly not with a galleck (Catholic Priest) and there we were, talking about the same things, righteousness, the nature of Messiah, the Scriptures and so on. He was amazed, and frankly so was I.

I realized that we were co-religionists. We did not share the same faith, but we did share the same religion. The moral and ethical concepts, the understanding we shared about much of the nature of the Almighty, even customs such as the washing of hands and the blessing of bread and wine, the prayers and psalms and chants, the hope of Messiah. We shared all these to some degree. We were playing in the same ball park, as it were.

What we did not share completely were faith and our understanding the nature of Torah (the Law). I regarded the whole Hebrew Scripture as fully inspired. He regarded Torah as preeminent, and of course he did not regard the New Testament as inspired at all, but was surprised to find that I do not consider the New Testament more inspired than Hebrew Scriptures. Talmud, along with Torah, was his whole life. Talmud is not mine though Old Testament – better called Hebrew Scriptures – most certainly is. His great trust is in Talmud and Torah. My trust is in Jesus of Nazareth, a Jew whom I believe to be the visible image of the invisible God, the Torah come to life! (c.f. St. Paul’s first letter to the Colossians, chapter one, verse 15)

Nonetheless, it was a transformative conversation for me. I realized that we were both claiming to be Israel. One cannot claim to be Israel without Moses and Mt. Sinai, but one cannot be a Jew without Talmud. I believe that my friends, the Tsaddik and the Rabbi, are doubtless Israel. They don’t believe that I am Israel, because I am not a Jew. In this, I think, they make a fundamental mistake. They claim, as I believe does Talmud, that the word “Jew” and the word Israel are interchangeable. I don’t think this claim can be made on the basis of Hebrew Scriptures. It is interesting that the word “Jew” or “Jews” (Yehud, Yehudim) really doesn’t appear in the Hebrew Scriptures very frequently. I think it is less than 100 times. The word Israel appears more than 2,000 times, 2575 times if the New Testament is included in the count. The word only refers to what we might think of as a Jew beginning with the second temple period, principally in the book of Esther, probably written in 350 BC about events that occurred in 470 BC, that is after the return of the exiles to Jerusalem. I maintain that Rabbinic Phariseeism, which is what we now call Judaism, really took hold of the religion of Israel in Babylon, the cultural center of the remnant of Israel after the devastation of the Holy land in 132 AD.  Remember, it’s the Babylonian Talmud that carries the most weight in Jewish life, not the Jerusalem Talmud. The Pharisee movement created an innovation in the religion of Israel that allowed one to practice a form of the religion of Israel when one could not go to the temple. This was an innovation.

I have a unique spin on the passage of Christian scripture in which Jesus talks about new wine skins and new patches on old garments.

“No one tears a piece of cloth from a new garment and puts it on an old garment; otherwise he will both tear the new, and the piece from the new will not match the old. No one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise the new wine will burst the skins and it will be spilled out, and the skins will be ruined, but new wine must be put into fresh wineskins, and no one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise the new wine will burst the skins and it will be spilled out, and the skins will be ruined. New wine must be put into fresh wineskins. No one, after drinking old wine wishes for new; for he says, 'The old wine is mellow.” (Chrestos in Greek means “mellow” in this context)” Luke 5:38 

People assuming that Jesus’ innovations are the new wine, struggle with this final statement that “…old wine is mellow, better, good et alia.” Why would Jesus say that His innovations are not as good as the customs of the Pharisees and the disciples of John the Baptist? 

I maintain that He is saying the opposite. He is saying that Rabbinic Phariseeism is the innovation. As I mentioned, Rabbinic Phariseeism is a way to practice the religion of Israel without a temple. Jesus was saying that as Messiah he would fulfill the messianic expectation by rebuilding the temple at the same time transforming it into a temple made of living stones.  “You also, as living stones, are being built up as a spiritual house for a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus the Messiah.” (1Peter 2:4)  

He would fulfill the Messianic expectation of the rebuilding and purifying the temple that had been profaned by the Syrian Greeks, the Hasmoneans who extended its space for military purposes and then by Herod the Great, who used it to aggrandize himself. He would, however, do so in a way unexpected. He would create a living temple, the church.  He thus claimed to be the fulfillment of the tradition of Israel. It was the Pharisees who were the innovation.  

My dear friend Rabbi Lefkowitz, an ultra-orthodox Rabbi, would howl at this interpretation, as would most Christians, but it was he who started my thinking about this, I’m sure to his chagrin. He once said, “You Christians have got it wrong. You are more Jewish than we are. You have temples and sacrifices. We believe that the temple and the sacrifices of the law were concessions to the Jews, lest they backslide into the practices of the Canaanites. The sacrificial order is not central to Judaism. It’s the moral and ethical content of the Torah that matters.”  To which I want to respond that the pages of the Hebrew Scriptures fairly drip with sacrificial blood?  

A second insight that pushed me in this direction came from Hershel Shanks, editor of the Biblical Archaeology Review, with whom Rabbi Lefkowitz thoroughly disagrees on this point. Shanks holds that two forms of Judaism survived the destruction of the temple, Christianity and Rabbinic Phariseeism. The Sadducees, the Zealots, the Essenes and the followers of John lost their reason for being with the destruction of the temple. Rabbinic Phariseeism, or what we now call Judaism, is a religion of the synagogue. It survives because the temple is optional, though desirable. 

Christianity is still the religion of the temple, though a spiritualized temple. Catholicism and eastern Orthodoxy still offer sacrifice. Protestantism is thus a deviant form of Christianity, a form of Phariseeism which holds that there is no more sacrifice and no need for further sacrifice. We, in the traditional forms of Christianity, maintain, as I believe Jesus did, that we are fulfilling, not changing Torah. The only way I would disagree with Hershel Shanks is instead of using the word Judaism to stand for the totality of Israel, I would say that two forms of the religion of Israel survived the destruction of the temple, Christianity and Judaism.

The best estimates for the Jewish population of the ancient Mediterranean world are about one or two million. The estimate of the Jews living in the Diaspora, (scattered communities) in the Roman world is perhaps 4 or 5 million more. 

Dr. Rodney Stark in his book The Rise of Christianity, points out that in a few centuries the Jewish population of the Roman Empire was greatly reduced to perhaps fewer than one million. Certainly many were killed in war or died in plague, but it is doubtful, that the majority of first century “Israel” would have perished. More likely they found in Christianity a kind of “reform” Judaism which allowed them to practice the religion of Israel, praying to the God of Abraham Isaac and Jacob and reading the books of Moses, and the prophets, without the restrictions that made life so difficult in a diaspora, (a scattering) through the Greco Roman world, where circumcision was mocked as an obscenity and kosher meat was hard to find. 

The end of all this, is that there are two major representatives of the religion of Israel, two groups of people who reverence the books of Moses and the rest of the Tanakh, that is Hebrew scriptures, three if you count the 800 Samaritans who are still alive. The two are Christianity and Judaism, or more properly, Rabbinic Phariseeism. To say that Christianity comes from Jewish roots is very problematic. It means that Christianity must necessarily supersede Judaism; or that somehow Christianity is inferior to its parent religion, Judaism, a sort of “Judaism light.” 

I believe it is more accurate to say that both Judaism, though it precedes Christianity by about 3 or 4 centuries, and Christianity are variations of the religion of Israel. We Christians thus must concede that Jews have an authentic claim to be Israel. What I would hope for is the recognition of Jews that we too practice a form of the religion of Israel, which we believe to be its fulfillment. Thus we may find a new mutual respect and a way to collaborate despite the horrors of the past, a collaboration that is respectful and mutually beneficial, while admitting real and serious differences. 

We claim to be Israel by just a bit of genetic inheritance and a lot of adoption. We are members of the same religion, but followers of different faiths. Jesus and Moses are not enemies. Their followers should imitate them.

Rev. Know-it-all

PS you will be pleased to know that my family did not get along with Henry Ford. They refused to loan him money when he wanted to get his business going. We thought he was a bad investment and beside he gave us the shpilkes.