In the preceding chapter I sketched the historical development of Pharisaism from its source in the work of Ezra to the time when it had found its literary expression in the Talmud and the Midrash. I said that from first to last what was developed was the religion of Torah. It is therefore essential to the understanding of Pharisaism that the reader should, first, obtain a clear conception of the meaning of Torah, and, second, that he should bear that conception always in mind in his further study of Pharisaism. It will be my task in the present chapter to show what Torah meant, and what form the religion of Torah actually, and perhaps necessarily, assumed. If I succeed, then the reader will understand how it was that Rabbinical devotion to Torah could express itself quite naturally in terms which to the unenlightened Gentile appear to be extravagant—as, for instance, when it is said that God studies Torah for three hours every day (b. A. Zar. 3b).
There would be no particular difficulty in understanding what is meant by Torah, if it were not that it is commonly supposed that the word "Law" is the just equivalent of it. The Greek, alike of the Septuagint and of the New Testament, renders "Torah" by νὁμος [Greek: nómos]; and while the translators of the New Testament rightly rendered νὁμος [Greek: nómos] by "Law," they nevertheless perpetuated what was a misconception on the part of those who used the Greek word to represent "Torah." It is to avoid that misconception that I have already used, and shall continue to use, the word "Torah" untranslated, as a technical term whose full implication cannot be expressed in any one English word. It is true that the word "torah" is simply and correctly translated by the word "teaching"; but, as used in the later Judaism, it denotes a particular kind of teaching, and also the sum-total of what was taught as well as the vehicle or medium by which it was given. It further denotes any particular portion of that teaching. In short, it is a word into which the Rabbis compressed more meaning than can be found in any other word in their language; and we shall more readily grasp that varied meaning if we keep to the word Torah, as being unspoiled by erroneous associations.
The original meaning, then, of the word Torah is simply "teaching," any kind of instruction given by any person to any other person; for instance, Prov. i. 8, "Forsake not the 'torah' of thy mother." More specifically, it was religious teaching, conceived as given either by God to Israel, or by man to his fellow-man. Thus, Isa. li. 7, "the people in whose heart is my Torah" (where the speaker is God); and, for human instruction, Deut. xvii. 11, "according to the tenor of the 'Torah' which they shall teach thee," "they" being the priests. This last passage gives the clue to the further developments of the word. It had been for ages the custom in Israel for the priests to give instruction to the people upon matters connected with religion, explanations of duty, decisions of disputes, intimations of the will of God. This was, of course, Torah; and it was Torah which was regarded as being given by God through human agency. The Torah which the Lord gave by the hand of Moses would not originally imply any code or book, but simply such ancient sayings, precepts or otherwise, as were traditionally ascribed to Moses as the great teacher of Israel in the days of old. The connection of Torah with Moses, though others might have given Torah as well as he, had this result, that gradually a body of traditional teaching was accumulated, ascribed to him and bearing his name; and the several attempts to collect and codify these are to be seen in the various strata of the Pentateuch. They are mostly in the form of precept and command, as was only likely, since they were intended for the guidance of conduct. But that was not why they were called Torah. If Moses had taught something that was not commandment at all, it would still have been Torah, because it was taught.
In this sense, Israel had never been without Torah; and the prophet no less than the priest owned that in it God had continually taught His people. Prophecy itself was only a form of Torah, for the prophet spoke the word of the Lord.
Now, whatever else Ezra introduced that was new, it was not Torah. If he had religious teaching to give, as of course he had, he only followed in the train of the prophets and priests from Moses downwards. And when he offered Torah to the people, they knew what he was referring to. Nor did the novelty consist in the fact that Ezra made known to them a larger body of Torah than they had previously been acquainted with. It does not greatly matter, for the present purpose, whether the book which Ezra read to the people was the Priestly Code, or the whole Pentateuch substantially, though not finally, complete. For even if the earlier documents had not been as yet welded into one whole with the Priestly Code, they were nevertheless in existence, and were already owned as Torah of Moses.
What Ezra did was to lay a much greater emphasis upon the need of obedience to what was contained in the book of Torah (or the books) as being the duty of every Israelite. What was in fact the collected accretions of centuries, was regarded by Ezra, and by all Israel, as Torah from God communicated by Moses, and therefore entitled to precedence over any Torah imparted to anyone else. The book, or books, in which it was recorded contained all that God had chosen to reveal for the instruction of His people. The five books of Moses were the written form of the Torah. They were not the Torah itself. It is only for convenience that the Pentateuch is often called the Torah. The two are not identical. The Pentateuch differs from the Torah as the vessel differs from its contents, even though there be but one unique vessel in which those contents are preserved. Ezra, then, offered for the acceptance of Israel, in the book that he read to them, what he believed to be the full revelation which God had made. But he went beyond those who had preceded him, beyond even those who had carried through the reform of which the book of Deuteronomy is the manifesto, by reason of the stress which he laid upon personal and individual acceptance of it. Deuteronomy, no doubt, contained over and over again the demand, "Thou shalt observe to do" according to all these commandments, and it enforced the demand by the appalling catalogue of curses upon the disobedient which may be read in the 28th chapter. But Deuteronomy was written before the Exile, and Ezra lived after it. The priests had given Torah, and the prophets had proclaimed God's revelation of His nature and of man's relation to Him and consequent duty. They had been pre-eminently preachers of righteousness. But yet, in spite of the zeal of the prophets and the teaching of the priests, the bitter lesson of the Exile had proved that Israel had not served his God as he ought to have done. It was Ezra's function to apply the lesson of the Exile and to direct the religious life of Israel into such lines that no similar disaster should again be experienced; or rather, that no such sin should again be committed as had led to that disaster. Ezekiel, indeed, had been the first to perceive the necessity of a change in the direction of Israel's life; but he had lived at a time too early for a real beginning to be made. Yet it can hardly be doubted that the seed, which Ezekiel sowed among the captives in Babylonia, bore fruit in the ideas which underlay the reformation of Ezra. When Ezra came forward with the book of the Torah, he did so not in any sense as an opponent of the prophets, or as making a breach between their ideas and his own. He came forward to enforce their teaching, to apply it, and to get from it a larger result of practical righteousness than it had produced in their time. It was just because the prophets had so splendidly revealed God to Israel, had proclaimed to him the full grandeur of his privilege, that Israel must now be taught to do his part as he had never done it before. The greater the privilege the greater the responsibility. So far from being at variance with the ideas of the prophets, Ezra was the one to complete them, or at least to put his people in the way of completing them. There is a difference of method between Ezra and the prophets; there is no difference of principle. And as the Pharisees and the later Rabbis did but carry out the method and the principle of Ezra, they stand in the same line with him as the legitimate successors and continuators of the prophets.[2] It may be said with truth that of the later types of Judaism—Hellenism, Apocalyptic, and Rabbinism—the last, and only the last, carried on and handed down the inheritance which the prophets had left. What Hellenism and Apocalyptic had to give went to Christianity, so far as it survived at all.
The purpose of Ezra was to lay stress on the embodiment, in the practical life of the individual Jew, of the teaching of the prophets (including Moses) concerning God and Israel. The main point for Ezra was that God had taught certain things—knowledge of Himself, knowledge of His will. What had been taught must be learned and taken to heart, and, so far as it was of the nature of precept, must be carried out in practice. It was not enough to know; the Israelite was required to do and to be.
The practical application of this idea needed the acceptance of it on the part of the people, and further, a definite undertaking to make certain changes in their manner of life. And, before all, it was necessary that they should, so far as possible, separate themselves from the "peoples of the lands" in whose midst they found themselves, on returning from the Exile. This is, of course, the meaning of the putting away of the foreign wives, and the forbidding of such marriages for the future. The general programme of the reform is set forth in Neh. x., which is nothing more than the logical corollary of the acceptance of Torah. Among the points there specified, besides the prohibition of intermarriage with foreigners, are the observance of the Sabbath, the payment of the tax for the service of the house of God, and the duty of bringing first-fruits and tithes. Of course these provisions do not cover the whole duty of the Jew, and they were not intended to do so. Their purpose was to set up the Jews as a closed corporation, distinct from the surrounding peoples, and to provide for the maintenance of the Jewish cultus. Within the limits thus drawn, this enclosure marked off from the Gentile world, the Jew was to live his whole life, and the Torah was to be his guide in doing so. The limits were drawn in order to make it possible for the Jew to live up to the Torah. The limits themselves are not part of the Torah; and hence it follows that a Jew could live with complete loyalty to the Torah, and yet be but little conscious of the limits within which he enjoyed his spiritual freedom and privileges. Unless occasion reminded him of the fact of separation between him and the Gentiles, he could give his whole mind to the immediate concerns of his religious life—meditation, prayer, and the doing of his duties towards God and man. His thought was not taken up with a painful study of precepts, but was free to range over the whole relation in which he stood towards God. The Torah was his guide to the whole meaning of that relation, not merely to the performance of specified duties. And therefore, when Ezra prevailed on the Jews to become a separate community, he was not condemning them to a life of barren legalism, cutting them off from a free communion with God; he was providing for them a means whereby they could enjoy that free communion, defended against the dangers which, in the past, had been so disastrous to the religious life of the people. It is, of course, true that in doing so he was at the same time cutting the Jews off from free intercourse with their fellow-men of non-Jewish race, and thereby restricting their development as human beings. And the Jews ever since have paid a heavy price for that separation. But in Ezra's time free intercourse with non-Jewish peoples did not seem at all a desirable thing, if the Jewish people were to survive. It is indeed difficult to believe that they would have survived, if the policy of Ezra had not been carried out. And if they had not, what would have become of the Jewish religion? And how would the great spiritual treasure of the prophets (to say nothing of the Torah itself) have become available for those who, in a later age, were to depend so largely upon it? Whether the policy of separation is to be for ever kept up, is a question which the future must decide. But that Ezra saved the Jewish religion and the Jewish people is hardly open to dispute.
Ezra, then, provided for the Jews an enclosure, marked off from the Gentile world, within which to live their religious life; and he gave them the Torah, as being the full revelation which God had made through Moses, for their guide in the life they should thenceforth live there. Clearly, no one would enter that enclosure, or remain within it, unless he really and seriously meant to live on the lines of Torah. And that is why, from the time of Ezra, the importance of Torah becomes so marked, and insistence on it so emphatic; why, in short, from that time, the Torah dominates the whole field of religion for those who followed the lead of Ezra. They virtually declared that they would stand or fall by the Torah. For them, the Torah was the medium through which religion became real to them; as it were, the glass through which they viewed all the dealings of God with their own race in the past, and with mankind in general. This will be more fully seen when we come to what the Talmud has to say about Torah. But that is only the expansion in detail, as pious imagination dwelt upon the theme, of the idea which Ezra planted in the mind of his people, that of the supreme importance of Torah as the revelation which God had made, the perfect guide, the source of all that could be known or required to be known, by him who would "love God with all his heart, and with all his strength, and with all his might."
The Jew who followed the lead of Ezra was, as before, a member of the community of Israel; but he was, in a far greater degree than before, aware of his own responsibility for the right living of his life in relation to God, the doing and the being of what was pleasing to Him. The Torah was given to Israel; but it was none the less addressed to each Jew. And that, not merely in regard to particular precepts but in regard to the religious teaching as a whole. It may be true that nothing in the Pentateuch rises to the height of spiritual grandeur attained by the great prophets. It may be true that their free inspiration denoted a power and fulness of religious life greater than could be developed by the Torah as a body of teaching, or even regarded as a final revelation. But however sublime the religion of the great prophets had been, the religion of the ordinary Israelite had by no means attained to the same degree of power and fulness. If it had done so, there would not have been the collapse of national religious life which brought about the Exile. The effect of making the Torah the guide of life, the seat of authority in religion, was to deepen the spiritual life of the ordinary Jew; it gave him a stronger sense of personal responsibility, and opened out to him regions of religious experience of which he had seldom if ever been aware. The effect of thus exalting the Torah was not, as it is so often said to have been, to cramp and harden the spiritual nature of the Jew, by confining it within definite limits and oppressing it by precise commands. I would not say that this never happened; because it is not wise to assert a universal negative. But it certainly was not the primary or the usual effect. The Torah made the religion of Israel personal and individual to a far greater degree than it had been before; and it did so by conveying to the individual Jew not merely the legal precept but the prophetic fervour, the joy and the inspiration of personal communion with God as well as the high privilege of serving Him. The introduction of the Torah was not the signal for a decline in the national religious life, but the beginning of a new and strenuous advance; and whereas, before, the prophets had towered high above the mass of the people, who had remained at a comparatively low level of spiritual attainment, henceforth there is a great development of the spiritual nature of the ordinary people, the individual Jew. There were no more prophets, because there was no further need of any prophets. Their work was done; and in respect of that part of their work where they had failed, Ezra and his followers succeeded. The prophets had declared the full meaning of the religion of Israel, its glorious hopes, its triumphant certainties, its boundless possibilities. The people had heard, but had too little heeded. Ezra, by means of the Torah, and expressly and intentionally by that means, drove all this home to the heart of the individual Jew, and so wrought it into the very texture of his religious nature that it has remained there ever since. It is high time to put away altogether, as one of the exploded errors of history, the notion that Ezra, by the exaltation of the Torah to the supreme place in Jewish religion, set that religion upon the down-grade. I believe it to be nearer the truth to say that after Moses, and Isaiah (or perhaps Jeremiah), Ezra is the third greatest man in the Old Testament.
It can scarcely be too often repeated that the Torah, as Ezra understood it, meant divine teaching upon all and everything that concerned religion. It was not confined to commands, positive or negative, but included everything that bore upon religion at all. This is evident on the face of it; because the contents of the Pentateuch (which is the written embodiment of the Torah) include much else beside precept. As a Rabbi pointed out, long afterwards, if the Torah had been only precept, it would have been sufficient to begin it at Exod. xii. 2, where the first precept occurs. "And why was it written (Gen. i. 1), 'In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, etc.'? To show the power of His might" (R. Jitzḥak, in Tanḥ 4ª). The meaning of which is that the Torah is a revelation of more than the divine will.
The view that the Torah, as recorded in the Pentateuch, is the supreme revelation which God made to Israel, and that it covers the whole extent of the religious life, theoretical as well as practical, is implied in the position which it held in Judaism from the time of Ezra onwards, and underlies all that the Talmud says about it. There is no point in the long line from Ezra to the closing of the Talmud, at which it can be said: "Here the conception of the Torah was narrowed into the meaning of mere legal precept." It was at no time thus narrowed. And if, as is often admitted, Judaism, after Ezra and before Christ, allowed of a considerable degree of spiritual attainment on the part of those who were under the Torah, there is no ground for denying the possibility of such spiritual attainment on the part of Jews in or after the time of Christ, because the conception of the Torah remained the same in essence. What change there was, between Ezra and the Pharisees and the later Rabbis in the Talmud, was in the opposite direction to that of restriction of its meaning. They realised far more than Ezra did, or could do, the fulness and richness of the Torah as a divine revelation; and while they took a delight in glorifying it on its imperative side, as embodying divine commands, they never dreamed of saying that the Torah was precept and nothing more.
In his well-known book, Die alt-synagogale Theologie, p. 24, Weber says: "If we have to admit that this praise of Torah (in the Talmudic literature) is entirely in accord with similar praise of Torah in the Psalms, we must nevertheless not forget that here (i.e. in the Talmud) the Torah is praised as Law, while in Scripture the conception of Torah is wider and includes all revelation, alike of law and of salvation."
The opposition here alleged does not exist; and the statement that it does is the cardinal error of Weber's mischievous book. For the right understanding of Pharisaic Judaism, the fact that Weber is the usually accepted guide is well-nigh fatal. It will be observed, however, that Weber admits the wider conception of the Torah in the later books of the Old Testament, especially in the Psalms; and that is all that matters at present. It is of importance to realise that the spiritual life of Israel not merely ought to have done, but actually did increase and develop under the influence of that Torah which Ezra had exalted to the supreme place. There are two very important indications of the truth of this statement; one is the rise of the Synagogue, and the other is the growth and completion of the book of Psalms. It will be no digression, but an appeal to evidence directly bearing on the subject, to speak at this point of both these.
The origin of the Synagogue is to this extent unknown, that no precise date can be assigned at which it was first instituted. But it did not appear in Palestine before the time of Ezra, and it was already ancient and immemorial in the time of the Maccabees. It is possible, and even probable, that it arose amongst the captives in Babylonia. It is certain that it spread through the whole Jewish community in Palestine when it was introduced. The Synagogue, Beth-ha-keneseth, "meeting-house," was a place where Jews assembled for religious purposes. It is reasonable to suppose that what first led to the establishment of such places, by the captives in Babylonia, was the fact that they were cut off for an indefinite time from their native land, and the Temple of their God. It was not only that they were prevented by distance from "going up to the Temple to pray"; it was that the Temple itself was destroyed, and its services no longer performed. There was thus no national worship of God at all. Yet God was still there, to be worshipped. Trust in Him had not died out from Jewish hearts when Jerusalem fell. What more simple and natural, for all that it was in fact an unheard-of innovation, than that here and there a company of brothers in exile should meet together, and pray to the God of their fathers? So far as I know, there had never been, in the world's history, any form of congregational worship till the Synagogue appeared. Till then, worship had usually been performed in some temple or local shrine, and consisted in the offering of some gift or sacrifice, usually through the medium of a priest, and accompanied no doubt by some prescribed prayer. This was done in the Temple in Jerusalem, while the Temple yet stood. And the Synagogue did not set out to do the same thing on a small scale, but to do something entirely different. The time came when the Temple service was restored, and the ancient sacrifices offered again with the fullest pomp of ritual. But the Synagogue did not on that account suspend its operations, or show the least sign of declining in popular favour.
The idea of the Synagogue was twofold; it was a place of worship, i.e. congregational worship, and it was a place of teaching, i.e. religious teaching. It has kept that twofold character ever since, or at all events kept it till long after the Talmudic period. For the Synagogue had come to stay, and it has continued down to the present day. Of all the institutions that man has ever devised, the one with the longest continuous history is the Synagogue. And that it answers to a real and permanent religious need is shown by the fact that the Christian religion took over both the idea and the form of the Synagogue, in organising its own meetings for worship, and has retained them ever since; except where sacrificial ideas, derived partly from the Temple worship and partly from pagan ritual, have interfered with and spoiled the simplicity of the Synagogue type of service. It is highly remarkable that the same elements which are familiar in Christian worship—hymn, prayer, Scripture reading, and sermon—are found in the earliest Synagogue services so far back as the records go. And the reason why they have been retained, practically unaltered, is surely this, that they have been found to answer their purpose so well that no change was felt to be needed. Whoever first devised the form of the Synagogue service came, no doubt unconsciously, upon one of the fundamentals of the spiritual nature of man, made one of the discoveries which determine the future development of the race for all time. The Synagogue perhaps grew up rather than was intentionally created; and it was accepted because it so exactly met the needs of those who first made use of it. During some twenty-three centuries it has served the purpose of common worship, both in its Jewish and its Christian form; and when it is considered how enormous has been the influence of the practice of meeting for common worship, such as the Synagogue first provided and made possible, then it becomes highly significant that the Synagogue appeared in close connection with the labours of Ezra and the new emphasis laid on the Torah. Whether, on the supposition that the Synagogue arose on Babylonian soil, it owed its origin to the conception of Torah as Ezra understood it, we have no means of knowing. But it is certain that its rapid spread in Palestine took place when the idea of Torah was already made dominant. And the Synagogue was naturally adapted to embody that idea. As the Torah was the revelation which God had made to Israel, the study of it and the practical application of it were both associated with the "house of meeting." To study it was to ponder the meaning of the revelation. And to practise it was, amongst other things, to worship the God who had given it. The Synagogue was intended to develop through religious fellowship the whole nature of those who met there, spiritual and moral, and by no means only intellectual. And even if the Torah which they studied had been nothing but precepts, yet these included a personal devotion to the service of God which was practically unthinkable without worship of Him. It was as natural that those who met in the Synagogue should join in prayer together, as that they should read or hear the book of the Torah, and should edify one another by expounding its contents. That is what they did; and the Synagogue did not fail to become a most important factor in deepening and strengthening the spiritual life of the people at large.
Now if the effect of the exaltation of Torah, due to Ezra, had been, as it is usually said to have been, gradually to harden and cramp the spiritual freedom of the Jewish mind, then either the Synagogue would have ceased to minister in any way to spiritual needs, or else it would have represented a protest against the deadening influence of Torah. But in actual fact there has never been, at all events till quite recent years, any such opposition between the Synagogue and the religion of Torah. On the contrary, it was precisely the religion of Torah which the Synagogue, through all these centuries, has existed to promote; and it was the Synagogue, so inspired, which served as the type and model of Christian worship. The Synagogue is one of the first-fruits of that Judaism which, under the lead of Ezra, took its stand upon the Torah.
Further evidence in the same direction, namely, that the tendency of the religion of Torah was not towards spiritual decline, is afforded by the book of Psalms. That evidence would be more cogent than it is, if it were possible to fix with certainty the date of every Psalm. That cannot be done; but the fact remains that the collection of the Psalms, and the use of that collection as a lyrical expression of devotion, belong to the time after, and not before, the age of Ezra. It is often said that the book of Psalms is the hymn-book of the second Temple; and I do not challenge the general correctness of that statement. But some, at all events, of the Psalms seem to be less adapted to the Temple service than to that of the Synagogue. I mean that those utterances of intensely personal devotion which make the Psalms so wonderful a treasure of spiritual experience, are much more in keeping with the simple worship of the Synagogue than with the stately and official celebrations of the Temple. It might indeed be said that some of the Psalms are too personal even for the congregational worship of the Synagogue, if we did not know, from common usage, that hymns of that character are constantly sung in Christian worship. There is hardly any one of the Psalms which could not have been quite well sung in the Synagogue; while there are many which have no obvious fitness for the service of the Temple. But, in any case, it was not until after Ezra had made Torah the dominant factor in Judaism that the book of Psalms was collected and arranged, and in part composed, as we have it now. It contains hymns of an older date, in some cases perhaps a much older date. And it is possible that some smaller collections had been made in times before Ezra. But there are several Psalms which quite clearly owe their origin to the idea of Torah as the supreme revelation, besides others which bear witness to the influence of that idea; while the collection of the whole is best explained as due to the need, first brought to the Jewish consciousness by the Synagogue, of some means of giving united expression to the thoughts and feelings of a worshipping multitude. Of course it is not here implied that the collection or production of the book of Psalms took place immediately after the time of Ezra. The collection may have only been completed as late as the first century b.c. But the point is that the whole was collected, and much of it composed, under the influence of the religious ideas associated with Ezra and the Torah. And it should be observed that the later be the date assigned to the composition of some of the Psalms, and the final collection of the whole of them, the stronger is the evidence that the religion of Torah was not the unspiritual formalism that it is often supposed to have been.
I shall have more to say about the Psalms, as evidence for the meaning of the religion of Torah, in the last chapter, in which I shall deal with Pharisaism as a spiritual religion. For the present enough, perhaps, has been said to show that the Judaism to which Ezra gave its distinguishing character by raising the Torah to its supreme place there, was thereby enriched and not impoverished on its spiritual side; it did not sink but rise, it became not more shallow and poor, but more full and deep, with greater power than it ever had before as a determining factor in individual life.
It may be objected, at this point, "All this may be very true, in regard to the religion of Ezra, as conditioned by Torah; but does it hold good in regard to the religion of the Pharisees, of whom, in this chapter, nothing has as yet been said? Ezra may have been such as has been described; but it is the Pharisees who are commonly said to have been mere legalists in their ethics, and formalists in their worship." I am quite ready to meet that challenge; and it was for the purpose of preparing to meet it that I have been so careful to make clear the conception of Torah implied in the work of Ezra, and its effect upon the religion of those who followed his lead.
As has been said already, there was no divergence in principle between Ezra and the Pharisees. Both accepted with entire assent the conception of the Torah as the supreme revelation made by God to Israel; and they owned in like manner, with entire assent, the duty of conforming in thought, word, and deed to the divine teaching therein contained. In what, then, did the Pharisees differ from Ezra? In what directions was development possible from the idea of Torah as he conceived it? And in particular, what line of development was still open to the Pharisees when they first became a distinct element in the Jewish national life?
In the time between Ezra and the Maccabees that provision had been made of the Synagogue worship, to which reference has already been made; and within the lines of a liturgy whose simple beginnings are ascribed to the Men of the Great Synagogue, and which was further enlarged by the piety of later generations, that piety continued to find expression in public worship. Private prayer never confined itself to stated forms; and private prayer was always an essential element in the religion of Torah. It must never be forgotten, that in all the developments of Pharisaism and Rabbinism on the lines of theology and the practical conduct of life, the spiritual and devotional side is always involved. The men who built up the huge fabric of Talmudic casuistry were men who prayed to their Father in Heaven (calling Him by that name), and who, in simplicity of heart, "worshipped him in spirit and in truth." If this is challenged, (though it would not be challenged by anyone who really knows the Rabbis), then I ask, were the great men who built up the equally huge fabric of Christian doctrinal theology men in whom the spiritual nature was atrophied? Let Augustine answer for his brethren among the Christians; and if his answer be allowed, (and no one who has read the Confessions will dispute it), then let it be allowed that R. Akiba, a double-dyed Pharisee if there ever was one, and a master of Halachah, may also have known "the deep things of God," and "walked in the light of His countenance."
The development of the religion of Torah from Ezra to the Pharisees, and on to the Talmud, took place along two main lines, it being understood that through all the spiritual and devotional side was ministered to. The two lines of development are indicated by two words, of which I have just mentioned one—Hălāchah and Hăggādah. To grasp the significance of these terms is essential for the right understanding of Pharisaism. I will not give a definition of them, just at this point, but will rather describe the two methods by which the Torah was interpreted, and for which these two names were chosen.
The Torah, as recorded in the Pentateuch, was set up by Ezra as the supreme revelation made by God to Israel. It was Teaching intended to be learned. Now one of the first things that must be learned by any man who would serve God is How he shall serve Him. What shall he refrain from doing? How shall he know, if he is in doubt, whether he ought to do this or that? And again, many things are done as being customary; there are usages, observances, ceremonial acts of which the origin is not known. Are these to be approved or condemned, when tried by the standard of the right service of God?
On the lines laid down by Ezra, and followed by the Pharisees and the Rabbis, the answer to questions such as these was to be sought in the Torah. Answers to some of them were found at once. In many passages, the words were explicit: "Thou shalt do so," or "Thou shalt not do so." In other passages, minute directions were given for the performance of certain acts. But cases would arise which were not expressly dealt with in the written Torah; and in such cases it became the duty of those who had most deeply studied it, to give a decision according to what they believed to be the intention of the Torah. They would infer from what it enjoined in a given set of circumstances, what it would enjoin in a somewhat different set of circumstances. This is what the early Sopherim did, and probably Ezra himself. And these decisions were on the one hand interpretations of the Torah, and on the other hand rules of conduct, to be applied as occasion might require. On both accounts they were carefully handed down, for the guidance and instruction of posterity. This is the Tradition of the Elders, and it extends from Ezra to the closing of the Talmud.
Now let us examine that tradition at some suitable point, say the beginning of our era, when Pharisaism was fully established. The Tradition of the Elders had become by that time a considerable body of decisions, originally given by way of interpreting the Torah so as to apply it in particular cases. These decisions were not written down, but preserved in memory. A Pharisee would say that all these were part of the Torah. They were not something added on to it, of merely human as opposed to divine authority. They were successive unfoldings of what had been hidden in the Torah from the beginning. The particular teacher who had given such and such an interpretation, thereby rendered explicit what had till then been implicit in the Torah. The Torah was not merely the written word of the Pentateuch, but the divine thought behind it. And to interpret the Torah was not to read something fresh into the written word, but to get something fresh out of it. If a Pharisee were asked, Where is the Torah to be found? he would answer: "The written word and the unwritten tradition together make up the Torah." And he would further say that the unwritten was more important than the written, because the unwritten unfolded what was concealed in the written, and extended its application. But it was all the Torah; and however far the process might be extended, however detailed the interpretation might come to be, it would still all be the Torah. For the Torah was in itself inexhaustible, being the full revelation that God had made. And all the drawing forth and unfolding of its meaning was but the bringing into the consciousness of men what was and had been in the Torah from the beginning. This is the theory of Torah, as it was certainly held by the Pharisees, and embodied in the Talmud. Whether Ezra himself held it, there is no evidence to show, and I do not claim that he did. But it is clear that once the Torah is made supreme, this is one of the possible lines along which that idea could be developed. There are no doubt other lines; but the main characteristic of the Pharisees and of the Rabbis is that they followed this line, and no one can say that they did not do their work thoroughly.
What it amounts to is this, that the Torah was to be made, not merely in theory but in practice, a complete guide to life. The aim was to learn, from what God had revealed, His will in regard to every slightest action that a man might do. That could be learned from the Torah; and if it could be, it ought to be. No amount of study was too great, if, by that means, something more might be learned of how God willed that a man should live. Every fresh interpretation of the Torah, when once accepted as valid, was an extension of its meaning, or rather a transference of its meaning from the region of the unknown to the region of the known.
The result of this process was a detailed statement that such and such and such actions were to be done by anyone who would rightly serve God, because they were what God Himself had taught in the Torah, as being His will. This detailed rule of right conduct is what is denoted by the name Halachah.[3]
Halachah is the most conspicuous element in Pharisaism, partly because it was the object of its authors' most close and continuous thought, and partly because its results were immediately visible in the actions which it prescribed. It was the Halachah which gave rise to the common opinion that Torah is the same as Law. It is the Halachah which has laid the Pharisees open to so much misrepresentation and obloquy. And, if there was one thing more than another that a Pharisee would extol as divine, it was the Halachah; because it was to him the express direction of God how rightly to serve Him.
Evidently the greatest care would be needed in the interpretation of the Torah, to draw from it the right conclusion. If the result—the Halachah—was to be accepted as the divine teaching, made explicit upon such and such a point, it could not be left to chance or caprice to determine the form in which it should be expressed. It was not open to any teacher to give his own interpretation upon some point and straightway to say, "This is the Halachah," i.e. this is the Torah made explicit upon this subject. What was to be regarded as Halachah was only determined after careful deliberation, guided by the recorded opinion of earlier teachers, where known, and also by recognised rules of interpretation. The end proposed in such discussion was either to define in minuter detail some general rule of conduct derived from the Torah, or else to connect some already existing usage with the Torah so as to show that it had divine sanction. The masters of Halachah were not engaged upon the construction de novo of a system of ethics or a system of law. They were engaged in adjusting to the standard of Torah all the actions of life, so that in every one of them the divine will might be carried out. And when it appeared that such and such was the real meaning of Torah upon a given point, the Halachah ascertained by valid methods, then they were not free to decide otherwise upon that point. Which is only to say, what everyone must say, that he is not entitled to go against the authority which he personally regards as supreme.
The Halachah covered part of the ground which is usually occupied in a nation's life by the civil and criminal law. And this is another reason for the common identification of Torah with Law. Law there must be for the regulations of social life, the performance of contracts, the prevention of crime, and the like. The Jews needed a civil and criminal law, as any civilised people needs it. And though in certain respects they were subject to the Roman law, (at all events in the time of the Pharisees and the Rabbis), yet they devised a system of their own, because they would have their law based on the Torah. The Roman government they obeyed from compulsion; to the Torah they gave the full allegiance of heart and will. The Halachah accordingly is, to a large extent, a system of civil and criminal law based upon, or derived from, the Torah, and resting for its sanction upon the divine revelation therein contained. And if the Halachah, in dealing with such subjects as must be dealt with in a code of civil and criminal law, goes into minute detail, makes subtle distinctions, draws very fine lines between what is and what is not lawful, it only does what any adequate system of law is bound to do. And to say that the mass of detail and minute precept of the Halachah was, or must have been, oppressive to the ordinary Jew, is as true, or untrue, as to say that the ordinary Englishman is oppressed by the mass of detail and minute precept in the body of statute and common law by which his actions as a citizen are regulated, and which he is presumed to know. In the one case, as in the other, certain lines are defined by a recognised authority, for the regulation of action; but for any given person, it is seldom that he will be in a position to feel the constraint, or expressly to seek the permission, of the greater number of the laws under which he lives. If he is in that position, then the Englishman under the statute and common law, equally with the Pharisee under the Halachah, acknowledges a rule of conduct having authority over him, and not to be disobeyed with impunity. And the main difference is that, to the Jew, the authority of the Halachah was the authority of the Torah, and the Torah was the revelation of God. So that, to the Jew, the code of civil and criminal law was specifically sacred in a way that it is not to the Englishman.
But the Halachah, as the reader will wish to remind me, came very much more closely home to the Jew than a code of civil and criminal law could do. It was the rule of his private and domestic life, it defined his conduct both towards God and his fellow-man. Certainly it did. And the Pharisee would say, "Why not? Do I not need to serve God in everything I do, however small? And if the Torah can teach me exactly—yes, very exactly—what is most pleasing to Him, shall I not thankfully receive that teaching, and the more of it the better?" On this theory, it can easily be seen that there is no real distinction of great and small, important and trivial, in the things that are done in accordance with Halachah, because, in each case, what was done was regarded as a doing of God's will. In themselves, and apart from that, actions were trivial or important, great or small, and the Pharisees knew perfectly well that they were. But the Pharisee never regarded the mere doing of the action as sufficient; in all and every case there must be the purpose of serving God, the intention of pleasing Him. If he were assured that God had directed such and such a thing to be done, in a given case, then he would not say, "This is a trivial thing," or "This is a great thing"; but, "This is precisely what God would have me do at this moment and under these circumstances," and he felt a joy in doing it as exactly as he could. All this is widely different from what Christians are accustomed to, in determining their actions; but my object is to make clear the point of view of the Pharisees, and to show that on the lines of their theory they were perfectly justified in those precise definitions of conduct, even in matters which on other lines would be considered trifling. However small might be the details upon which the Halachah was defined, it was still Torah that enjoined the doing of the action in this way and not in that way, though, on the face of it, there might seem to be no reason to do it in one way rather than another. And the authority of Halachah was the will of God. It is easy to pick out from the Mishnah instances of minute regulation upon points of no apparent importance—such, for instance, as the rules for dealing with an egg laid upon the Sabbath. If a Pharisee were challenged upon that, or any similar case, he would say: "The Torah, the divine revelation, extends over the whole of life; and its principles, when drawn out and applied to that particular case, yield the results stated in the Halachah, bearing thereon. The divine will is taught me in regard to that; and what concerns me is the doing of the divine will, and not the smallness of the occasion in regard to which I do it."
The duties enjoined in the Halachah were called "Mitzvōth," i.e. commandments. And the essence of a "mitzvah" was that it was a thing which God willed to have done. It was an occasion of service, a means offered to man by which he could in a given instance please God. Therefore the Pharisee delighted in being able to perform a "mitzvah"; and it never occurred to him that he was burdened by the weight or oppressed by the number of them. "The 'Mitzvōth,'" said a famous Rabbi, "were only given in order to purify Israel. The things commanded made no difference to God" (Rab, in Ber. R. § 44, p. 89ª). They were so many opportunities given, by the sheer kindness of God, for man to do his Maker's will. Why God should be pleased to direct that such things should be done just in that way and in no other, it was not for man to inquire. All that he had to do was to take the opportunity, and serve God in the manner which God enjoined. Merely to do the action, without the conscious assent of his will and the devotion of his heart, was no fulfilment of his duty; for what God desired was the harmony of the human soul with Himself in willing obedience, and not that, for instance, just 2000 cubits and no more should be the extent of a Sabbath day's walk.
R. Joḥanan b. Zaccai, a contemporary of Jesus, was once asked what was the reason for performing all the ritual of the sacrifices, and the other minutiæ of the ceremonial law. He answered: "A corpse does not defile, and waters do not cleanse. But it is a decree of the King of kings. The Holy One, blessed be He, hath said, 'I have ordained my statute; I have decreed my decree. Man is not entitled to transgress my decree.' As it is written (Num. xix. 2), 'This is the decree of the Torah'" (Pesikta 40b). That is a far-reaching saying, and gives the clue to the whole meaning of the Halachah, as the rule of right conduct deduced from the Torah, and applied by the Pharisees.
It is obvious that a theory like that lends itself to abuse, because it makes a severe demand for constant devotion on the part of the man who lives under it. Undoubtedly it could, and in some cases it did, lead to that mere formalism and hypocrisy which have been charged upon the Pharisees as a class. The Pharisees themselves were perfectly well aware of the danger, and that it was not always successfully averted. But most distinctly, such formalism and hypocrisy were only the perversion of Pharisaism and not inherent in it. And not only so, but for the Pharisees as a class, on their own showing in the Talmud, the Halachah, with its abundant "Mitzvōth," was felt to be a help and not a hindrance to him who would walk with God, a joy and not a burden.
The Pharisees, as was explained in the previous chapter, were those in their time who interpreted most strictly the Torah which in some degree all Jews recognised. It was they who worked out the Halachah, as it was they who carried out its principle into the minutest details of practice. On their theory of Torah, it was clearly their duty to be as precise as they were in their food and their dress, in the "tithing of mint, anise, and cumin," the wearing of their phylacteries just so and not otherwise, in their scrupulous regard to "clean" and "unclean," "lawful" and "forbidden," and the like. And it was only for the sake of being in a position to carry out more fully what they deemed to be the will of God, in all these and many other matters, that they separated themselves from those who were less careful, and formed themselves into groups, societies, companionships, as they called them (Ḥabūrōth). That separation is indicated by the name applied to them, Pherūshim, or Pharishaia in the common Aramaic speech. Their own name for themselves and each other was "Ḥaberim," "companions," as they were "banded together for a full obedience" to what God had enjoined in the Torah.
It is easy to make Pharisaism appear ridiculous, a mere extravagance of punctilious formalism. But that is only possible to those who look at it from a point of view which is not that of its devoted adherents, or who judge it by a standard which they never recognised. Pharisaism is entitled to be judged according to what the Pharisees themselves meant by it, and its worth to be estimated by what they found in it, without comparison with other and widely different conceptions of the theory or practice of the service of God. I shall make no such comparisons, either now or later. My whole object is to present Pharisaism as I believe it really to have been to the Pharisees themselves, who, whatever else they were, were in deadly earnest about it all, and gave even to that Halachah, which more than anything else has brought scorn and ridicule upon them, the patient labour of at least six centuries.
I believe that, if the Pharisees had had nothing more than the Halachah, they would still have made a religion out of it. I mean, if they had developed from the Torah, which was to them the supreme revelation, only its Mitzvōth, they would still have been able to find in it some satisfaction for the spiritual wants of their souls. But they had much else, as will be shown in more detail in subsequent chapters. It was their task, or rather their absorbing delight, to elaborate the Halachah, to make it an ever more perfect exposition of the divine will in regard to the conduct at least of Israel; as it was their joy, in the obeying of those precepts, to "walk humbly with their God," as they certainly did. But it should be borne in mind that in addition to the Halachah, with its strenuous and salutary discipline of thought and action; there was the whole range of meditation upon divine things—speculation, imagination, inquiry into the mysteries of nature and human experience, devout wonder at the ways of God and the marvels of His world, all, by the light which He had given in His Torah. For great as the Halachah was, and divine and holy, the Torah was greater, for in it God had given all that He had to give. "Greater," said a Rabbi, "is one single word of Torah, than all the 'Mitzvōth' contained in it." And another: "All the world is not equivalent to one single word of Torah" (j. Peah. 15d), meaning that the beholding of the perfect revelation of God is more than the realisation in action of a part of it. Again, extravagance, it will be said. Yet only the extravagance of exalting in spoken word that which is owned as supreme in thought. The phrases may be to non-Jewish ears devoid of serious meaning; but in that way the Pharisees chose to express what in their hearts they owned as fully and perfectly divine, that Torah which to them was wisdom from God, the revelation of all truth, goodness, power, and love. It was to them the very expression of the mind and thought of God; and that is what they meant when they said that God looked upon the Torah when He created the world (Tanh. 2b), or that He Himself studies the Torah every day. It is His self-communing made known to man.
All this, which covers the whole field that is occupied in other religions by doctrinal and speculative theology, was included in the Torah and formed part of the religion of those who owned it as supreme. And all this had its place in their thought along with the Halachah.
And at the heart of those same Pharisees there was the piety which sought and found God in the worship of the Synagogue and the home, which looked to Him with love and humble trust, and knew Him to be not far off but very near, no mere abstract power, no hard taskmaster, but the Heavenly Father.
These things I believe to be true of the Pharisees; not of every individual, just as one would not say of every Christian that the full glory of his religion was realised either in him or by him, but true as the full expression of what Pharisaism meant, and true in a larger measure as the experience of those who professed it.
Beneath all that outward guise of unfamiliar phrase and uncongenial method, so far removed from all that to Christians seems the natural expression of religion, there was nevertheless the communion of living souls with the living God; and however different was the way in which they felt called to walk, from that in which other men walk, in that way they steadfastly continued; and, knowing in their hearts that God was with them, they "trusted in Him and were not ashamed."
It is from the New Testament that the ordinary Christian reader gets his ideas about the Pharisees. There is mention in the Gospels of frequent encounters between Jesus and the Pharisees; and the Epistles of Paul contain much severe comment on the Pharisaic conception of religion. No one, who desires to understand what the Pharisees themselves meant by their religion, can afford to pass by, without careful examination, these records of unfavourable criticism; and he must enter upon such examination not by any means with the preconceived intention of confuting the critics or of agreeing with them, but simply for the purpose of getting to know why there was such criticism, and what truth lay on each side in the controversy. With this object, I shall devote one chapter to the study of the opposition between the Pharisees and Jesus, and another to that between Pharisaism and the teaching of Paul. Incidentally, it will be possible to find room for various points which bear upon what has been said in the foregoing chapters.
It will be admitted that to discuss the relation of the Pharisees to Jesus is to tread upon delicate ground; for, whatever Jesus was, the place which he holds in the thought and reverence of Christians is shared by no one else; and it is less easy to say the right thing when he is regarded as a party in a controversy than when he is contemplated as in himself supremely great. It is less easy, because the controversy was one in which sharp and bitter things were said on both sides; and to regret that they were said, and still more to suggest that they were said without sufficient warrant, is to cast inevitable reflections on those who said them. It is easy to say that the Pharisees were wrong—that is only what is expected of them; it is another thing to say that Jesus was wrong, that even he did less than justice to his opponents, and, in his intercourse with them, showed upon occasion qualities which were extremely human but not obviously divine. I yield to no one in my reverence for Jesus; he is, to me, simply the greatest man who ever lived, in regard to his spiritual nature. Some may think that too little to say of him; others may think it too much. I do not stay to argue the point; I only wish to make clear, beyond any misunderstanding, my own position. What I have to do at present is to deal with the fact that between Jesus, being such as I have indicated, and the Pharisees, there was an opposition of thought and principle too great to be resolved into harmony; and I wish to study that opposition, so as to judge fairly—that is, without prejudice one way or the other—the real meaning of it. If, on the one side, the verdict is expressed in the phrase, "Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites," on the other it is summed up in the assertion, to be found in the Talmud, "Jesus practised magic and led astray and deceived Israel" (b. Sanh. 107b). To say offhand that one of those assertions is true and the other false is merely to beg the question. It is more to the purpose to understand how it came about that they were said. That such a statement should be made about Jesus is to Christians hard to endure. They feel it to be unjust and untrue. That such a statement should be made about the Pharisees is to Jews hard to endure. They feel it to be unjust and untrue. They are the weaker party, and they have the right to be heard.
In view of the sharp contrast expressed in the two sayings just referred to, it might seem that the Pharisees and Jesus had nothing in common. And indeed the final breach was inevitable and irreparable. Religion as the Pharisee conceived it could not come to terms with religion as Jesus conceived it. As to that I will say more presently. But it is well to bear in mind, and even to emphasise, the fact that there was nevertheless a considerable amount of common ground between them, much more than is usually supposed. With a great deal of what Jesus said about God, and about man's relation to Him, no Pharisee would feel disposed to quarrel, or, so far as the evidence goes, ever did quarrel. The discussions in the Gospels did not turn, for instance, on the question whether Jesus should or should not have referred to God as the Father in Heaven, or whether forgiveness was God's sure answer to repentance. No Pharisee ever challenged him on either point, or on many another of the directly religious and ethical sayings which he uttered. A Pharisee could not so have challenged him without disowning his own religion. Modern Jewish historians not unnaturally lay much stress upon the similarity between the teaching of Jesus and that of the Rabbis, at all events the best of them; and that similarity cannot be denied, whatever may be the explanation of it. Moreover, it is not merely a similarity of phrase, though no doubt in some cases it is nothing more. That proverbial sayings should be used alike by Jesus and the Rabbis is not wonderful. Such were, for instance: "It is enough for a disciple to be as his master" (b. Ber. 58b); "With what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again" (Sot. i. 7); "Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof" (b. Ber. 9b); "Physician, heal thyself" (Ber. R. xxiii. 4), which Jesus himself mentions as a familiar proverb (Luke iv. 23).
These were part of the common stock of daily speech, and are no evidence either for or against a similarity between the ideas of Jesus and those of the Pharisees. But when Jesus said, "Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand," he was referring to what was already familiar to his hearers, and had been, long before John the Baptist had begun to deliver his message. And when the Sermon on the Mount was first spoken, it was not all strange and new to the hearers. The general character of the sayings there grouped together is thoroughly Jewish; so much so that one could hardly imagine a Greek saying them. There are differences, certainly, between the sayings contained in the Sermon on the Mount and the Rabbinical parallels to them; and for some of them no Rabbinical parallels can be found. But, take it altogether, the Sermon on the Mount would seem to a Pharisee to be very like what he believed already. Even the Lord's Prayer would not be wholly new. Certainly some of its phrases can be paralleled in the Rabbinical literature; though no less certainly there are others which cannot. For the prayer as a whole, there is no parallel in Jewish sources—a very significant fact. But "Our Father which art in Heaven" is Jewish; so also, "Hallowed be Thy name. Thy Kingdom come"; "Give us this day our daily bread"; "Forgive us our debts"; "Deliver us from the evil." I am not sure about "Lead us not into temptation." And if "Thy will be done" means the same in the Lord's Prayer as it meant when uttered in Gethsemane, there is no parallel to it in Jewish sources.
This carries us into the very heart of the religion of Jesus. And in regard to these fundamental beliefs there was no disagreement between him and the Pharisees. I am perfectly well aware that the Rabbinical parallels, even those most complete, are found in literature which is later than Jesus, and I shall rightly be challenged to show on what ground I hold that these later Jewish dicta represent the beliefs of the Pharisees in the time of Jesus. I do not agree with Jewish scholars who say that Jesus borrowed them all from the Rabbis of his time. A man of such independent thought as Jesus certainly was, would hardly need to go in search of such ideas, as not having them already himself. It is inconceivable that Jesus should never have thought of calling God "Our Father in Heaven" until Hillel or Shammai had instructed him to do so. The point scarcely needs to be laboured. I put on one side altogether the theory that Jesus was indebted to the Rabbis of his time for the beliefs, and the verbal forms of them, which he shared with the Pharisees.
But with no less decision must the theory be rejected according to which these various beliefs and phrases were borrowed from Jesus. If they had been, i.e. if Pharisees who heard Jesus say these things had adopted them as their own, and even to some extent made them current in their own religious teaching, it is perfectly certain they would never have been allowed into the Talmud. Suppose, for instance (which is what a great many people suppose), that Jesus had been the first to use the phrase, "Our Father which art in Heaven," so that to Jewish ears that had been entirely unknown until he used it. In that case, the origin of the term would have been perfectly well remembered; and the feeling against Jesus in Pharisaic circles was far too strong to allow, for a moment, the use of a phrase known to have been coined by "the Sinner of Israel." The earliest occurrence of the term in the Mishnah, so far as I know, is at the end of chapter ix. of the treatise Sotah; and there the person who uses it is R. Eliezer b. Horkenos. This particular Rabbi is very well known. He lived at the end of the first century of our era. He got into trouble on one occasion; and the reason of his trouble, according to his own admission, was that he had unwittingly praised something that was told him, and which he afterwards learned was a saying of Jesus. He was filled with horror at the thought that he could ever have approved anything which had emanated from that teacher. Now R. Eliezer himself was probably too young to have seen and heard Jesus; but his old master, R. Joḥanan b. Zaccai, was a contemporary, and must have witnessed the tragedy in Jerusalem. If Jesus had invented the term, "Our Father in Heaven," that fact would be well within the knowledge of R. Eliezer, and he would have cut off his right hand sooner than have used the phrase. Instead of that, he used it with devout intention: "Who is there on whom to lean, except our Father who is in Heaven?" It was a phrase which expressed the ground of trust in God. And neither to himself nor to anyone else did it occur that he was using a phrase either recent or suspicious in its origin.[4]
All this goes to show that there cannot have been any borrowing from Jesus on the part of those who recorded in the Talmud sayings similar to his, or who used phrases implying similar beliefs. It is just conceivable that slight and unimportant sayings of his might have been picked up and made current amongst the Rabbis. But that phrases so important and so numerous as those which are offered as parallels to the teaching of Jesus, should have been borrowed from him, is, to anyone who knows the Talmud at all, a sheer impossibility.
There remains, accordingly, this alternative, that such phrases represent what was familiar to and accepted by both Jesus and the Pharisees, as ground truths about which there was no dispute. Jesus did not explain, as he had no need to explain to his hearers, why he called God the Father in Heaven. He took it for granted that they knew whom he referred to and what he meant. And no Scribe ever asked him to explain his meaning. It is clear that, wherever it came from, the term "Father in Heaven," as applied to God, was not new in the time of Jesus. It was part of the common stock of religious ideas, a natural element in the Jewish religion of that time. When and how it first came into use I do not know. It is not found, in so many words, in the Old Testament or the Apocrypha, though there is a broad hint of it in Isa. lxiii. 16, "Surely Thou art our Father, etc." If it be (and who will deny that it is?) one of the great watchwords of spiritual religion, then observe that it can only have come into use in the time between the Maccabees and Jesus; and no other source for it can be deemed so probable as the Synagogue, the home of the religion of Torah.
And much the same argument applies to the rest of what can be shown to be similar in the religious ideas of Jesus and those of the Rabbis. They cannot have been borrowed from Jesus. They were known in his time because he gave utterance to them, and was not challenged for doing so. They were known and devoutly believed by the Talmudic Pharisees; there is no indication of their being a novelty. They must therefore represent substantially what was held and believed by the Pharisees in and before the time of Jesus.
It may, of course, be argued that Jesus put a deeper meaning into the common terms than the Pharisees did. But this is extremely difficult to prove; and merely to say that he did is to beg the question. Who would venture to say that all Christians put precisely the same meaning upon the common terms which they employ, or that a given term will not mean to a deeply spiritual Christian much more than it would to a shallow and frivolous one?
I do not contend that all the Pharisees, or any of them, were the equals of Jesus in spiritual depth, just as I would not contend that all Christians, or any of them, were his equals in that respect. But there is certainly no warrant for saying that all Pharisees understood the common phrases of their religion in a low and narrow sense, as compared with the sense in which Jesus understood them. To say that "Our Father in Heaven" meant for the Pharisee only that God had chosen Israel to be His own people, and that the name Father "did not in the Jewish theology lead to a deeper insight into the nature of God as Love," is one of the flagrant misrepresentations with which Weber's book abounds (Weber, p. 150). There may have been Pharisees to whom the phrase meant nothing more; there certainly were Pharisees to whom it meant that God was near to each one of His children, in love and mercy and personal care. That the Pharisee thought of God only, or even mainly, as distant and inaccessible, or as a taskmaster whose service was hard, is a baseless fiction. Even, then, allowing that Jesus, by the depth and power of his own spiritual nature, did read into the common terms of Jewish religion a fuller meaning than had been previously found there, he nevertheless used those terms because they served to carry that meaning, as they stood and without alteration.
We have, then, reached this position, that both Jesus and the Pharisees shared in common a Judaism expressed in the terms of a spiritual Theism, developed in the Synagogue and the home, and learned there alike by the Pharisees and by Jesus. It was certainly not the creation of the Scribes, quâ Scribes, so that Jesus, or anyone else, would need to have sat at the feet of some Gamaliel in order to learn it. It was the spiritual inheritance of the Jew, into which he entered by natural piety, and from which neither the simple and unlearned nor the Scribe versed in the subtleties of the Halachah was excluded. I shall have more to say about this in the concluding chapter.
Such, then, was the common ground which Jesus shared with the Pharisees. We have now to study the opposition between them, which finally drove them apart in irreconcilable antagonism. The true nature of that opposition, the cause and ground of it, did not appear at the outset. Indeed, it may be questioned whether either the Pharisees or even Jesus himself ever fully and consciously realised the inner meaning of it. That the Pharisees knew why they distrusted, feared, and finally helped to destroy Jesus, is true enough. And Jesus expressed, in the plainest terms, the ground on which he denounced the Pharisees. But whether on either side the real significance of the struggle was clearly seen, is to my mind doubtful. Jesus may have seen it. I do not think the Pharisees did, or ever have done, from that day to this. To bring out that meaning, or what seems to me to be that meaning, will be the point to which I shall lead up in the remainder of this chapter; and with that in view I shall survey the main incidents of the controversy as they are recorded in the Gospels.
The appearance of Jesus as the successor of John the Baptist, taking up his message and proclaiming it with a force of his own, was enough to draw immediate attention to Jesus, and to incline men to give him a favourable hearing. This is to put the matter from the point of view of the people in general, and the Pharisees in particular, who were in possession of a settled religion, and to whom Jesus was an unknown man who had to make his name. That he preached repentance, and proclaimed the near advent of the Kingdom of Heaven, would be only a reason for listening to him. No Pharisee, nor any other Jew, with the national history behind him, would question for a moment that God might at any time raise up some messenger to proclaim His will. What else had the prophets been, in the old days? And had not John the Baptist been much like one of them? That John, and after him Jesus, had called his hearers to repent, was no reason whatever for resenting his boldness, or for denying his right to speak. It was the natural thing for a prophet to do; as, in much later times, it is natural for a revivalist to convict his hearers of sin, and lead them to the mercy seat. They do not resent being called sinners, and are only grateful for the glad tidings of the mercy which saves them. So with the Pharisees; there would be no disposition on their part to find fault with Jesus for coming forward as a preacher of repentance, let alone a herald of the Kingdom.