REJECTION
OF ‘APARTNESS’ … 57
The Messiah of the Jews … 57
Rejection of family ties … 58
THE
NEW VALUES … 59
The
political … 60
The
social … 61
‘Love thy neighbor’ … 61
The family … 65
The law on divorce … 66
Jesus on divorce … 68
The family: parents and children … 69
The personal … 70
The love of God … 70
The love of the Law … 71
Jesus’ teaching of the ethic … 72
The Kingdom of God … 75
The Jewish concept of the Kingdom … 75
Jesus’ concept of the Kingdom … 76
CHRISTIAN
LEGALISM … 77
NOTES
AND REFERENCES … 81
III
THE NEW ETHIC
REJECTION OF ‘APARTNESS’
The Messiah of the Jews
The
Jews had long expected something to happen to relieve their humiliation; all
looked for a deliverer or ‘Messiah’1 who would re-establish
the glory of Israel, breathe life into its spirit and better the
life-conditions of its people. Nonetheless, no-one expected a revolution that
would uproot their whole ethos: ‘every tree which bringeth not forth good fruit
is hewn down, and cast into the fire' (Matthew 3: 10, 7:19. Luke
3:9).
The Jews had a doctrine that, even if most of them
were unworthy, there was always ‘a remnant’ of the good among them to justify
the Jews continuing to be God’s chosen people. In this way, they rationalized
both racist separatism and moral unworth. But they were not, as Jews, necessary
to God’s purpose: Jesus knew that ‘God is able of these stones to raise up
children unto Abraham’ (Matthew, 339). Jesus did not contemplate the
ethical reform of the Jews as Jews—that would have negated the very nature of
that reform; patching up what was wrong was simply not the right remedy: ‘No
man putteth a piece of new cloth unto an old garment, for that which is put in
to till it up taketh from the garment, and the rent is made worse’ (Matthew
9:16; Mark 2:21; Luke 5:36). Jesus' Jewish contemporaries had
been so long set in their arrogant self-regard and hypocrisy that their moral
sense had atrophied: ‘Their heart was hardened’ (Mark 6:52); ‘This
people’s heart is waxed gross and their ears are dull of hearing, and their
eyes they have closed; lest at any time they should see with their
eyes, or hear with their ears, and should understand with their
heart, and should be converted, and l should heal them’ (Matthew 13:
15). Their whole ethos had to be discarded if ethical reform was to take place.
Being born as a Jew was not in itself a value; a person who believed that it
was had to be born again to become worthy of salvation: ‘Except a man be born
again, he cannot see the kingdom of God’ (John 3:3). In the same way the
effects of upbringing and culture also needed to be undone: ‘Except ye...become
as little children, ye shall not enter…’ (Matthew 18:3; 19:14; Mark
10:14-15; Luke l8:16-17). What Jesus invited to was radically apart
from, radically unlike, what
--pg57--
the
Jews had become used to. Between the two ways of life, the opposition was
total: ‘For whosoever will save his life [under the old ethic] shall lose it
[under the new]: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it’ (Matthew
10:39; 16:25; Mark 8:35; Luke 9:24; John 12:25).
Rejection of family ties
When
Jesus repudiated Jewish chosenness, he repudiated the worth of any collective
relationship with God. No-one is better than any other except ethically, that
is, by individually loving God and realizing His will. The only
relationship, Jesus taught, which ought to bind men together is an ethical one.
When his followers drew his attention to the fact that his mother and brethren
were seeking him in the crowd, he answered unequivocally: ‘Who is my mother and
my brethren?’ Then, indicating his disciples, he said: ‘Behold, my mother and
my brethren! For whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother,
and my sister, and mother’ (Matthew 12:48-50; Mark 3:33-5).
Jewish racism was diagnosed as the root of the
sickness which had perverted the ethic of Moses. God, in Jesus’ view, is the
God of all mankind, each of whom stands in exactly the same relation to Him.
God is not God to the Jews only, not the God of Abraham and Jacob and their
tribe exclusively. ‘There is none good but one, that is God’ (Matthew
19:17; Mark 10:18; Luke 18:19). And Jesus also said: ‘be not yet
called Rabbi: for one is your Master…and all ye are brethren. And call no man
your father upon the earth; for one is your Father, which is in haven’ (Matthew
23:8-10; Mark 12:29, 32). The Jews’ habit of calling themselves ‘the
children of God’ and of calling God ‘their Father’ was especially intolerable.
Rather, Jesus told the Jews, that which ‘ye will do’ is ‘the lusts of your
father [i.e. the devil]’; whereas ‘he that is of God heareth God’s words’ (John
8:44, 47). According to John, Jesus likened the Jews to one who ‘was a
murderer from the beginning’ and so acted and persisted ‘not in the truth’; or
like one who has ‘no truth in him’, who speaks ‘of his own’, that is, who lies.
In sum, the Jews are described as alienated from God; and that alienation
(being not ‘of God’) is the cause—not the effect—of their moral and ethical
failings: ‘He that is of God heareth God`s words: ye therefore hear them not,
because ye are not of God’. John is not here presenting Jesus as
anti-Jewish in some general way; rather, Jesus is shown as standing against the
claim that the Jews are a people chosen apart from all other peoples. Jesus’
universalist ethic is diametrically opposed to any (not just Jewish) racist
exclusivism.
There are passages in the Synoptic Gospels which
attempt, rather clumsily, to narrow, even to undo, the universalist aspect of
Jesus’ teaching. These passages, quite incredibly, claim that Jesus’ mission
was intended only for the Jews—not simply to begin but also to end with them. Matthew
5:17-19 attributes to Jesus the saying that he came not ‘to destroy’ but ‘to
fulfil’ the Law, and ‘Till heaven and
--pg58--
earth
pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be
fulfilled’ (5:18). Then, turning the whole purpose of Jesus’ mission upside
down: ‘Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and
shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in me kingdom of heaven; but
whosoever shall do and teach than, the same shall be called great in the
kingdom of heaven’ (5:19). The very Jewish anxiety behind these passages is
explicit when Matthew restricts Jesus’ mission to the twelve tribes, ‘to
the lost sheep of the house of Israel’ (10:5-6). Jesus is also reported as
forbidding his disciples to preach to the Gentiles among whom—in confirmation
of the hatred for them of Judah—are counted the Samaritans.2
A similar note is sounded in various passages in Luke.3
The preserving of the Jewish Law, the preferring of ‘the sons of Abraham’,4
are accents which persisted in Christianity with, as we shall see below
(pp.197ff., in a discussion of church and nationality), the gravest
consequences.
These are, certainly, false accents, a radical
misunderstanding of Jesus’ teaching. He urged that men should seek the kingdom
of God, not the kingdom of Israel. Mark (1:14) introduces Jesus as the
man who ‘after that John was put in prison... came into Galilee preaching the
gospel of the kingdom of God‘. The Kingdom of God is a spiritual kingdom of
souls whose wills are `determined’ only by God. It exists in this world
inasmuch as some souls are God-determined despite the constant appeal (or
threat) of non-divine influences on the will. It exists after death, in heaven
where such appeals and threats are completely absent. ‘Repent for the kingdom
of heaven is at hand’ (Matthew 4:17; 10:7); ‘Seek ye first the kingdom of
God’ (Matthew 6:33): these are, authentically, Jesus-like commands which
he gave to his hearers and to his disciples—‘go
thou and publish abroad the kingdom of God’ (Luke 9:60). We
recognize these words as authentic because they are wholly consonant with the
‘first commandment’ to love God with all one’s heart, soul, mind.
The new gospel is radically different from the Law.
Once the inner transformation it commends has been achieved, the Law is no
longer needed. The transformed person means to do God’s will in every
situation, not to satisfy the provisions of the Law. It is not that law is in
itself an evil; it need not be. But one should seek an escape from its
determination of rights and wrongs in order to be free for the higher task of
loving God and realizing His will. Salvation lies beyond where Law can reach:
‘Except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and
Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven' (Matthew
5:20).
THE NEW VALUES
The
four Gospels of the New Tcstamcnt,5 Matthew, Mark, Luke,
and John (made canonical by the Church in the latter part of the fourth
century after Christ) are accounts at second or third hand and have
--pg59--
been
subjected to many revisions. Despite that history, they preserve a surprisingly
revealing amount of Jesus’ sayings. We may classify these sayings according to
the realm of values to which they are most relevant: the political, the social,
the family, the personal, and the cosmic.
The political
All three Synoptic Gospels report the conversation
during which Jesus made the well-known remark: ‘Render therefore unto Caesar
the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God’s’ (Matthew
22:21, Mark 12:17; Luke 20:25). The impression of evasiveness on
Jesus' part is strengthened by the narrators’ presentation of the incident as a
Pharisee plot to trap Jesus. Thus Matthew 22:15 begins its account with the
information that the Pharisees ‘took counsel how they might entangle him...’
Luke 20:20 is clearer than both Matthew and Mark: ‘And they watched him and
sent forth spies, which should feign themselves just men, that they might take
hold of his words, that so they might deliver him unto the power and authority
of the governor’. Seen in this light, Jesus’ answer is a brilliant success: the
Pharisees failed utterly to get Jesus to incriminate himself in the eyes of the
political authority. But surely we should expect rather more from this inspired
Prophet, more from the Gospel, than to find Jesus playing (better than them)
the Pharisees’ game. Their mischievous intent is obvious. Jesus will have
transformed that mischief into an occasion to convey his divine message.
For a man who has satisfied the first commandment to
love God, there is no question but that his whole will and all his actions will
be determined by God. Such a man would indeed render Caesar’s due to Caesar and
God’s due to God—not as two divergent or alternative duties, but as one duty
pertaining to one and the same reality. What is Caesar’s is necessarily also
God’s, since everything is God’s, absolutely. More strictly, political or civil
matters constitute a sub-whole within the larger whole (inclusive of
everything) which is God’s. There are many such sub-wholes or ‘realms’—the
human body is an example, the family is another. We recognize these sub-wholes
because each has a separate, distinguishable structure. But their separateness
is not real or final; they are not autonomous in any real or final sense. Their
separateness exists in our understanding and is useful to us. But to regard the
divisions and categories which our understanding finds useful as final
realities is a grave mistake. The secular and the sacred are two departments of
thought, not of reality. Reality, regardless of the number of standpoints from
which it is understood is, absolutely and incontrovertibly, subject to God’s
determination. Even from the standpoint of understanding, it is incorrect to
regard the secular and the sacred as alternative categories, as wholly
separate dominions, each with its separate rules and values. The secular and
the sacred lie upon the same axis—both are subject to the same laws of
goodness,
--pg60--
the
same values. The secular and the sacred are not, therefore, conflicting
realms. Nor can these realms conflict in a soul whose will is totally dedicated
to God's will which overarches and embraces all the affairs of mankind and of
creation. Obviously, if Caesar’s domain were all his own and God’s were all the
priest’s—and this split is the root of all misunderstanding—conflict is
inevitable. But the plurality of realms with independent values has to be
invented in the understanding first, before a corresponding plurality of values
and loyalties can arise and become a problem, a conflict, in our lives. But
that is far from Jesus’ mind which, entirely committed to God’s Will, could not
envisage any problem except within that all-inclusive commitment.
The Jews were divided between on the one hand, a
resentful longing to subvert the Roman authority and on the other, sullen
co-operation with that authority in order to salvage something of their
national being. None accepted Rome as such; all looked to the reconstruction of
the Jewish national state as the cure to their present ills. Rather than appease
these two attitudes (also existing as factions), Jesus’ answer sought to
surmount their difficulties by bringing both under the overall divine purpose
of man. Caesar, or the imperium Romanum, is a reality which cannot be
ignored and which must be obeyed. So is the reality of the human will to
affiliation with a community, of which Jewish racism was the exaggerated,
extremist corruption. But in obeying either reality, one must not forget the
overarching sovereignty of God. Both `Caesar’ and ‘Israel’ are equally under
God’s law. For the realities which they both seek to determine are themselves
the realities which ought to be determined by God. And Jesus’ solution of the
tensions between them is that loyalty belongs to God above all; that the first
commandment is always first; that all other loyalties must be measured and
given, only and always, within that loyalty to God.
The social
‘Love thy neighbor'
In the realm of the social, all four Gospels regard
Jesus’ dialogue with the Jews as central. Health and well-being are universally
necessary, universally desired. All human beings have an entitlement to life,
health, joy and the conditions necessary to enable them to realize the other,
particular gills with which God has blessed them. In the exercise of these
entitlements, all men and women are required to be loving and helpful to one
another. The realization of God’s gifts in all human beings is the ethical
purpose of each, and their realization in each is the ethical purpose of all.
That, certainly, is the Will of God as it is understood in the teaching of
Jesus.
‘Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would
borrow of thee turn not thou away’ (Matthew 5:42, Luke 6:30).
--pg61--
Love
not only fronds and relatives, also ‘Love your enemies do good to them that
hate you’ (Matthew 5:44; Luke 6:27).
The twelve disciples were commanded to heal the sick,
cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils’, ‘freely’ (Matthew
10:8).
And `when you come into an house, salute it’ (Matthew
10:12).
Finally, ‘do good and lend, hoping for nothing again
[in return]’ (Luke 6:35); ‘be ye therefore merciful’ (Luke 6:36; Matthew
5:7).
The keynote of this teaching is its universality, of
which the most general expression is ‘love thy neighbor. This command as we saw
in the previous chapter, is not ‘second’ to the ‘first’ of the commandment to
love God with heart, soul and mind; rather, it is entailed in loving God, is a
part of the content of loving God. Loving one’s neighbor lies, as it were,
lower down, on the same axis as loving God. The two commands are not
alternatives—there is never any question of either loving your neighbor or
loving God. Nor are the two commands identical. Loving God is comprehensive:
the inner self submits to ‘determination’ by the Will of God or, simply,
accepts the doing of His Will. And His Will includes all the other realms of
human life and action, as well as the relation of neighbor to neighbor. In the
mind of a Jewish legalist, a Matthew or Mark, that relation might be given the status
of a ‘second’, ‘alternative’, dominion, below or near the dominion of the
individual’s relation to God. But it has no such status in the mind of Jesus,
who neither regards ‘love thy neighbor’ as secondary or alternative to love thy
God’, nor confuses the two (as does Luke6) into a
single commandment. The commandment can only be ‘love thy God’, within the
framework of which ‘love thy neighbor’ must be understood as maternally
entailed.7
Jesus’ elevating the love of neighbor as part of the
content of the love of God, was a radical challenge to the Jews. It was so,
even when misunderstood—that is, even when ‘love thy neighbor’ was ‘ranked’ as
equally obligatory, or obligatory secondarily, after ‘love thy God’ love of
God, for the Jews, meant love of the God of Israel and Israel alone. The God of
Israel’s will had been laid out to them in the Law. To obey the Law was to
realize Israel by realizing the will of Israel’s God. Any love of neighbor must
then be subject and secondary to that Law. The Jews reasoned, and felt, that
Jesus’ universalist ‘love thy neighbor’ ran against their keenest instinct of
being Jewish and against the highest interests of Israel’s future. The
challenge, therefore, crystallized as a conflict between the priority of Jesus’
love of neighbor and Jewish Law, and its pot of sharpest focus was the
Pharisee's question (Mark 3:4) ‘ls it lawful to do good on the sabbath
days?’
The Sabbath is the most important and fundamental
institution in Judaism, the quintessence of all Jewish Law, of the whole Torah.
That may seem an extravagantly large claim. It is not. The Sabbath represented
(and still does represent) for the Jews the special relation in which they
stand to their God and to the rest of creation. It is not surprising that the
whole Issue between Jesus and Judaism, should take the form of a dispute
regarding the sanctity of the Sabbath. The rab-
--pg62--
binic
Haggadah tells us that ‘If all Israel observes two Sabbaths [or even one, Leviticus
3:1] in all their details it will immediately be redeemed from exile’; that ‘he
who honors the sabbath with the preparation of delightful things will receive
all that his heart desires; his portion will be limitless and his sins will be
forgiven’; that ‘he who eats the three prescribed meals on the sabbath will be
saved from the troubles of the Messianic age, from the judgement of Gehenna,
and from the wars of Gog and Magog’; that ‘had the Israelites observed the
first sabbath in all its details, no nation or tongue could have prevailed
against them’ (Shabbath 118a, b).8
The great Jewish philosopher of the Middle Ages,
Maimonides, wrote: ‘The institution of the sabbath and the prohibition against
idolatry are each equal in importance to all the other laws of the Torah’
(Hullin, 5a). ‘The sabbath is also a sign between the Holy One and us for ever.
Therefore while he who transgresses all the other laws of the Torah is regarded
merely as one of the wicked ones of Israel, he who... desecrates the sabbath is
placed on the same level with the idolater...’ (Moreh, 2, 31). Maimonides then
quotes Isaiah 56:2, S8:13-14 and concludes with the latter’s words that,
if the Jews but keep the Sabbath, I [Jahweh] will cause thee [Israel] to ride
upon the high places of the earth and feed thee with the heritage of Jacob thy
father’.
Since Ezra, the Sabbath has never been regarded by
Jews as simply a desirable, divinely inspired or instituted, day of rest. It is
strictly a Jewish affair concerning only the ‘house of Jacob’. The Sabbath is
not binding on non-Jews, not even morally. The non-Jew may work on the Sabbath
as much as he pleases. His work is only a desecration if a Jew profits from it.
A Jew may only order a non-Jew to do work on the Sabbath if a non-Jew stands to
profit from it. The nature of the institution is finally evident in that it
permits, in case there was a sick person who was not in danger of death, and in
whose behalf the Jew himself dared not violate the Sabbath, the non-Jew may be
instructed to do the work’.9 The Jewish Law elaborated such
detailed laws regarding the Sabbath because, it seems, Jahweh himself and
Israel whom he faithfully serves, revolve around the observance. The Law had
prescribed that no work be performed by Jews on the Sabbath except in case of
genuine danger of life. The Mishnah enumerates thirty-nine classes of
prohibited work. It related how if a man hears a fluttering in his dove-cote,
he may climb up to see if the trapped dove is suffering more than ordinary
discomfort, if not, he must climb again without loosening it. He may
investigate the plight of his animal that has fallen in a ditch or well, but
more work than this is justified only on account of great pain or peril of
death’ (Ramsey, 1950, p.56).
All four Gospels are unanimous in their account of
this battle of loyalties: the Pharisees upholding the sanctity of the Sabbath,
and Jesus upholding that of the moral law prescribing goodness as the paramount
end of all action. But nowhere in the Gospels does one find an explicit
statement of the significance of that battle. Conditioned never
--pg63--
to
doubt that the day of rest and prayer is secondary to the moral law, we fail to
appreciate the gravity of what was being contended. In consequence we
misunderstand the nature of the struggle Jesus had to wage. The centrality of
the issue can be gauged from the fact that all four Gospels recount Jesus’
‘desecration’ of the Sabbath, after which all four tell of the Pharisees’ at
once scheming to destroy him (Matthew 12:14. Mark 3:6; Luke
6:7, 11; John 5:13). The analysis of the event in John 5:16 is
shared by the other Gospels: ‘And therefore did the Jews persecute Jesus, and
sought to slay hurt, because he had done these things on the sabbath day’.
The ‘desecration’ of the Sabbath relates to two
incidents plucking corn by hand while strolling in the field, (Matthew 12:1;
Mark 2:23; Luke 6:1), and the curing of the man with the withered
hand (Matthew 12:13; Mark 3:1; Luke 6:6; John 5:5).
Both are slight offences which rabbinic analysts could have covered under a
variety of provisions and sub-provisions. In defence, Jesus cited the example
of David who, exhausted after his flight from King Saul, entered the temple
with some of his friends, where he desecrated the holiest quarter of the temple
by helping himself to the ‘showbread, which was not lawful for him to eat,
neither for them which were with him, but only for the priests’.10
From this, Jesus concluded that he and his disciples should be allowed to do
the far less offensive plucking of a few ears of corn when they were hungry.11
With regard to the healing of the man with the
withered hand (John 5:5 calls it an infirmity), Jesus evoked the law permitting
rescue of animals: ‘What man shall there be among you that shall have one
sheep, and if it fail into a pit on the sabbath day, will he not lay hold on
it, and lift it out? How much then is a man better than a sheep?’ (Matthew
12:1-12; see also Luke 13:15, 14:1-5). The law allowed violation of the
Sabbath only to save a life. Had Jesus tried to show that this was the case,
the Pharisees would probably have absolved hurt, arguing that he was still a
Jew who honored the Law though too slack in its observance. In any case, the
demands of the Law could not always be perfectly satisfied. In Luke
(13:16), after the charge of hypocrisy against those who rescue livestock on
the Sabbath, Jesus asks ‘And ought not this woman, being a daughter of Abraham,
whom Satan hath bound… be loosed from this bond on the Sabbath day?’ It can
have made no difference to Jesus himself what race the woman belonged to what
mattered was her need of help. In making that association Jesus suggests to the
Jews that observing the Sabbath has become more important than the welfare even
of fellow-Jews which was, supposedly, the whole point of the Law.
In sum, we may conclude, that in the realm of social
relations, Jesus’ teaching aimed to destroy the precedence given to community
membership and survival over goodness, kindness and human feeling. Of the many
issues Jesus’ teaching covers in this realm, none focuses the issue so clearly
as doing good deeds on the Sabbath. In the Sabbath, as the quintessence of the
law, the whole community of Israel,
--pg64--
its
survival, existence and perpetuation, is urged. This, for the Jews, is an ideal
superior to anything else, including the ethical which is defined as that which
serves the perpetuation of the people. It was this connection between ethical
and social that Jesus sought to break because it was the opposite of everything
he stood for. Goodness, the moral imperative, must stand on the highest
possible level: it is absolute because it is the content of the love of God of
all ethics. By inverting the true order of values, by placing what lies ‘at the
lower end of the axis at the top, the Jews had confounded the divine purpose
for man.
The family
In
the Patriarchal period, the Hebrews regarded mixed marriages as abomination. Genesis
34:1-31 gives a clear example. There, the story is that for ‘a hundred pieces
of silver’ Jacob leased some land from the king of Shechem for his people. His
daughter, Dinah, on a visit to Shechemite women, attracted the attention of the
king’s son and heir (Shechem), who fell in love and lay with her without
waiting for the customary nuptial ceremony. In the ensuing negotiations between
Jacob and the king, it was agreed, on the basis that the offending couple loved
each other and that customary law allowed the marriage of such
hitherto-unmarried offenders, that Shechem would keep Dinah as his bride.
Strikingly, the agreement was not sealed with silver, gold, or cattle which the
young lover as well as his royal father were prepared to offer in abundance,
but with the promise that Shechem would become circumcised and thus identify
with the Hebrews. Shechem and the king were so enthused at this suggestion
that, taking Jacob at his word they circumcised themselves as well as all their
citizens. Jacob and his children were not pleased at this act of Hebraization.
The Genesis account expressly says (34:13) that they had only suggested
circumcision ‘deceitfully’. Thus, ‘on the third day, when they were sore’
(34:25) Jacob’s sons slew all the Shechemite males and carried away their
women, children, and all earthly goods.
This attitude must have persisted through the years in
Egypt for it is not otherwise possible to understand how the Hebrews could have
preserved their separate identity, and cultivated their consciousness of it to
the point of carrying out an Exodus—assuming the Biblical version is to be
trusted. After the Exodus, the Hebrews first mixed with Midianites, Moses’
in-laws, and then with Horeb, the tribes of Northern Arabia, who according to
some scholars gave the Jews the Jahweh cult and in confederation with whom,
among others, they entered Palestine. After their settlement in Canaan, racial
intermixture on an even larger large scale was unavoidable. Separatist racism
declined at least among the Canaanites and those of their neighbors who agreed
to settle in Palestine after marriage with Hebrew wives. David, Solomon, Ahab,
and untold numbers of their subjects contracted such marriages.12
But though diluted and often replaced by tolerance, racist
--pg65--
separatism
never completely died out.13 Mixed marriages were stigmatized
and criticized often with considerable intensity.
In the Babylonian Exile, the purity of the race
undoubtedly suffered, much to the dismay of the racists whose protests prepared
the ground for Ezra and Nehemiah's violent outburst against goyimism.
Upon then return to Judah, the Jews unleashed a harsh campaign against those
lax in observing the law, particularly against those who had violated the
purity of the race by marrying non-Judahic wives.14 That ‘the
people of Israel, and the priests, and the Levites have not separated
themselves from the people of the lands…’ (Ezra 9:1, 3) caused Ezra to
tear his cloak, his hair and beard. The language is vehemently racist: ‘the
holy seed’ has been sullied (9:2). Ezra, with the elders (10:2), demands that
the Jews ‘put away all the wives, and such as are born to them’ (10:3), and
that they separate from the people of the land’ (10:11). Acceptance was
grudging (Nehemiah 9:2; 10:28)—not surprisingly, as the Jews were
required to give up wives, sons and daughters, and to promise never again to
enter, or allow their kin to enter, to marriage with non-Judahites thus a
return to the Patriarchal position had been achieved. Henceforward, the Jews
had no Law other than the stringently racist code promulgated by Ezra and
Nehemiah.
The Law on divorce
The
Jewish law of divorce followed these developments closely.15
In the Patriarchal period, Jewish divorce custom was not unlike that of the
surrounding Near Eastern countryside. A man could unilaterally put away his
wife, thus. Abraham dismissed Hagar by a sheer act of will, seeing her off with
what her shoulder could carry by way of bread and water (Genesis 22:14).
As the Hebrew’s sense of racial separatism was strong enough to withstand any
attempt at mixture, divorce was easy. The Hebrew family was in those days
strictly patriarchal (Mace, 1935, p.66). Its head could be counted upon to
exercise sound judgement in the choice of wives and concubines and the
repudiation of those who might ‘pollute’ the purity of the race by refusing
assimilation therein. That seems to be the upshot of the story of Abraham and
Hagar, and of Jacob and Shechem.
The Deuteronomic reforms took place in Canaan, long
after the Hebrews had settled and mixed with the Canaanites.16
The reforms were strictly anti-Canaanite but mostly on account of the
Canaanites' recognition and worship of gods other than Jahweh. The Canaanites’
idols and altars, and their cults and associated customs were to be destroyed (Deuteronomy
12:2-3), and Jerusalem was to be Jahweh's only sanctuary (14.1; 18:9-22). That
done, the Canaanites had nights they could enjoy (24:7-22) and accompanied the
Jews’ feasts in Jerusalem (16:11ff.; Leviticus 19:34). The country was full of
Canaanites and the Jews intermarried with them. It was under the Influence of a
conscience undetermined by claims of Hebrew racial purity that
--pg66--
limitations
began to be imposed upon divorce which, since Jacob, had been an unlimited male
prerogative. There were too many men and women of Canaanite origin for the
diehard racists to regain the prerogative of repudiating foreign wives in the
manner of Abraham. Thus, the Deuteronomic law (24:1) demanded ‘a bill of
divorcement’ to be given by the husband. Another check on impulsive action was
the provision that, under certain conditions, the separations should be final
(24:4; 22:13- 19, 28-9). The law still permitted divorce almost at the
husband’s whim (‘that she find no favor in his eyes 24:1), nevertheless making
it harder than it had been--to involve others in the matter, to hire scribes to
prepare the document, must have demanded some effort and commitment in those
days.
In the period of the prophets, as mixing with the
Canaanites continued so did the trend towards limiting divorce. Condemnations
of divorce began to be heard, though it was not until Malachi (2:16; 5:15) that
a pronouncement was made against the institution of divorce as such. The Exile
must have seen many Jews marrying non-Jews; the travails of a deported
community would have created situations where men maltreated the wives ‘of
their youth’ and unscrupulously put them away.
Following the Exile, divorce was again very common but
without incurring the opprobrium of the Exile period. Under the influence of
Ezra and Nehemiah's racial separatism, demanding the repudiation of all
non-Jewish wives and children, divorce was made easier and approved The ethical
progress towards making divorce more disapproved (and so less common), a
progress prompted by mixture with the Canaanites and continued under the
prophets, was set back. But Ezra-Nehemiah could not undo the Deuteronomic
reforms outright. A bill of divorcement continued to be necessary, but was made
much easier to draw up and apply. Divorce required a statement that the husband
had found some ‘uncleanness’ in his wife. This gave Ezra-Nehemiah the
opportunity to reinstate the practice of wife and child repudiation exemplified
(in the Bible account) by Abraham. ‘Uncleanness’ was interpreted to enable the
exclusivist, ‘ethnically Cleansed’ community they wanted.
The vague wording of the Deuteronomic law gave rise to
rabbinic controversies well adapted to Ezra's racist program. We do not have
the texts of those controversies at the time of Ezra. But we do have a fairly
reliable record of the situation at the time of Jesus. Undoubtedly, for a long
time before Jesus, there had been two trends in the rabbinic tradition: one,
following from the inspiration of the prophets, tended to interpret uncleanness
in the sense of adultery or incapacitating infirmity, the other, following
Ezra, allowed any reason and interpreted as ‘uncleanness’ even the case where a
man finds a more attractive woman.17 The legal question
(represented, in Jesus’ time, by the Shammai school on the one hand and the
Hillel-Akiba school on the other) was a much debated one. We may note that
Joseph considered putting Mary away ‘privily’ (Matthew 1:19)
--pg67--
Jesus on divorce
Jesus’
first great insight was that this was not simply a matter for legists to debate
the fine points of. It concerned important values of human dignity—of the
individual and the family, that divinely established institution with which the
most elemental values of existence and life, as well as the highest of personal
values (love, fidelity, care and sacrifice), and a wide range of societal
values, are realized.
Easy divorce, useful for the racist’s program, denies
the value of the marriage institution. When a man marries he ‘shall leave his
father and mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh’
(Genesis 2:24). In the divine scheme, the husband-wife relation
transcends other relations of tribe or race. It is precisely the institution in
which Divine Will and nature join hands to combat racist separatism.
Jesus did not contribute to the legal debate about
divorce; he rejected the debate and repudiated the law itself. In the Sermon on
the Mount, he said: ‘It hath been said whosoever shall put away his wife, let
him give her a writing of divorcement. But I say unto you, that whosoever shall
put away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication, causeth her to commit
adultery: and whosoever shall marry her that is divorced committeth adultery’ (Matthew
5:31-2). The inevitable argument with the Pharisees is also reported in Matthew
(19:3-12).
They came to Jesus pleading the Hillel-Akiba view that
it is ‘lawful for a man to put away his wife for any cause’ (19:3). Jesus
answered them boldly, drawing their attention to the facts of creation, to the
nature of man, re-affirming the Genesis truth that the family relation
stands above tribe and race, indeed above ‘father and mother’ (19:4-5). He
concluded by repudiating divorce as contrary to God’s Will, as an undoing of
the bond He has instituted (19:6). The Pharisees were quick to observe that
this view contradicted the text of the Deuteronomic law: ‘Why did Moses then
command to give a writing of divorcement and to put her away’ (19:7)? They
attributed authorship of the law to Moses, and wondered if even a Jesus would
dare to contradict Moses. Furthermore, to speak against divorce at all was
inviting trouble at the hands of the authorities: at the time, Jesus was
travelling in the territory of Herod who had just divorced his wife in order to
marry Herodias.
Jesus’ answer, though textually ambiguous, was clear
in meaning. ‘Moses’, he said, ‘because of the hardness of your hearts suffered
you to put away your wives: but from the beginning it was not so’ (Matthew
19:8). However this pinion is interpreted,18 it means that
Moses too disapproved of divorce.
This is only too natural, for it is not possible for
Jesus to conceive of another great Prophet as being in error. Jesus then
reiterated his position that marriage is divinely ordained and that divorce is
no part of the divine scheme. Obviously the phrase ‘except for fornication’ is
itself a legalism in which Jesus could not have been interested his
--pg68--
purpose
being to give the general principle, not to enumerate exceptions. Like every
other principle this one too was not absolute and could have exceptions, which
would be governed by the higher principle of love of God which alone is
absolute.
The significance of Jesus’ stand on divorce has been
interpreted in a variety of ways. The ‘liberal’ Jews who espoused the
progressive ideas of the prophets, understood Jesus to have championed the
school of Shammai. The followers of the racist Hillel-Akiba line recognized in
Jesus’ stand further reason to destroy him. Both scholars who explicitly
recognize Jesus as a champion of the Shammai school,19 and
those who do so implicitly,20 have missed the point. Jesus
was interested in championing neither Hillel nor Shammai, either implicitly or
explicitly.
Divorce was the edge of friction between the
separatist/universalist trends which Jesus resolved decisively in favor of
universalism. The question of adultery was the edge of friction between
inward/outward family morality. Adultery, though well condemned by law and
custom, was quite widespread: scarcely a prophet fails to condemn the Jews for
it.21 The penal code prescribed death by stoning, practiced
in Jesus’ time (see John 8:3ff ) Jesus said: ‘it was said by them of old
time [meaning obviously the Law], Thou shalt not commit adultery. But I say
unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed
adultery with her already in his heart’ (Matthew 6:27-8). Adultery is
not only what the law condemns and what the people punish in accordance with
that law. It is, besides, to wish lustfully for another woman than one’s own.
This is prior to the act which has been brought to the attention of the law;
prior to the act itself. For it concerns the man in his consciousness of
himself as a moral subject. Suffice it for man to be guilty that he has
lustfully desired another woman. From this point of view, hardly anybody, and
certainly no case of adultery, escapes. For conscience sees all. This was the
lesson he meant to teach when the Pharisees brought him the adulteress that he
might condemn her and vindicate them, or defend her and contradict the Mosaic
law. ‘He that is without sin among you,’ he told them, ‘let him first cast a
stone at her’ (John 8:7).
The family: parents and children
Another
instance of Jewish law corrupted by legalistic analysis is the fifth
commandment, ‘Honor thy father and thy mother’ (Exodus 20:12). Jewish
Law had elaborated a theory of vows which required a son or daughter who made a
vow to dedicate a certain property or service to Jahweh, to keep the vow regardless
of consequences, even though the parents might be thereby deprived badly needed
assistance (Deuteronomy 23:21-3). It was natural that the two
commandments would often conflict and the rabbis upheld the vow at the cost of
love of parents. The practice hardened the attitudes of children towards their
parents; not, for the rabbis, an undesirable development as
--pg69--
it
bound the youth in loyalty to rabbi, temple, and Jahweh, and therefore helped
to forge and maintain the communal bond. An oral vow could be impulsively made.
And, not frequently, upon being faced with a request to surrender something to
the parents, a son could invoke the laws protection simply by proclaiming that
he had already made a gift of the thing to Jahweh (‘It is corban’). The
rabbis did not actually enforce the execution of vows. They left it to the
discretion of the individual’s conscience which, though not prosecuted, was
nevertheless accused by the law.
As Jesus saw it, there should be no doubt where the
right choice is: honor father and mother (Matthew 15:5-7; Mark
7:9). No man ought to vow any properties or goods necessary to his own, his
family or parents’ subsistence. If the goods he vows are unnecessary things,
the issue does not arise, for he would not by doing so be prejudicing the
interest of his parents. Thus, Jesus did not suggest further qualifying details
to the law, but transcended it, putting the love and honoring of parents out of
contradiction as it were, with the duties to God. In doing so, Jesus once more
gave voice to a developing and maturing ethos which ran counter to Pharisee
racist conservatism.22
It is with this in mind that we should read the words Matthew
puts on Jesus’ lips in his admonition to the twelve apostles: ‘I am come to set
a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother... He
that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me… (10:35-7).
Obviously, by these words Jesus cannot have meant to annul his assignment of
priority to filial duty, but to affirm the absolute priority of doing God’s
Will. These words do not repudiate filial duty but that loyalty to clan, tribe,
race, against which he maintained an unswerving antagonism throughout his
mission. He is here repudiating the same evil that he condemned in his
rejection of the rabbinic position on corban.
The personal
The love of God
The
political, the social, and the family realms provide ample scope for the love
of God to become operative and thus determine the human ethos. However, it is
in the realm of the personal that this love can best express and realize
itself. For love pertains to the inner disposition of the individual as a moral
subject. Certainly, the individual’s actions are events, with an outward form
and presence in a social context. But it is not on account of their outward
aspect, their being in the world, that these actions can be said to realize
love of God. That love is a quality which ought to characterize all human
deeds, personal or social, but it can do so only in relation to the inner
disposition of the doer. That, as we have stressed, is the breakthrough of the
new ethic. It removed love, its highest and only absolute principle, from the
--pg70--
realm
of actuality where events really happen or relations are really established, to
the inner world of the determinants of the individual’s intentions and deeds.
The love of the Law
Moving
the pivot of ethics from real effects in the outer word to the inner world of
intent and will was a tremendous revolution. Jewish Law, anxious first and last
to serve and preserve the Jewish race, crystallized around precepts whose
reason for existence was to bring about a particular effect in the world—the
preservation of Israel and restoration of its former power and glory. Virtue
was realized when, and to the extent that, that effect was realized. Precisely
because this was the intention of the Jewish Law, the Torah as a body of
general principle (like the ten commandments) was not adequate. Only after its
elaboration and rewriting as the Halachah could it serve that purpose. And it
was to the Torah as Halachah, a body of specific do’s and don'ts, that the Jews
pledged themselves after Ezra’s reforms. The elaborations were justified by Exodus
18:20: ‘Thou shalt make clear to them the statutes and the toroth and
make known to them the way where they should walk and the thing which they
should do’. The Pharisees gathered a number of specific commandments for the
faithful Jew to carry out, thus establishing his faith with the Torah and the
race-community of Israel. To refuse to do what the Halachah commanded was
regarded, after Ezra’s time, as high treason to Israel, as well as to Jahweh,
Israel’s God.23
Doing a specific thing to achieve a particular effect
in a particular situation is of the essence of Halachah ‘before everything
else’ (see Travers Herford, 1924, pp.73, 143). To the Pharisees, morality was
reduced to first knowing and then doing: the Torah and Halachah made knowledge
practically ‘complete’. All that was lacking was the doing. In this ethic of
effects or consequences, intent and will had no place. Thus if the thing done
is ‘good’ the action and the agent are ‘good’, that is, ethically
worthy—regardless of intention. For example, the Mishnah ruled that ‘if a woman
undertakes a Nezirite vow and then [unknowingly] drinks wine or is defiled by a
corpse, she is to receive forty stripes’ (Epstein, 1936, Nazir 23a, 6, 79). In
defence of the spirit of this ruling, the Pharisees relied on Leviticus
5:17: ‘if a soul sin, and commit any of these things which are forbidden to be
done by the commandments of the Lord, though he wist it not, yet is he
guilty, and shall bear his iniquity’. Rabbah ben Bar Hana gave a judgement that
one who eats the paschal lamb with the intention of doing so ‘walks in the path
of the Lord’; one who eats it with the intention merely of having a meal is a
‘transgressor who has stumbled therein’. The Talmud adjoins to this judgement
the refutation of Resh la Kish whose point was not, as might be expected, that
without the proper intention, one could not be said to have even accidentally
stumbled into the path of the Lord. Rather, his point was precisely the
opposite:
--pg71--
simply
by eating one had produced the effect (consuming the paschal lamb) and so could
not be a ‘transgressor’ (Epstein, 1936; Nazir 23a, 6, 82)
The
absence of the ‘right’ intention is judged irrelevant. The point becomes
clearer when we realize that the presence of the ‘wrong’ intention or some
other, unrelated intention. Is also irrelevant. This is well illustrated in
this comment attributed to ‘Ulla in the Talmud: ‘Both Tamar and Zimri committed
adultery. Tamar committed adultery and gave birth to kings and prophets. Zimri
committed adultery and on his account many tens of thousands of Israel
perished’. Obviously, to ‘Ulla, it is the effect of adultery that is relevant
in judging the final worth or unworthy of Tamar and Zimri. In like spirit, Rab
Judah, citing Rab, a greater and older authority, said: ‘A man should always
occupy himself with the Torah, and its precepts even though it be for some
ulterior motive’ (Epstein, 1936; Nazir 23b, 6. 84). ‘Ulterior motives’ do not
negate the value of the actions as long as their effects are what they ought to
be. Indeed, Rab Judah will tolerate ulterior motives on the mere hope, or
contingency of a desirable effect, arguing that one who reads the Torah with
ulterior motives may yet, eventually, follow the Torah and its precepts (as
above; see also Epstein. 1936; Horayoth 10a-b 67-76)
To Jesus, all this seemed wrong to the core. The
identification, in matters of value, of the highest good with Israel, confused
the utilitarian with the moral, the law with the conscience, the effect of
doing something with the ethical worth of the someone doing it. The ethical
worth of a person cannot take place in the abstract: it must enter the world.
In that sense there is a relation between the utilitarian and the moral—between
getting things done and the will being prepared (‘determined’) to do them. But
the value of what gets done does not determine the moral worth of the deed—that
depends, exclusively, in the ethic of Jesus, on how the person doing it was
‘determined’. The benefit to a beneficiary of the deed, the benefit to the
doer—these are not strictly relevant to the moral worth of the deed which,
again, depends on how far it is ‘determined’ by the love of God.
Jesus’ teaching of the ethic
Jesus
gave this new Insight of his several expressions, all designed to bring its
truth into focus. An old, poor woman contributed a farthing to the temple
treasury. The utilitarian, goods-value of her gift was very small, but it was
‘all that she had, even all her having’. She gave not In order to show off,
like the rich who throw in their gold seeking worldly acclaim, but ‘out of her
want’. She gave for the sake of giving, to pour herself out to her fellow human
beings, to help them at the cost of her own well-being. The love of God so
moved, so ‘determined’, her soul that all other considerations fell away and
led by her vision of oneness with the divine image, she gave all she owned.
Therefore, her desert is greater than that of all the other contributors
--pg72--
combined.
By these observations (Mark 12:41-4; Luke 21:1-4; Matthew 6:1-4), Jesus sought
to emphasize the truth that it is the will alone, in its intensity, its scope,
its motives, its purpose, its ‘determination’, that the ethical is to be
sought.
Another expression of this same truth is the anecdote
the Evangelists report of Jesus’ encounter with some Pharisees at the dinner
table. Luke (11:37ff.) sets the event in the home of a Pharisee who
‘besought him [Jesus] to me with him’. Mark (7:1ff.) refers to some
unspecified occasion, while Matthew (15:1ff.) recounts only the
arguments involved. It is doubtful if so mild-natured a person as Jesus would
answer his host with a tirade of condemnation just because the latter remarked
the fact that the disciples did not wash their hands before eating. This
difficulty for the reader is certainly owed to the dramatization, the narrative
presentation. The more important point is that the Pharisees' questions on this
subject were not hypothetical ones, nor disinterested: they related to the
central issue of being seen to observe (therefore of being seen to belong to)
the Law.
What must have happened is that Jesus or (more likely)
his disciples, were seen to have sat down to eat without performing the
ceremonial ritual of hand-washing. It is also likely that in some of the homes
of those disciples, the Pharisees noticed that the rituals of washing the pots
and pans a number of times as a purification from sacral defilement by milk or
meat and their products, were being neglected. They suspect a flouting of the
Law: 'Why walk not thy disciples according to the tradition of the elders?’ (Mark
7:5, Matthew 15:2). In contradicting, even condemning them, Jesus was
not—as Mark clearly explains (7:3-4)—denying the need for cleanliness. Jesus
made no issue of that. Rather, he used the occasion to point out the emptiness
(in moral terms) of outward cleanliness, of an outward observance of law with
no inward commitment to God. Thus, his reproach was that the Pharisees ‘make dean
the outside of the cup and the platter’ while the ‘inward part is full of
craving and wickedness’ (Luke 11:39). They honor God with their ‘lips’
but their ‘hearts are ‘far’ from Him. They pretend in so doing to uphold God's
commandments when in fact they deny God's commandments and, instead, observe
laws made by men: ` ...Laying aside the commandment of God, ye hold the
tradition of men’ (Mark 7:7-8).
In stark contrast to the attitude of the Pharisees,
the concern of the truly moral being is, above all else, to purify the will, to
‘ethicize’ the character and temperament (the ethos,) to so impress the soul
with love of God that it will do His will in every situation ‘… the light of
the body is the eye… if… thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of
light.... If thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness’ (Matthew
6:22-3, Luke 11:34). In the same way, a will ‘determined’ by the love of
God must issue in a life filled with moral value: out of a good tree, good
fruit is to be expected (Luke 6:43). The highest goal of Jewish law is
the will to power of a separatist state, an unethical end, and its central
concern is to bring about only certain
--pg73--
particular
effects which it (the Law) judges desirable for the race-community as a whole.
In Jesus’ view, man’s highest value (in truth his only highest value) is God:
man strives to be ‘perfect, even as... [the] Father which is in heaven is
perfect’ (Matthew 5:48).
Against this context, Jesus’ sharp reproach can be
understood and appreciated. The Pharisees obsessed themselves with the slight
business of everyday living, and so maintained a thorough neglect of weightier
matters—love of God mercy. Only someone with a warped ethos would be more
concerned with ‘that which goeth into the mouth’ than ‘that which cometh out of
it’ which would show the defilement which has entered the heart and settled
there: ‘From within out of the heart, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries… [a
longish list follows]’ (Mark
7:21-2).
The measures the Pharisees prescribed are for the outward forms, body and
race-community. What Jesus’ teaching presents is for the soul, compared to
which the body is of no value at all. If the soul’s value is understood and
accepted, we can have no fear of those who threaten to torment or destroy the
body; rather we should fear God who enables and judges the soul. He is worthy
of all fear and therefore of all love.
The Jews’ preoccupation with worldly riches was
another disposition that prevented their spiritual and moral senses from awakening
to the ethic of Jesus. Anxiety about such things is improper and impossible to
one who entrusts the inner being to its Creator: in Jesus’ beautiful rhetoric,
are the ravens not provided for even ‘though they do not sow or reap or store
in barns?’ The lilies in the field neither toil nor spin but are arrayed in
glory greater than Solomon’s. Man cannot have two such radically opposed
masters as God and Mammon; either love God and hate Mammon, or hate God and
love Mammon. The only alternative for the ethically transformed person is to
‘hate’ the world—that is, to hold it on the level of elemental value where it
properly belongs—and to love God, seeking His Kingdom with a lifetime
dedication (Luke 11:29-31).
In this spirit Jesus counselled his disciples to
renounce their worldly goods and affairs and follow him, indeed, to do so in
order to follow him. (Mark 10:21; Matthew 6:25ff., 33). He
gave the same advice to the Pharisee who recognized that loving God with heart,
soul and mind is the first commandment—which had earned the compliment that he
was not far from the Kingdom of God (Mark 12:34). What else, the
Pharisee had asked, in addition to not committing adultery, not stealing, not
bearing false witness, etc., should he do to enter heaven (Luke18:21)?
Better than such precepts, Jesus answered, is the love of God; one side of that
is repudiation of the things of the world. To be a disciple of Jesus, to hear
his word, is to do it; believing and doing are one (John 7:17; 9:31-3).
That is a great and exacting commandment: ‘Strait IS the gate, and narrow is
the way, which Ieadeth unto life, and few there be that find it’ (Matthew
7:14). No wonder that very few have been able to observe it. Even Peter’s claim
to have achieved this (Lo, we have left all, and have followed thee’) is
checked by Jesus
--pg74--
who
tells him: ‘...There is no man hath left house, or parents, or brethren, or
wife, or children, for the Kingdom of God’s sake, who shall not receive
manifold more in the present time, and in the world to come life everlasting’ (Luke
18:29-30; Mark 10:28-9).
To satisfy the first commandment that is, to transform
the inner self radically, to immunize it against ‘determination’ by anything
other than God’s Will—is both the means and end. To do it is to build one’s
house on solid rock secure against any storm. To do less than that, to fail to
dedicate oneself wholly, heart, soul and mind to loving God is to build on sand
(Matthew 7:24-7, Luke 6:47-9).
The Kingdom of God
The Jewish concept of the Kingdom
Under
pressures engendered by exile and political subjugation, the Jew’s had long
nursed a cult of secrecy and whispering, whereas Jesus, born in their midst
taught frankly, boldly, straightforwardly. They expected a leader to deliver
them from subjugation and restore Israel's former glory.24
The earlier dream was of a warlike Jahweh riding into Jerusalem in triumph,
vanquishing their (his) enemies and driving them before him in chains. Under
the influence of the later prophets (see Jeremiah 4, 7, 11; Isaiah 52-3, 57,
66), the figure of the deliverer changed to an agent of Jahweh born in
humility, who would act secretly. By the time of the Apocalyptic writings
(fourth-third centuries BC), especially in Joel (3:2ff.) and Daniel
(12:1-12), the Day of Jahweh’ has very little to do with the chastisement and
purification of Israel, rather more to do with Jahweh avenging and restoring
Israel. It seems that, in Jewish consciousness, the power of the deliverer grew
in indirect proportion to the failing hope of seeing their shattered kingdom
restored.
By the time of Jesus, the most widespread conviction
among the Jews was that their hopes could not be realized in the normal course
of political and historical change.25 They came to believe
that only a universal cataclysm could bring them a chance for vindication. The
nature of the deliverer’s mission was seen as a composite of the prophetic, the
spiritual and the political (see Klausner, 1955, p.163). But the political
aspirations were the most dominant. The hope of a deliverer was the innermost
longing of both the separatist conservatives and the more spiritually inclined
liberals (Möwinckel, 1956. pp.153-4). The Pharisees’ preference and, after
them, that of the majority of Jews, was, predictably, a restoration to political
power (Bright, 1953, pp 167-9)
This vision of Israel’s decay and collapse, then its
restoration and vindication as the Kingdom of God was, to all intents and
purposes, the history of the Jewish people. The concept was central to Jewish
thought and feeling. It was therefore quite natural for Jesus to focus a
--pg75--
good
part of his teaching on it. He accepted the term ‘kingdom’, as we shall see,
simply as a convenient means of entry into the charged emotions surrounding it:
his aim was to transform those emotions and the Jews’ concept of God’s Kingdom.
Jesus’ concept of the Kingdom
Jesus
would have nothing to do with political restoration of the kingdom of Israel or
the conquest of Israel’s past and present enemies: ‘My Kingdom is not of this world:
if my Kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight, that l should
not be delivered to the Jews: but now is my kingdom not from hence’ (John
18:36).26 Jesus explicitly condemned the concept of a Kingdom
of God for only the people of Israel. The Kingdom of God has no relation to a
particular place or time or to a particular people: all are admitted (from any
and every quarter) who love God. The excluded are: ‘workers of iniquity’ (Luke
13:27) ‘...Ye shall see Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, and all the prophets, in
the kingdom of God, and you yourselves thrust out. And they shall come from the
east, and from the west, and from the north, and from the south, and shall sit
down in the kingdom of God’ (Luke 13:28-9; see also 16:15-16).
The Kingdom of God is for whosoever loves God and does
His Will, and it is wherever such individuals are inasmuch as the Kingdom is
with them: ‘Into whatsoever city ye enter, and they receive you... say unto
them, The kingdom of God is come nigh unto you' (Luke 10:8-9). Because
the Kingdom is ‘not of this world’, it is not brought about by insurrection, by
political conspiracy secretly plotted. Accused of so doing at his trial, Jesus
said: ‘l ever taught openly to the world; l ever taught in the synagogue, and
in the temple, whither the Jews always resort; and in secret have I said
nothing. Why askest thou me? Ask them which heard me, what I have said unto
them: behold they know what l said’ (John 18:20-1). Equally, the Kingdom
of God is not brought about by external means, by ‘outside’ intervention from
God: all that God will presently do has already been done in that He has sent
Jesus—‘if l cast devils by the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of God is come
unto you’ (Matthew 12:28). What remains to be done, remains for mankind
themselves to do. By following the teaching of Jesus, by loving God with heart,
soul, mind and by doing God's Will, the disciples have already given an
instance of the Kingdom of God and brought it ‘nigh’ (Luke 10:8-9,
quoted above). What remains to do is to deepen commitment within themselves to
God's Will, and to teach that commitment to others: ‘That ye should do as l
have done to you [i.e. teach]` (John 13:15); ‘My doctrine is not mine
but His that sent me. If any man will do His will... he that followeth me shall
not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life’ (John 7:16;
8:12).
Clearly, Jesus’ teaching rejects the Kingdom of God as
imagined by his Jewish contemporaries; nor, in that teaching, is there any
basis for
--pg76--
the
doctrine, elaborated by the Christians of history, that the Kingdom would come
‘with power’ at the ending of the world.
Jesus’ teachings were rejected by the Jews in favor of
a historical cataclysm which would re-establish the racial-political Israel
(Burkitt, 1914, p.13). To them, Jesus seemed to have overhastily judged the
resurrection of Israel impossible and turned to a ‘merely’ spiritual kingdom.
This, the Jews argue, the Christians did ‘in ignorance,’ for ‘they were giving
up the substance for the shadow`. The spiritual element, initiated and
cultivated by the prophets throughout the centuries, and raised to
unprecedented height by the ethical breakthrough of Jesus, was mere ‘shadow’ to
the Jews, the substance being always an Israel of flesh and blood. Accordingly,
‘the first duty of an Israelite is, not to waste his energies on the
discernment of that spiritual element, but to study the law...’ and to enact it
(Burkitt, 1914, pp.14-15). Similarly, without rejecting messianism, the Jews
were not taught to expect a cataclysm that would end the world as it presently
is, but a cataclysm by which their present miseries would become, in this same
world, blessings. From the standpoint of Biblical-Talmudic Judaism, the Jews
conceive of the Messiah as ‘a redeemer strong in physical power and in spirit
who in the final days will bring complete redemption, economic and spiritual to
the Jewish people.’27 According to Philo, such a Messiah will
rescue Israel from exile and subjugation, and ‘leading a host and warring
furiously’ ‘will subdue great and populous nations.’28 The
Kingdom of the Jewish Messiah, definitely of this world, is one that, in this
view, will come not by cataclysm but, though its time may not be foretold,
through preparation (Klausner, 1955, pp.524-5). By rejecting Jesus, and his
spiritualized kingdom, the Jews rejected at once ‘the conviction that had
produced the Apocalypses’ (Burkitt, 1914, p.15). Hence, the Apocalyptic
consciousness became a mainly Christian preoccupation and colored the ideas handed
down among the early generations of Christians whose world-view still belonged
predominantly to the Jewish stock of ideas (Burkitt, 1914, pt 2, chs 5-7).
This ‘Israelization’ of the message of Jesus was not
the only misinterpretation that message was to undergo. As Jesus and his
disciples were rejected by the Jews, the disciples sought their followers among
the Gentiles. There, under a totally different consciousness, the message of
radical self-transformation and of the monistic ethic of love of God was to
undergo further transvaluations which we shall consider in Part 2 of this
study.
Christian legalism
Our
view of the ethic of Jesus as a breaking away first from Jewish Law and then
from law in general, ought to mean that there cannot be a ‘law of Christ’ other
than the first commandment to love God wholly, exclusively. Nevertheless, there
is a Christian legalism. This is not a legalism such as Ezra had instituted for
the Jews, although
--pg77--
Christian
‘canon law’ has often made it hard to make out the difference. The relation
between Jesus’ first commandment and what some Christians intend to mean by the
‘law of Christ’ has never been very clear. The problem has been to give a
meaning to ‘law of Christ’ which is, at the same time, true to the normal
meaning of ‘law’ and to Jesus’ ‘love of God’.
An example of the confusion in Christian thinking is
to be found in O.H. Dodd’s Bampton Lectures delivered at Columbia University in
1950 (Dodd, 1951). ln Dodd`s mind, the Sermon on the Mount is law. He wrote
(p.64): ‘It appears that we shall not be far wrong in taking the Sermon on the
Mount as Matthew had represented it, namely, as the new law which supersedes
the law of the Old Testament’. But it is hopelessly confusing to speak of a
‘new law which supersedes the law of the Old Testament’ when ‘law’ has a
different meaning in each case. Turning against his opponents, Dodd warns that
‘we have to take account of the fact that in certain quarters of the Church…
there has been a strong bias against any understanding of Christianity as a new
law’ (p.65).
Dodd grants that those who hold the opposite view (the
‘bias [that] comes out... in some forms of contemporary neo-protestantism’)
have some grounds in the New Testament to which they refer, such as ‘Christ is
the end of the law for all who have faith’ (Romans 10:14); ‘you are not
under law but under grace' (Romans 6:14); and Paul’s concept of apolytrosis
or self-emancipation from the Jewish Law. But, he argues (pp.65-6), these
Christian theologians present ‘in almost all periods of the Church’ have
misunderstood their Christianity as well as their Paul. He tells us that Paul’s
ideas of being ‘within Christ’s law’ (I Corinthians 9:21), ‘fulfilling the law
of Christ’ (Galatians 6:2), of ‘the commandment of the Lord’ (I Corinthians
14:37), etc., should have had a sobering influence upon them, since at least it
is not certain ‘that Paul intended to repudiate the understanding of
Christianity as a new law.’ To refute their view, Dodd sets himself to analyze
the Pauline position.29 ln fact, by his analysis the view he
seeks to refute is not refuted but vindicated.
Dodd argues (p.68) that the community of Israel at the
Babylonian conquest when ‘Judaism collapsed’, and the new Christian community
in Paul’s time, are analogous situations. In the former case, Jeremiah
(31:31-4) instituted a new covenant under which ‘the sins of the past would be
forgiven and… [the Jews] would know God in quite a new way, because His law
would be written on their heart instead
of upon tables of stone’. In the latter case, Judaism collapsed again and Jesus
instituted a new covenant in which the new ‘epistle of Christ [is] inscribed
not with ink but with the spirit of the living God, not upon tablets of stone,
but upon hearts of flesh for tablets’ (p.68, with reference to 2 Corinthians
3:3). According to Dodd, there is no better description of Paul’s estimate of
the difference between the two covenants than Paul’s own characterization. God,
he quotes Paul as writing, ‘who also hath made us able ministers of the New
Testament
--pg78--
[covenant],
not of the letter but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit
giveth life’ (pp.68-9).
Very correctly, if pedantically, Dodd points out that
in the phrase ‘the letter killeth’, the Greek word gramma, being
translated as ‘letter’ means ‘written word’. The commonly held view, according
to Dodd, is therefore wrong. That view, initiated by Paul himself, held by the
Apostolic Fathers and confirmed by Bishop Ambrose of Milan in his famous lesson
to the young Augustine (in many respects the founder of Christianity as it is
to this day), has become a part of the very fabric of Christian thought. It
separated the ‘letter’ of the Old Testament, the literal meaning, from the
‘spirit’ which needed allegorical interpretation in order to be understood. In
this way, argues Dodd (p.69), ‘obsolete provisions of the Law of Moses might be
given artificial meanings edifying to Christians’. But the ‘law of Christ’ is
not ‘a law of commandments contained in ordinances’ (Ephesians 2:15);
rather, it is a law ‘written on the heart’ (p.70).
And the precise meaning of that distinction? To speak
of an ‘inward’ law and an ‘external’ law, Dodd rightly says, is unhelpful. It
is ambiguous and only re-states the problem, it doesn’t explain it. Dodd goes
on to assert that Paul cannot have meant that there is no law for the
individual Christian except that of the individual’s ‘inner light’. ‘To every
man his own conscience is God’ Dodd repudiates as ‘a sentiment of the pagan
poet Menander... [a sentiment] at variance with the fundamental Christian
position that the Lord is King and the conscience of man His subject’ (p.70).
He that argues that Christianity is not a ‘religion of the spirit’ in any sense
opposed to its being, also, a ‘religion of authority’.
But again we must ask, what is the precise meaning of
that distinction—between ‘spirit’ and ‘authority’? Certainly, Christianity is
not a religion of self-abandonment or self-indulgence, but if there is
‘authority’ in Christianity, what kind of authority is it? The ‘Kingdom of
God’, a fundamental concept in Christianity, Dodd tells us, ‘implies
authority’; and Jesus taught ‘with authority and not as the scribes’. So, Jesus
taught with the authority of the Kingdom of God, and not with the authority of
the laws of Judaism written by ‘scribes’ and enforceable by human authority
within a worldly kingdom. But, once more, we are left where we were: what is
the difference between the authority of Christ and the authority of a political
sovereign?
Dodd certainly feels he has taken the argument
somewhere since he proceeds to a conclusion which he describes as ‘clear’. His
conclusion is (pp.70-1): it would be a mistake to think that the difference
between the ‘administration of the written word [i.e. written, positive laws|
and the administration of the spirit [i.e. what is written on the heart] is
precisely that between objective and subjective ethical standards, or between
authority and freedom’.
Finally, Dodd has located the distinction we have been
seeking in the distinction between ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ ethical
standards. By ‘subjective’ is meant, in this context, any norm or value which
the
--pg79--
individual
alone decides is a norm or value—the individual alone decides what is ‘right’
or ‘wrong’. By ‘objective’ is meant, in this context, a publicly expressed and
shared (perhaps enforceable) understanding of what is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. Now
Jesus cannot have intended to license ‘subjective ethical standards’, the morality
of ‘anything goes’. What, then, did he intend? According to Dodd, he intended
that from the inward, radical transformation of the self (which we have
described as the aim of Jesus’ mission) should issue ‘objective ethical
standards’. In short, once transformed into a Christian the individual’s being
Christian must be expressed in ‘objective’ (i.e. positive) laws. What that
means, alas, is that Christ did not labor to abolish the Jewish Law but simply
to change it. What it also means is that until the ‘law of Christ’ is expressed
in the form of ‘objective’ laws and standards, it is in danger of degenerating
into ‘subjective ethical standards’, the individual being ‘a law unto himself’.
Dodd thus appears to give positive definition to the
‘law of Christ’. Starting from John 13:15, where Jesus admonishes the disciples
to ‘do as l have done to you’ and 13:34 where he gives them the commandment to
‘love one another...as I have loved you`, Dodd asserts that the obligation
which the new covenant entails is to reproduce in human action ‘the quality and
the direction of the act of God by which we are saved’ (p.7l). As against
Augustine's ‘Love God and do as you please’ (see above, p.48) Dodd cites the
teachers of the early Church who put together ‘a comprehensive and somewhat
detailed scheme’ of laws the Christian is supposed to observe (p.72). But it is
ridiculous to understand Augustine as licensing self-indulgence, and quite
improper to argue against the historical abuses of Augustine’s teaching instead
of arguing against the teaching itself. The appeal to the authority of the
Church Fathers doesn’t help his argument much either—unless, of course, he can
explain that authority. In fact, Dodd is unable to reach and hold a clear
position on this question. Thus, for example, he tells us that ‘Jesus Himself
has set forth a substantial number of ethical precepts... in markedly
authoritative tones and solemn warnings that they are intended to be obeyed’
(p.72). But then he straightaway withdraws from this position by denying that
Jesus’ law is a ‘law of commandments contained in ordinances’. This is only a
half-hearted withdrawal, however, because the only reason for it is that ‘few
of them [Jesus’ laws] are capable of being made into direct regulations for
behavior’ (p.73). He goes on to observe, in truly legalistic spirit, that
Jesus’ precepts for moral action are ‘highly concrete’, ‘embarrassingly
specific’, and not ‘broad generalities’. But he cannot make up his mind once
and for all. And then, again, he dodges back to the view that the commandments
of Jesus cannot be expressed as laws because they are general principles: ‘It
is hardly possible to treat it [the command to turn the other check] as a
ruling to be directly applied in all appropriate circumstances’ (p.74). And
then, at last, he returns to the view that the obligation under the ‘law of
Christ' is only to reproduce the ‘quality’ and ‘direction’ indicated (and
enabled) by the precepts of
--pg80--
Jesus.
The contents of those precepts (such as the Sermon on the Mount), are
‘meanings’ and ‘values’ which are intended to ‘make abundantly clear what must
be the quality of every action… approaching the conscience through the
imagination’ (p.76).
If the approach to conscience is ‘through the
imagination’—and not through the (forceful) authority of objective, external
laws—that the law or laws of Christ cannot be called ‘laws’ in the usual sense
of the word. They are only examples, specific, concrete instances, of what
Jesus, a person wholly submitted to God, actually did in his life. Any soul
that has wholly surrendered itself to God will do only God’s Will in the actual
situations of life. And God’s Will must, by definition, be made real. As we saw
earlier (above, pp.14ff.) it is the very nature of goodness that it seeks to be
real; a goodness in the abstract, a goodness that (so to speak) keeps itself to
itself and will have nothing to do with the real world, cannot be goodness.
Notes and references
Notes
1 Joseph
Klausner, a Jewish writer, distinguishes between ‘Messianic expectation’ and
‘belief in the Messiah’. By ‘Messianic expectation’ he means ‘the prophetic
hope... in which there will be political freedom, moral perfection, and earthly
bliss for the people Israel in its own land, and also for the entire human
race.’ By ‘belief in the Messiah’ he means ‘the prophetic hope... in which a
strong redeemer, by his power and his spirit, will bring complete redemption,
political and spiritual, to the people Israel…’ (Klausner, 1955, p.9; italics
added). As is evident in Klausner’s and also, in either ease it is the
freedom and welfare only of Israel that is in question.
2 On the Samaritans, see ch.I (p.31
above) and n.9 (p.40 above).
3 Luke
recounts the joy of Simeon (a man ‘righteous and devout [who was] looking for
the consolation of Israel’, 2:25) when he saw the baby Jesus in the temple,
brought there by his parents forty days after his birth (2:22, on the rites,
see Leviticus 12:2). Simeon saw ‘thy salvation’ and ‘the glory of thy
people Israel’ (2:29-32). The conjunction of the two betrays a particularly
Jewish hope, for a Messiah for the Jews. Similarly, Zecharias (the father of
John the Baptist) prophesies, in the account in Luke: ‘salvation for us/
ln the house of his servant David…/ Salvation from our enemies…mercy towards
our fathers/ And to remember his holy covenant;/ The oath which he swore unto
Abraham our father...’ (1:69-73). Here too the emphasis is on a collective
salvation for the Jews. Again, Zacchaeus, a tax-collector whom Jesus visits in
his house is saved ‘as he also is a son of Abraham’ (Luke 19:9). This
explanation, put into Jesus’ mouth, is extraordinary. The fact that Zacchaeus,
accused of being ‘a sinner’, gives half of his wealth to the poor, and restores
any unjust
--pg81--
gain to the wronged person four times over, is not
offered as the reason why he is saved. The verses (7-9) could also be read as
equating being ‘saved’ with being ‘a son of Abraham’. Either way, the emphasis
on the race to which Zacchaeus belongs is wholly at odds with the universalist
ethic of Jesus. Equally so, the implication of 18:32-3 that Jesus would be
mocked, shamefully treated and spat upon by the Gentiles: the meaning
cannot be that only the non-Jews mistreated Jesus; we are then left with the
suggestion that the humiliation is worse because it is suffered by a Jew at the
hands of non-Jews.
4 The
sayings ‘l am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel’ (Matthew
15:24) and ‘Go not into the way of the Gentiles, and into any city of the
Samaritans enter ye not; But go rather to the lost sheep of the house of
Israel’ (10:5-6) do not seem to us to be genuine. Christians who still argue
that they are genuine seem to be unaware that such statements commit Jesus to a
separatist nationalism of which he was utterly innocent. They see their own
Christianity deeply enmeshed with the racial history of the Jews which
centuries of acceptance of the Old Testament as word-for-word God’s revelation
has imposed upon their minds. In consequence, they are spiritually unable to
break free from the grasp of Jewish sectarianism, (See Faruqi, 1960)
5 The
‘New Testament’ is the title given to a collection of twenty-seven writings by
eminent Christians of the first and second centuries after Christ including Matthew,
Mark, Luke and John; the Acts of the Apostles; the Epistles
of Paul, known as Romans, I and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians,
Philippians, Colossians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Timothy,
Titus, Philemon, Hebrews; the Epistles of James, of 1 and 2
Peter, of 1, 2 and 3 John, and of Jude; and
finally, the Revelation of St John the Divine. The first four are known
as the Evangels or Gospels, and give an account of the life and reaching of
Jesus. Since much of the material is repeated in them, attempts at harmonizing
them were made at an early stage of Christian history. In about 170, Tatian
started this research and gave the discipline its first fruit, The
Diatesseron (literally, ‘the one by means of four’). His method, namely,
the arrangement of the Gospels’ account of the life and teaching of Jesus in
parallel columns so as to present their rapport or variety and thus to
construct a complete gospel, was followed down to l774. Then Griesbach
published a critique of the relations of the Gospels to one another, laying any
hope of a complete Gospel to waste. The presupposition of The Diatesseron,
together with lrenaeus’ fanciful reasoning, that the Gospels are four because
the winds and directions are four (see lrenaeus, 1925 edn, Against Heresies,
3, 1, 8, Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1, pp.42B-9), were put aside in favor of a
division into the Synoptic Gospels (i.e. Matthew, Mark and Luke)
and John. The former do, in fact, however variantly, follow a common
pattern, and concern themselves with the ministry of Jesus in Galilee. The
latter is uniquely theoretical and where it concerns itself with anecdotes, it
is limited to Jesus’ work in Judah. The rest are letters written for the
benefit of churches in areas more or less distant from the author in answer to
definite questions, settlement of issues and/or the edification of the
faithful.
--pg82--
These twenty-seven writings are a
selection from a much larger body of Christian literature which circulated
during the formative first six centuries of the history of Christianity. The
diversity of literature which must have been read in the churches and presented
as holy must have dismayed the serious, conscious Christian. Accordingly,
attempts were made to constitute a canon out of some writings chosen for the
purpose. The first such attempt was made as early as 140 by Marcion, and his
selection consisted of the Gospel of Luke and ten of the Pauline
Epistles, not including the pastoral. In doing this, Marcion was undoubtedly
prompted by his rejection of Hebrew Scripture and his desire to substitute for
it a Scripture he could truly call ‘Christian’. This created a stir, especially
as Marcon had already been at odds with a number of churches over the meaning
and nature of Jesus’ personality and mission, and his selection and arrangement
of the material was, at least partially, dictated by his theology (Souter,
1913, p. 166). These churches had to answer Marcion’s claims. They were also
being challenged by the claims to easy prophesying of an anti-ecclesiastical,
anti-clerical movement which the movement’s leader, Montanus, advocated as ‘the
outpouring of the Holy Spirit’ on the Christian church, and under which he
announced that the Heavenly Jerusalem would soon descend near Pepuza in Phrygia
(Epiphanius, On Heresy, 48, 1). The churches therefore prepared their own
collection of writings which they placed side by side with the Hebrew
Scripture. This collection did not change Marcion’s except in its arrangement
and by adding to it further epistles and other writings. It must have been the
nucleus which later became the canon, For, in 1740, Muratori published a
‘fragment’, presumed to come from Rome towards the end of the second century,
which acknowledges a collection of Scripture consisting of the four Gospels,
the Acts, the thirteen Epistles of Paul, two Epistles of John, the Epistles of
Jude, and the Apocalypses of John and Peter.
But it should not be assumed that any
collection in this or the following century achieved any kind of unanimity. The
Muratorian fragment does not acknowledge four books of the later canon; the
Apocalypse of John was accepted in the West but not in the East, while the
Epistle to the Hebrews and that of James were not accepted in the West.
Alexandria, for a long time the seat of Hellenic, as opposed to Jewish,
Palestinian, Ebionite Christianity, recognized as Scripture the Epistles of
Barnabas, Clement of Rome, and The Didache, which were all struck off
the canon of orthodox Christianity, Clement of Alexandria, likewise, rejected
the Epistle of James, 2 Peter, and 3 John which were regarded as
Scripture by Rome. The Churches of Edessa and Mesopotamia, meanwhile held
firmly to The Diatesseron (the four Gospels), the Acts, and the
Epistles of Paul alone. Even as late as the middle of the third century, Origen
distrusted James, 2 Peter, and 2 and 3 John; but he
favored a larger canon. Around 325, Eusebius divided the books of the New
Testament into three classes: (1) those which are generally acknowledged, a
class limited to the four Gospels, Acts, Epistles of Paul, 1
Peter, 1 John and—Eusebius is not quite so certain here—the Apocalypse of John;
(2) those which were disputed but widely acknowledged, a class which includes James,
Jude, 2 Peter, 2 and
--pg83--
3 John; (3)
those which are rejected, a class in which he included the Acts of Paul,
the Shepherd of Hermas, the Apocalypse of Peter, Barnabas, The
Didache and, according to some, the Apocalypse of John.
The first mention of the canon as it
appears today occurs in the thirty-ninth Festal letter of Athanasius in 367,
but strife between the churches as to the exact size of the canon was to
continue for over three centuries more. In the West itself, (i.e., in Rome)
Athanasius’ canon was not acknowledged until 382, under Pope Demasus. Even the
acknowledgement needed a ratification which came only at the end of the fifth
century under Pope Gelasius. In Africa, it took three synods in less than
twenty-seven years for the canon to win some kind of general acceptance and it
took such men as Augustine to do the work (419). Though under growing
limitations, contention as to the size and nature of the canon continued until
the second Trullan Council of 692, when the formation of the canon may be said
to have been closed. This does not mean that in the world at large, Christians
had then stopped to contend in the matter. The Paulicians, for instance, who
did not stop being an independent sect of Christianity until the twelfth
century when Byzantine persecution put an end to them, relied on an entirely
different canon than the orthodox; and it is not improbable that some
Christians, particularly among the Churches of the Near East, do not hold to
the Christian canon even today.
ln the West, Christianity did not spread
as a religion revealed in a body of teachings, a system of ethical and
religious ideas, conveyed by God to Jesus Christ and communicated by him to
man. The first Western Christians expected an actual cataclysm to take place by
which the real order would be upset and ‘the Kingdom of God‘, according to their
notion, instituted in its place. Thus, Western Christianity began not as a
‘religion of the book’, but as one of impending reversal. Its advocates and
faithful could not have felt the need for a ‘Scripture’. Besides, they already
had one in the Hebrew Scripture which they regarded as their own, though with
no few twists of interpretation. Throughout the first two centuries of
Christianity, the greater part of Christian teaching strove to establish that
Jesus Christ was the person of whom the Hebrew Scripture prophesied. As the
expected event never came, they began to look into the traditions, teachings,
and writings of the ancestors with the hope of finding therein a substance of
their faith other than the expectation of the Kingdom. By that time, the Eastern
Churches which understood Jesus as the Prophet of the true religion of God, the
Scripture of which the Hebrews had falsified, had argued so much with the Jews
concerning it that they felt the need for a statement, or `Book’ in which the
fundamental teachings of Jesus were set. It was no wonder therefore that the
striving after conceptualization and the writing down of that conceptualization
had crystallized in the Eastern Churches, and that Marcion was the first
compiler of a Christian Scripture.
The issue of the nature and size of the
content of the canon was really the issue of Christian theology and
hence, of Christianity itself. Thus, the so-called ‘heretical’ churches had
each its own Scripture and undoubtedly each underlined particular passages and
claimed them as authority for its
--pg84--
own teaching. Even when a measure of unanimity as to
the nature of Christianity was reached, predominantly in the West by the end of
the fourth century, the roads to this unanimity were often those of ‘lobbying’
the Church Councils by powerful interest groups and open persecution of the
dissident bishops and their followers. Unfortunately for the religion of Jesus,
it never enjoyed the benefit of the scribe’s art, since the scribes, in Jesus’
days, were his most committed enemies, and since his following did not count
among them any men of culture, of reading and writing. Paul, the first learned
convert of Christianity, did not make the decision to join the faithful until
after the life of Jesus had run its course.
Marcion’s arguments, as to the nature of
Christ, of the Scripture, of salvation, of Hebrew religion, etc., were
unanswerable on the level of authority, since no authority had by then set
itself as empowered to speak for Christ. Moreover, since all that was known of
Christ to the Christian Churches were the second-hand reports of the
evangelist, apostle, bishop, or other, there was no way to answer a
controversialist contending the contents of these reports. If Peter’s, James’s,
Barnabas’s, and Clement’s word are authoritative why should not Marcion’s,
Beryllus’, Valentinus’, Basilides’, etc., be equally so? Under the pressure of
this kind of argument, and in the total absence of incontrovertible words of
Jesus on the subjects in dispute, the church developed a new meaning of
authority. The doctrine of the Holy Spirit was there to lend itself and it was
referred to in order to establish validity or normativity where there seemed to
be none. That which the Churches of the West combated as the Montanist heresy—namely,
the outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon Montanus and his women
priestess-prophetesses Priscilla and Maximilla—they conferred upon themselves
as ‘the Church of Christianity’. This move could even claim a tradition in its
favor: Ignatius had already taught that the Bishops are so by the will of Jesus
Christ, as Jesus Christ himself is so by the Will of the Father; ‘unless a man
be within the sanctuary, he lacks the bread of God’ meaning that in order ‘to
commune with God at all’ the Christian must ‘live in harmony with the will of
the bishop’ and enjoined that all Christians ‘must regard the bishop as the
Lord Himself’ (‘lgnatius to the Ephesians’ 3, 4, 5, 6 in Kirsopp Lake, 1914,
vo1, pp. 177ff.). The ground was thus prepared for a doctrine of revelation
which invests with canonicity and holiness not only what Jesus had said, or is
reported to have said, but also the pronouncements of the churchmen. By this
extension of the powers of the Holy Spirit to support and to cover, as it were,
its own work, the Church had set itself up as a holy authority in whatsoever it
had decided or would yet decide were the nature of Christ, or of his mission.
By means of this doctrine, the Church which had been only one contender in the
dispute became both plaintiff and judge.
6 Luke
runs the first commandment into the ‘second’, and then presents the confusion
of the two as the essence of the whole law: see 10:25-8.
7 The
King James (Authorized Standard) Version showed some vestige of how
Jesus understood ‘love thy God’ and ‘love thy neighbor’ by saying the latter
was ‘like’ the former: ‘And the second [commandment] is like unto it, Thou
shalt love thy neighbor as thyself’ (Matthew 22:39-40);
--pg85--
‘And the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love
thy neighbor as thysef’ (Mark 12:31), However, in the Revised Standard
Version, the editors have seen fit to strike out ‘like’, so that the reader is
forced to read ‘love thy God’ and ‘love thy neighbor’ as separate commands.
8 Compare
Shabbath 87b, Tosafoth to Shabbath ‘Kasher’, J.H. Greenstone’s article
‘Sabbath’ (1905).
9 Moses
ben Maimon, Yad Ha-hazakah, Shabbath 2, 10. (Quoted in Greenstone,
1905.)
10 Matthew
12:4; Mark 2:25; Luke 6:4. The anecdote from David’s life is
given in 1 Samuel 21:1-6. On the prescription regarding the showbread,
see Exodus 25:30, 35:13, 39:36; and Josephus, Jewish Antiquities,
3, 10, 7, 1930 edn, voI.4, p.441.
11 Jesus
also invoked the precedent of the priests themselves working on the Sabbath and
remaining nonetheless ‘blameless’. This is a far less convincing argument than
the incident of David. Jewish law had provided that the priests’ work in the
temple in preparation for the Sabbath ceremonies was not work in the ordinary
sense and therefore stood outside the list of thirty-nine prohibited activities
(Mishnah, Shabbath, 7, 2).
12 That
Israelites were permitted to marry non-Israelites is evidenced by David’s
marriage of Bath-Sheba, a Hittite (2 Samuel 11-3, 27) and many other
instances—see e.g. 1 Chronicles 2:17; 2 Samuel 3; 1 Kings
16:31, Ahab’s notorious Jezebel.
13 The
fact that Deuteronomy expressly forbade marriage with the original
inhabitants of Canaan may not be explained away as belonging to a much later
period than Kings. For it is unlikely that either the Deuteronomic reform or
the revolution of Ezra would have codified a family law that was utterly
unknown hitherto. It should be remembered that Josiah’s introduction of the
Deuteronomic law was not a state promulgation of positive law, but a
proclamation of commitment to the sacral law already there.
14 ‘Nation
and cult having vanished’, writes J. Bright (1959, pp.415-16) ‘they had little
else to mark them as Jews. This undoubtedly helps to explain that growing
stress on Sabbath, circumcision, and ritual cleanness observable in the exile
and immediately after. Indeed, all Israel's leaders, from Ezekiel through the
restoration prophets to Nehemiah, show great concern for Sabbath, tithing, the
Temple and its cult, ceremonial purity, and the like. These things were not, to
them, external trivia, but distinguishing marks of the purified Israel for
which they labored.’
15 It may
be argued that, since divorce was not necessarily always divorce of a
non-Jewish wife, the development of the Jewish law of divorce could not have
been determined solely by racist considerations. This reservation is not
justified. First, the law of divorce was made or promulgated at three decisive
moments of history: the Patriarchal period, Josiah’s reform, and Ezra’s
revolution. All three moments were primarily characterized, as far as Hebrew
and Jewish thinking on the family is concerned, by great awareness of racist
separateness or unseparateness. In the Patriarchal period, all the Biblical
material dealing with the family (the accounts of Abraham, Jacob, Dinah and
Shechem, Joseph, etc.) deal exclusively with
--pg86--
instances in which a foreigner is involved. At this
period consciousness of racial separatism ruled supreme. In Josiah’s reign, the
period was characterized by racial admixture and a muting of the separatist
voices. Under Ezra, racism was the dominant—indeed, consuming—note of Jewish
consciousness. It is only natural that the focus of thought at a given time
will imprint itself on the productions of that period. Secondly, of all human
institutions, the family is the one at which all racist considerations come
into focus. Commerce and trade, public security and politics, inheritance and
torts, all are by nature removed from racist considerations except in the
rarest circumstance. The family is precisely the legal area in which racism can
be implemented. What is important here is ‘entry’ or ‘exit’ from wedlock of
members of the Jewish race. Entry into wedlock could not be directly regulated
by authority. It was therefore natural that the Law would direct itself to exit
from wedlock which it could regulate: an offence must become real before the
law can deal with it. But if it is already real, the law that deals with it
must be of divorce. Thirdly, the consideration that it is wrong to assume that
the Jewish law of divorce aimed for the most part at dealing with non-Jewish
wives because Jewish wives too were meant by that law to be protected against
the vagaries of their husbands, is anachronous for the period under
consideration.
16 For an
alternative reading of the dates and documents involved, see Pedersen, 1947,
vol.4, p.585ff.
17 The
minutiae of the debate can be followed in I. Epstein, 1936, vol.7, in
particular pp.436ff. See also Josephus Jewish Antiquities, 1930 edn,
vol.4, p.597. Philo too speaks of divorce available ‘under any pretence
whatever’, 1855 edn, voI.3, p.312.
18 It is
hard to read this passage, as Christians tend to do (with full Jewish
agreement), to mean simply that Moses suffered such a command to be issued by
God on account of men’s hardness of heart. The Interpreter’s Bible
(1951) on Matthew 19:5, comments: ‘it is a standard Jewish teaching that God
frequently adjusts a high principle of law to human weakness’, and quotes E.P.
Gould’s definition of ‘hardness of heart’ as ‘the rude nature which belongs to
a primitive civilization.’ But what does it mean for Moses to be corrected by
God and for Moses to accept the divine correction `on sufferance? If God wants
to promulgate a precept, does the Prophet resent it, and accept it only on
sufferance? It is far more probable that Jesus meant to say that Moses never
said such a thing and never promulgated such a law; that since in the beginning
the law did not read in that way, it must have been their hardness of heart that
changed the law of Moses to suit the Jews’ own racist tendencies.
19 Notably,
Amram, Jewish Law of Divorce According to the Bible and Talmud, London,
1897, discussed in Mace, 1935, p.257 and J. Hastings’ article ‘Marriage,
Semitic’, The Dictionary of the Bible, Scribner`s, New York, 1901.
20 e.g.
R.H. Charles, 1921, p.33.
21 For
examples, see: Genesis 12:18-19; 20:2-7; 26:10-11; 39:7-9; Exodus
20:14; Deuteronomy 5:18; 2 Samuel, 12:13; Proverbs
2:17-18;
--pg87--
6:26, 32; 7:18-20; Ecclesiasticus 23:18-26; Jeremiah
7:9; 23:10; Ezekiel 16:32; 18:6, 11, 15; 22:11; 33:26; Hosea 4:2, Malachi
3:5.
22 The Babylonian
Talmud, Nedarim 9:1 (Epstein, 1936) already expressed the view that a man
need not keep a vow if it interfered with his duty to his parents, but this
insight was hardly observed in the Pharisee-dominated atmosphere of the Jewish
Law. See S. Belkin, 1936, .227-34.
23 The
Halachah we have was assembled by R. Akiba (d. 135), but its material, as
Halachah, goes back to the time of Ezra, and its origins go back to the Exile.
24 With
Amos, in the eighth century BC, the idea was born of ‘a day of Jahweh’ when,
through the Assyrians as instruments of his will, Jahweh would chastise
and purify Israel (Amos chs 3-8,
are full of reprobation and condemnation) but would also consolidate her on a
healthier and surer foundation. It is doubtful whether any other Old Testament
Book contains a more intense and straightforward rejection of Israel on account
of her sins. So much so, that-in what for a moment seems to be a transport of
ethical universalism, Amos ascribes to Jahweh a universalist, providential
attitude to the Gentile Philistines and Syrians who, by definition, are not
entitled to Jahweh’s care. This is so striking and exceptional in the Old
Testament that many Jewish and Christian apologists cite it as evidence for the
case that Judaism is not totally racist separatism. But how short-lived is
their optimism! As soon as Jahweh is through with his accusation and
condemnation, Joel, for instance, makes him say: ‘l will not utterly destroy
the house of Jacob...[lndeed] I will command, and I will sift the house of Israel
among all nations, like as corn is sifted in a sieve, yet shall not the
least grain fall upon the earth… In
that day will I raise up his ruins, and I will build it as in the days of old’
(italics added). Not yet satisfied with this reversal, Jewish genius demands
revenge. The whole rebuilding of Israel and the Tabernacle of David, continues
Amos, is designed ‘that they may posses the remnant of Edom, and of all the
heathen’ (9:7-12). Next, with Isaiah, the Jews’ self-image was still virile
enough to conceive an ‘anointed’ savior of Israel before whom ‘the crooked
places will become straight’ and ‘the gates of brass will be broken to pieces, the
bars of iron cut asunder’ (Isaiah 45:2).
25 This
idea became generalized into the form that God is the master-operator of the
processes of history, and is, according to H.H. Rowley (1944, pp. 141ff.) the
‘enduring message of apocalyptic.’
26 Typical
of the method in which Jesus dealt with the question of whether the Kingdom of
God is material or spiritual is his solution to the problem (presented to him
as a trap by the Pharisees) of the wife who had had seven brothers as husbands:
whose wife would she be in the resurrection when, presumably, she and all her
husbands were raised up? Jesus answered that in the resurrection, in the
Kingdom of God where Abraham, lsaac, and Jacob now sit, people do not marry at
all, neither are they regarded under these material categories of married,
unmarried, etc. The Kingdom is a purely spiritual one, and in it, all are
equally the angels of God (Matthew 22:24-32; Mark 12:18-26; Luke
20:27-37).
--pg88--
27 Klausner,
1955, p.520. The description is obviously Philo’s (1855 edn, vol.3, pp.477-8,
‘On Rewards and Punishments, 16’): ‘An intrepid hardihood of soul and an
irresistible strength of body either of which things is formidable to the enemy
and if both qualities are united they are completely invincible.’
28 Klausner,
1955, pp.163-4, 520-3; Philo, 1855 edn, pp.477-8.
29 I give
Dodd’s analysis of Paul’s position not for the sake of presenting Paul’s
position (for this, see below, chs V-VII), so much as for the sake of
presenting Dodd’s. In fact, I do hold that Paul transformed the values in
Christ’s teaching in several important respects, but that it was his peculiar
merit to have understood Christ correctly on this subject of apolytrosis
(self-emancipation from the Law).
References
Belkin, S. (1936) ‘Dissolution of vows
and the problem of antisocial oaths in the Gospels’, Joumal of Biblical
Literature, 55, pp.227-34.
Bright,
John (1953) The Kingdom of God, Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, New York.
Bright,
John (1959) History of Israel, The Westminister Press, Philadelphia.
Burkitt, F. Crawford (1914) Jewish
and Christian Apocalypses, The Schweich Lectures, British Academy, London.
Charles, R.H. (1921) The Teaching of
the New Testament on Divorce, Williams and Norgate, London.
Dodd, O.H. (1951) Gospel and Law,
Bampton Lectures 1950, Columbia University Press, New York.
Epstein,
I. (1936) The Babylonian Talmud, Soncino Press, London.
Faruqi, lsma’il R. al- (1960) Review of
S.B. Frost The Beginning of the Promise in Christian Outlook, 16(1), pp.
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(1925 edn) Ante-Nicene Fathers, Scribner’s, New York.
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Lake,
Kirsopp (1914) The Apostolic Fathers, Macmillan, New York.
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J.A. (1907) The Samaritans, the Earliest Jewish. Sect Their
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Pedersen,
Johannes (1947) Israel, Oxford University Press.
Philo
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--pg89--
Ramsey,
Roben Paul (1950) Basic Christian Ethics, Scribner’s, New York.
Rowley,
H.H. (1944) The Relevance of Apocalyptic, Lutterworth Press, Landon.
Souter, Alexander (1913) The Text and
Canon of the New Testament, Scribner’s, New York.
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