Pharisaism

“ So much for the Pharisaic conception of God. We will now consider another set of beliefs of theirs upon which a comparison with New Testament teaching is possible and instructive—the Pharisaic ideas about Retribution, reward and punishment, merit. There is no consistent Pharisaic doctrine upon the subject, but rather a comment upon the facts of human experience from different points of view. That man's will is free is one of the axioms of Pharisaism. ”

“ Christianity could by no possibility have remained in union with Pharisaism; what Jesus began, and what Paul completed, was a severance as inevitable as it was painful. But it was painful because it was the dividing, not of the living from the dead, but of the living from the living. The Judaism of the Pharisees, from which Christianity tore itself away, was no obsolete formalism, but a religion having the power to satisfy the spiritual wants of those who were faithful to it. ”

“ And the wise are without knowledge, and the understanding as those who are without discernment. For the multitude of their deeds [301] is nothing, and the days of their life are a breath before Thee" (b. Joma. 87b, mentioned by R. Joḥanan) . Christians usually get their notion of what a Pharisee's prayer was like from Luke xviii. 11, 12; and I do not deny that Pharisees may sometimes have prayed after that manner. Nevertheless, what I have just recited is more true to the real spirit of Pharisaism than the prayer in the Parable. ”

“ Though as Pharisaism was opposed to Christianity he set himself against it, and against all its traditions that were set up in competition with the law of God or in contradiction to the gospel of Christ, yet, as it was opposed to Sadducism, he adhered to it. We must never think the worse of any truth of God, nor be more shy of owning it, for its being held by men otherwise corrupt. If the Pharisees will hope for the resurrection of the dead, Paul will go along with them in that hope, and be one of them, whether they will or no. ”

“ And this is the ground on which I said, in the third chapter, that the opposition between Pharisaism and the religion of Jesus was fundamental and irreconcilable. Not, indeed, that the religion of Jesus himself centred on a person, as the religion of Paul and all later Christians did; but that Jesus himself was that person; and his personality could by no means be expressed in terms of Torah.
It is evident that devotion to a Person will produce a type of mind very different from that produced by devotion to an Idea ”

“ Yet the man who would stand well in the eyes of society must not whisper a word against pharisaism; for the Pharisee is a highly respectable person, and observes the proprieties; he typifies the conventional righteousness and religion of his time. ”

“ Especially when the one has grown great and has become the religion of many nations, while the other has remained as the inheritance of a lonely people? Why should not the Christian be glad to own that the Jew, even the Pharisee, knew more of the deep things of God than he had supposed, and after a way which was not the Christian way, yet loved the Lord his God with heart and soul and strength and mind,—yes, and his neighbour as himself? The time is surely come when Pharisaism should be recognised as a religion entitled to be judged on its own merits and by [334] its own standards ”

“ That separation is indicated by the name applied to them, Pherūshim, or Pharishaia in the common Aramaic speech. Their own name for themselves and each other was "Ḥaberim," "companions," as they were "banded together for a full obedience" to what God had enjoined in the Torah.
It is easy to make Pharisaism appear ridiculous, a mere extravagance of punctilious formalism. But that is only possible to those who look at it from a point of view which is not that of its devoted adherents, or who judge it by a standard which they never recognised. ”

“ The principle here laid down will be sufficient, I believe, to explain the chief characteristic differences between the Pharisaic and the Christian type of mind, disregarding, of course, individual variations. It has been pointed out, in a previous chapter (p. 171) , that Christianity in all its forms centres upon a person, namely, Christ; and that Judaism in all its forms, and Pharisaism most of all, centres upon an idea, namely Torah, and will recognise no person as the object of its devotion, save only God Himself. This is not a proud resistance to the appeal of a great personality ”

“ In the main it is this—that Paul condemned Pharisaism in theory, while Jesus condemned it in practice. Paul held that the whole system was radically [192] defective, and remained so whatever relative excellence might be produced under it in the lives and characters of those who submitted to it. He condemned it, though he had himself, as he said, been "as touching the Torah, blameless." Jesus, on the other hand, charged the Pharisees with certain specific sins and vices, such as hypocrisy, pride, self-righteousness, etc. ”

“ Strangely enough, therefore, the strength of men's love for God, and of their belief in His love, gave an impulse to the legalistic Pharisaism which our Lord denounced as the acme of loveless irreligion. ”

“ It is not self [302] -righteousness which is expressed in that prayer, but the acknowledgment of special obligation, a higher calling, in no way inconsistent with humility and reverence. The prayer in the Parable was doubtless intended by its author to represent Pharisaic piety in an unfavourable light; but the example I have just given is enough to show that a Pharisee would put a different interpretation upon it. ”

“ The knowledge thus obtained will throw light upon many passages in the New Testament; but it will be chiefly [4] valuable if it helps the reader to realise that the Pharisees were "men of like passions with us," men with souls to be saved, who cared a great deal for the things of the higher life, men who "feared God and worked righteousness," and who pondered deeply upon spiritual problems, though they did not solve them on Christian lines, nor state the answers in Christian terms. ”

“ However, I will come down to a time when the Pharisees, if they ever became such as the New Testament represents them, must have long acquired that character. Here is a prayer which dates from the second century of our era, and is part of the liturgy still in daily use:—"Lord of the worlds! not trusting in our righteousness, do we cast our entreaties down before Thee, but trusting in Thine abundant mercies. Who are we? What is our life? What is our virtue? What is our righteousness? What is our deliverance? What is our strength? ”

“ So, too, for individuals according to temperament, some elements of the general belief would have more importance than others; and there would be, further, a great variation in the [257] strength of conviction with which the beliefs were held, as also in the character of those who held them. It is clear that such a general conception of religion could open a way for the faults of pride and hypocrisy, charged against the Pharisees, as it also could open the way for the virtues of humble piety and sincere devotion. ”

“ I am not without hope that a small book may be read where a large one would be passed by, and that the ends of justice—in this case justice to the Pharisees—may thereby be the better attained. I have not sought to write a panegyric on them, but, so far as may be possible for one who is not a Jew, to present their case from their own standpoint, and not, as is so often done, as a mere foil to the Christian religion. This is one reason why I have not referred to the writings of other scholars, except in the one case of Weber. ”

“ Pharisaism, like worldliness, has penetrated to an alarming extent into the Church of England.
Parallel and proportionate to the world's selfishness is its cynicism. This also is largely unconscious. Lacking any true insight into spiritual realities, the world lacks vision and lacks hope. It presumes always that "the thing which has been, it is that which shall be." It beholds the evil that is done under the sun, and pronounces it inevitable. It fails to understand that to pronounce any evil inevitable is to be guilty of blasphemy against the GOD of heaven. ”

“ If such a one took as his ground principle the immediate authority of conscience and his own direct intuition of God, and if he then judged the Pharisees by his standard and not by their own, then he would easily draw the conclusion that they were hypocrites, because he would see them treating as of great importance things which conscience would pay no attention to; and he would judge that men who [167] could be satisfied to discharge the obligations of religion in such a way, must either be ignorant of what religion really is, or pretenders to a piety they did not possess. ”

“ But, behind all such utterances, there is the unwavering belief in the direct communion of God with man. The Holy Spirit was naturally most often referred to in the case of the prophets, in whom its manifestation was most conspicuous. But its influence is implied in the fact of prayer, and is nowhere denied in regard to men in general. "Whatever the righteous do, they do it by the Holy Spirit." That is the utterance of a Pharisee (Tanḥ. Vajeḥi, xiii. p. 110a) , and it is the key to the whole Pharisaic conception of the relation of man to God. ”

“ The sinner does not plead either the merits of the Fathers, as might have been expected, or the merits of Christ, as according to Paul he ought to have done, if his peace with God were to be made. That he was forgiven, and that anyone in like case would be forgiven upon repentance, is the emphatic declaration of Pharisaic belief. ”

“ And a few lines further on it is stated that He spoke all the ten commandments in one act (of speaking) . There is here no attempt to explain how God, being Almighty, can take particular notice of persons; there is the unquestioning belief that He does so. He may be high in Heaven, but no suffering creature of His suffers unseen or unheard. "A bird perishes not, without Heaven" (i.e. except by the will of God) ; so said a great Pharisee, in words that have a striking likeness [262] to a saying of Jesus on the same subject (j. Sheb. 38d, and cp. Matt. x. 29) . ”

“ "Was it not the chief mistake and also the hopeless futility of Pharisaism to meddle with the minute affairs of life, and to lay down what a man should do at every turn? It was not therefore an education of conscience, [Pg 261] but a bondage of conscience; it did not bring men to their full stature by teaching them to face their own problems of duty and to settle them, it kept them in a state of childhood, by forbidding and commanding in every particular of daily life. ”

“ I lay stress on the phrase "naturally, and with no sense of compulsion"; because it is very difficult for the Christian, whose supreme authority is not [316] the Torah, to realise the position of the Pharisee in this matter, and to understand that he did not feel himself to be under constraint. Of course, wherever there is authority, there is that which on occasion will constrain; and the Christian is, to that extent, no less under constraint than the Pharisee. But it is not an oppressive burden, though it may be a hard duty, to submit to an authority which is owned to be supreme. ”

“ They feel it to be unjust and untrue. That such a statement should be made about the Pharisees is to Jews hard to endure. They feel it to be unjust and untrue. They are the weaker party, and they have the right to be heard.
In view of the sharp contrast expressed in the two sayings just referred to, it might seem that the Pharisees and Jesus had nothing in common. And indeed the final breach was inevitable and irreparable. Religion as the Pharisee conceived it could not come to terms with religion as Jesus conceived it. ”

“ Pharisee and Paul upon this point is, in appearance, very great; but, in fact, is very small. Both are agreed that there must be the imparting of divine influence to the human soul. With that influence, the quickening of the life of the soul by the divine power and inward presence, the soul is enabled to will the good and to love God. Without that influence it would perish. The Pharisee held that the divine influence was imparted direct from God to the soul, without any intermediary. It was not the Torah that imparted it, but God Himself. The Torah was given to teach him ”

“ The passages I have quoted, and there are many others, and scores and hundreds of sayings about repentance which all teach the same lesson, are the utterance of Pharisees, of men who were steeped to the lips in Rabbinism, who gloried in the Torah, who delighted in the abundance of its precepts, and the consequent casuistry of the schools, and who felt in their hearts that love of God which they did their best to show forth by serving the Lord with gladness in the doing of His commandments. ”

“ The discussions in the Gospels did not turn, for instance, on the question whether Jesus should or should not have referred to God as the Father in Heaven, or whether forgiveness was God's sure answer to repentance. No Pharisee ever challenged him on either point, or on many another of the directly religious and ethical sayings which he uttered. A Pharisee could not so have challenged him without disowning his own religion. Modern Jewish historians not unnaturally lay much stress upon the similarity between the teaching of Jesus and that of the Rabbis, at all events the best of them ”