So, some Jehovah's witness knocked on my door...

[agricola]

At any rate - the apocryphal books are great for getting a look at the kind of things people were concerned about in that period. They didn't make the cut into the Jewish Bible because they were often written in Aramaic with some Greek, and not in Hebrew, and because they were, basically, not 'old enough' to be respected enough -

The younger the book (the more recent) the more trouble it had getting made official - Daniel and Esther are probably the youngest (most recent) literature to be canonized, and they were controversial. Daniel, really, probably fits in better with the apocryphal books than it does with the rest of the Hebrew Bible (thematically).

Where were we?

[Lev]

The apocryphal books are literature written mostly between 300 BCE and maybe as late as 50 CE or so - you are right, BH. And that is exactly the period when all these different ideas were being encountered by the Jews, and different answers to different questions were suddenly arising - you can see, I think, that the Sadducees (mostly priests and wealthy urban Jews) pretty much just double-downed on the old traditions (no elaborate afterlife) while the Pharisees, and the other 'philosophies' grappled with the implications of those other faiths.

I think I remember you mentioning it here before, Agricola, but I wonder if this is related to the idea that Jesus may have either been a Pharisee or at least brought up in the culture and ideology of the Pharisees. Of course, if this was the case, he didn't really fit in as a standard Pharisee, which is why he argued with them so often. Those arguments, though, would have been from "inside" the group, rather than from entirely outside as they're often portrayed in sermons. Can you refresh our memory on this?

Lev

[agricola]

Oh he was definitely a 'pharisee' but possibly kind of like a lower case p pharisee. EVERY point Jesus presents in his teachings in the gospels is straight up pharisaic points, and all that 'arguing' is simply the way Jews go about discussing ideas. We call that 'arguments for the sake of heaven' (with 'heaven' there being a euphemism for God) and also 'these and those (statements) are the words of the living God' meaning that, both conclusions reached, although contradictory, are VALID OPINIONS as long as the participants are arguing 'purely' for the sake of getting it 'right'. The point being, BOTH are 'right' even though they don't agree, because both are genuinely searching for what God wants (which is apparently plenty of arguments).

Basically, 'arguing' shows that you CARE.

Note that throughout the NT, you almost never find a Sadducee standing around listening to Jesus, or asking about anything. Or an Essene either - Jesus was a pharisee talking to pharisees, about pharisee 'favorite topics', like the true meaning of the commandments, and whether the soul continues to exist after the body dies, and what 'the kingdom of God' really means.

He wasn't, apparently, a PROFESSIONAL pharisee. But then, there weren't very many of those. Most of the leading lights of the pharisaic movement which we know of, had regular day jobs.

Jesus was what Jews call a 'maggid', a kind of traveling preacher. Very popular, but not always scholastically trained. The concept goes clear back to the age of the prophets (maggid was one of the titles applied to prophets) and continues through history at least as far as the Hasidic movement, which was almost ALL spread by maggids. Even Jesus' reputation for healing is something pretty common for a maggid.

Wiki has a decent article -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maggid

[Lev]

Thanks, Agricola. What about the apparent, real conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees (capital P)? Not just the arguing for the sake of argument but the "woe unto you..." statements and similar? Was this all part of the rhetoric or would it have been unusual?

Lev

[agricola]

In-family fights are always the worst, right? Besides - if you read that statement (woe unto you) he wasn't talking about PHARISEES. He was talking about people who PRETENDED to be Pharisees (probably for the political clout) but didn't actually do what they ought (hypocrites, remember?).
Jesus also told his apostles to listen to what 'the pharisees' said and to DO WHAT THEY SAID (taught) because 'THEY SIT IN THE SEAT OF MOSES' (which means that they were the legitimate interpreters of the written Law from Moses) but not to do what they DID unless they were doing what they should, and what they taught (again, watch out for hypocrites).

Jesus didn't say 'listen to the priests and Sadducees'. He didn't say 'listen to the Essenes'. He said 'listen to the Pharisees'.

A lot of Jesus' complaints about pharisees wasn't about what they taught or believed (because he believed the same things) but about how they sometimes went about it: showing off - praying loudly, making their tefillin (phylacteries) extra big, making donations in public, and things like that. He never said don't pray, he never said don't wear tefillin, he certainly never said don't make donations - in every one of those cases, Jesus said don't make a big public deal about it! Don't show off.

[Lev]

Interesting stuff, Agricola. It makes a lot of sense. What's the history behind the "sit in the seat of Moses" business? Was there consensus among Jews that the Pharisees had actually inherited some authority or would a Sadducee or an Essene have said the same thing about his own group? In other words, did each group assert that it was the proper authority, sort of like the China and Taiwan governments? And what about the priests? They would have had the clearest claim to authority since they (and not any of the other mentioned groups) were actually established during the time of Moses. How had their grip on power slipped so much that the other competing groups were even able to arise?

If you tire of compiling all this information for me and the others on this forum, just say so. We're all capable of looking this stuff up on our own, as much as we appreciate your effort.

Lev

[agricola]

That is a VERY important question - and one of the things that reveals that Jesus himself was a pharisee.

YES - EACH GROUP CLAIMED TO BE THE REAL HEIR TO MOSES.

The Sadducees had the Torah! They were the descendants of Aaron! They HAD THE BOOKS!! They WROTE the books! they certainly assumed the authority to say what was, and what wasn't 'proper worship'.

The Essenes thought THEY had the real authoritative line of descent.

and so did the Pharisees.

When Jesus said that the Pharisees 'sit in the seat of Moses' he is absolutely declaring himself a 'pharisee' by definition. The pharisaic party said that yes, the priests (Sadducees) had the original texts, BUT the interpretation of those texts was the inheritance of any educated person. And it was the responsibility of every Jew to LEARN (and not just do what the priests told them to do, but to work to UNDERSTAND what the priests were saying, and why, and where it came from, and what it meant).

That was - in its way - radical.

The priests said they had authority because they 'ran' the Temple and were the only ones who could carry out many of the religious actions, events etc of the people. The pharisaic party claimed (and we know this because they wrote it DOWN, in the Talmud, the huge compilation of generations of pharisaic teachers and scholars) that THEY had authority - directly from Moses:

Pirkei Avot Ch.1:1
Moshe received the Torah from Sinai and passed it on to Yehoshua; Yehoshua to the Elders; the Elders to the Prophets; and the Prophets passed it on to the Men of the Great Assembly (that would be the Sanhedrin).

See what they did there? They cut the priests totally out of the line of succession on the authority of the Law (Torah).

Every rabbi, from the first century to the twenty - first century, traces his or her 'authority' back through their teachers and the teachers of their teachers, ultimately straight back to one of those 'Men of the Great Assembly' who were, predominantly, Pharisees (the assembly was mixed, and included some Sadducees, but overall they led to - through their students - modern Judaism via Pharisaism).

Pharisaism continued to develop within Judaism, but Christianity branched off in the first century, and didn't share in the development of Judaism after that point, but developed its own interpretations and practice. But in the first century, the Jesus-movement was a subgroup of (a rather diverse) Pharisaism.


Go ahead and ask. A real person's voice can sometimes be clearer or can at least personalize what an article states. Besides, I enjoy this.

[Lev]

Well, OK I'll go ahead and take you up on your invitation to keep asking questions. Just say so if I begin to sound like a toddler asking: why, why, why... Deal?

Two questions related to your last post: 1. What led to the marginalized status of the priests within Judaism? and 2. Why do you suppose none of the four gospels makes it clear which movement Jesus was associated with? Reading the NT, I get the picture of Jesus as a radical independent, coming on the scene to shake everything up. An equal-opportunity revolutionary. If, as you say, he was part of one of the factions and had at least some degree of loyalty to that faction (by acknowledging the Pharisees' claim to authority), why isn't this made explicit? Two possible answers I can think of are that either it was well-known by the audiences of each of the gospels and thus didn't need to be said, or that by the time the gospels were written, Christianity had developed enough as its own movement that it didn't necessarily matter which "branch" of Judaism it had come from, just that it came from Judaism in general (sort of like when you meet a person who's moved to the US from Canada--they never say which province they're from, just "Canada").

Lev

[B.H.]

I bet I know the answer about the priests. The high priest could not serve unless he was approved by Rome.

[agricola]

I bet I know the answer about the priests. The high priest could not serve unless he was approved by Rome.

BH is onto part of the problem, here.

Up until about 200 BCE, the high priest was a descendant of Aaron - no problem. But from the time of the return from Babylon (around 480 BCE or so) until Alexander the Great conquered Persia (when was that - around 300 something?) the high priest was chosen 'as usual' but had to be approved by Babylon (because Babylon ruled the land of Judah, which was called the 'land across the river' or the 'province across the river (Jordan)').

Then when Alexander died, his generals split 'the world' between them, and Judah was just about exactly halfway between Persia and Egypt - and just as you'd expect, things were a bit - fraught.

Judah (by now called 'Judea' (yehudiah)) passed hands a couple of times, and then the ruler of Persia's side (the Seleucid emperor) got it back again, and started a new way to consolidate his empire, which involved suppressing all the little, old fashioned religions in favor of his own enlightened variety. In Judea, that involved a change in temple heirarchy.

So beginning with the Maccabean rebellion, the temple priestly heirarchy started getting totally disrupted. The normal sequence of high priests was broken, and different factions started fighting among themselves - then the Maccabees WON (the Maccabees were from a priestly family) and set themselves up as king (IMPORTANT!!! Kings were supposed to be tribe of JUDAH, not tribe of LEVI!) and appointed a loyalist as high priest.

Bingo - factions.

One group that totally objected to the Hasmonean (Maccabbean) high priest were the Essenes. They fled to the desert with THEIR official high priest. Then the Hasmonean rulers had a problem with line of succession, and one of them invited the Romans in to 'help'. They started as 'advisors' but within a generation or two, they were directly ruling.

And approving the appointment of a high priest.