Until I saw this video on the Hebrew Matthew’s gospel yesterday, I had no idea that there is a branch of Judaism, the Karaites, who reject the authority of the Talmud (which codified the “oral torah” of the Rabbis, the heirs of the Pharisees of Jesus’s time) in favour of the sole divine authority of the tanach, the Hebrew Bible. They separated in the 8th century, when the Talmud originated, refusing like Jesus to accept the rabbis’ claim to have solely maintained an oral tradition interpreting the torah correctly since the time of Moses. Sadly, numbering only 35,000, they are today vastly outnumbered by Rabbinic Jews (who are outnumbered by secular Jews!).
The Karaite Bible scholar in the video, Nehemia Gordon, points out the ideological similarity between Orthodox Judaism and Roman Catholicism, with a priestly caste claiming that only they have the wisdom or holiness to interpret the Scriptures correctly through their traditional knowledge. In Christianity, of course, the Protestant Reformation recovered the belief that the Church is a priesthood of Spirit-indwelt equals, a temple anointed with the ability to search out and share the truths of God’s word when it is faithful (1 John 2:20).
I guess a majority of my readers are Evangelicals, more or less committed to this principle of Sola Scriptura. But my experience is that most of us, a lot of the time, are just as beholden to the spurious authority of leaders or movements and denominations as those who can’t see the tanach for the talmud. We aren’t that bothered about checking what we experience in church against the Bible, and rejecting what isn’t in it. In other words, we’ve substituted “never reforming” for the sound Reformation safeguard of semper reformans. Here’s a “for instance.”
I recently, for various reasons, decided to do a study on what the New Testament teaches about the indwelling (rather than the wider role) of the Holy Spirit. For the purpose of this blog, let me start with some of what I didn’t find. So, as far as I can see, nowhere in the New Testament, or even the Bible as a whole, is the Spirit said to fall on anyone, ever. That set me wondering where the old chorus, in my memory since I became a Christian, came from:
Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on me;
Break me, melt me, mould me, fill me.
Written in 1926, it was inspired by a sermon by the American revivalist George Stephens. Its theology can probably be traced back to 19th century Holiness teaching, which in turn derived from Wesleyan Sinless Perfection teaching, and was the precursor of Pentecostalism. To simplify, the teaching was that there is a second blessing, over and above “mundane” gospel faith, of the direct experience of the Holy Spirit, only achievable (usually in the feverish atmosphere of a revival meeting) by a radical repentance that came to be called “brokenness.” Those not experiencing , or losing, the experience were clearly not fully “broken,” and hence needed the Spirit to fall afresh on them from heaven. It therefore made sense to ask the Spirit to come crashing down.
Over time, especially in Pentecostalism, the same experience became “the baptism of the Holy Spirit” (which is a biblical term, but not as they understood it), necessarily evidenced by the gift of tongues. Later, in the Charismatic renewal, the same experience became (to avoid a theological minefield) “filling with the Spirit,” and was usually divorced from the need for tongues. In fact, though it was exactly the same experiential phenomenon as that in the Holiness movement, it became separated from repentance, too, and available to anyone willing to be slain in the Spirit (not biblical) by the man on stage, as the worship band played on. The same experience, with or without sinlessness, brokenness, tongues or even, sometimes, conversion (because the experience itself becomes the definition of conversion) is widely sought – and yet even the thing itself, as my study showed, doesn’t come from the Bible at all.
Let me outline the theological common ground all of these variants lead to, even when none of the particular movements from early Methodism to New Apostolic Reformation are embraced. Our greatest need as Christians becomes to “encounter” God (not a New Testament concept), which means using the most effective means of worship to invoke him to come down from heaven in the guise of the Holy Spirit, evidenced by some kind of palpable experience, from a changed atmosphere in the room to out and out revival.
Let me now spend some time laying out the basics of what the Bible actually teaches. Let’s start with Jesus, who (significantly) receives the Spirit at his baptism, which may be seen as a baptism into his own Kingdom, the future Church. The Spirit descends from heaven (without falling!) like a dove – a tricky image without a clear biblical explanation. My own speculation is that the dove signifies innocence (Matthew 10:16), and/or alludes to the Spirit hovering over the waters as God’s executive agent in Genesis. Contrary to common explanations, the dove is not a symbol of peace in the Old Testament.
During his ministry, Jesus promised the same Holy Spirit to his Church to act in his stead after his ascension. In John 4 this is clearly linked to the replacement of the locus of worship, in the temples of Jerusalem or Samaria, with worship in the Spirit, who will dwell within believers and be a spring welling up to eternal life. This is another clear reference to the eschatological temple in prophets like Ezekiel, a river flowing out from this new temple across the world. This accords with several NT descriptions of the Church as the true temple, the body of Christ. Keep thinking temple, because it’s a controlling theme of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit in the New Testament.
The symbolism of the Pentecost event is, partly because of this teaching, much clearer than that of the dove and Jesus. Jesus, ascended to heaven, asks the Father to send his Spirit, as Jesus promised. When he does so, the house in which the new Church is gathered is filled with the sound of the wind, which derives from Ezekiel 1, in which the shekinah glory of God, as a windstorm, turns up where least expected – in the Babylon of exile. Later (ch10) the same glory will depart from the apostate Jerusalem temple, only to return in that upper room in jerusalem at Pentecost. Pentecost also has fire, like the cloud that fills the tabernacle in Exodus or Solomon’s temple in 1 Kings. So Pentecost is all about the coming of God’s glory, his Spirit, to the new temple, the Church of Jesus Christ. The tongues on each member simply express the spiritual words they will use to spread the river of life round the world.
Now note this: once the glory of God comes to this true temple, it will never depart as it did from Solomon’s temple. Although now, as in Old Testament times, the temple could not contain the Spirit, who continued to act throughout creation, yet to come close to God one must come to his temple, full of the shekinah. The implications of this are a very different theology, which is consistent with every reference to the Spirit in the New Testament. To ask the Spirit, or Jesus, or the Father to come during a church service is as futile as it would be for the priests to pray the same thing, as they were prevented from ministering by the shekinah filling the temple. “I am already here,” God might say, “manifesting myself by the spiritual gifts welling up from the holy spring you have received. Listen to each other speak my words.”
A few more examples. As Jesus taught, he said “The words I have spoken to you are spirit and they are life.” This was firstly because the words of Jesus (meaning the gospel, his teaching, and indeed the whole Scripture spoken by the logos) are divine, and partly because they were made effective to save his hearers by the Spirit indwelling him, and therefore indwelling his speech too. Nothing has changed in the Church age. When the believer – preacher or “layman” alike – speaks the saving words of Jesus, he does so in the power of the indwelling Spirit. There is no contradiction between Paul saying that he persuades and convinces effectively, and that salvation is the work of God alone. That’s why the Hypercalvinists have entirely misunderstood salvation by leaving evangelism to God: the Spirit of God on earth is in believers, who are commanded to overflow in spiritual words to save others.
References to pouring out, used by Peter to describe Pentecost to the Jews, come both from his text in Joel, and from Isaiah 44. They describe not God sitting in heaven pouring a jug of Holy Spirit so it falls on each believer, but are the language of blessing linked to regeneration. Every NT reference to “pouring out” the Spirit relates back to the once-for-all blessing of the giving of the Spirit at Pentecost, in which new believers also share. Once again, asking God to pour out his Spirit invites the divine response, “I already have – what are you doing with him?”
Three other groups of people in Acts are said to have a “mini-Pentecost.” Close examination shows that they are all outworkings of that first “pouring out” as Spirit-filled apostles proclaim the word in the power of the Spirit and, by God’s grace, impart that same Spirit to their hearers. All three are exceptional foundational events extending God’s temple into new territory, rather than describing normal Christian experience.
The Samaritans do not receive the Spirit until apostles come to lay hands on them. Refer back to the Samaritan woman at the well, and you realise that God is showing that Samaria and Jerusalem are rejoined in the temple of the Church. Israel’s worship is reunited, under the authority of Jesus and the apostles.
Cornelius and the gentiles are, of course, the big surprise, having by the Holy Spirit ministry of Peter been shown to have access the temple where God’s glory dwells, rather than being subject to the death penalty as they would be at the Jerusalem temple.
John the Baptist’s disciples in Acts 19 seem less significant to us now, but must have been a significant number in Luke’s day. Perhaps John, like the Essenes he’s sometimes associated with, was denouncing the temple sacrifices when he offered forgiveness through baptism. If so, Paul was telling John’s disciples that they could rightly worship in the true temple where (unlike Herod’s temple) the shekinah now dwelt.
And so we can go on. Luke uses “filling with the Spirit” in three non-technical ways, and certainly not as a second blessing. Sometimes, he means a permanently spiritual person like Stephen or Barnabas. Sometimes he refers to the welling up of the Spirit after certain occurrences, like the bold speaking of the believers after the encouragement and prayer of Acts 4. Sometimes he means an extraordinary endowment for a particular situation, like Stephen (again) at his stoning, or Paul striking Elymas blind. Nowhere in Acts does anything suggest we should ask to be filled with the Spirit. Rather, the idea throughout is that as we meet together, or put the acts of the flesh to death, we will increasingly be filled (from the spring already within). We do not need to be repeatedly filled (as the silly Charismatic adage goes) because we leak, but because we sometimes manage to obstruct the spring that has been bubbling within us since we first believed.
More could be said to explain every reference, but my point is, specifically, that one comes to a very different theology by seeing the Spirit as God’s permanently indwelling glory in his temple the Church, to be jointly shared and fostered, rather than as something or someone to be invoked from heaven whenever we feel in need of God. More broadly, my point is that it’s very easy to carry on working on an entirely unbiblical theological model simply because we don’t take our choruses, or our practices, or our spiritual expectations, back to Scripture for critical re-examination, and obedience to the truth. But whenever we do that, we’re doing just what the Roman curia or the Rabbis are doing, and Jesus is no happier with us than he was with the Pharisees:
Then some Pharisees and teachers of the law came to Jesus from Jerusalem and asked, “Why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders? They don’t wash their hands before they eat!”
Jesus replied, “And why do you break the command of God for the sake of your tradition? For God said, ‘Honour your father and mother’ and ‘Anyone who curses their father or mother is to be put to death.’ But you say that if anyone declares that what might have been used to help their father or mother is ‘devoted to God,’ they are not to ‘honour their father or mother’ with it. Thus you nullify the word of God for the sake of your tradition. You hypocrites! Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you:
“‘These people honour me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me.
They worship me in vain;
their teachings are merely human rules.’”
Ooooh. Interesting post.
My little points. And I do mean “little” because this is clearly a subject of immense scholarly debates.
1. The Talmud’s authority stems from the Mishna which was codified possibly 400 years earlier. The Talmud is just the commentary on the Mishna’s rulings (+ tangential conversations about all sorts of stuff.)
2. The objection I have with Karites is that even though you don’t have “rabbis” being ordained in the OT, you do have teachings which have the nation approaching the Levites or even Moses to ask for legal rulings or to just be taught the law of Moses (the Levites). There does appear to be an understanding that Levites would teach the nations a particular way of doing things. Just imagine the pilgrimages to Jerusalem and bringing sacrifices only to have different groups doing different things. Karites teach that ultimately, the application falls on the individual and I don’t see that as sustainable. In my opinion, their small number in such a long time allowance demonstrates that fact. God’s covenant to the Jews was not just a creed, but a set of deeds as well.
I guess my point is that it’s not just that Karaites don’t hold by the authority of the rabbis; that is the lesser of the issue. It’s that if you take their philosophy’s logical conclusion, the plan of God was always for each individual to interpret the “deed” as he saw fit, regardless of how it might splinter the community and the larger Israelite nation as a whole. And one has to ask if that makes sense and is that what you see in the OT? Mose’s ruling for the daughters of Zelophehad isn’t a ruling he tells them is just for them. It becomes law for all of Israel. One can easily assume that such questions were the norm and more and more questions would need to be resolved along the way which became rulings for all of Israel.
3. I agree with him that orthodox Jews put an insane amount of weight in learning Talmud, but, even within orthodoxy, there are two category of every halacha (law). The two Aramaic terms are:
– D’Orita (from the Torah)
– D’Rabanan (from the rabbis)
Every orthodox child learns these two separations. What it means is, does a particular halacha have the weight of the Torah behind it or the weight of the rabbis behind it. It doesn’t mean you can pick and chose. Orthodox Jews believe you must keep all halacha no matter its categorical origins, but, if something is from the rabbis, there is far more leniencies. A sin would be neglecting biblical rules, not rabbinic. For example, while orthodoxy interprets EATING, (not just cooking) meat and milk together as biblically prohibited, it notes that the prohibition of eating FOWL and milk is purely rabbinic. Now while that may make no practical difference on a day-to-day basis, it’s a pedagogical way never forget the difference in how we observe with our community.
4. But of course this is where the karaites and orthodox jews real disagreements are. The Mishna is loaded with laws it claims is D’Orita even though it is not spelled out in the Bible. I will just use the video’s example of the 39 prohibited categories of the Sabbath? The Karait will assert no such laws are written about. A pharisee will assert if the Tabernacle ceased being built on the Sabbath, maybe it was those actions that helped in the building of the Tabernacle, were always prohibited. (BTW, the idea of 39 prohibited actions fall nicely to the idea of the Sabbath being a cosmic temple in Genesis, since it is the tabernacle [a temple] which helped them derive the law of what to do on the Sabbath). The rabbis would still call this “D’Orita”, from the Torah since it’s about keeping a Torah law.
So it’s an interesting question for you as well. Was Jesus’s problem with the Pharisees that they would interpret scripture in a single way for all of Israel (and layer it with human tradtions as well), or that they were simple terribly hypocritical?
Hanan, thanks for this interesting and useful info.
I was aware of the Mishna, but you clarify the relationship between that and the Talmud nicely. For the purposes of the blog intro I simply took Nehemia’s summary.
The unity of Israel (thinking of second temple times especially) was of course important. But despite the Pharisees’ efforts there was considerable diversity of belief and practice not only between the classical Sadducees, Pharisees and Essenes, but of course the Pharisaic schools of Hillel and Shammai. And there were more splinters, so that a well-known research paper on 1st century Messianic expectations was entitled “Judaisms and their Messiahs.” For all that, the annual feasts remained huge and, apparently, pretty unified.
You may be aware how the Catholic/Orthodox (before they split in the 11th century!) churches became oppressors. Initially, as heretical sects arose, early church fathers appealed to the Bible, and to what the churches that had first been founded taught, that is what was the tradition handed down directly from Jesus and the apostles. So the hierarchy gained its authority from the tradition.
The problem became that “the tradition” over time became defined as what the hierarchy taught, culminating in things like an infallible Pope. It included non-biblical stuff that crept in over time and so became traditional, not subject to biblical scrutiny because the hierarchy taught it. Hence the cult of Mary, purgatory, indulgences and all kinds of nonsense.
It seems to me that the Mosaic injunction for the Levites to teach was intended to mean that they knew the torah best, and how to handle it faithfully – not that they had access to an unwritten law parallel to the scriptures. The Pharisees were not Levites, of course – Saul/Paul, for example, studied under Gamaliel and was a Benjaminite. And so it would seem that the post-destruction rabbis had a fairly thin claim to either an unbroken oral tradition or an authoritative monopoly on right interpretation.
It seems pretty clear that Jesus, and the Church he founded, had very little truck with the tradition of the elders. Not only does Jesus critique the Pharisees for it, as per the video, but both the gospels and the apostolic letters are chock full of biblical references (comprising not just quotes but an entire interpretive framework), but never traditional rulings. It’s also true that Jesus tends to agree on current controversies more often with Hillel than Shammai, but always on the basis of his own authoritative use of Scripture, not theirs. On divorce he’s closer to Shammai.
As my OP implies, the decentralisation of interpretation that Jesus established was based on the gift of the Holy Spirit after his ascension, an “anointing” given to all believers, albeit with different gifts, such that not all would become teachers, but all would be able to weigh what was taught. Hence the need for unity was, to Jesus, met by the unity of the Spirit rather than by a priestly tradition.
You will rightly observe that the rise of Catholic/Orthodox tradition (which we can probably largely pin on the sacerdotalism re-introduced under the emperor Constantine) put things back in the hands of a hierarchy, and you might rightly point to the gazillion Christian denominations and sects today.
But my experience is that both are not due so much to different interpretations of Scripture, as to failure to subject teaching to the test of Scripture (in the power of the Spirit). To give a Jewish example (since I came across it yesterday), the Messianic scholar Seth Postell tests the Rabbinic interpretation of Isaiah 53, following Rashid, as not referring to an individual Messiah, but to the nation of Israel or a faithful remnant thereof. Postell shows by intertextual comparison how Jeremiah 11 uses the passage to describe his own individual persecution by the nation, thus being a far earlier, and inspired, interpreter than the rabbis. Isaiah 53 therefore prophesies an individual (though not Jeremiah himself).
A very good question. My take is that he saw the whole “hedge around the law” process as destroying what the torah was actually for, that is (as Psalm 119 explores at length) to give freedom to worship God joyfully and righteously. He would not have seen the point of freezers having (as mine does) a “sabbath setting.”
And so later the apostle Peter, a simple working class law-abiding Jew, not a Pharisee, when discussing the question of whether these new gentile believers should be required to keep the law, talks of “putting on the necks of the disciples a yoke that neither we nor our fathers have been able to bear.” I suspect Jesus would have seen that the law as a yoke would make Pharisaic hypocrisy almost inevitable. Maybe it contributes to the preponderance of secular Judaism today.
Once again, Jesus’s approach to obeying God’s law freely was the Holy Spirit, poured out (as per Joel) on believers. Paul, “a Pharisee of Pharisees,” came to teach the way of the law as mutually exclusive with the way of the Spirit. By that he did not advocate antinomianism, but a heart and will renewed by the Spirit as in Jeremiah’s new covenant (and other passages) and inclined towards love of God and neighbour, informed by torah. For more on that, see my recent post on law here.
What I said at the end of that speaks a little to the question of solidarity, for Jews in particular. Now, more than ever, the need for a sense of Jewish unity and identity is shared by Karaites and Orthodox alike, not to mention Messianic Jews, and even those who are to a greater or lesser extent secular. One way or another, that national/cultural unity will be based on torah, and expressed (as it was even in the first century Jerusalem church under James the Lord’s brother) in zeal for the law… but not necessarily separate chinaware for meat and dairy.
So i wasn’t saying the Pharisee (or any other subgroup claiming superiority of their tradition) are NECESSARILY correct. Only that the CONCEPT of a ruling of what the law OUGHT to mean finds credibility in the biblical story as opposed to Karaism which tend to lean on individual interpretation. Remember that as Christianity believes Jesus is a fulfillment of the law and that the faith is the governing aparatus, orthodox Jews and Karaite still believe in fulfilling the actual commandments on a practical level. And there in lies the issue I had. If Karaites wish to follow the law, but say they will only keep it on a scriptual level for each family to interpret freely, they are negating the biblical story that is interwoven along the commandments. Now even though Pharisees are not levites, the concept of teaching the nation HOW to keep the commandments is more in line with orthodoxy than it is Karaism. Pharisees are not levites, but hey, one can say someone had to fill in and be the teachers to the nations. One can understand a group of “rabbis” rising up in these days to be the teachers considering the corruption of the Temple elites. Again, this is not saying they are correct, but only looking at it historically, Karaism doesn’t seem to fit either biblical Judaism or Christianity.
One could ask why is that every sub group had their own “final” ruling as to what practical Jewish law was, and none of them left it to the individual as Karaites have it.
That was my only qualm with Karaism.
As for the rest, well, there is a lot there. I always wonder how all this began back in those days. You could say that Jesus agreed with Hillel more due to his own authoritative interpretations. That works fine while Jesus is around. But what about all those years before there was a Jesus. The Jews had to do their best in understand these texts. Hillel can’t lay claim to be the Son of Man. But I would say it is a compliment to Hillel that out of his own struggling and hard work with the text he got to the point where you can say Jesus mostly agreed with him.
I think it is only natural that a people that are given commandments to keep are going to have questions about those commandments and someone is going to have to give them clarity. A Sabbath setting on a refrigerator has in it the same origins as any other question that may have come to the pharisees, or saducees or rabbis. Society also changes and new uncertainties come up where, perhaps, a biblical allowance is annulled, or to prevent ignoring biblical law, the rules are changed so that the biblical law can still survive. If you ever have a chance, look up the Response materials from early rabbinic Judaism. It’s questions and answers to the rabbis. I have a hard time this started all of a sudden in some vacuum. It goes back all the way to the Bible when the daughters of Zelophad approached Moses to ask their questions.
It doesn’t mean I think they got it all right. I don’t. I think many of the fences around biblical law are too much. But as Lawrence Schiffman (probably the world’s foremost scholar on Dead Sea scrolls) showed, that quite a few halachic rulings in the Mishnah are echoed in the materials of the Qumran sect.
I’m scarcely qualified either academically or as a gentile to have strong views on the rise of the oral law and who, if anyone, had the best interpretations. Certainly, I can see why after the Exile the nation said, “Let’s not go there again, guys, eh?” Or perhaps even more in the hellenising days when the problems came largely from within the need to demarcate the godly was crucial. It seems to be a moot point whether we should regard the Maccabees as good guys or bad guys in a messy period. Likewise the Pharisees.
FWIW there seem to me great problems with postulating a continuity of authoritative interpretation from Moses’ time, when for example in the days of Ahab when the faithful were driven underground, or in the reign of Manasseh when even the torah itself was lost.
Yet there seems to be a class of faithful Jews, in Jesus’s time, who for economic and other reasons couldn’t meet the Pharisees’ standard of purity yet sought truth. And Hillel himself, together with some of the Pharisees and scribes who met Jesus, seem to have shared with them and him the idea that the shema is the key to interpreting the law. That emphasis on love can’t have been universal, or it would not have been remarked upon in the gospels on several occasions.
I suppose my general observation is that Messiah was expected to bring righteousness to an Israel still, in some sense, in spiritual exile. Jesus offered righteousness both in his teaching and through his Isaiah 53 suffering, and also spoke of his people Israel as lost sheep without a shepherd. How they got to be lost is perhaps a question best answered by Jews!
Hanan
This video of Seth Postell (incidentally an important source for my second book) mentions the very problem you raise of how one can understand torah without a voluminous oral tradition. I think you’ll find it interesting!
Hey Jon,
I think you misunderstand. I don’t claim you NEED an oral tradition. I’m claiming oral traditions (plural) will arise inevitably simply for the fact that Israel would ask questions to their judges, leaders, priests. Sort of in the same way that Americans ask their supreme court “what does freedom of speech mean and doesn’t mean”. My argument is simply that from an Israelite POV (not a Christian POV, that does not have the “works” being intertwined WITH the faith), receiving an answer to the question of “how do we keep X” would be important. It’s sort of the same way Ezra taught the Israelites Torah on their return from Exile. He and the levites would surly explain to them how to keep the comandments – and this the important part – in a UNIFIED manner. That to me goes against the Karate perspective that everyone should interpret the application of law as they see fit. I for one would think if Ezra heard that, he would have a good belly laugh (or execute them).
I also don’t believe there is one authoritative tradition (or menorah in Hebrew) of how to keep things. As you say, the Bible itself claims the links were broken, but even though the answers themselves in HOW to apply the law may have been broken, the fundamental yearning and questioning to authority figures on how to apply the learn – meaning, the concept behind it – would have been universal.
Yup – I see your point, and wasn’t suggesting your own agreement with oral tradition – just that you had raised it. An alternative, at least if one’s take on mitzvah is obeying the spirit of the law rather than rigid uniformity, would be to seek the torah for an interpretive key so that the individual reading it would not go off at half-cock.
Seems to me that was what Hillel and his followers were seeking to do by applying the over-arching principle of love to the commandments. With that Jesus agreed – telling a scribe who was evidently in that camp that he was “not far” from the kingdom (Mark 12).
(The interesting part is what follows his agreement with the scribe that God is one and should be loved above all else – he goes on to suggest what the scribe is still lacking from Psalm 110, giving the scribe a Messianic headache about the oneness of God.)
NB For any readers too lazy to check out the Seth Postell link I gave Hanan, he is demonstrating that the most importnat teaching of torah is not laws, but the prophetic narrative of the failure of the law to bring righteousness. Once again, that seems to fit into your point, Hanan, that obedience seems harder than it should be. Hence Deuteronomy ends by saying that they’re still needing the “prophet like me” that Moses promised.
I have nothing to add except to say that this is interesting stuff, thank you for your interactions.