The Jewish Annotated New Testament (147 page)

FROM PHARISEES VS. SADDUCEES TO RABBIS VS. PRIESTS

Of the two schools of thought that are most prominent, the Pharisees and the Sadducees, the former are treated in the sources primarily according to their orientation toward Torah. For example, Matthew 12 opens with a story about the Pharisees’ insistence upon the Sabbath laws; Acts 5.34 mentions a law-teacher named Gamaliel as one of their leaders, just as Josephus, referring to the next generation, mentions one Simeon ben Gamaliel (son and successor of Gamaliel) as a leader of the Pharisees in a passage in which Josephus characterizes the Pharisees as noted for their precision in matters of Jewish law (
Life
191). Paul similarly identified himself “as to the law, a Pharisee” (Phil 3.5). These texts correspond to the fact that rabbinic literature of the first several centuries of our era focuses on knowledge of the law and refers to Gamaliel and his son Simeon as early heroes of the rabbinic movement, just as it also frequently condemns the Sadducees and sides with the Pharisees in their disputes with the Sadducees. The Pharisees thus are likely a “proto-rabbinic” movement, although there were certainly differences between the Pharisees of the days of the Temple and the rabbis of the later period.

The Sadducees, in contrast, are often treated in connection with the high priesthood. At Acts 5.17 Luke glosses “the high priest … and all those who were with him” with “that is, the sect of the Sadducees.” That jives quite well with the fact that the very name “Sadducee” derives from “Zadok,” the name of the high priest in the days of David and Solomon; according to the Hebrew Bible (1 Chr 6.1–15; Ezra 3.2; Neh 12.10–11,22; cf.
Ant
. 20.234), Zadok founded the dynasty that provided high priests down to the second century BCE (see Sir 51 [Hebrew addition] “Give thanks to him who has chosen the sons of Zadok to be priests”); although at that point the Hasmoneans (“Maccabees”) took over the high priesthood, the Zadokites/Sadducees nonetheless remained prominent thereafter. This high-priestly nexus is supported by various points in rabbinic literature (e.g.,
b. Yoma
19b; 53a) and also by Josephus, who reports that James, the brother of Jesus, was executed at the instigation of a Sadducean high priest (
Ant
. 20.199–200).

Recognition of the high-priestly nature of the Sadducees allows us to expand our understanding of them in two ways. First, just as the Pharisees’ focus on Gamaliel and on law allowed us to align them with the later rabbis, the Sadducees’ priestly orientation suggests a similarity to the Qumran sect, though with some tensions between the groups. The similarity rests in the fact that the Qumran sectarians too were very much occupied by priestly issues. Note, for example, their concern with ritual purity and with the laws focused on priestly matters in the Temple Scroll (11QSTemple), and that according to its most basic rules, the sect entrusted supreme authority to the priests: “only the sons of Aaron shall rule with regard to law and property, and according to their say shall decisions be made concerning all matters concerning the people of the
Ya
ḥ
ad
” (1QS 9.7). Thus, although there were certainly differences and at times even hostility between the Sadducees and the Qumran sectarians, we may nevertheless view them both as priestly sects. Just as we may meaningfully contrast modern Protestants to Catholics even though there are differences among denominations of Protestants, so too should we view the Sadducees and the Qumran sect as “denominations” of priestly Judaism that may be contrasted with the Pharisaic/proto-rabbinic type of Judaism.

PRIESTS VS. RABBIS: INHERITED ROLES AND CHOSEN ROLES

The similarity of the Sadducees and the Qumran sect allows us to use the Dead Sea Scrolls as evidence for the nature of the Sadducees too and facilitates our understanding of what being “priestly” implied. Among Jews, priests are born, as sons of priests (Aaronites). Among Pharisees and rabbinic Jews, in contrast, those who excel in the study of the Torah became rabbis if and when their teachers and their communities decided to recognize them as such. This suggests that priestly Jews would tend to assume that the rules dealing with the sacred and with binding obligations are established by nature, whereas Pharisaic and rabbinic Jews would tend to think that human decisions play a much more important role. This was reinforced by the institutions within which priests and rabbis usually worked, and which granted them their status: for the priests religious life was focused upon the one Temple of Jerusalem, of which the location was determined (so the Bible teaches) by God; for the Pharisees and rabbis (even before the Temple was destroyed in 70 CE and certainly thereafter) were typically associated with houses of study and synagogues, which were founded at will by Jewish individuals and communities. (See “The Synagogue,” p.
519
.)

This distinction, between roles acquired by birth and those that are chosen, seems to have been at the heart of the distinction between these two types of Jews, and it had significant implications. For example, anyone who believes that religious status derives in the first place from the facts of birth is likely to have doubts about the possibility of conversion to Judaism. Indeed, several texts bespeak the priestly view that although Gentiles might associate themselves with the community, they cannot become Jews. Thus, Greek inscriptions on the Temple Mount forbade the entry of the
allogenēs
(person of non-Jewish birth) beyond a certain limit; cols. 39–40 of the Temple Scroll from Qumran forbids converts entry into the Temple’s inner courts; and the Damascus Document (CD 14.3–6) treats converts as a fourth group alongside priests, Levites, and “Israel.” Similarly, since a belief in immortality or resurrection entails the belief that there is a soul independent of the body, and there is tension between that and the definition of priests according to their birth with no regard to anything pertaining to their souls, it is no surprise that the priestly sects denied life after death, as is reported by Josephus (
Ant
. 18.16) and the New Testament (note esp. Mk 12.18–27 and parallels, also Acts 4.1–2 and 23.6–8). Again, Jews of a priestly orientation, whose religious life centered on the Temple of Jerusalem, will have found it somewhat difficult to take a synagogue seriously, since their own status was reinforced by the fact that they, but not those who do not share priestly birth, could enter into the Temple’s sacred sphere and minister in the Temple service. Rather, priests tended to adhere to the notion of a natural law, that is, that the values inherent in nature (“written on their hearts … conscience,” as Paul put it in Rom 2.15) are indeed binding, whereas Pharisees and rabbis preferred to hold that, just as with regard to the making of religious leaders and location of religious institutions, it is human decisions that endow things with their importance and their legal status.

Thus, for example, a central Qumran text insists that the calendar must correspond to the movements of the moon, with “no moving times up or moving holidays back” and with “no deviation right or left” (1QS 1.14–15), which is an allusion to Deut 17.11. The rabbis, in contrast, insisted that their court’s decisions about the new moon must be accepted even if they were wrong astronomically (
m. Rosh Ha-Shana
2.8), and on the basis of the same verse in Deuteronomy they argued that courts’ decisions must be followed even if they declare the right to be left or the left to be right. On the other hand, the Mishnah reports (
m. Ketub
. 13.2) that since it is obviously natural and fair to expect that a man who traveled abroad will reimburse a neighbor who supported his family in his absence, “the sons of the high priests” held that such a husband was indeed required to do so. The rabbis, in contrast, held that the fact that the neighbor had not formulated the matter as a loan, via promissory note or the like, meant that it could not obligate the husband. That is, even at the expense of rejecting a demand that is obviously fair, the rabbis demonstratively held that it is decisions that matter. The things that matter, and oblige us, are not simply so; rather, they acquire that status because we decided to call them so. The rabbis, that is, held that months and debts are like rabbis: they are not natural, instead, they are created or determined by human decision. Priests, in contrast, held that months and debts were in effect “natural” occurrences created, like themselves, by nature.

THE OTHER GROUPS: FILLING OUT THE EXTREMES

At this point, we can place the other sects in relation to the Pharisees and Sadducees. Those two sects, we may assume, were fairly centrist. The Sadducees, who depended upon the values of sacred birth and sacred place, represent the nationalist position that reflects the basic ethnic values of a people living in its land. Even more traditional than the Sadducees (so somewhat to their “right”) was the Qumran sect; if earlier we noted its priestly orientation, now we may add that it must have been more doctrinaire about it than were the Sadducees, for the latter remained well represented in Jerusalem, at the center of Jewish society, while the Qumran sectarians, unhappy about what they considered mismanagement of the Temple and corruption of the priesthood, chose a separatist and self-imposed exile. Still more doctrinaire, as far as nationalist beliefs are concerned, were the movements of anti-Roman rebels, such as the Sicarii, whose rebelliousness derived from their uncompromising devotion to the value of Holy Land—a value that was centered around the axis of priestly Judaism, the Temple, which, as what the Bible frequently terms “the house of God,” was the linchpin of the Land’s sanctity. The Romans’ demand that Judea be ruled from Rome, not from Jerusalem, contradicted that biblical notion diametrically, and the Sicarii and other rebels were willing to risk all to terminate that anomaly. Indeed, in the end they rebelled and the anomaly was removed—but by the destruction of the Temple, not by the end of Roman rule in Judea.

The basic orientation of the Pharisees and protorabbis, namely, the ascription of importance to things we decide upon rather than givens, was, in contrast, the basic principle of diasporan existence. For if is natural for those in Judea to do like the Judeans and for those in Rome to do like the Romans, and they do it by default, the only way Judeans in Rome (or elsewhere in the Diaspora) could go on doing what Judeans do is for them to decide to do what is unnatural: although they could not adhere to Judea, they could adhere to Juda
ism
, if they chose to do so despite their natural circumstances. Moreover, Jews in the Diaspora were more exposed to and influenced by Hellenistic civilization than were their Judean cousins, and the whole premise of Hellenism—a universalist movement, which allowed people everywhere to become “Greeks” by virtue of their education and culture—is that what makes people what they are is their culture, i.e., their values and commitments, not their birth or their location. The Greek gymnasia around the East were schools that turned barbarians into Greeks— a process analogous to the processes that could turn Gentiles into Jews, run-of-the-mill Jews into rabbis, and profane sites into “holy places” because a community decided to build a synagogue upon it. Thus, the basic premises of Pharisaism and of Hellenistic culture were basically the same but were certainly felt more intensely in the Hellenistic Diaspora. For the purposes of this schematic survey the important point is that the Hellenistic Jews of the Diaspora were to the “left” of the Pharisees, even more willing than the Pharisees to place a premium upon choice rather than birth. Thus, if the Qumran sect and anti-Roman rebels were more Sadducean than the Sadducees, Jews of the Hellenistic Diaspora were more Pharisaic than the Pharisees.

That Hellenistic Diaspora was the context that produced Paul, in Tarsus, which was “no mean (Greek)
polis
” (“an important city,” Acts 21.39), so too Paul, who proclaims so insistently that “there is no difference [in Christ] between Jew and Greek” (Rom 10.12; also Gal 3.28, echoed in Col 3.11). For Paul, God’s presence is not limited to people of any particular pedigree or of any particular place like the Temple of Jerusalem, but is found within the heart of every believer and within every believing community (1 Cor 3.16; 6.19; 2 Cor 6.16; so too in a letter by one of Paul’s disciples, Eph 2.19–22). These views are quite nonpriestly but quite easily paralleled by equally demonstrative statements in early rabbinic literature. Indeed, if we had to guess with whom someone like Paul would study upon coming to Jerusalem, it would in fact be, as the narrator of Acts tells us, a Pharisaic teacher, Gamaliel (Acts 22.3).

The conceptual scheme suggested here must be modified to allow for more nuance. First, note that Pharisaic religion left a good bit of room for choice by God too; what was important for them was that he made such choices independent of nature. For example, CD 4.21–5.1 states the priestly view that since God created one man and one woman, polygamy is forbidden; but the Pharisees and the rabbis—just as they refused to collect a debt, which was only natural but not formulated as one, so too they allowed polygamy because there is no statement in the Torah that forbids it. Second, note that despite the basic similarity of Pharisaic Judaism of Palestine and Hellenistic Judaism of the Diaspora, the Pharisaic emphasis on observance of the law was harder to maintain in the societal conditions of the Hellenistic diaspora, and there we often find, instead, a tendency to interpret Jewish law allegorically. Third, similarly, there are basic differences between life in Jerusalem and life in the desert, and therefore, despite the basic similarity of the Sadducees and the Essenes as priestly sects, the fact that the latter lived, by choice, in “exile,” out in the desert, led it to develop some nonpriestly characteristics reminiscent of those of Diaspora Judaism.