Without a doubt, substantial ignorance exists in the world when it comes to Jews and Christians. Jews are, for the most part, ignorant of Christian Scripture and its origins, and Christians, again, for the most part, are ignorant of rabbinic Judaism (which formed modern Judaism). Most Christians also lack an understanding of the interpretation of Jewish Scriptures from antiquity to the first century CE. This last point, however, includes an extra step that adds an even more challenging aspect. While Jews are simply ignorant of Christian Scripture because they do not commonly read it, Christians are ignorant of Jewish Scripture not because they have not read it but because they read it through a Christian lens. We will discuss this aspect related to translation and interpretation in chapter 5. However, my purpose in this chapter is to help Christian friends understand that the view of Judaism presented through the lens of the New Testament is a skewed one, to say the least, and first-century Judaism, seen through the proper lens, differs greatly from modern Judaism.

The Gospels as a Source

To view first-century CE Judaism in its historical form, we have to do what I imagine may be difficult for some Christian clergy and laypeople: we must gently and temporarily view the Gospels in their historic contexts and recognize the human

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influences that shaped them. In any religion, whether it is Abrahamic or not, viewing the Holy Scriptures as “perfect”—that is, as literally handed down from God can result in a closed-minded approach to reading Scripture and in a lack of full knowledge and understanding. I would give the same advice to those in the Jewish faith who feel that the Torah, meaning the Five Books of Moses, was written by God and is perfect in every way.

While such a literal view of Scripture exists, the modern study of Scripture provides deeper understandings that simply cannot be ignored. Working with the Torah example above, let us consider that even if we allow ourselves to believe that the Torah was handed down at Sinai—an unknown place in the wilderness, with thunder and lightning and the entirety of the Jewish nation there to witness it—we cannot ignore the fact that once Moses received it, it was put in the hands of human beings. The divine nature of the law of the Torah and its authority are mediated through faithful but fallible human beings. Therefore, if we follow the idea that it was handed down in a perfect form, its perfection was slowly and systematically reduced when it was transferred as oral accounts, copied by scribes, and later translated. Humans make mistakes, and it would be unfair to believe that scribes, translators, and clergy would make mistakes and errors in every instance except in handling the Torah. More relevant to our discussion, the same can be said of the Gospels. Christians view the Gospels as divinely inspired, but they were also written down, spread to others, copied and translated, and interpreted by faithful and fallible human beings. The original “perfect” form of the Gospels is not something we can recover.

For the purposes of this book, which aims to educate Christians regarding the historical and current lives of Jews, we look at Scripture not in a flattened literalistic way but in a way that uses modern scholarship to understand the real challenges and

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obstacles that stood in front of the Gospel writers as they described first-century Judaism and the life of Jesus as a first century Jew. It is important for Christians to be aware of the potentially problematic readings of the New Testament and to be open to differing interpretations and questioning of historicity.

We can begin with the problem of chronology, meaning that two generations passed between Jesus’s life and ministry and when the writing of the four Gospels was completed. Historically, Jesus is thought to have lived forty to seventy years before they were written. The Gospel of Mark, known to be the earliest one, is thought to have been completed in or around 72 CE. Matthew’s Gospel is understood to have been written circa 85 CE, and Luke, circa 94 CE. The Gospel of John was likely the latest one, with a date close to 100 CE. While many Christian clergy and laypeople are aware of these dates, the chronological problem is not front and center.

Certainly, it can be argued (and it is) that writing about a person’s life forty to seventy years after that person lived evokes serious challenges for the author. Though stories about Jesus were told orally, writing an accurate biography of any person’s life years after the fact would be a challenge, even if that person were there telling you about it! As an example, I often tell my students to attempt to write biographies of their deceased grandfathers. I say, “Surely you may have some memories of him, and you may even remember clearly some stories he told you about his life. Perhaps you could dig up old birth records and photographs to help you along the way or even speak to friends or family members of your grandfather who are still alive. Even with all that, you may find the task to be difficult due to a lack of information and the amount of time that has passed.” Dr. Michael Cook illustrates another example for us: “Imagine a string of beads that scatters on the floor. The odds of restringing

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them in their original sequence are low, and matters are further complicated if some beads have been lost and have to be replaced by new ones.”1

The Gospel writers had very little in front of them when writing their Gospel accounts of Jesus, a challenge that still exists for Christian scholars today: “Jesus may have been an illiterate peasant (Crossan, Horsely, et al.) or a relatively learned member of the middle class (Koester, Brown, et al.); we do not know. He may have been an apocalyptist (Fredriksen) or a magician (Morton Smith), a ‘wisdom’ sage or a self-styled prophet. Scholars disagree on what to emphasize.”2

Moreover, it is likely that the Gospel authors had not been alive or were very young during the time of Jesus. Their understanding of historical events and the situation in society at the time might have been limited. Would I, born in 1981, be able to give an accurate portrayal of what Jewish life was like in the 1980s based on memory? Certainly not. We are sometimes uncomfortable thinking about the Gospel writers having such limits, but the differences in the Gospels themselves reveal that each writer had unique sources and interpreted the stories through different lenses. Each was inspired in their own way, but each was also subject to human fallibility.

Moreover, while Christianity traditionally understands the name of each Gospel to represent an actual person, scholars now see the texts to have been composed anonymously, perhaps years after the persons attributed to them had died. The exercise of “pseudepigrapha”—that is, attributing a work of writing to a well-known name to give it greater authority—was not invented by the Gospel writers. Biblical books of the Hebrew Bible also carry this mark, the most well known being the books of Isaiah and Jeremiah, which “have been made by later hands, some by second or third-generation disciples of the master . . . and others by literary editors (redactors).”3 With a lack of any resemblance

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of copyright laws, biblical writers attributed the most famous and well-known names to the works in order that they would be popular and read. The naming may also have involved some symbolism: “When the Torah . . . is assigned to Moses, the Psalms to David, and wisdom books to Solomon, we should probably understand Moses as the prototype of the lawgiver, David as the prototype of psalmist, and Solomon as the prototype of a sage or wise man.”4

Naming the Gospels after followers of Jesus was an ingenious and purposeful act. For example, take the claim that the Gospel of Matthew was written by Jesus’s disciple Matthew. This gives it far more credibility than naming it after the Christian author who lived two generations later. To add to the challenges just presented, let us remember that the four Gospels were written not in the land of Israel, where Jesus resided, but likely in different locations in the Mediterranean region. Not only had time passed between Jesus’s life and the time of the Gospel authors, but the writers were separated geographically from the land where Jesus lived. If the writers lived neither at the same time as Jesus nor in the same place as him, how could they give an accurate accounting of Jewish life in Judea and Galilee some forty to seventy years earlier?

I return to the example of writing your grandfather’s biography: Would you know about your grandfather’s adult life? Maybe. But what about his childhood? Not only did you not know him at that time in his life, but you have no direct knowledge of what life was like half a century ago. Finally, and most importantly, we cannot ignore the fact that each author, whether Jewish or Christian, secular fiction or nonfiction writer, has within them a specific agenda when writing down a story. Who is the audience of the book? Does the author have biases, conscious or unconscious, regarding the subject matter? Can any religious author truly be called an impartial one, especially when writing about

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their own theology and beliefs? We rely on the Gospels and other writings not for an exact historical understanding of first-century Judaism and the life of Jesus but for hints of the authors’ perspectives. Could sections be true or based on the truth? Yes. But it is the notion that the Gospels reflect an accurate, unbiased historical view of first-century Judaism that creates (and created) severe gaps of ignorance between Jews and Christians.

A reader of the Gospels must understand the goal of the authors, which was to tell the story of Jesus so that, as the writer of Luke says, “you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught.”5 This “telling” did have an agenda: to present Christianity in a positive light and Jesus as the hero and the victim all at once. And when there are heroes, there are inevitable villains. The Gospels have several examples that can be read and seen as anti-Jewish in nature. This is not to be confused with anti-Semitic. The term anti-Semitic, coined in the late nineteenth century in Germany, refers to racial prejudice and discrimination against those who speak (or spoke) a “Semitic” language or derivative thereof. While the term Semite can refer to both Jews and Arabs and Semitic languages include Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic, anti-Semitism has come to reflect only a hatred of Jews, and new terms, such as anti-Muslim or Islamophobia, were coined to describe discrimination against non-Jewish Semites. Anti-Jewish, on the other hand, is not necessarily a pejorative term, though it can be. The authors of the Gospels wished to portray the stories they told as pro-Christian, intended to inspire those who read them to choose Christianity over Judaism. To accomplish this, they inevitably had to shine a negative or outdated light on aspects of first-century Judaism and present Christianity as the “correct” or “new” path. Dr. Michael Cook, a leading New Testament scholar, points out succinct examples of “anti-Jewish” choices in the Gospels. For example, he shows that the author of the Gospel of Matthew removes the “Judaism” from

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Jesus’s theology and at the same time “systematically intensifies Mark’s many negatives toward the Jews.”6 The best examples of this are found in the differences in Mark 12:28ff. and Matthew 22:35ff. Cook shows these in a table:7

Mark 12:28ff.

Matthew 22:35ff.— revising Mark

One of the scribes . . . asked him, “Which commandment is the first of all?”

One of [the Pharisees], a lawyer, asked him a question, to test him. “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?”

Jesus answered, “the first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one; and

And he said to him, _________________________

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ . . .”

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment . . .

And the scribe said . . . , “ You are right, Teacher . . . ” Jesus . . . said to him,

“ You are not far from the kingdom of God.”

_________________________

In Cook’s chart, we should immediately see the “anti-Jewish” maneuvers used by the author of the Gospel of Matthew. Let us begin with the change in Matthew that we would categorize as anti-Jewish but not as a pejorative. When Jesus is asked by the scribe in Mark about the first commandment of them all, Jesus replies with his telling of the following words from Deuteronomy 6:4–6: “Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.” These words were and are currently the “watchword” of the Jewish faith, known

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best as the Sh’ma. In Judaism, the words of the Sh’ma are said twice daily, before sleep, and as the last words before death. The author of Mark shows Jesus’s knowledge of this by writing that Jesus answers with Deuteronomy 6:4–6 when asked the question by the scribe. There is an inherent “Jewishness” in his answer, according to Mark. However, when Matthew, using Mark’s Gospel as a source, retells the story, he has Jesus leave out the first verse, Deuteronomy 6:4, “Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord alone.”8 By doing so, Cook argues, Matthew has removed the word “Israel,” thus removing the “Jewishness” from the commandment. Again, this use of editing is categorized as “anti-Jewish” but not negative, as Matthew instead wishes to shape Jesus’s answer as less Jewish.

On the other hand, Matthew does engage in a “negative” anti-Jewish edit in these verses as well. While Mark tells the story of an innocent quandary asked by one of the “scribes,” Matthew intentionally categorizes the asker as a “Pharisee” and adds the words “to test him.” Matthew removes the innocent notion of a question built from curiosity and describes the Pharisee as one who wishes to quiz Jesus on his knowledge of Judaism. As Cook elucidates, “It is with Matthew, then, that we first detect a disturbing pattern: a Christian writer intensifies his source’s negatives about Jews and omits the positive.”9 One cannot hope to understand the words of the New Testament without acknowledging the common and sometimes obvious agendas of the Gospel writers.

Moreover, history tells us that dozens of other “gospels” were written but removed from the actual canon for theological or political reasons. Therefore, it is not just the authors’ agendas we must be wary of but also those of each compiler, redactor, and canonizer. Do other “gospels” provide a more historical under- standing of Jesus’s life or that of first-century Judaism? It was the decision of those in power at the time to decide which writings

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were to be considered history and accurate and which were not. This practice’s subjectivity goes without saying. We will discuss this more in later chapters.

While these aspects above are certainly taught in some liberal Christian seminaries—as are other challenges, such as the fourth Q source theory—everyday Christians (to say nothing of Jews) are ignorant of them. This is mainly due to the wide gap in education between clergy and laypeople in the world of religion. While clergy are exposed to multiple authorship theories, biblical criticism, and archaeology, the average Christian may feel an obligation to uphold the authority of the texts and not raise questions about the development of the canonical text of the Bible. While there is plenty to note on the historical life of Jesus and the discrepancies found in the Gospels and New Testament, what is more concerning for us in our discussion are the misconceptions regarding first-century Jews and Judaism, which have led to, among other things, anti-Semitism and a lack of understanding of modern Judaism by Christians. We will see more on anti-Jewish roots within the Gospels in chapter 2.

First-Century Judaism: What It Was and What It Wasn’t

To understand what first-century Judaism was, we must start back further on the time line and discuss the events that led up to Jews living in Judea under Roman control. The year 587 BCE saw the destruction of the Great Temple in Jerusalem by the Babylonian Empire, permanently changing the core of Judaism and its theological views. Jews of the time had a choice whether to accept that the Babylonian army, helped by its gods, had truly defeated the God of Israel and destroyed His home or to see the event as a reflection of their own sins and faults, as explained through the words of Lamentations:

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Because the Lord has afflicted her For her many transgressions;

Her infants have gone into captivity Before the enemy.10

This became the prevalent idea within Judaism—that the Jewish God was indestructible and more powerful than all the others and any defeat was because the God of Israel allowed it as punishment. The roots of this kind of theology originate in the Torah and Hebrew Bible, but this thinking was officially cemented when the Great Temple was destroyed.

Half a century later, Cyrus the Great, the king of Persia and Medea, destroyed the Assyrians, the conquerors of Israel, and the Babylonians, the conquerors of Judah, and decreed that the Great Temple was to be rebuilt as part of his “benevolence which seemed to sit well both with his temperament and with the need to govern a large and far flung empire.”11 No doubt Jews of the time felt that the God of Israel was controlling Cyrus and that God had finally forgiven the Jewish people for their sins that caused the destruction of the temple. The Second Temple was completed in 515 BCE. The Jewish center had returned but not without some significant changes. While the vessels and other religious objects were returned from the Babylonian Empire and the altar was built in the same place as its predecessor, the Second Temple was in no way comparable to the beauty and extensiveness of the First Temple.

Following the Persian Empire, the small sliver of land on which the Jews resided changed hands several times. The Hellenistic period began in 334 BCE with Alexander the Great. With Hellenization came the assimilation and reinterpretation of Jewish culture as it mixed with Greek culture, creating “several varieties of Hellenistic Judaism.”12 After Alexander’s death, his kingdom was divided between the dynasties of the Seleucids

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and Ptolemies. The Seleucids invaded and gained control of the Holy Land after waging war with the Ptolemies.

By 175 BCE, Jews began to feel the pressure and influence of Hellenistic assimilation, which eventually led to the Maccabean Revolt in 168 BCE. This story is chronicled in the book of Maccabees, seen as apocryphal in Judaism, and included in the canon of some Christian Bibles. While we will discuss the religious and ritual aspects of Hanukkah in chapter 3 and the choice to keep the book of Maccabees out of the Jewish canon in chapter 4, for the purposes of our discussion here, the Hellenization and forced assimilation by the Greeks led to a bloody and political uprising against Antiochus IV Epiphanes. Under Antiochus IV, Jews were no longer allowed to live under their own laws, meaning the laws of the Torah, and were considered “second-class citizens in an oligarchy.”13 While this is another story entirely, it is important to understand the foundation of politics and emotions within the Jewish mindset in the first century CE.

Following the Maccabean Revolt came the beginning of the Hasmonean period, which directly preceded the Roman conquest. More important than the military battles was the beginning of what is known as sectarianism, meaning that Jews began to see themselves as having differing ideologies under the same umbrella of Judaism. However, as Lawrence Schiffman points out, at this stage, we do not see such a strong break in sects as we do in the first century CE: “Indeed, what divided the groups from one another was only a small part of their faith and practice; what brought them together as a nation, civilization, and religion far outweighed the differences, which tend to be exaggerated in the sources, so often written as polemics rather than as objective appraisals.”14

By the end of the Hasmonean dynasty, Rome had officially taken control of Judea, and by this point, the sects of Judaism,

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unlike half a century earlier, began to divide, evolving into the sects known as the Pharisees and the Sadducees. It is important that Christians or any readers of the New Testament see the Pharisees and Sadducees through the lens of historical accuracy. And what I am arguing is that historical accuracy regarding these sects cannot be discovered by reading the Gospels. As we spoke about earlier, the Gospel writers had their own agendas regarding the framing of Jewish life in the first century and how Jewish leaders interacted with the character of Jesus. As we discuss the historical view of these sects, let us keep in mind the words of Rabbi Samuel Sandmel:

No group in history has had a greater injustice done to its fine qualities and positive virtues than have the Pharisees through parts of the Gospels. Western tradition, taking its cue from the New Testament, has accorded the word “Pharisee” with the connotation of one satisfied with the mere externals of religion, or else a hypocrite. That Pharisaism was not immune from the possibility of such aberration is attested by the Pharisaic writings themselves, which warn against it by depicting caustically the Pharisee who has gone astray. The denunciations in the New Testament, however, are not limited to potential aberrations, but to all of Pharisaism and to all Pharisees. And earlier generations of Christian scholarship, going on from these denunciations, have tended to label all of Judaism as no more than the hollow shell of religious observance, or as pure and simple as hypocrisy.15

Rabbi Sandmel’s warning is real and necessary as we enter this phase of our study regarding first-century Judaism. Jews of the time faced dangers similar to what they face today. One of those is Christian authors characterizing the New Testament

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as historical fact rather than as theological interpretation or allegory. Most laypeople within Judaism and Christianity know little to nothing of the Pharisees and Sadducees other than what is written or spoken about in the New Testament. As Rabbi Sandmel correctly points out, these categorizations by Christian Gospel writers are unfair, to say the least, as is the prejudice against all Jews that derived from them. For now, let us begin with this basic description of the Pharisees:

Pharisees: a group of Jews active in the period of the Second Temple. Many scholars speculate that these Jews were forerunners of the rabbis, though this view has increasingly been challenged. In any event, Pharisees, as described by Josephus and others, were known for their concern with purity and their strict observance of the Law. As represented in the New Testament and well into the modern period, the term Pharisee was often used in a derogatory sense by Christians, arguing that the Pharisees were indeed the Jews, with their overemphasis on the Law and ceremonies and their rejection of Jesus.16

As the Companion to Jewish Studies argues, it is important to dismiss and discard the polemical view of the Pharisees based solely on subjective views. For example, let us first examine the view of Pharisees through the lens of Flavius Josephus, a Jewish historian who is thought to have lived between 38 and 100 CE. Josephus is known for describing what he calls the four “philosophies” of Judaism in the first century CE: Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, and Activists. Only the first two are relevant to our discussion, though it is important to note that it is likely Jesus considered himself a Pharisee, but the Roman government considered Jesus and possibly his followers to be Activists. Josephus describes the Pharisees as follows:

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Now for the Pharisees, they live meanly, and despise delicacies in diet; and they follow the contract of reason: and what that prescribes to them as good for them they do: and they think they ought earnestly to strive to observe reason’s dictates for practice. They also pay a respect [sic] to such as are in years: nor are they so bold as to contradict them in anything which they have introduced. And when they determine that all things are done by fate, they do not take away the freedom from men of acting as they think fit: since their notion is, that it hath pleased God to make a temperament; whereby what he wills is done; but so that the will of man can act virtuously or viciously. . . . On account of which doctrines they are able greatly to persuade the body of the people: and whatsoever they do about divine worship, prayers, and sacrifices, they perform them according to their direction.17

While this is somewhat helpful in understanding first-century Pharisees and their basic philosophy, we must take Josephus’s words with an understanding of his bias. As Gary Porton elucidates, “Previous generations of scholars accepted Josephus’ claim that the Pharisees controlled the Jewish community, especially after the destruction of the Temple. However, modern scholarship has not only rejected Josephus’ picture of the scope of the Pharisees’ influence, but also much of the descriptions of the Pharisees and Sadducees in the New Testament and the rabbinic documents. . . . While we may accept the broad outline of Josephus’ history, the details with which he fills in his account are less certain.”18

In fact, it is important for Christians to know that all the sources that mention Pharisees, Paul, the Gospels, and rabbinic literature contain biases in their descriptions. How these are presented, even in modern writing, reflects the agenda of the author,

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whether it is about what they believed or how they were viewed by others at the time:

The Pharisees were a kind of reform movement within the Jewish people that was centered on Jerusalem and Judea.The Pharisees sought to convert other Jews to their way of thinking about God and Torah, a way of thinking that incorporated seeming changes in the written Torah’s practices that were mandated by what the Pharisees called “The tradition of the Elders.” . . . It is quite plausible, therefore, that other Jews, such as the Galilean Jesus, would reject angrily such ideas as an affront to the Torah and as sacrilege.19

Pharisees were interested in text and interpretation rather than in sacrifices and the cultic rituals that were practiced by the Sadducees. In fact, it is this difference that spurred tension between the two groups, especially because the Sadducees, whose interpretations of the law hinged upon their status as aristocrats, rejected any new interpretations of the Torah by the Pharisees, most certainly those that would take the central attention from the Second Temple and the authority of the Sadducees. Moreover, the issues of resurrection and authority of the Oral Torah (as opposed to just the Written Torah) were central to this tension: “Resurrection and the revealed Oral Torah are the major doctrinal points at issue between the Pharisees and the Sadducees. Moreover, we can see how these issues might be directly related, since it is an enormous stretch—if not an impossibility—to find a doctrine of resurrection in the Torah, so one who does not hold with an Oral Torah might well be led to deny any such doctrine.”20

When the Second Temple was destroyed by Rome in 70 CE, the Sadducees lost their power, and with that change came the

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rise of the Pharisees and their transformation into the rabbinic sages. Pharisees, like their rabbinic successors, were considered scholars of text, and it was their use of texts in parables and interpretation that helped shape their view of the law and Jewish beliefs. It was the Pharisees who first “devised oral interpretations beyond the written Torah text,” which were the origins of what is now known as midrash.21 To Jewish history, Pharisees are the great predecessors of rabbinic interpretation, the creation of Halacha ( Jewish law), and the power of legal arguments and interpretation as seen in the Mishnah and the Talmud: “When the Jewish uprising against Rome was suppressed, the Pharisees alone survived it as an effective force in the Jewish community. By default, as it were, their program of building grassroots Jewish communities around the Law as interpreted by oral tradition stepped front and center.”22

This transformation can be seen through the time line of teachers and their disciples during the first century CE, specifically from Rabbi Hillel, “the greatest Pharisees of the first century,”23 to his student Yohanan b. Zakkai, “whose disciples, according to tradition, carried him out of Jerusalem in a coffin before the city fell to the Roman troops.”24 Jewish tradition tells us that Zakkai established an “academy” at a place called Yavneh, an ancient Israeli city. With the temple destroyed in 70 CE, a new kind of noncultic Judaism had to be created, and Zakkai set out to do so with his academy. Yavneh was known as a “center of Pharisaic Judaism as it developed into rabbinic Judaism.”25 The transformation to rabbinic Judaism was not without controversy, but that is a subject we will discuss later.

It is unfortunate that most Christian readers know nothing of the historic Pharisees and that Christian writings show a very different perspective. As Roland Deines, professor of the New Testament at the University of Nottingham in the United

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Kingdom, writes, “Nearly everybody seems to know enough about the Pharisees to label someone else’s behaviour as ‘pharisaic,’ but nobody ever claims to be a Pharisee himself. Pharisees are, almost always, the ‘bad guys.’They are hypocrites whose outside appearance does not match their true inner nature.”26

One example we have already seen in Matthew’s adaptation (Matt 22:35–40) of Mark’s story (Mark 12:28–34) about the greatest commandment. In Matthew’s tale, Pharisees are lawyers who wish only to “test” Jesus to see the status of his intellect and knowledge of the law. It is a malicious view that paints all Pharisees as arrogant and doubters of Jesus’s authority. While this is a passive jab at the Pharisees, the Gospel takes a direct approach in chapter 23 in what is called the “Seven Woes on the Teachers of the Law and the Pharisees”:

Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to.

Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when you have succeeded, you make them twice as much a child of hell as you are.

Woe to you, blind guides! You say, “If anyone swears by the temple, it means nothing; but anyone who swears by the gold of the temple is bound by that oath.” You blind fools! Which is greater: the gold, or the temple that makes the gold sacred? You also say, “If anyone swears by the altar, it means nothing; but anyone who swears by the gift on the altar is bound by that oath.” You blind men! Which is greater: the gift, or the altar that makes the gift sacred? Therefore, anyone who swears by the altar swears by it and by everything on it. And anyone who

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swears by the temple swears by it and by the one who dwells in it. And anyone who swears by heaven swears by God’s throne and by the one who sits on it.

Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill, and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy, and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former. You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.

Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. Blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean.

Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean. In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.

Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You build tombs for the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous. And you say, “If we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.” So you testify against yourselves that you are the descendants of those who murdered the prophets. Go ahead, then, and complete what your ancestors started!

You snakes! You brood of vipers! How will you escape being condemned to hell? Therefore I am sending you prophets and sages and teachers. Some of them you will kill and crucify; others you will flog in your synagogues and pursue from town to town. And so upon you will come all the righteous blood that has been shed on earth, from the blood of righteous

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Abel to the blood of Zechariah son of Berekiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar. Truly I tell you, all this will come on this generation.27

Again, we must remember that this “speech” by Jesus was written up to fifty years after his death, and the Gospel writer’s agenda was to write a polemic against this particular group. As Jack Miles succinctly explains, “Jesus was surely one of the greatest polemicists of all time. It is thanks to him that the very word ‘Pharisee’ has as its second definition in Webster’s College Dictionary ‘a sanctimonious, self-righteous, or hypocritical person.’”28

Matthew, as well as Mark and Luke, records another story regarding the law of the Sabbath that paints the Pharisees in an unfair light:

At that time Jesus went through the grainfields on the Sabbath. His disciples were hungry and began to pick some heads of grain and eat them. When the Pharisees saw this, they said to him, “Look! Your disciples are doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath.” He answered, “Haven’t you read what David did when he and his companions were hungry? He entered the house of God, and he and his companions ate the consecrated bread—which was not lawful for them to do, but only for the priests. Or haven’t you read in the Law that the priests on Sabbath duty in the temple desecrate the Sabbath and yet are innocent? I tell you that something greater than the temple is here. If you had known what these words mean, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the innocent. For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.” Going on from that place, he went into their synagogue, and a man with a shriveled hand was there. Looking for a reason to bring charges against Jesus, they asked him, “Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?” He said

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to them, “If any of you has a sheep and it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will you not take hold of it and lift it out? How much more valuable is a person than a sheep! Therefore it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath.” Then he said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” So he stretched it out and it was completely restored, just as sound as the other. But the Pharisees went out and plotted how they might kill Jesus.29

Here the Pharisees are seen as sticklers for the law, even in the face of suffering. They gleefully point out those who are breaking the Torah law and, according to Jesus, “have condemned the innocent.” It is Jesus who teaches the seemingly ignorant Pharisees to see that “it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath,” chastising them for such an exact reading of the Torah law. The passage paints Pharisees as heartless and without compassion while showing Jesus as not only a healer but a better teacher and more empathetic follower of the law. Additionally, it ignores the understanding in Jewish law, which the Pharisees would have known, that the preservation of life and health always supersedes the Sabbath law. Moreover, one cannot ignore that Matthew’s tale points to the Pharisees as those who would “plot” to kill Jesus. The unending charge of deicide against Jews of every era begins right here in this passage.

Imagine for a moment that the Gospels and stories such as these serve as your only “historical” sources of first-century Judaism. What would be your takeaway? One need only to skim the words of Matthew and other books to see that Pharisees—and, later, rabbis or perhaps all Jews—are to be labeled as “hypocrites,” those “condemned to hell,” “snakes,” a “brood of vipers,” murderers, greedy, self-indulgent, “unclean,” wicked, self-serving, and heartless. Those who take the Gospel of Matthew as history and Jesus’s words as fact run the risk of holding a negative view

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of Pharisees and thus Jews in the modern era. We see this in all forms, including that of modern pastors and their teachings. Here is one example from Kurt Skelly, the senior pastor of Faith Baptist Church in Fredericksburg, Virginia: “In our modern Christian vernacular the title Pharisee carries a markedly negative connotation, and rightfully so. In the days of Jesus, however, they were recognized as the most fastidiously observant religious leaders of the day. I suppose there exists some Pharisee in all of us, so it’s important to recognize their toxic attitudes and behaviors.”30

It is the job of both Jews and Christians to push past this simplistic view of first-century Judaism interpreted through the lens of Gospel writers and their avid readers. After all, it was Matthew’s telling of Jesus’s rejection of the Pharisees that inevitably helped spur anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic rhetoric that continues to this day.

The Sanhedrin in the First Century

One of the distortions of first-century Judaism from the New Testament regards the status and power of the Sanhedrin, the Jewish high court. The word itself is Greek, not Hebrew, from synedrion, meaning “assembly” or “council.” Importantly, Jews of the ancient world would have not referred to the court in this way but rather used the Hebrew beit din (house of justice). The court, or courts, of Sanhedrin during the first century is not to be confused with the Talmudic tractate that shares the same name. The tractate, or section, of the Talmud, completed in the fifth to sixth century CE, is a law code that deals with subjects that the Sanhedrin of the first century and before may have discussed. Rather, it contains far more information and legal discussions—some in theory, not in practice—than occurred in

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the actual Sanhedrin court, as “the Sanhedrin was invested by later Jewish tradition with an antiquity which it probably never possessed.”31 Indeed, it is useless to project the law codes of the Talmudic Sanhedrin onto the first-century court again, if it even existed.

These are just some aspects of the subject of the Sanhedrin in which the Greek sources—namely, the Gospels, Acts, and Josephus—give a false impression. The importance of this distinction is to provide Christians with a more realistic impression of the Sanhedrin and the “trial” spoken about in the Gospels. In fact, scholars today argue that “we lack proof that such an institution yet existed by Jesus’ day (nor are we certain, even later on, whether and how this bet din—literally, ‘House of Justice’— originated, or functioned).”32

Let us begin with the Sanhedrin “trial” of Jesus recorded in Mark 14:53–65:

They took Jesus to the high priest, and all the chief priests, the elders and the teachers of the law came together. Peter followed him at a distance, right into the courtyard of the high priest. There he sat with the guards and warmed himself at the fire. The chief priests and the whole Sanhedrin were looking for evidence against Jesus so that they could put him to death, but they did not find any. Many testified falsely against him, but their statements did not agree.

Then some stood up and gave this false testimony against him: “We heard him say, ‘I will destroy this temple made with human hands and in three days will build another, not made with hands.’” Yet even then their testimony did not agree.

Then the high priest stood up before them and asked Jesus, “Are you not going to answer? What is this testimony that these men are bringing against you?” But Jesus remained silent and gave no answer.

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Again the high priest asked him, “Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?”

“I am,” said Jesus. “And you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven.”

The high priest tore his clothes. “Why do we need any more witnesses?” he asked. “You have heard the blasphemy. What do you think?”

They all condemned him as worthy of death. Then some began to spit at him; they blindfolded him, struck him with their fists, and said, “Prophesy!” And the guards took him and beat him.33

Matthew’s recording of the event is similar, with a few changes noted:

“You have said so,” Jesus replied. “But I say to all of you: From now on you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven.” Then the high priest tore his clothes and said, “He has spoken blasphemy! Why do we need any more witnesses? Look, now you have heard the blasphemy. What do you think?” “He is worthy of death,” they answered. Then they spit in his face and struck him with their fists. Others slapped him.34

There are several issues spotted right away. For one, the Sanhedrin, in its time of existence, operated only during the day, never at night. Second, and more importantly, we must dispense with the idea that it possessed any real power under Roman occupation in the first century and understand that it was, at most, an ad hoc gathering of “scribes.”

Despite the impression given by the New Testament, such a tribunal was considered lawfully convened only if approved

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by the local Roman prefect. The Sanhedrin dealt with political crimes, particularly sedition, and essentially rubber-stamped the convener’s wishes.35

It is unfortunate that the New Testament provides such a skewed version of the power of the Sanhedrin. It neglects the fact that the high priest of the Sadducees worked directly under and with the Roman government because of its authority. In fact, it was the high priest’s duty to “notice any untoward goings-on . . . and to report them immediately to the Roman governor.”36

The most pertinent subject regarding this misconception of the power of the Sanhedrin is its ability, or the lack thereof, to consign Jesus to the cross, as “the challenge posed by Jesus to the Jewish authorities cannot have been of such significance as to warrant a demand for his execution. The Romans . . . had both a vested political interest in his death and the authority to execute him.”37

In the Gospels, it appears that there is a straight line between the Sanhedrin and Pilate and that the scribes and the high priest themselves were able to sentence a person to death within the Roman government. In truth, the Sanhedrin, in any century, did not have the power to initiate arrests or proclaim the execution of another person. Under Roman occupation, the Sanhedrin, if even allowed to exist, had no real power to affect those living under Roman rule and law. Certainly, the beit din could handle functions of Jewish law, such as religious or ritual matters, deciding answers to religious practice questions or those of Halacha, but this was the reach of its power: “It had authority over Jewish life in Judea, but Romans reserved control over some areas, especially capital punishment. For this reason, and because this trial is placed on Passover when such activities would be strictly forbidden by Jewish Law, the scene is of questionable historicity.”38

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Moreover, a beit din is a holy gathering of scribes and teachers; in no world would it be possible for the members therein to “spit” on an accused subject or “beat” him. For many reasons other than those specified, Jewish and Christian scholars alike believe it is clear that the Sanhedrin episode was inserted and fabricated. It should not be taken as historical in any sense, let alone as an accurate view of the power of Jewish courts under Rome or the trial and execution sentence of Jesus.

Judaism Then and Judaism Now

Whenever I sit at the tables of interfaith dialogue, inevitably an issue of confusion arises when discussing what Jews believe or how they act because of a discrepancy between first-century (cultic and biblical) Judaism and modern-day (rabbinic) Judaism. While we modern Jews carry with us elements of our biblical ancestors, the texts of the Torah and Tanakh have been discussed and interpreted for millennia, the challenges within have been responded to by modernity, and new ways to fulfill commandments have been described outside the realm of sacrifice.

As we discussed above, the Pharisees, as the only sect of first-century Judaism to survive both the destruction of the temple in 70 CE and the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132 CE, transformed into what are now known as “rabbis.” The term “literally means, ‘my teacher’; originally a title for someone in an authoritative position, it came to signal a member of the group responsible for development and codification of specific sets of literature (Mishnah, Tosefta, Talmud, Midrashim).”39 Though the shift from temple to synagogue, Pharisee to rabbi, marks an important historical point for the creation of rabbinic Judaism, it is just as crucial to discuss the Jewish community outside the land of Palestine in what is known as the Diaspora, centered in

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Babylonia. Unfortunately, unlike in Palestine, where we have both Christian and Roman archaeological evidence to help shine a light on the rabbinic life of Jews at the time, in Babylonia, the only sources we have are the rabbinic texts themselves, though we know certain key points, most notably that Jews who fled Jerusalem or were exiled after the destruction of the Great Temple in 587 BCE continued to reside in Babylonia. They “began their sojourn in . . . northern Mesopotamia and the areas east of the Tigris: Assyria, Adiabene, Media, and Elam.”40 And while the history of rabbinic life and academies through the Persian period is something to be studied, for the purpose of our discussion, let us move to the creation of the rabbinic documents and sources that formed modern Judaism and remain today as paramount to Jewish communities everywhere.

These bodies of work, which constitute the Oral Torah, are known as the Mishnah, the Talmud, the Tosefta, and midrash. In short, the midrash is “running commentaries on biblical texts,”41 and the Mishnah, Talmud, and Tosefta represent “topical groupings of materials (e.g., regarding holiday observance, family matters, jurisprudence, etc.).”42 Though once studied and repeated only orally, the collection of rabbinic work became too much to memorize and was eventually written down into large volumes. The Mishnah, a second-century CE law code, was then commented upon by the Gemara, and both were added together into a volume codified in the fifth century CE known as the Talmud. The Tosefta, which means “supplement,” adds supplementary material to the Mishnah and Gemara. While legends exist regarding the Oral Torah’s multiple authors, editors, and the like, “we have no reliable information concerning the processes of their creation, the forms individual passages had before their incorporation into later documents, from where editors got what they included, what they chose to exclude, or their editorial principles in general.”43 That being said, these bodies of

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work became the building blocks for how Judaism was to relate to and interpret the biblical writings, how any community from any time was to answer questions about Jewish law, and how to properly observe it. These works further led to medieval and later commentaries and law codes that are still observed today by certain denominations. This also began the process of Halacha, the way to follow Jewish law in all denominations of Judaism. In other words, modern Judaism is primarily based not on the remnants of biblical and cultic aspects from the Torah and Tanakh but on the interpretations and laws that were written later by the sages and rabbis regarding how to relate that material to their own versions of modern times.

Regarding Diaspora Judaism and that which was based in Palestine, two bodies of work emerged that are now known as the Talmud Yerushalmi (the Jerusalem Talmud) and the Talmud Bavli (the Babylonian Talmud), with the former being born out of Palestine and the latter out of Babylon. While the Talmud Bavli is far more extensive and accepted as a source, the Talmud Yerushalmi is still used as a source document to discuss and argue Jewish law.

As for midrash, as Porton points out, “most scholars argue the collections of Midrashim derive from the popular sermons the rabbis delivered in late antiquity. Others maintain the Midrashim are internal rabbinic creations meant to demonstrate the rabbis’ expertise in manipulating Torah.”44 Whatever the purpose or origin, the midrashim became the way for rabbis to explain and interpret the Torah, in a sense answering the questions that Jews would have about the text before they were asked. As every editor and author has their own agenda, we must realize that “sages began explaining the meaning of biblical texts, and it soon turned out that there was no longer any need to change the actual words of the texts. All that was necessary for the sage was to explain that while the text might sound as if

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it meant X, what it really means is Y.”45 This began an “interpretive movement” that gave power to the rabbis to unlock the mysteries of the Torah and Tanakh texts and provide answers to questions and solid explanations for conundrums, discrepancies, scribal errors, and contradictions in what was understood to be a holy and perfect Scripture. James Kugel explains it this way:

Perhaps the most important consequence of this interpretive movement was the establishment of an overall postulate about the Bible itself. These sacred texts did not consist solely of the words on the page; those words came along with a growing body of traditional interpretations. This idea ultimately came to be formulated in rabbinic Judaism as the “two Torahs,” the written text of the Pentateuch and the Torah she-be‘al peh, the “Oral Torah”—that is, an orally transmitted explanation of the Written Torah that accompanied it and was its inseparable equal.This large body of interpretations and expansions touched virtually every verse in the Pentateuch (and a good many verses in the rest of the Hebrew Bible). For rabbinic Judaism, what the Oral Torah said was what the Pentateuch really meant.46

Later, in order to provide authority to the rabbinic texts of the Oral Torah, the “tradition” was formed that both the Written and the Oral Torah originated from the great revelation at Sinai. In other words, at some point, most likely between the first century BCE and the first century CE, traditional Jewish thought began to assert that while Moses was writing down the Written Torah on Sinai, God whispered the words of the Oral Torah, and the latter was passed down by word of mouth until written down in the Mishnah in the second century CE. This belief is thought by scholars to have been created by the “desire on the part of the Yavnean rabbinic authorities to solidify their authority by claiming divine origin for their own traditions.”47

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In fact, the Mishnah tractate Pirkei Avot (Wisdom of the Fathers) begins with that exact legend so as to establish authority: “Moses received the Torah at Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua, Joshua to the elders, and the elders to the prophets, and the prophets to the Men of the Great Assembly.”48 The “Torah” being described here is the Oral Torah, not the Written Torah. The tractate continues with the passing down of the oral law, with phrases beginning with “Antigonus (a man) of Socho received [the oral tradition] from Shimon the Righteous,”49 “Yose ben Yoezer (a man) of Zeredah and Yose ben Yohanan [a man] of Jerusalem received [the oral tradition] from them [i.e. Shimon the Righteous and Antigonus],”50 “Joshua ben Perahiah and Nittai the Arbelite received [the oral tradition] from them,” and so on.51 These words continue throughout the tractate of Pirkei Avot, providing divine influence and authority to each rabbi and sage.

So what does this mean for everyday Jews and Christians when discussing their similarities and differences? For one, Christianity was and is based on first-century Judaism, not rabbinic Judaism. This means that when Christianity was formulated, its foundations were built on the New Testament’s interpretation of the Hebrew Bible (which they called the Old Testament). Rabbinic Judaism’s method of interpretation of the Hebrew Bible was separate from Christianity’s, and thus the two streams grew apart, with Christianity using the New Testament and canons to create a religion and rabbinic Judaism using the Oral Torah as commentary on the Written Torah to create the future of Jewish beliefs. Second, at the point where the rabbis were being formed, after the revolts and destruction of the Sadducees and other sects of the time, “the Christian movement was increasingly turning towards the Gentile world, separating itself from both Jewish people and Jewish practice.”52

It is my hope that this chapter not only educates Christians on first-century Judaism but helps discuss and discard any

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misnomers about modern Judaism and its formation in relation to Christianity.

Key Takeaways from Chapter 1

It is possible and necessary to challenge the theological lenses that Gospel writers applied to their versions of Jesus and his interactions with Jewish religious leaders. Providing a more accurate historical perspective on first-century Judaism and Christianity can open the minds of your flock to a broader understanding than what is read in the Gospels alone. New interpretations that lead to greater interreligious understanding can emerge.

The Gospels provide a skewed version of Pharisees and Jews of the first century and should not be taken as historical in many places. Your congregation should dive deep into the history of first-century Judaism.

First-century Judaism is not modern Judaism, and Christians should become more familiar with the multiple rabbinic sources that led to the changes that created all of the modern denominations of their Jewish neighbors. A Christian will not get a full understanding of modern Judaism by reading the Bible alone.