Pharisaism, Its Aim and Its Method

by R. Travers Herford

With the downfall of the Jewish state, after the war of a.d. 70, the Sadducees disappear from history. The Pharisees remained, as representing all that was left alive of Judaism; but the name was no longer needed, and seldom if ever used. The Jewish remnant were not indeed all Pharisees, in the strict sense of the term; but they were on the whole in sympathy with them, as they always had been.

If I have clearly indicated the relations of the Pharisees and Sadducees to each other, and to the mass of the nation, it will be easy to indicate the place of two other classes of persons bearing well-known names. The Essenes stand apart from the main body of the Jewish people; they were ascetics and recluses, of more than Pharisaic strictness (for asceticism was not a characteristic feature of Pharisaism either in practice or theory), and they combined with the religion of Torah certain mystical doctrines of their own. Whatever influence they may have had upon other elements in Judaism, they had little if any upon Pharisaism.

There remains the class called "Am-ha-aretz," or "the people of the land "—the "people that knoweth not the law" (John vii. 49). This title denotes, not a definite division, but simply those amongst the people who in fact were least influenced by the Pharisees, and least drawn to them. Such would be not only the careless and indifferent, but also those who, for higher reasons, did not readily fall in with the Pharisaic system, or to whom religion as presented by them was not acceptable. It is these mainly who are referred to when it is said that Jesus saw the people "as sheep without a shepherd" (Mark vi. 34). And it is only likely that those would most gladly hear him who were least inclined to follow the Pharisees.

From this sketch of the composition of the Jewish nation, in the time of Christ and thereabouts, it will be seen that the main line of development is represented by Pharisaism. It comes down from the time of Ezra, as the religion of Torah, expounded and administered by approved teachers, known from the first as Sopherim. The names Ḥasidim and Pharisee denote its most zealous representatives at two different periods; but they imply no change of principle, or even of method. What change there was is seen in the growth of a body of teaching, the decisions and interpretations of successive exponents of Torah, handed on and repeated from memory, for the instruction of those who should come after. This is what is known as the Tradition of the Elders, referred to in Mark vii. 5 and elsewhere. And when I come to deal with the theory of Torah in the next chapter, I shall show how this Tradition of the Elders was a sign of the continued vitality of the religion of Torah, not the gradual strangling of it. At present I am only concerned with the fact, not with the meaning of it. The Tradition of the Elders can be traced in the Mishnah up to the time of the early Sopherim, not far distant from Ezra; it is the thread which binds together the development, through Ḥasidim and Pharisaism, of the Jewish religion. And it marks the course of the main stream of Judaism far on through the centuries. The Essenes vanished. The Sadducees were swept away when the Temple was destroyed. It was the Pharisees who alone could or did weather that storm, and carry the divine treasure of the religion of Torah into safety. Already, in the time when Jesus was a boy, Hillel the Babylonian had applied his genius to the interpretation of Torah in ways which gave it a fresh power of ministry to spiritual wants. And when, seventy years later, the catastrophe came, the man was ready who should go forth from Jerusalem, and establish for the ancient religion a "temple not made with hands." Joḥanan ben Zaccai was that man. When he saw that the city was doomed, he went to the Emperor Vespasian, and made his submission to the force that could no longer be resisted (b. Gitt. 56^b). The Emperor asked what he should give him, though he sought no reward. "Give me Jabneh and its wise men"—Jabneh being a town on the coast, where already there were some of the leading Pharisaic teachers. The request was granted, and Joḥanan b. Zaccai gathered in Jabneh the remnants of the learning and wisdom of Judaism. There he and his colleagues repaired the shattered fabric of the religious life of their people, and adjusted it to the new conditions. The Temple with all that belonged to it was gone for ever. But the Synagogue and the College remained, as the home both of worship and study; and the religion of Torah probably gained rather than lost by being finally cut loose from association with the Temple cultus. The assembly at Jabneh took up the task of developing the religion of Torah, and carrying forward the Tradition of the Elders, where it had been interrupted by the war. The teachers to whose hands that task was now committed were henceforth known as the Wise; the names Sopherim and Pharisee were seldom used, but the essential features of their work remained unchanged, and it was carried on in the ancient spirit.

In the interval between the capture of Jerusalem in a.d. 70 and the almost greater disaster in a.d. 135, when the revolt of Bar Coch'ba was stamped out, the assembly of the Rabbis met from time to time in Jabneh, or Lydda; and even during the persecution which followed on the failure of the last rebellion, when the Jewish teachers were hunted up and down, and Akiba, the greatest of them, was tortured to death, there were still left those who would carry on the tradition of their religion. These were young men who received ordination as Rabbis, when it meant death to be a Rabbi at all, if he should fall into the hands of the Romans. It is told (b. Sanh. 14ª) of R. Jehudah b. Baba, that he took six of his disciples into a secluded spot and there ordained them, and that he had hardly finished before he was discovered by the soldiers, and fell, stabbed with Roman spears. The six young men all survived to become the teachers of the next generation. They handed on what had been committed to them as a sacred trust, the religion of Torah, and the tradition in which its meaning and contents were set forth in growing fulness and clearness.

This takes us out of the period covered by the New Testament. But I add the few words necessary to round off the bare account I have given of the development of Judaism through the Pharisees.

The Tradition of the Elders, as I have said, increased in volume and complexity as each generation of teachers added something to it. The necessity, therefore, gradually made itself felt of arranging and systematising the great mass of traditional matter. This was attempted first by the R. Akiba just mentioned, then by R. Meir, one of the six young men ordained in the time of the persecution. But it was only carried to completion, after long years of labour, by R. Jehudah ha-Kadosh, commonly called "Rabbi," par excellence. He collected all that he could find of the decisions and opinions of earlier teachers, sorted them out under different heads, noted those which were universally admitted and those which were doubtful, and thus framed a code of law for the guidance of all Jews. This collection is the Mishnah; and the text as we have it now represents, in the main, the code of Rabbi. There are, of course, interpolations and additions to it. There is another great collection known as Tosephta, containing a good deal of the same material; it is nearly contemporary, but it has never had the same authority as the Mishnah. The date of the Mishnah can be put at about the year 210. Rabbi died in 219. The Mishnah became in its turn the subject of study in the Rabbinical schools, and two fresh lines of tradition begin from this point, each of them starting with a disciple of Rabbi. One of them is the line of development of the Mishnah in the Palestinian schools, of which the chief seat was Tiberias; the other was the line of development of that same Mishnah in the Babylonian schools—Sura, Nehardea, Pumbeditha, and others. The result of each process was a mass of commentary on the Mishnah, and not merely commentary but accretions of every kind having any sort of connection with Judaism as a living religion. This development of the Mishnah is in each case called Gemara. And Mishnah plus Gemara is the Talmud. There is only one Mishnah, but there are two Gemaras, differently named according to the land of their origin. And it is usual to speak of the Palestinian Talmud and of the Babylonian Talmud respectively.

Neither of these two was ever completed. The Palestinian schools, at the end of the fourth century, had no one left who was capable of carrying on the work; and in Babylonia, though much more was done, a final completion was never reached. After the beginning of the sixth century nothing more was ever added to the Talmud; and even of what was in existence then, not all survives now.

In the Talmud is contained the main source for the knowledge of what Pharisaism meant; because it was made the storehouse in which all, or nearly all, that was held to be valuable in the Tradition of the Elders, the explicit religion of Torah, was stored up. There is a huge literature contemporary with the Talmud, to which the general name of Midrash is given; all of it is traditional, and all of it bears on the religion of Torah, in one way or another. This is the written deposit of Pharisaism, the mark which it has left upon the literature of the world. It is there, and not in the writings of those who did not understand its ideals or share its hopes, that its real meaning can alone be found. Those ideals and hopes first dawned in Jewish minds under the influence of Ezra. The Talmud is the witness to show how some of his countrymen, some of the bravest, some of the ablest, some of the most pious and saintly, and a host of unnamed faithful, were true to those ideals and clung to those hopes; and how, through good report and ill report, through shocks of disaster and the ruin of their state, ground down by persecution, or torn by faction, steadily facing enemies without and enemies within, they held on to the religion of Torah. They have not sought, and they certainly have not found, the praise of men for their steadfastness. For these are the Pharisees, and the world has for them only a contemptuous gibe. Who was it that said: "For every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment"?