Pharisaism, Its Aim and Its Method

by R. Travers Herford

How far he was conscious of this divergence, or rather, when he became aware of it, can hardly be determined. But in the controversy with regard to divorce the divergence became unmistakable. The controversy was strictly not about divorce in itself, but about the attitude of the Torah towards divorce. Jesus condemned divorce (Mark x. 2 fol.). Whether he allowed the one exception or not, his general condemnation of the practice is not open to question. But the Pharisees also condemned divorce. They could not abolish it, but they sought to restrict what had been the immemorial freedom of the husband to put away his wife at his pleasure. It is often urged against Hillel and Akiba that they allowed divorce for frivolous reasons, and Shammai is praised because he would not allow divorce except for unfaithfulness. Neither the blame nor the praise is justified or even called for. The only difference between Hillel and Shammai on the subject was whether the Torah allowed divorce for trivial reasons, or restricted it to the one grave reason. It was a question of interpretation of the authority recognised alike by Hillel and Shammai. It was not a question of the private opinion of either of them upon the ethical character of divorce. If Hillel and Akiba had seen their way to interpret the Torah in accordance with their own ethical judgment, they would certainly have done so. And, in fact, the Talmudic treatment of the subject is in the direction of making divorce difficult, and of giving protection, where possible, to the wife against the caprice of the husband. But in face of the fact that the Torah, the written Torah, expressly allowed divorce (Deut. xxiv. 1), not even Hillel and Akiba could establish the contrary view.

So far as the condemnation of divorce on its own account was concerned, the Pharisees would be in agreement with Jesus, though probably not to the extent of admitting no exception, supposing that Jesus himself went so far. The point of controversy was in regard to the Torah as bearing on the subject. This is clear, because Jesus himself appealed to the Torah. He asked the Pharisees, "What did Moses command you?" And it appears that what he was thinking of was the passage, Gen. i. 27, "Male and female created he them." But the Pharisees quoted against him the express command, Deut. xxiv. 1, "Let him write a bill of divorce, etc." So that here there was Torah against Torah. The Pharisees would say, "We agree with you that divorce ought, so far as possible, to be restricted and avoided; but, nevertheless, we cannot condemn it outright, because the Torah, which is God's own teaching, expressly allows and even enjoins it. But you, who do condemn it outright, how do you reconcile that with Torah?" Jesus answered that the permission to divorce was a concession made to human imperfection, and that the real intention of God was expressed in the passage in Gen. i. 27. But that answer implied necessarily that the written Torah was, in this one case at all events, not divine and perfect, since it contradicted itself. And such an answer was fatal to a recognition of the supremacy of Torah, as the Pharisees understood it. To them, the fact that Jesus had, in this one instance, definitely repudiated the divine authority of Torah, would outweigh the fact that upon the subject of divorce itself they were to a large extent in agreement with him. The result of the controversy would be a deepened impression, alike on the Pharisees and on Jesus, that his standpoint was not that of Torah, and that his ground principle was irreconcilable with theirs.

Another phase of the opposition between Jesus and the Pharisees is shown by the incident described in Mark vii. 1-23, of which the catchword is "Corban." The Pharisees and Scribes ask Jesus "why his disciples did not follow the Tradition of the Elders, but ate their bread with unwashed hands." Jesus turned upon them and charged them with making void the word of God by their Tradition. "For Moses said, Honour thy father and thy mother; and, He that speaketh evil of either father or mother, let him die the death. But ye say, If a man shall say to his father or mother, That, wherewith thou mightest have been profited by me, is Corban, that is to say, Given to God, ye no longer suffer him to do aught for his father or his mother; making void the word of God by your Tradition; and many such like things ye do." Now, even if the charge brought against the Pharisees were true, that they would not allow a man to be released from a vow in order to honour his parents, they would not thereby be "making void the word of God by their Tradition." On the contrary, they would be upholding it. For, while Exod. XX. 12 says, "Honour thy father and thy mother," Num. xxx. 2 says, "When a man voweth a vow unto the Lord, or sweareth with an oath to bind his soul with a bond, he shall not break his word, he shall do according to all that proceedeth out of his mouth." No provision is made for annulling vows, except those of a wife by her husband or her father under certain conditions. The practice of annulling vows generally was introduced by the Rabbis, and they admitted that it had no direct sanction in Scripture. If, therefore, in the case of a man who had made a vow to the detriment of his father and mother, they refused to release him, they would be upholding Scripture against their Tradition. True, Scripture would be opposed to Scripture; but the responsibility for that rested on Moses, not on them; and the practice of annulling vows would have the effect of removing that contradiction, and was perhaps so intended. However that may be, the charge against the Pharisees of making void the word of God by their Tradition would not be borne out in this instance, even if it were true that they refused to release a man from a vow of the kind described.

But the assertion that they did so refuse is contrary to the express statement of the Mishnah, which is the codified Tradition; and is moreover entirely at variance with the spirit of Rabbinical ethics in regard to respect to parents. The crucial passage is M. Nedar. ix. 1, and it runs thus: "R. Eliezer says, 'They open a way for a man on the ground of honour to his father and mother.' The Wise forbid. R. Zadok said, 'Before they open a way for him on the ground of honour to his father and mother, they should open it for him on the ground of honour to God. If this were so, there would be no vows.' The Wise agree with R. Eliezer, that in a matter which is between a man and his father and mother they open a way for him on the ground of honour to his father and mother." Two cases are here distinguished; in the first, if a man makes a vow of any kind, he is not to be released from it on the ground that it would bring reproach on his parents to have such a rash and foolish son. He must be made to keep his vow. But in the second case, if a man make a vow upon a matter between himself and his parents, i.e. one which, if he keep it, will occasion injury or loss to them, then he is to be released from it on the ground of honour to his parents. The commentators on the Mishnah all agree in this interpretation, and there is no doubt as to the intention of the Mishnah. Moreover, there is no indication that there ever had been a different opinion, as if the statement now made in the Mishnah had taken the place of an earlier statement. There is no evidence that the Pharisees ever held or taught the doctrine attributed to them by Jesus, while it is contradicted in the most definite manner by the declarations of their own legal authorities.

The charge is all the more pointless because the Pharisees, whatever else they may have failed in, always showed the most devoted respect to parents. A more unfortunate ground of attack could hardly have been chosen than that which is taken in the Corban incident; and the Pharisees would not have had the slightest difficulty in repelling the charge brought against them. Whether the error involved in the account of the incident be due to the Evangelist or to Jesus himself, an error it remains. And it is not fair, on the strength of the New Testament text, however it came to be written, to hold the Pharisees guilty of denying that which they themselves expressly enjoin. That is the fact. How the misstatement[7] came to be made, I do not know and will not speculate. Of course this does not in any way affect the truth of the principle enunciated by Jesus: "There is nothing from without the man which going into him can defile him, etc." That marks, in practical effect, though possibly not in theory, a complete breach with Pharisaism, since the Torah did, in the most explicit manner, distinguish between clean and unclean, and did teach that outward things caused defilement. The Pharisees held by the Torah; Jesus, at this point, threw it over. Yet the Pharisees could and did say that the defilement was not caused by the outward thing itself, but expressed the will of God that certain actions and contacts should be avoided. Why He had so willed, they did not know nor inquire; enough that He had so willed, and included it in the Torah which He had given. If it be said, "So much the worse for a religion and an ethic which are based on Torah," the question is taken down to first principles, and will be answered variously according to the view held of those first principles. I only observe that the religion of Torah was hampered by the fact that it applied a sublime theory to material some of which was originally quite independent of that theory and unworthy of it; and the Pharisees were unable to recognise that fact, while doing their best, and a very splendid best, to overcome a difficulty of whose nature they were not, and could not be, aware.

The opposition between Jesus and the Pharisees finds its most emphatic expression in the long speech contained in Matt. xxiii., the keynote of which is: "Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!" It is sometimes argued that Jesus himself did not say all the hard things in that speech, but that they represent the hostility of the early Church towards the men who had destroyed her founder. That is possible; and certainly the Evangelists do not incline to a favourable view of the Pharisees on any occasion. But I do not feel free to evade the duty of dealing with that speech by availing myself of that argument. Moreover, I do not see anything to make it impossible, or even unlikely, that Jesus did say all those things. Having in effect broken with the religion of Torah, and being in the position of a man driven to bay, fighting, as the saying is, with his back against the wall, it is only human nature that he should so speak as to hit hard. And, if it were the case of any other man, who would take the words spoken under such conditions as expressing the calm and deliberate judgment of the speaker upon the persons addressed, or as weighty evidence of the truth of the statements made? I am not going to go through the various charges in order to estimate the truth or the exaggeration of them. I shall make no suggestions that perhaps the Pharisees in that time were very bad, though they were more respectable before, and, in a curious way, recovered their character afterwards. Nor will I admit that it was perhaps true of the rank and file, but that men like Hillel and Gamaliel and Joḥanan b. Zaccai were honourable exceptions. If it was true at all, it was most of all true of Hillel and Gamaliel and their compeers, because these represented Pharisaism in its perfection, and their religion was the religion of Torah in all its height and depth and length and breadth. Whatever could be truly said of Pharisaism, either good or evil, was true of the religion by which they lived.

I take all that sweeping denunciation as the final expression of irreconcilable opposition between Jesus and the religion of Torah. And I shall content myself with making a few observations upon the fact and the meaning of it. As for the term "hypocrites," the justice of the implied charge is not established by the fact that the charge is made. That hypocrisy is possible under the religion of Torah is undeniable; but there is certainly no necessary connection between the two. The Pharisees themselves were quite aware that there were hypocrites in their ranks.[8] The retort would be justified that hypocrites have been found amongst professing Christians also. But recrimination is not argument. The hypocrisy question is not really difficult to understand, if the explanation already given of the religion of Torah be borne in mind. The theory of that religion, when put into practice, necessarily involved the doing of many acts in a particular way. Even actions in themselves of little or no importance became important when the Torah directed a specific way of doing them. They were done as a fulfilment of the will of God upon that particular point; and His will was not fulfilled unless there was, on the part of the agent, the conscious intention of serving Him. The mere opus operatum was worthless. To the Pharisee, starting from Torah as his ground principle, the doing of a multitude of apparently trifling acts was the obvious way of putting religion into practice, and he rejoiced in doing them. But one who did not start from Torah as a ground principle would have no clue to the understanding of what the Pharisees did, or why they did it. If such a one took as his ground principle the immediate authority of conscience and his own direct intuition of God, and if he then judged the Pharisees by his standard and not by their own, then he would easily draw the conclusion that they were hypocrites, because he would see them treating as of great importance things which conscience would pay no attention to; and he would judge that men who could be satisfied to discharge the obligations of religion in such a way, must either be ignorant of what religion really is, or pretenders to a piety they did not possess. The religion of Torah lays itself open to the misconstruction which charges its adherents with hypocrisy. But, apart from particular instances where the charge could be established, the charge only shows how far those who make it are unable to comprehend the Pharisaic conception of religion. To urge that their conception of religion was defective is legitimate; to condemn them as hypocrites on the strength of a different conception of religion is not legitimate, no matter by whom it is done.

And this leads me to the conclusion of what I have to say about the opposition between Jesus and the Pharisees. The conflict was one between two fundamentally different conceptions of religion, viz. that in which the supreme authority was Torah, and that in which the supreme authority was the immediate intuition of God in the individual soul and conscience. The Pharisees stood for the one; Jesus stood for the other. The particular occasions of dispute, some of which have been noticed, mainly served to bring out this fundamental opposition; at all events that is their chief importance.

The conflict was unequal, because it was one in which an Idea was matched against a Person. The idea of Torah was sublime, and deserved all the devoted loyalty that was given to its expression and defence. But it was an idea, mediated in the consciousness of those who held it. Jesus was a living soul, with the spiritual force of a tremendous personality; and against him the idea of Torah could not prevail. This was the real meaning of the fact that he taught "as one having authority, and not as their Scribes." This was the ground of his claim to forgive sins, a claim which the Pharisees could only interpret as blasphemy (Mark ii. 7). And this appears in all his relations with the Pharisees, as the force which opposed them, and which they could neither comprehend nor overpower. They could not at the same time retain the conception of Torah as the basis of their religion and admit the authority of Jesus. They saw no reason why they should abandon Torah; they could not therefore do other than reject Jesus. And when the verdict of the Pharisees is expressed in the saying of the Talmud, already quoted, "Jesus practised magic and deceived and led astray Israel," that contemptuous dismissal shows how completely they failed to realise that what had opposed them had been the strength of a great personality. And I do not think that on the Jewish side this ever has been realised from that day to this. If the Pharisees had realised it they would have met him with arguments quite different from those which they did use; possibly they would have refrained from controversy altogether. As it was, they remained within the circle of religious ideas which they knew, and continued to find in the Torah the satisfaction of their spiritual wants—a real satisfaction of real wants, such as men might feel who were not hypocrites and impostors, but earnest and devout, and chiefly concerned to do the will of their Father in Heaven, in what they believed to be the way He desired.

If there was on the part of the Pharisees a complete inability to comprehend the religious position of Jesus, there was also on his part an inability[9] to comprehend the religious position of the Pharisees. If he had realised what Torah meant to the Pharisees, he might, and doubtless would, have desired to show them a "more excellent way," but he would not have taken the line which he did of denunciation and invective, since to do so would defeat his purpose.