Pharisaism, Its Aim and Its Method

by R. Travers Herford

But Paul's view of Torah is not completely described by saying that he ascribed to it a character which it did not possess and an influence which it did not exercise. He leaves out of account features which it did possess, and represents the religion founded upon it as lacking in elements which in fact were no less present there than in his own religion. As already shown, Paul represents Torah exclusively as precept, νὁμος [Greek: nómos], whereas it comprised the whole revelation recorded in Scripture and rendered explicit by the valid interpretation of Scripture. It comprised, therefore, the knowledge of God Himself, of His providence and righteousness and fatherly love, also, of the way of communion with Him, the assurance of forgiveness to the penitent, "the means of grace and the hope of glory." All that belonged to his religion, the Pharisee found indicated in the Torah, somewhere; and it was his delight to learn what God taught him therein.

Now Paul's whole case rests upon the fact that there is no power in a commandment to help a man to fulfil it. The Law was, according to him, laid upon Israel with a demand for obedience, but with no power to ensure that obedience. The Law said, "Thou shalt"; but it gave no strength to the feeble will, however much it might shine with pitiless light upon the frightened conscience. Austere messenger of the will of God, it stood over its helpless slave, pointing indeed to heaven, but stretching forth no hand to lead him there. The Law being thus powerless to aid in the fulfilment of the divine command, there could be no righteousness under the Law, no harmony between the human will and the divine. Even if there ever had been such harmony, (and there had not been since the sin of Adam), there was no power in the Law to restore that harmony when it had once been broken. What the Law could not do, it was, according to Paul, reserved for Christ to do. Through faith in him came the power, not indeed to do what the sinner had failed to do, but to restore the broken harmony and reconcile man to God. That power was the direct influence of the living mind of Christ upon the human soul; and the effect of it was to set it free from bondage, so that it could of its own will turn to God. Paul here states, in terms of Christ, a profound truth, namely, that the human soul depends, for its power to will and desire the good, upon God; and that, without the means of communion with its divine source, the soul must languish and die. And Paul expounded this truth in terms of Christ, because in his own experience it was through Christ that the divine help had come to him; the force of a living personality which had set free his soul was that of Christ. To him it seemed that such was the only way by which the longed-for deliverance could be effected. Now the Law was not a person, a living spirit, but a command, a written word. And even the Torah, in its wider meaning, was still only a body of knowledge, a revelation, a complex idea; it was not a living spirit, that could give of its own life to a human soul. How, then, could there be, under the conditions of Torah, that imparting and receiving of divine influence by which alone the soul could be enabled to will the good, or even to live at all? Such seems to me to be the reasoning underlying Paul's conception of the powerlessness of the Law to save, its failure to impart righteousness.

But the Pharisee to whom that argument might be addressed would not have the slightest difficulty in meeting it. He would say, "Certainly there must be that divine influence upon the soul, the power imparted by one living spirit to another; else the soul cannot live or do any good thing. Certainly, also, the Torah is not a living spirit; it is only a body of truth, a revelation, a complex idea, or, if you will, a set of commands. But, what then? We look for help not to the commandment, but to Him who gave the commandment; not to the Law, but to the Lawgiver; not to the Torah, but to the wise, holy, and loving God, of whom the Torah is the revelation. We learn, from the teaching which He has given to us, to go direct to Him, pray to Him, trust Him, love Him, find help and strength from Him. He is our Father in heaven, always ready to hear His children, to forgive them when they repent of their sins against Him, and to deliver them from evil."

This is what any Pharisee would reply to Paul's argument about the impotence of the Law to justify. The difference between the Pharisee and Paul upon this point is, in appearance, very great; but, in fact, is very small. Both are agreed that there must be the imparting of divine influence to the human soul. With that influence, the quickening of the life of the soul by the divine power and inward presence, the soul is enabled to will the good and to love God. Without that influence it would perish. The Pharisee held that the divine influence was imparted direct from God to the soul, without any intermediary. It was not the Torah that imparted it, but God Himself. The Torah was given to teach him; having no power or life in itself, it revealed to him the divine source of power and life, and to that source he went.

Paul held that the divine influence was imparted to the soul through Christ; and his point, that it could not come through the Law, is true, but wholly irrelevant; for no one ever said that it could. The implication that it could come only through Christ may be relevant, but is certainly not true; for all the experience of Jewish piety is witness against it. When Paul, on the basis of his own experience, set up his doctrine of the function of Christ, in the relations between God and man, he did what he had every right to do; and he has earned the gratitude of all who have found salvation through the faith in Christ which they have learned from him. But Paul was not entitled to ignore the experience (no less genuine than his own) of those whose conception of religion he condemned. If all that they deemed essential to religion, not merely the idea of Torah, but the direct influence of the living God, had been included and stated in Paul's presentation of Judaism, then the comparison between the Jewish and the Christian conception of religion would have been more fair and equal; and if it did not appear that there was any marked superiority of the one over the other, there would at least have been the evidence that God is sought and found in more ways than one.

Enough, perhaps, has been said by way of general argument to show that Paul's version of Judaism is incorrect and defective. But it will be well, at this point, to indicate more particularly the evidence upon which I have maintained that Pharisaism is not the barren formalism that it is usually supposed to have been, nor the merely preparatory foil to Christianity, which is all that Paul could see in it.

There is first of all the general fact of the existence of the Jewish people in unswerving loyalty to the Torah, and in the faith and practice of the religion founded upon it—an existence and a loyalty maintained through centuries of bitter persecution at the hands of Christians. It is simply impossible that such a result could have been produced, if the religion, by which its adherents lived and for which they died, had been a soulless hypocrisy, a pious sham, or a futile delusion. If such could have been the case, then what better guarantee is there for the truth and worth of the faith for which Christian saints and martyrs have died and heroes fought? A corrupt tree cannot bring forth good fruit. And if the fruit be good, then, in the one case as in the other, the tree must be good. No adverse opinion of the Judaism which has suffered and survived, and which, be it remembered, is the Judaism of the Pharisees, can be justified in face of the witness of Israel to the faith once delivered to its saints.

There is further to be considered the fact that before the time of Paul, and indeed ever since, the Pharisees had for their spiritual nourishment the Scriptures of the Old Testament, including the prophecies and the Psalms. The study of these, and the constant use of them in the Synagogue, would have been uncongenial to men whose one concern was for hair-splitting casuistry, and would either have been discontinued or reduced to an unintelligent formality. It was neither. The Scriptures were the constant study of the Pharisee; and the worship of the Synagogue derived much of its power to minister to the needs of the worshippers, through its close dependence on the devotional outpourings of the Psalms, and the prayers which embodied the spirit of them. The Pharisee never for a moment thought that he was growing aloof from the Prophets and Psalmists of the older time; and while in the Torah, written and unwritten, he believed he had a fuller and more detailed knowledge of what God had revealed, it was still the revelation of the same God who had spoken to Abraham, who had shown His power by the Red Sea and on Sinai, who had inspired the Prophets and been praised in the Psalms. There may be legitimate regret that Israel cut itself off from all knowledge of and contact with the great literatures of Greece and Rome, and so missed the salutary influence of variety of thought. The Pharisees chose their own line deliberately in this matter; and when they saw what came of Hellenism, they might well feel that they had chosen rightly. But whether or not, if they did keep out the great Gentile literature—the "external books," as they called them,—they most certainly did "read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest" their own. And a religion that has absorbed into itself the ideas of the Hebrew Scriptures, a religion whose springs have been continually fed from that source, and whose ruling purpose was to serve and glorify the God revealed in those Scriptures, cannot have been, and assuredly was not, the hard and narrow formalism which its opponents have declared it to be.

These considerations have weight as evidence of what Pharisaism really was; and their weight has by no means been sufficiently taken into account; indeed, it has been ignored altogether in the commonly accepted estimates of the character of Pharisaism. Strong, however, as such general evidence is, I will further strengthen it by reference to the utterances of Pharisees themselves, taken from their own literature. And, out of many that I might choose, I will take such as bear more particularly upon the points raised in the strictures of Paul.