Much is said about the Holy Spirit in the Pharisaic literature, without any attempt to make all that is said consistent. But, behind all such utterances, there is the unwavering belief in the direct communion of God with man. The Holy Spirit was naturally most often referred to in the case of the prophets, in whom its manifestation was most conspicuous. But its influence is implied in the fact of prayer, and is nowhere denied in regard to men in general. "Whatever the righteous do, they do it by the Holy Spirit." That is the utterance of a Pharisee (Tanḥ. Vajeḥi, xiii. p. 110ª), and it is the key to the whole Pharisaic conception of the relation of man to God.
So, too, in regard to Faith, while the word does not appear so often on the pages of the Talmud as it does in the Epistles of Paul, the thing was an essential element in the religion of the Pharisees as it was in that of Paul. They never defined precisely what faith meant; it appears as a simple and unquestioning trust in God; and they thought about it after a simple fashion, without, however, being thereby shown to be wanting in it. "Great is faith," says a Midrash (Mechilta Beshall. ii. 6, 33b). "For Israel believed in Him who spake and the world was; and as a reward for believing in the Lord, the Holy Spirit rested on them, and they uttered a song: as it is written, 'They believed on the Lord.... Then sang Moses, etc.'" (Exod. xiv. 31; xv. 1). "And so you find" (continues the Midrash) "that Abraham our father did not inherit this world and the world to come except by the merit of faith, because he believed in the Lord. As it is written, 'And Abraham believed in the Lord, and He counted it to him for righteousness'" (Gen. xv. 6). R. Nehemiah said, "Everyone who receives even one commandment in faith is worthy that the Holy Spirit should rest on him." So even the Pharisees could appeal to the same Abraham, whom Paul called as a witness against them; and they did so with the most obvious sincerity, as having a perfect right to do so, and probably with complete ignorance that the Christian apostle had appealed to Abraham in support of his argument against their religion. And it was well done of the compiler of the Midrash to add the closing words of the passage I quoted; for I know of hardly any other saying which so illumines the inner side of Pharisaism as this, that "Every man who receives even one commandment in faith is worthy that the Holy Spirit should rest on him."
In all that I have said in the course of this chapter, I have had before me the purpose of showing what is true about the religion of the Pharisees upon those points which are affected by Paul's condemnation. True, Paul condemned it as a whole, as a system of thought and practice fundamentally and in principle contrary to what he regarded as the truth. But he only alleged certain features of Pharisaism as the sign and expression of its defect. He alleged its reliance upon the Law and its consequent non-reliance upon Christ. He drew certain conclusions from its alleged defects, and his conclusions have been accepted as valid ever since. I have therefore tried to show chiefly on these points what the Pharisees themselves thought and felt and believed; and have left out of notice other aspects of Pharisaism which were not challenged, and which might have been challenged with more reason than those which Paul actually chose. He might have made a strong case against the particularism of the Pharisees in comparison with the universalism of his own Gospel. For though it can be shown that the Pharisaic conception of religion did not exclude universalist ideas in regard to mankind in general, yet it can hardly be questioned that such ideas were but seldom touched upon and by no means conspicuous in the ordinary thought and debate of the Pharisees. Moreover, the Torah itself, which was to them so all important, was given only to Israel, and could serve only them as a means of salvation. If the Gentiles were to profit by it, they must do so in fellowship with Israel. And that made real universalism impossible, whatever might be the aspirations of this or that particular Rabbi. God offered the Torah, says the Midrash, to all the nations of the world; and all refused it except Israel. They had their chance, and rejected it. That is for Jews a not unnatural view, but it does not lead to universalism. Yet, if Paul had challenged Pharisaism on this its weakest side, instead of aiming his blows at an unreal creation of his own brain, he would not have been left unanswered. The Pharisees would have replied, "True, we have not grasped the idea of universalism in any effective way. But what does your own universalism amount to? Only to this, that amongst the elect, those whom you say God chooses out to be saved, the distinction of Jew and Gentile does not count. But neither for you nor for us is there any question of his actually saving all men. There is no real universalism at all. And there is this between us, that you tell of the wrath of God poured out on all mankind except the elect; you tell of Christ who in some way is the means of saving those elect; you hold that life in this present world is only a temporary captivity in an evil state from which there will be a speedy release at the coming of Christ in glory. To us there is no Christ; for we need none, except the Messiah, who shall come when God shall please, and who will do otherwise than he of whom you speak. But we need none to save us from our Father in Heaven, and none to persuade Him to forgive when else He would turn away. And this present life, in this present world, is to us not a vale of tears or a captivity in an evil state. It is the scene of our service of God. And that Torah, of which you have said such hard things,—you who once gloried in Torah yourself, and must have known, though now you have forgotten, how it was once "the light of all your seeing,"—that Torah is to us the guide of life, that shows us how in the small deeds of every day we can, if we will, do that which is pleasing to God. Yes, we fail sometimes; and as your own master said, "even if we did all the 'mitzvōth,' we should still be but unprofitable servants, having done only that which was our duty to do." Still, we serve Him with heart and soul, the best we can; and we count it nothing to have done only the mere act prescribed, without the intention of pleasing Him. We look to Him as our help and our shield, our Father and Lord, our strength and our redeemer. And He does not turn away from us. Go you and worship Him as you will; and if the Torah no longer says aught to you of what once it said, then seek the revelation of God elsewhere, and hear his voice in other tones. As for us we will "abide in the things we have learned, knowing from whom we have learned them." And so long as we are faithful to the trust that God committed to Israel, when He made him a nation, and gave him the Torah and raised up the prophets, and sent psalmists and wise men to teach their brethren, so long "may the Lord God be with us as He was with our fathers."
It is the Pharisee who has kept the promise of Israel; and to these latest days he keeps it still.
CHAPTER V
Some Points of Pharisaic Theology
In the second chapter it was pointed out that the development of the religion of Torah, in the centuries from Ezra to the Pharisees and on to the Talmud, took place along two main lines. These are indicated by the two words Halachah and Haggadah. Upon the meaning of the former I dwelt at some length; but, for the sake of clear and adequate treatment, it seemed better to defer the consideration of the latter. The thread then dropped I shall pick up now; for the answer to the question "What was the theology of the Pharisees?" is given in the Haggadah. This is true in more senses than one; for to understand what is meant by Haggadah is to understand the Pharisaic mode of approaching questions of doctrinal theology, while a comprehensive knowledge of all that they taught upon such questions could only be obtained by a survey of the whole mass of Haggadah contained in the Rabbinical literature. To accomplish anything like that would need a very large volume. Weber devoted a whole book to it; and he might well have written a second, to include all that he had left out of the first. It will meet the purpose of the present work to explain the way in which the Pharisees dealt with doctrinal theology, and to illustrate this by reference to some main heads of belief, choosing such as may serve to throw light on references in the New Testament to Pharisaic doctrines. I shall then be in a position to use the results obtained for an explanation, in the final chapter, of the remarkable difference in character and tone between the Pharisaic religious discourse and that of the New Testament teachers—a difference felt by all who are able to compare the two literatures.
For the purpose of the present inquiry I must again remind the reader that the religion of Torah, since the time of Ezra, was based upon the belief that God had made to Israel a full and final revelation, had given a body of teaching, for their guidance and enlightenment upon all matters in which the divine and the human came into contact. The vehicle of this revelation, the written record of it, was the Pentateuch, called therefore the Torah, par excellence. But all the other Scriptures were considered to be of divine authority, and only subsidiary to the Pentateuch, because they helped to make clear its meaning. Further, what was implicit in the divine revelation, written in the Pentateuch and amplified in the other Scriptures, was rendered explicit in the oral interpretation. And whereas the litera scripta manebat, unaltered in form and quantity, the oral interpretation continually increased in amount and in multiplicity of detail, as being an ever more full and exact exposition of the contents of the original revelation. To use a mathematical simile, the whole Torah might be compared to the sum of an infinite series, written in definite symbols, and made to express a more detailed concrete result by the progressive evaluation of its terms.