NothinsGonnaStopIt!: The Storyline of the Bible by Bill Jackson

Author:Bill Jackson [Jackson, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Spiritual & Religion
ISBN: 9781935959571
Publisher: Radical Middle Ministries
Published: 2016-07-26T04:00:00+00:00

PARTIES WITHIN JUDAISMThe PhariseesThe Pharisees are cast as the enemies of Jesus in the Gospels, but who were they really? Relying on many extra-biblical sources we can reconstruct a much better picture of this very influential subculture.

After the exile, the priests and the scribes had provided the internal leadership of the nation. In Ezra's time they had been virtually identical, but during the Greek period they grew apart due to disagreements about how to respond to the new modernism and wound up polarizing during the period of the Maccabees. From the priestly circles would emerge the party of the Sadducees and from the scribes would emerge the hasidim and the party of the Pharisees, the lay experts in religious matters. The Essenes would eventually branch off from the Pharisees as the more conservative branch of the hasidim.

There is no scholarly consensus as to what the term "pharisee" means, but the party came to the fore during the days of the Hasmoneans as a pressure group with the goal of maintaining strict, ritual purity out of zeal for the law of Moses. They did not originate as an official body, nor were they official teachers, as were the priests, but they claimed to speak for the "traditions of the elders" in proclaiming what is referred to as the "oral law."

The oral lawMoses himself realized that the law had to be interpreted and ruled that the priest in office at a particular time should reapply the timeless principles of the law in their new context (Dt. 17.8-11).

During the persecutions under Antiochus IV, the hasidim, both rich/poor, clerical/lay, realized that the survival of their people was in direct proportion to their zeal for the law. The problem was that from Ezra until then, the law was the business of the professional elite, the priests and scribes. The common people were not allowed to have more than a cursory knowledge of something considered so holy. Against this, the hasidim felt that anyone (even proselytes) could now study Torah. The question was how to educate the commoners.

Whether to meet this need, or simply because it was a good idea, we don't know (maybe a little of both), but the Greek educational system was adopted within Judaism. This is also an example of the many ways hellenization had crept into even the culture of the hasidim (they would have thought it was their idea!). Thus, education spread in scribal schools to lay strata. The position of the teacher broke away from the temple and out into the gymnasiums, the locus of Greek education. Studying with one teacher, or rabbi, was particularly Greek. The apostle Paul, for instance, was trained under the rabbi Gamaliel; Acts 22.3).

Over time, rabbinic debates and judgments on the Torah were passed on as oral tradition through the priests, the scribes and those lay people given over to issues of purity. These debates took the form, "rabbi so-and-so says this and rabbi so-in-so says that" and tended to "strain out gnats and swallow camels" (to quote Jesus; Mt 23.

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