The Bad Guys Of The Bible

 

There’s no doubt about it: the Pharisees are the bad guys of the  Bible.

 

They’re portrayed as nothing short of selfishness and hypocrisy personified. Indeed, the very word ‘pharisee’ has become part of the vernacular and is shorthand for someone who is hypocritical, arrogant and, above all, legalistic.

 

Legalism being, of course, one of the basic things that Christianity has, historically,   condemned  Judaism for.

 

In the Bible, the Pharisees are portrayed as being fixated on adhering to man made laws, especially those that pertain to ritual purity. Jesus is presented as being the exact opposite: dismissive of the Jewish laws, and instead, concerned with ‘love’.

 

One typical example: according to the New Testament, Pharisees wanted to punish Jesus for healing a man’s withered hand on the Sabbath. However, no historical Rabbinic rule has been found according to which Jesus would have violated the Sabbath.

 

The Christian Scriptures aren’t subtle in condemning the Pharisees, either.

 

In fact, they give us the ‘Woes Of The Pharisees’ – an entire list ofcriticisms by JesusScribes and Pharisees. The Woes are found in the Gospel of Luke 11:37-54 and Gospel of Matthew 23:1-36.

 

 

  

 

Crucially, in some places within the Christian scriptures, it’s clear that ‘pharisee’ is used to represent Jews, period.

Thus it’s important to examine the way that, historically, Christianity has presented this particular Jewish sect.

 

Is the New Testament depiction an accurate one? And if not, why did the authors demonise this particular group?

 

Well, there’s an easy answer to the latter point. Of all the Jewish sects, it was the Pharisees that most resisted the influence and ideology of early Christianity. For Jews it was always incomprehensible for anyone to state that G-d would take human form.

 

So the Christian belief that a deity, in mortal form, could ‘die’ was rejected as being inherently ‘pagan’ by the Pharisees. Understandably so, since a deity in mortal form is a motif that we find in many Pagan religions and cults.

 

Similarly, the idea of the ‘trinity’ was irrational in the view of the Pharisees,  since it seemed to violate the sacred Jewish teaching of G-d being One.

 

Given their disagreement with core Christian beliefs, is it any wonder that the Pharisees are presented so negatively in the Christian Scriptures…?

 

 

Yet the evidence suggests that the Christian Bible is far from accurate when it comes to the Pharisees.

 

For instance, though the New Testament presents the Pharisees as obsessed with avoiding impurity, Rabbinic texts reveal that the Pharisees just tried to offer ways of removing impurities, so that a person could again participate in the community.

 

And while in the New Testament the Pharisees objected to Jesus approaching outcast groups such as beggars and tax-collectors, Jewish texts actually stress the availability of forgiveness to all.

 

Indeed, much of Jesus’ teaching, for example the Sermon on the Mount, is consistent with that of the Pharisees and later Rabbinic thought.

 

Some scholars believe that those passages of the New Testament that are most hostile to the Pharisees were written after the destruction of Herod’s Temple in 70 C.E., at a time when it had become clear that Jews knew Jesus was not their Maschiach.

 

At this time Christians sought new converts from among the Gentiles; they thus had to be able to explain why converts should listen to them, rather than the Jews, concerning the Hebrew Bible, the Tanakh.

 

Of course, the Pharisees were just one of several sects within Judaism at the time of the second temple. They were the most significant group, though, because it’s from their traditions that contemporary Judaism arose.

 

But contrary to the Christian portrayal of them, the Pharisees were by far the most egalitarian sect. They believed that everyone, whether rich or poor, deserved an education, and that Torah should be accessible to all Jews. The Pharisees, then, were the ‘blue collar’ Jews of their time.

 

One of their staunchest beliefs was in the importance of the Oral Torah. This was given by G-d to the Jews at Mount Sinai, along with the written Torah. The Oral traditions were not codified until centuries later, and today we know it as the Talmud. Prior to that, the traditions were passed along orally, from father to son.

 

The Pharisees also believed in an ‘afterlife’ of some sort, and that those who were wicked on earth would be punished accordingly after death. Finally, they were sure that the Jewish Maschiach would arrive – the Messiah who, as we believe today – will fulfill the 23 Jewish prophecies and usher in world peace. The Messianic Age, in other words. So far, then, we can see that the Pharisees adhered to core, traditional Jewish beliefs.

 

But perhaps most crucially, the Pharisees were responsible for ensuring that Judaism survived, unadulterated by the influences of other, conflicting faiths and lifestyles.

 

This was a time when the Greeks were keen to assimilate the Jewish people by trying to combine their own, multiple deities, with Jewish theology. The Pharisees resisted any attempt at violating or diluting core Jewish tenets, and they were probably vocal about it. Nothing terrible about that, though.

 

Rather than recognising the devout nature of the Pharisees, though, the New Testament condemns them as taking part in the Jewish rituals without being spiritually involved in them. Over and over and over, Christian Bible tells us that the Pharisees were abject hypocrites.

 

Other Jewish sects, less passionate about preserving Judaism, are not indicted in this manner. The Sadducees, for instance, were far more relaxed and open to the Hellenic influences that many Jews encountered. The Sadducees also rejected the Oral Torah, instead preferring to focus on the Temple and all the associated rituals.

 

They also disagreed with any notion of an afterlife. Perhaps it is not surprising that after the Romans destroyed the temple in AD 70, the Sadducees faded into obscurity. They are not portrayed nearly as negatively.

 

There is a certain irony, also, in that the Christian scriptures show Jesus bitterly castigating and condemning the Pharisees. Yet from what we do know of his attitudes, Jesus actually agreed with many of the Pharisees’ conclusions.

 

In particular, he agreed with much that was taught by Hillel, who always taught ‘love thy neighbour’, long, long before Christianity adopted it and attributed it to Jesus.

 

The Pharisees also supported Gentiles who wished to convert to Judaism. Other sects were less supportive. Again, it is therefore somewhat strange that it’s the Pharisees who are consistently demonised in the New Testament.

 

Paul

 

One of the most bewildering aspects of the Christian Bible for Jews, or at least those of us who read it, is this idea that Paul was a Pharisee. Frankly, he didn’t seem to get even the basics of Judaism.

 

And there is not a single Jewish reference, anywhere, to any rebel student of Gamaliel who had a life changing vision either on the road to Damascus or anywhere else. Nor is there any mention of any follower of Gamaliel who suddenly became a heretic and started urging other Jews to abandon Torah and all the Jewish religious laws!

 

Paul spoke out against keeping the Kosher rules, and against circumcision, yet nowhere do we find even a fleeting mention of him! Why not?

 

Other miscreants and heretics are certainly referenced in the Jewish texts, warts and all.

 

And if Paul was such a brilliant student, why are all his references from the Greek version of the Hebrew scriptures, the Septuagint?

 

How is it that he seems so lacking in knowledge of the Hebrew Tanakh, and so ignorant regarding Halacha, the Jewish religious law?

 

Indeed, some writers question whether Paul was Jewish at all.

 

Hyam Maccoby, for example, has raised some intriguing points about Paul. And he reminds us that there were good reasons for Paul claiming to be a Pharisee, even if he wasn’t:

 

It should be noted that modern scholarship has shown that, at this time, the Pharisees were held in high repute throughout the Roman and Parthian empires as a dedicated group who upheld religious ideals in the face of tyranny, supported leniency and mercy in the application of laws, and championed the rights of the poor against the oppression of the rich.

The undeserved reputation for hypocrisy which is attached to the name ‘Pharisee’ in medieval and modern times is due to the campaign against the Pharisees in the Gospels — a campaign dictated by politico-religious considerations at the time when the Gospels were given their final editing, about forty to eighty years after the death of Jesus.

 

Paul’s desire to be thought of as a person of Pharisee upbringing should thus be understood in the light of the actual reputation of the Pharisees in Paul’s lifetime; Paul was claiming a high honour, which would much enhance his status in the eyes of his correspondents.

 

Maccoby and several others have pointed to the writings of the Ebionites, an early group who believed Jesus was a normal mortal and nothing more. They had some very definite views on Paul. Maccoby explains:

 

Their writings were suppressed by the Church, but some of their views and traditions were preserved in the writings of their opponents, particularly in the huge treatise on Heresies by Epiphanius. From this it appears that the Ebionites had a very different account to give of Paul’s background and early life from that found in the New Testament and fostered by Paul himself.

The Ebionites testified that Paul had no Pharisaic background or training; he was the son of Gentiles, converted to Judaism in Tarsus, came to Jerusalem when an adult, and attached himself to the High Priest as a henchman. Disappointed in his hopes of advancement, he broke with the High Priest and sought fame by founding a new religion.

This account, while not reliable in all its details, is substantially correct. It makes far more sense of all the puzzling and contradictory features of the story of Paul than the account of the official documents of the Church.

The Ebionites were stigmatized by the Church as heretics who failed to understand that Jesus was a divine person and asserted instead that he was a human being who came to inaugurate a new earthly age, as prophesied by the Jewish prophets of the Bible.

Moreover, the Ebionites refused to accept the Church doctrine, derived from Paul, that Jesus abolished or abrogated the Torah, the Jewish law.

They were the same group that had earlier been called the Nazarenes, who were led by James and Peter, who had known Jesus during his lifetime, and were in a far better position to know his aims than Paul, who met Jesus only in dreams and visions.

Thus the opinion held by the Ebionites about Paul is of extraordinary interest and deserves respectful consideration, instead of dismissal as ’scurrilous’ propaganda — the reaction of Christian scholars from ancient to modern times.

 

The Ebonites, then, stated categorically that Paul was not Jewish. Their statement on this is to be found in the writing of Epiphanius in the 4th century, which says:

 

“They declare that Paul was raised in a pagan household. He went up to Jerusalem and when he had spent some time there, was seized with passion to marry the daughter of the high priest; and this was the reason he became a proselyte (Jew) and went through the Jewish ritual of circumcision. But when the lady rejected him, he flew into a rage and wrote against circumcision and against the Sabbath and the Jewish Law.”

(Pamarion 30.16.6).

 

There is one final irony in the awful portrayal of the Pharisees in the Christian scriptures. And that is the possibility advanced by some that Jesus was himself a Pharisee.

 

Several scholars have argued that Jesus’ arguments with the Pharisees is a sign of inclusion rather than any real enmity. Debate was, after all, the main narrative mode employed in the Talmud as a search for truth.

 

As we touched upon earlier, Jesus’ teaching of ‘love thy neighbour’ reflects the teaching of the school of Hillel.

 

Jesus’ views of divorce, meanwhile, are closer to those of the school of Shammai, another Pharisee.

 

Hyam Maccoby writes:

“In my earlier book on Jesus, Revolution in Judaea, I showed how, in the Synoptic Gospels, Jesus speaks and acts as a Pharisee, though the Gospel editors have attempted to conceal this by representing him as opposing Pharisaism even when his sayings were most in accordance with Pharisee teaching.

In the present book, I have used the rabbinical evidence to establish an opposite contention: that Paul, whom the New Testament wishes to portray as having been a trained Pharisee, never was one. The consequences of this for the understanding of early Christianity are immense.”

 

One thing seems certain: the Pharisees were probably far more decent, and far less sinister, than is suggested by certain parts of the Christian bible.

Answering The Apologists For Islam

Those who seek to justify Islamic terrorism, often do so by stating that both Judaism and Christianity also have violent histories. Islam, they insist, is being ‘unfairly’ singled out, even though the other Abrahamic faiths are also inherently violent.

The two favourite and increasingly weary examples offered are the slaying by the Hebrews of the Canaanites (Judaism) and the bloody crimes of the Crusades (Christianity).

And this tactic by apologists for Islamic terrorism often works. It helps shore up the pervasive yet false premise that Islam is ‘just like other religions’.  Or, to put it another way: it is not Islam that causes Islamic terrorism, but rather human nature.

One of the best responses I’ve read to this apologist tactic, comes courtesy of writer and expert on radical Islam, Raymond Ibrahim. Here is what he says on the issue of whether Judaism and Christianity also promote violence in the same manner as Islam (emphasis is mine):

“Such questions reveal a great deal of confusion between history and theology, between the temporal actions of men and the immutable words of G-d. The fundamental error being that Jewish andChristian history—which is violent—is being conflated with Islamic theology—which commands violence.

Of course all religions have had their fair share of violence and intolerance towards the “other.” Whether this violence is ordained by G-d or whether warlike man merely wished it thus is the all-important question.

The Israelites’ violence is an interesting case in point. G-d clearly ordered the Hebrews to annihilate the Canaanites and surrounding peoples. Such violence is therefore an expression of G-d’s will, for good or ill. Regardless, all the historic violence committed by the Hebrews and recorded in the Tanakh is just that—history. It happened; G-d commanded it.

But it revolved around a specific time and place and was directed against a specific people. At no time did such violence go on to become standardized or codified into Jewish law (i.e. the Halakha).

This is where Islamic violence is unique. Though similar to the violence of the Tanakh —commanded by G-d and manifested in history—certain aspects of Islamic violence have become standardized in Islamic law (i.e. the Sharia) and apply at all times. Thus while the violence found in the Koran is in fact historical, its ultimate significance is theological. Consider the following Koranic verses:

Then, when the sacred months have passed, slay the pagans wherever you find them—take them [captive], besiege them, and prepare for them each ambush. But if they repent and establish worship and pay the poor-due [i.e. submit to Islam], then leave their way free. Lo! Allah is Forgiving, Merciful (9:5).

Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger [i.e. Islamic law], nor acknowledge the religion of Truth [i.e. Islam], from the people of the book [i.e. Jews and Christians], until they pay tribute with willing submission, and feel themselves utterly subdued (9:29).

As with Tanakh  verses where G-d  commanded the Hebrews to attack and slay their neighbors, these Koranic verses also have a historical context. Allah (through Muhammad) first issued these commandments after the Arab tribes had finally unified under the banner of Islam and were preparing to invade their Christian and pagan neighbors.

But unlike the bellicose verses and anecdotes of the Tanakh  these so-called “sword-verses” subsequently became fundamental to Islam’s relationship to both the “people of the book” (i.e. Christians and Jews) and the “pagans” (i.e. Hindus, Buddhists, animists, etc).

In fact, based on the sword-verses (as well as countless other Koranic verses and oral traditions attributed to Muhammad), Islam’s scholars, sheikhs, muftis, imams, and qadis throughout the ages have all reached the consensus—binding on the entire Muslim community—that Islam is to be at perpetual war with the non-Muslim world, until the former subsumes the latter. (It is widely held that the sword-verses alone have abrogated some 200 of the Koran’s more tolerant verses.)

Famous Muslim scholar and “father of modern history” Ibn Khaldun articulates the dichotomy between jihad and defensive warfare thus:

In the Muslim community, the holy war [i.e. jihad] is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the Muslim mission and the obligation to convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force...

The other religious groups did not have a universal mission, and the holy war was not a religious duty for them, save only for purposes of defense... They are merely required to establish their religion among their own people.

That is why the Israeilites after Moses and Joshua remained unconcerned with royal authority [e.g. a “caliphate”]. Their only concern was to establish their religion [not spread it to the nations]…

But Islam is under obligation to gain power over other nations (The Muqudimmah, vol. 1 pg. 473, emphasis added).

Even when juxtaposed to their Jewish and Christian counterparts, the Islamic sword-verses are distinctive for using language that transcends time and space, inciting believers to attack and slay non-believers today no less than yesterday.

G-d commanded the Hebrews to kill Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites—all specific peoples rooted to a specific time and place. At no time did G-d  give an open-ended command for the Hebrews, and by extension their descendants the Jews, to fight and kill gentiles.

On the other hand, though Islam’s original enemies were, like Judaism’s, historical (e.g. Christian Byzantines and pagan Persians), the Koran rarely singles them out by their proper names. Instead, Muslims were (and are) commanded to fight the people of the book—“until they pay tribute with willing submission and feel themselves utterly subdued” (9:29) and to “slay the pagans wherever you find them” (9:5).

The two conjunctions “until” and “wherever” demonstrate the perpetual nature of these commandments: there are still “people of the book” who have yet to be “utterly subdued” (especially in the Americas, Europe, and Israel) and “pagans” to be slain “wherever” one looks (especially Asia and sub-Saharan Africa).

Aside from the divine words of the Koran, Muhammad’s pattern of behavior—his “Sunna” or “example”—is an extremely important source of legislation in Islam. Muslims are exhorted to emulate Muhammad in all walks of life: “You have indeed in the Messenger of Allah a beautiful pattern [of conduct]” (33:21).

And Muhammad’s pattern of conduct vis-à-vis non-Muslims is quite explicit. Sarcastically arguing against the concept of “moderate” Islam, terrorist Osama bin Laden, who enjoys half the Arab-Islamic world’s support per a recent al-Jazeera poll, portrays the prophet’s Sunna thus:

“Moderation” is demonstrated by our prophet who did not remain more than three months in Medina without raiding or sending a raiding party into the lands of the infidels to beat down their strongholds and seize their possessions, their lives, and their women” (from The Al-Qaeda Reader).

In fact, based on both the Koran and Muhammad’s Sunna, pillaging and plundering infidels, enslaving their children, and placing their women in concubinage is well founded (e.g. 4:24, 4:92, 8:69, 24:33, 33:50, etc.).

While law-centric and legalistic, Judaism has no such equivalent to the Sunna; the words and deeds of the patriarchs, though recorded in the Tanakh  never went on to be part of Jewish law. Neither Abraham’s “white-lies,” nor Jacob’s perfidy, nor Moses’ short-fuse, nor David’s adultery, nor Solomon’s philandering ever went on to instruct Jews. They were merely understood to be historical actions perpetrated by fallible men who were often punished by G-d for their less than ideal behavior.“

And regarding the Crusades, Raymond Ibrahim points out:

“In fact, far from suggesting anything intrinsic to Christianity, the Crusades ironically help better explain Islam. For what the Crusades demonstrated once and for all is that irrespective of religious teachings—indeed, in the case of these so-called “Christian” Crusades, despite them—man is truly predisposed to violence and intolerance. But this begs the question: If this is how Christians behaved—who are commanded to love, bless, and do good to their enemies who hate, curse, and persecute them—how much more can be expected of Muslims who, while sharing the same violent tendencies, are further commanded by the Deity to attack, kill, and plunder non-believers?“

Read more of Raymond Ibrahim’s excellent articles here

The Religion Of Peace Strikes Again – Christian Graves Desecrated

One thing you can say for sure about Islam: it’s an equal opportunity offender. It doesn’t just teach hatred of Jews, but also Hindus, Christians and in fact, all non Muslims or as Islam fondly refers to them: Infidels.

This week, its Christians’ turn to feel the wrath of the ‘Religion Of Peace’:

Israel National News, May 25:

Palestinian Authority Muslims went on a rampage Sunday and desecrated 70 Christian graves two weeks after the Pope praised efforts for a new Palestinian state and tried to appease Muslim anger over previous disputes between the two religions.

The vandals smashed gravestones and knocked metal and stone crosses off graves in the village of Jiffna, near Ramallah, home to approximately 900 Christians and 700 Muslims. Greek Orthodox Church official George Abdo told Reuters the head and hand of a statue of Madonna also was severed….

Sunday’s anti-Christian attack follows years of harassment from Muslims that has escalated a lengthy exodus of Christians from Judea, Samaria and Gaza. The areas enjoyed strong economies from 1967, when Israel took over administration of the areas following the Six-Day War, until 2000, when PA terrorists launched the Oslo War, also known as the Second Intifada.