Pistis Christou

If you were almost any English translation of the New Testament, you would find a particular word repeated throughout the pages: law. Once you happen upon Paul’s letters like Romans and Galatians, you will see a high recurrence of the word. There are understandable reasons for this: the Greek word used is νόμος has in many instances a legislative connotation of the pronouncements of a ruling figure. For instance, James 2:8 talks about the “royal law.” However, the Greek lexicons give the primary definition as a matter of “a procedure or practice that has taken hold”¹ or “that which is in habitual practice.”² This is closer to our concept of culture rather than it is legal rules. However, since at least the Latin Vulgate, where νόμος was translated as lēx, which is Latin legislative language for a legislative bill or passed regulation, the words and commandments of God from the mouth of Moses, that is the Torah, has been given a distinctive legislative and legal sense.

This legal language isn’t without merit on the surface of it. After all, God’s commandments were given for the people of Israel to obey and some commandments had prescribed punishments for failure to uphold the Torah. Then perusal of the Mishnaic and Talmudic literature exhibtting many of the characteristics of legal practices, such as extending the application of laws to new and different circumstances, trying to figure out how to address instances where there seems to be a contradiction between commandments, etc. Most likely, this attitude was also true of the religious leadership during Jesus’ time.

But, this legal picture can also be quite misleading. For us, laws are considered something compulsory, something we are bound to apart from our own conscience. You may not like the laws, but you are obliged to obey them or you will be punished. In our experience, laws do not reach into the heart, but bind people’s actions. But this wasn’t the experience of obedience to the Torah. While the practice of understanding and applying Torah took on legal characteristics, the motivation for submission to the Torah was taken to be a matter of love and devotion to this one God, over and against other the pattern of other societies, whether it be the Canaanites in the nascent stages of Israel’s history or the paganism that peppered the landscape under Roman rule. Thus, Torah as a distinctive, holy way of life apart from other people’s ways of life and worship also bound the people together in common life and love.

So Torah wasn’t obeyed as a system of legal principles, but as a way of life as a people before this God who had redeemed their ancestors from Egypt. Your love for God and your love of your own Jewish people was the under-riding motivation for obedience to Torah. This is part of the reason that sinners are often talked about in the same breath as tax-collectors, who as agents of Roman power were considered traitors to their people; sinners who failed to obey Torah were regarded not simply disobeying God but disregarding their own people.

This is where I suggest that the problem of the Pharisees and scribes in the Gospels exists. The standard portrayal of Pharisees and scribes and fuddy duddies about the rules, who then coincidentally happened to exhibit a malicious streak towards Jesus, absolutely does mischaracterize the adherents to the Jewish Torah. The Pharisees and scribes were not legalists in the modern sense of the term where we see obsessive concerns about interpretation and application law that is separated from devotion. The Pharisees and the scribes were deeply devoted in their passions. And it was sort of a devotion and practice that would have even made them popular among their people. If you were a Jew, there is a good chance you would think the Pharisees were quite charming, and that those scribes were awfully smart. You would have like them.

They saw something important, if not even potentially powerful, in Torah obedience. In the Torah they could define Israel over and against the pagan nations with a hope that such obedience would merit God’s faithful protection that would give them victory over their pagan overlords. This sense of God’s protection was certainly the case for the Jews at Qumran and likely they exhibited radicalized versions of this tendency already present in the religious mainline of Israel. But whereas those at Qumran held dreams for a judgment in the present age, the Pharisees looked powerful victory from God that they were seeking would have been that of resurrection, or as Jesus refers to in John 5:39, eternal life. Whereas Qumran had no unequivocal hopes in resurrection, the Pharisees placed great hope in the resurrection, knowing they were powerless to fight Roman power. These were people of faith.

Meanwhile, as teachers of Israel, they were not simply focused on their own self-preservation, but they took on a role of leadership and concern to guide their own people. They would bear upon themselves the task of leading their people.

So, where does it all go wrong? How is it that people who had such noble intentions and tasks can go so wrong? Or, are the Gospels simply an unjust and anti-semitic aspersion?

Allow me to suggest it is begins with the combination of devotion with legal principles. The Pharisees had no mere bureacratic mentality, but they were zealously devoted to their task. And that is where the danger lies. Bureaucrats, who can have their own dangers, are not necessarily out to apply the rules and procedures to every aspect and zone of life: they tend to not want to rock the boat. But being zealous for rules has its own danger of judgment of those who do not share the same zeal and same degree of proficiency that they have. Highly passionate people rarely tolerate apathy, laziness, and ignorance from others.

So, when people fail to adhere to their degree of holiness, they either speak derision masked as informative questions as they did as Jesus disciple’s for not washing their hands before eating, or they go further to the entire disregarding of those who they deemed sinners of breaches of even Torah itself. Furthermore, as highly passionate people can have a certain charisma, they would have gotten immersed into their role of their appearances before the people and the rewards that came from such celebrity and status. Then, when someone like Jesus enters the scene, doesn’t engage in their brand of holiness, and steals some of their thunder, that only stokes the fires of their passion even more. So, they engage in the conflict with Jesus with the one skill they highly esteem, their understanding and obedience to Torah. It is what differentiates themselves from others in their mind and it is how they will try to win against Jesus.

Meanwhile, Jesus doesn’t criticize their adherence to Torah, despite the modern mythical Jesus that has been constructed. There is not a hint of the mentality “we need to just get rid of the rules and live.” He certainly criticizes how they use the tradition of the elders to cast aspersion of his disciples, while they through the traditions fail to uphold the more important concerns of the Torah. Rather, Jesus’ criticism is their very understanding of the Torah. They see in the words of the Torah a source of power that they should adhere to, particularly for their own self-aggrandizement and their resurrection/eternal life. Jesus, instead, sees the Torah more like a light into the heart of people. One’s experience of obedience the Torah and the struggle with such would show one’s heart to oneself. Paul alludes to this in Romans 7, where the commandment to not covet teaches about coveting. In the commandment to not murder, one would not simply want to adhere to the Torah but find what rests within oneself that leads to murder in the form of hostile anger. Not committing adultery would not be enough, but one would want to be averse even intending and planning to do such. The practice of obedience to the Torah sheds light on oneself and all that goes behind the temptation to do what the Torah instructs one not to. However, if the focus is on the application of Torah to all of life, to create a system of righteous behavior, all in a passionate interest for righteousness, you would miss that is within, directing all your attention outward. The end results is that they fail to truly comprehend the Torah in light of the two most important commandments of love, even if they recognized them as important.

For Jesus, and for the Old Testament, the Torah is not so much legislation as it is instruction for the people to obey out of love for God. Certainly, as mentioned, it did regulate the common life of Israel with systems of punishment. And no doubt it was a common experience in Israel to experience the Torah as more a social instrument of regulation than an inner, personal striving. Hence, the story of Israel is the story of a people who do not remain faithful to God and His instructions. Hence, the prophet Jeremiah speaks of a new covenant where God’s instruction would be in people’s hearts. But, the place where the godly passion for God’s instruction will come from isn’t merely by a self-induced passion or a passion merely stoked by the forces of social modeling and contagion, but a passion granted from God. It rests not within the socio-political and personal forces of passion, but the force and power that comes from God’s Spirit. Meanwhile, the Psalms recognize the role of the Torah as a light that comes from God. But when the emphasis is placed on the power of Torah itself rather than on the power of God who instructs and guides through Torah, then one’s heart is not open to the God who directs but on the human heart to appropriate and extend for oneself. Hence, Jesus says in John 6:45 that those who have heard, learned from and have been taught by God. They were not looking to the Torah itself as the source, but they were looking and attentively seeking God’s will and they used the Torah as an instructive guide.

This mentality informs Jesus understanding of the Torah. When the adulterer was brought before Jesus, he saw no need to condemn her to death. He saw himself as the one without sin and so thus qualified to make a judgement. In this status as being fit to judge, he didn’t see the death of the adultery as a legal precedent that one must follow. He takes the opportunity to use this moment as a pedagogical moment to the adulteress, extending her grace and mercy as he tells her to sin no more. As one without sin, he could see what the purposes and uses of the Torah are for, and in the end, the goal is guidance and instruction of God’s people. Whereas the other people were certainly passionate and zealous for the Torah, their zeal blinded them to the ultimate pedagogical, instructive purpose, so they saw the Torah as regulations that can not and should not be abrogated.

So why do I tell this story? Because we have Godwin’s law-ed the Pharisees in Christian circles, treating them as a vacuous, catch-all derision for anyone who upholds any sort of law or principle. Consequently, we have been (wrongly) immunized from their negative examples. But, the true danger of the Pharisees were not in their love of God or even their seeking obedience to Torah, but to the power they found in Torah for their own virtue signaling to the people and compelling their vision upon the Jewish people as the educated and popular leadership of Israel. This is the danger that exists for all people, particularly when they have a system of justification purported to be from God that they employ for their own side. They have all the trappings of education, charisma, righteous appearances, and moral justifications, none of which are evil, but they lacked one thing: the actual type of heart that would lead them to bear the fruit that resembled the pictures they painted with their words. And this danger is only heightened today in the day of social media, where we must rely even more on the credentials, first impressions of charisma, selective stories of character, social justifications of them due to our personal distance the people we are an audience of. And thus, the Pharisees would have been seen as the heroes of their day as they looked for the day of their preferred future to arise, but time would reveal them to be far from the ideals they sought to progress. For instance, when you see people using positive sounding terms like “ethically sourced” to avoid weightier matters be aware, very aware, of what could stand behind those words and watchful to see what type of fruits are available for harvest.

1. BDAG
2. LSJ