Pharisaism, Its Aim And Its Method

Historical Sketch

The subject to which in the following pages I shall invite the reader's attention is one which may seem to promise but little of living interest, and still less of religious worth. The Pharisees are presented in the New Testament in no favourable light; and the average Christian has not much further acquaintance with them. Yet, though the name be now disused, the principles of Pharisaism have been maintained down to the present day; and it is these, more than anything else, which have kept Judaism as a living religion. That Pharisaism should wear an unpleasing aspect in the New Testament is not surprising; for it was not in the nature of things that the adherents of the old religion should understand or be understood by those of the new, in the times when they parted company. And there has not been much attempt at mutual understanding in all the centuries since. Christianity could by no possibility have remained in union with Pharisaism; what Jesus began, and what Paul completed, was a severance as inevitable as it was painful. But it was painful because it was the dividing, not of the living from the dead, but of the living from the living. The Judaism of the Pharisees, from which Christianity tore itself away, was no obsolete formalism, but a religion having the power to satisfy the spiritual wants of those who were faithful to it. The form in which its religious ideas were expressed is peculiar, and to Christians by no means attractive. While, therefore, the Christian has usually but little inclination to inquire into the real significance of Pharisaism, and but scanty means of informing himself even if he were so inclined, the fact remains that such knowledge is necessary if he would rightly understand the attitude of the New Testament to the older religion.

Pharisaism is usually judged from the outside, as seen by not very friendly eyes; and, even of those Christians who have studied the Pharisaic literature and who thus know it to some extent from the inside, there are few who seem able to imagine what it must have been to those whose real religion it was. No one but a Jew, of whom it may be said that the Talmud runs in his blood, can fully realise the spiritual meaning of Pharisaism; but sympathy can show even to a Christian much of that meaning, and it is on the strength of that sympathy that I rest my hope of carrying out my present task. Briefly, I wish to show what Pharisaism meant to the Pharisees themselves, as a religion having a claim to be judged on its own merits, and not by comparison with any other. The knowledge thus obtained will throw light upon many passages in the New Testament; but it will be chiefly valuable if it helps the reader to realise that the Pharisees were "men of like passions with us," men with souls to be saved, who cared a great deal for the things of the higher life, men who "feared God and worked righteousness," and who pondered deeply upon spiritual problems, though they did not solve them on Christian lines, nor state the answers in Christian terms.

It ought not to be impossible to do this in compass of a small book; and I hope that, when I have done, I shall have left with the reader some clear idea of who the Pharisees were and what they stood for, and a more just appreciation of them than is indicated by the word "hypocrites." I can at least say how they appear to me, as the result of exploring their literature, which has been to me the fascinating study of thirty years.

In this first chapter I shall survey the history of the development of Pharisaism, from its source in Ezra to its final literary embodiment in the Talmud. The following chapter will deal with the theory of Torah, and Pharisaism as the system intended to put that theory into practice. Then I shall consider Pharisaism in reference, firstly, to Jesus, and, secondly, to Paul. Some general points of Pharisaic theology will be dealt with in the fifth chapter; and in the concluding one I shall try to present Pharisaism as a spiritual religion.

I proceed now to the historical survey of the development of Pharisaism.

A great Rabbi, Resh Lakish, who lived in the third century a.d., uttered the saying that, "when the Torah was forgotten, Ezra came up from Babylon and re-established it; when it was forgotten again, Hillel came up from Babylon and re-established it; and when it was forgotten again, R. ?ija and his sons came up from Babylon and re-established it" (b. Succ. 20a). The meaning of that remark is that Pharisaism traced its origin back to Ezra; for it was the Pharisaic tradition which counted Hillel, and R. ?ija, and the Talmudic Rabbis generally amongst its exponents. And while no one would say that Ezra was a Pharisee, it is true that he was the spiritual ancestor of the Pharisees more than of any other element in post-exilic Judaism. In the time of Christ, Judaism was represented by Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, Apocalyptists, Hellenists; and all could claim a share in the inheritance of Israel. But the Sadducees had little reason to set up a descent from Ezra; and what was peculiar to Apocalyptists and Hellenists (two terms which of course overlap) was entirely unconnected with him. Pharisaism alone was the result of his work; and Pharisaism alone survived, to carry down through the centuries the spiritual treasure of Israel. Moreover, of all the elements in Judaism, Pharisaism is the one which was least affected by foreign influences. What it borrowed, from Greece or Rome, from Persia or Egypt, it fused into its own mould, or merely treated as unimportant curiosities; it never wavered for a moment in its allegiance to its own ground principle, never swerved from the line of development of which Ezra had marked the beginning, and for which he might be said to have stated the formula. The Talmud shows the traces of contact with Greek language and Roman law, gives glimpses of men of many nations, from Babylonians to Goths and even Germans (j. Jom. 45b). But, from one end to the other, it is the embodiment of a principle which Ezra was the first to introduce; and like a huge tree it has all grown from the seed which he planted. If Ezra could have looked forward and seen what the Talmud became, the vision would have filled him with delight; also, with deep thankfulness to God that he had been the means of giving to Israel what Israel needed.

I will reserve for the next chapter the explanation of the theory of Torah, which is the key to the whole system of Pharisaism in general, and to the work of Ezra in particular. But without some reference to that theory I cannot show what it was that Ezra did, and that the Pharisees carried on. If some of the statements I make appear to be unfounded or improbable, I ask the reader to suspend his judgment on them till I come to the theory which, as I believe, justifies them.

Ezra was the first who seriously took in hand the problem of the future of Israel after the great convulsion of the Exile. For nearly a century after the time, 536 b.c., when liberty to return had been given, the small band of Jews in and around Jerusalem had maintained with difficulty their place as a nation and the religion of their fathers. Subjects of the Persian king, like their neighbours, they were exposed to dangers, both political and religious, against which they were ill able to guard. They had the Temple as the central point of their religion; but the Temple was no protection against the influence of contact with "the peoples round about," nor did the performance of its ritual give any lead in the direction of a new religious development. Till Ezra came, the Jews did hardly more than mark time, if indeed they were not gradually losing ground. If Ezra had not come, it is conceivable, and indeed highly probable, that Judaism would have disappeared altogether.

The significance of the work of Ezra is this, that he stopped the process by which the religious vitality of Israel was draining away, and he gave a lead, opened a new line of development, turned the thought and energy of his people into a direction where progress was possible almost without end.

His reformation was carried out with a severity which would have been impossible unless he had had the support of Nehemiah, armed as governor with the authority of the Persian king. And the success he achieved was only won in the face of bitter opposition, and at a cost of domestic suffering and heart-burning which still makes one shudder as one reads of it in the book which bears his name. It was a case in which "diseases desperate grown, by desperate appliance are relieved." Ezra had it clear in his mind that if Israel was to survive at all, it must resolutely cut itself off from all possible contact with what was not Israel. It must become a closed corporation, a community occupying not merely a political but much more a religious and social enclosure of its own, within which it could work out its own salvation. In the catastrophe of the Exile, Ezra read the lesson that indiscriminate association with neighbouring peoples had corrupted its religious life, and brought upon a faithless nation a deserved punishment. If now Israel let itself relapse into the old way of intercourse and alliance with non-Israelites, the result would be the final extinction of Israel.

Such a prospect might have been tolerable if there had been nothing left for Israel to do. Some of those who opposed Ezra may well have thought that there was nothing which could demand so hard a sacrifice as that which he would force upon them. Why should they not live in peace with their neighbours, and do as they did? And why could they not keep their old religion, without making it a source of enmity abroad, and a cause of grief at home?

But Ezra had a clear perception of what there was for Israel to do. That religion, which in former times had been mainly the collective expression of the nation's relation to God, must now be realised as the personal concern of each individual. What the prophets had taught about God had so far produced no corresponding result in personal piety and conscious service. What had been declared by Moses as the will of God had been by no means fully taken to heart and wrought into the acts of daily life. There was divine teaching in abundance, and had been for centuries; now, the task must be seriously taken in hand of applying it, so that each individual might feel that he had a responsibility for doing the will of God, and might know what that will was. The great declaration: "Hear, O Israel, the Lord thy God the Lord is one," was immediately followed by: "and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might." If Israel now asked how he was to do this, Ezra's answer was that God had taught him in the Torah, contained in the five books of Moses. Henceforth let Israel "observe to do all that is written in this book of the Torah." That solemn promulgation of the Torah, described in the book of Nehemiah, is the central point of the reformation of Ezra, whether it were only the Priestly Code which was then introduced or whether it were the Pentateuch substantially complete. What Ezra did was to set up a written authority as the guide of personal conduct for each individual Jew. His demand was for the acceptance of this authority on the part of the nation, and a determined loyalty in carrying out the commands of God which would shrink from no sacrifice. It was, no doubt, the severity of this demand which for thirteen years delayed its acceptance; and the opposition was only crushed by the strong hand of Nehemiah. Whatever one may think of the method, the result was that Ezra gathered to him those who were prepared to do most and to sacrifice most for the sake of their religion; he had weeded out the weak and the faint-hearted, the indifferent and the lazy, and kept those who could be fanatics, heroes, martyrs, if the occasion should arise.

The Jewish community having accepted the policy of Ezra, was in this position:-it was separated by its own act from all avoidable contact with those whom we may now call Gentiles; and, within the enclosure thus as it were railed off, it was free to work out its national life on the lines of the religion of Torah, free also to interpret that religion of Torah in such ways as it might see fit. Ezra had secured for it a field of action and given to it the task it should perform there. If I say that Ezra was the second founder of the religion of Israel, I do not mean to imply that everything in the later Judaism owed its origin to him, still less that what survived from the pre-exilic Judaism was only what he endorsed and gave out again. The older religion had come down from a far-distant past; the ancient writings, prophetic, historical, legal, were witnesses of God's former dealings with His people; they still had the memory, as they renewed after the Exile the practice, of the ancient customs and religious rites. And the later Judaism could, and did, develop in several directions, taking up, as it were, suggestions from the older religion, and not confining itself to the line which Ezra more especially marked out. But the work of Ezra is practically the only channel by which whatever survived from the ancient religion passed into the later, and became the Judaism which is properly so called.

In some of its representatives later Judaism departed widely from the principles of Ezra, and Christianity may be said to be in part a protest against and a revolt from those principles; but nevertheless, if it had not been for Ezra there would have been no Judaism sufficiently alive to protest, or sufficiently vigorous to produce revolt. Ezra saved the life of the Jewish people, none the less that in later times there were Jews who cherished ideals which were far different from his.

I am concerned here only with one particular line of development of the later Judaism, the one which in an especial degree was originated by Ezra. This is the line of the religion of Torah strictly so called, meaning by that the religion which found expression in the intention of fulfilling, as a personal duty, the commands of God set forth in the Scriptures, and especially in the Pentateuch. This is not a full or an exact statement of the meaning of the religion of Torah; but it will serve for the present purpose, and I shall go into detail about it in the next chapter. Judaism, as the religion of Torah, required that every Jew should be in a position to know what was contained in the Torah and what it meant. There must be someone whose business it was to study the Torah and explain its contents, and to show how the precepts it contained were to be applied to cases not directly provided for. Teaching of that kind, to the extent at all events of giving instruction in moral and religious duties, had been given from time immemorial, and mainly by the priests. And there were still priests who could, and probably did, perform the same function. But the case was now different when every Jew was expected to know the commandments of the Torah, and was directly concerned with their bearing upon his own actions. This new necessity of the time was met by the labours of a new class of men, viz. the Scribes (Sopherim). It is significant that Ezra himself is called "the priest the Scribe." It is also significant that the men who assisted him by "explaining the sense," when he first read publicly the book of the Torah, were not priests but Levites. It is natural to suppose that many Levites chose to take up the important, honourable, and sacred work of the Scribe, the interpreter of the divine teaching, rather than to perform the menial duties of serving the priests in the Temple. Whether Ezra definitely organised and founded the order of the Scribes, I do not know; but the appearance of them is a necessary result of his policy, and may well be attributed to him. The term Sopherim is vouched for, as extremely ancient, in certain phrases mentioned in the Talmud.

The duties of the Sopherim would be, in the first instance, to study the Torah themselves, then to teach it to others, then to act as interpreters and judges in cases where appeal was made to them to know how, under such and such circumstances, the divine command was to be fulfilled. Now it is scarcely conceivable that each individual Scribe would feel himself at liberty to expound the Torah entirely according to his own judgment, without reference to what other Scribes might teach; or that such unfettered liberty would have been allowed to him if he had tried to use it. There must have been some amount of consultation of the Scribes with each other; and there must have been some kind of tribunal to which appeal could be made, some central authority whose decision would be recognised as final. Otherwise, the whole attempt made by Ezra would have ended in failure almost at the outset; and it did not end in failure. Now the Talmud contains some scanty references to an assembly called "The Men of the Great Synagogue," to which were attributed certain ancient institutions and sayings. That the statements in the Talmud about the Great Synagogue are all historically trustworthy is by no means the case. But the Rabbis who are responsible for those statements may well have been right in the main fact, though not in the details. The Great Synagogue, as they represented it, is clearly based upon the description of the assembly in Neh. x. And there is nothing to show that that assembly, or anything like it, became a permanent institution. But an assembly of some kind, a council of men "learned in the law," is the most natural form which would be taken by such a central authority as the system instituted by Ezra required for its successful working. It must remain an open question whether such a council was permanent, its members being chosen for life, or whether it was such an assembly as might be called together, ad hoc, from time to time, whether the number of its members was fixed, and on what conditions and by whom they were appointed. Upon these points the Rabbis of the Talmud had no certain tradition, perhaps no tradition at all. That the conception of the Great Synagogue was modelled upon the pattern of the Assembly in Neh. x. only means that the Rabbis had no better guide for their imagination in reconstructing what nevertheless must have been. And the same reason which prompted the calling of that historical council, under Nehemiah, would suggest that the natural tribunal from time to time would be a similar council of elders and learned men. This is all that is required to give a historical basis to the traditions concerning the Great Synagogue. Less than this leaves the facts unexplained; more than this opens the way for the discrepancies which have been used for discrediting those traditions altogether. I believe we are therefore warranted in retaining the name of the Great Synagogue, to mean in the first instance Ezra and those who supported him, and then those who in later times exercised authority on his lines and in his spirit.

Now it is nowhere stated in the Rabbinical literature, so far as I know, that the Sopherim of the early times were identical with the Men of the Great Synagogue. But they are closely associated, they seem to stand on the same level of antiquity, and, what is still more important, no distinction is drawn between their several functions, except that the Men of the Great Synagogue ordained (tikk?nu) certain things, while the Sopherim only taught and expounded. As just stated, there is no agreement amongst scholars upon the question whether the Great Synagogue was a real body or not; but of the existence of the Sopherim there is no room for doubt. And the Sopherim are the key (if I am right) to the meaning of the term, "Men of the Great Synagogue." That term represents the Sopherim acting together as a council to decide religious questions; a council not necessarily permanent, but called together from time to time as occasion might require. But it would be a council of Sopherim, not of all the leading men of the nation. The authority in public matters was, under the Persian governor, in the hands of the priestly aristocracy, whose interests lay in other directions besides that of the study of Torah. What was done by the Sopherim, and those with and for whom they worked, was done privately and without official sanction. The Rabbinical tradition which mentions the Zūgōth, or pairs, and calls one the Nasi and the other the Ab-beth-din, and implies that the one was president and the other vice-president of the Sanhedrin, is certainly incorrect. The Nasi was never the president of the Sanhedrin, in times when the Sanhedrin was still the great council of the State. But it may very well have been the case that in the meetings of the Sopherim, in other words, the Great Synagogue, there were a president and a vice-president; and that the names recorded in pairs in the Talmud are the names of some of the later of these officers. I should add that this explanation of the meaning of the term, "Men of the Great Synagogue," and the identification with them of the early Sopherim, is only a theory of my own; but it is the result of long consideration of the problem.

In an often-quoted passage from the treatise of the Mishnah called the Pirké Abōth, three sayings are ascribed to the Men of the Great Synagogue: "Be deliberate in judgment; make many disciples; make a hedge for the Torah." It will be of use at this point to consider these sayings, because they throw light upon the development of the religion of Torah in the particular direction indicated by the name Pharisaism.

To prove that these dicta were actually uttered by the Men of the Great Synagogue is impossible. But it is admitted that they are very ancient; and the tradition which places them at the forefront of the development of Rabbinism has this much in its favour, that they logically belong there. Either they date from a time not remote from Ezra, or they express the opinion of some later teacher as to the aims and methods of those who in that early time were responsible for the training of the people in the religion of Torah. This latter interpretation is possible; but the form in which the brief statement is made clearly shows that the Rabbis who compiled the Mishnah had no suspicion that the dicta in question were the utterances of a later teacher. If they had had such a thought they would have expressed it thus: "Rabbi so-and-so said that the Men of the Great Synagogue had said, etc." There is no hint that the three maxims are anything else but an old tradition; and the fact that these and no more are ascribed to the Men of the Great Synagogue indicates, by its very moderation, some reason for so ascribing them. A capricious inventor would have attributed much more to so ancient an authority, in order to obtain for his inventions the sanction of high antiquity. There is really nothing improbable in the transmission, even from the time of Ezra, of these bare fragments of ancient teaching. Their contents are in keeping with this supposition; and, if they were a later invention, they nevertheless accurately describe what the men of Ezra's time must chiefly have had at heart. They are instructions to do certain things, and are addressed to persons who had some special responsibility in reference to the Torah. We have seen that the central idea of Ezra's reformation was to make the Torah the inspiring and controlling influence in Jewish life, both national and individual. To this end it was needful that the people should be taught, that they might know what was in the Torah, i.e. what God had given for their instruction; also that they should be able to appeal to competent authority for the settlement of doubtful points. The Torah was the source of divine truth and divine justice, and both must be made accessible to those whose life as a conscious service of God depended on them. The shrine in which the divine treasure was contained must be kept safe from injury, as if it were protected by a fence.

The three maxims, ascribed to the Men of the Great Synagogue, were intended, as it would seem, for the guidance of teachers and expounders of Torah. They were the lines which the Sopherim collectively agreed upon, for their own practice as interpreters and judges. Deliberation in judgment is the key to the casuistry of the Talmud, and in the main justifies that casuistry. For what does it amount to except the desire to study a question from every possible point of view, and to take into account every possible, even though improbable, contingency?

To make disciples, in the sense of imparting knowledge of Torah, has always been the aim and the practice of Rabbinical Judaism; a fact to which the Talmud bears ample witness. The names, Torah, Talmud, Mishnah, Midrash, all imply the idea of teaching and learning-study as regarded either by the student or the instructor. In this larger relation, the minor one of discipleship to a particular teacher holds but a small place. Equally the ancient Scribe or the later Rabbi was enjoined not to make adherents of himself, but to impart to all whom he could influence the knowledge of divine truth which he possessed.

To "make a hedge about the Torah" is a famous phrase that has been much misunderstood. It certainly does not imply any intention to make a rigid system of precept in which all the spiritual freedom enjoyed by the enlightened soul in communion with God should be lost. The Talmudic Rabbis, who entirely endorsed the maxim, never read in it any such intention, and never supposed that they suffered any such loss of spiritual freedom. As in fact they did not. The notion that they did is an idea which only exists in the minds of Christians, misreading an experience which, as Christians, they have never known. What was always understood by the "hedge about the Torah" was the means taken to keep the divine revelation from harm, so that the sacred enclosure, so to speak, might always be free and open for the human to contemplate and commune with the divine. And, so far as the Torah consisted of precepts, positive and negative, the "hedge" was of the nature of warnings whereby a man might be saved from transgression before it was too late. The detailed mass of precept elaborated in the course of centuries, known as the Halachah (see Chapter II.) or rule of right conduct, and finally embodied in the Talmud, was part of the Torah itself made explicit, the divine teaching so far as it related to such and such departments of conduct. And even if the Halachah were the rigid and oppressive system which it is often supposed to have been, but which those who devised it and lived under it did not feel it to be, it was not itself the "hedge about the Torah." The religious guides of the Jewish people, from the early Sopherim to the latest Rabbi whose words are incorporated in the Talmud, did make a "hedge about the Torah"; and did their work so well that, whatever else was torn from Israel in the course of cruel centuries, the Torah remained, and still remains, the peculiar treasure of the chosen people.

I have dwelt at this length upon the consideration of the work of Ezra, and of those teachers closely associated with him known as the Sopherim or Men of the Great Synagogue, because, when once that is clearly understood, all the subsequent developments are easy to follow. I have not yet mentioned Pharisaism, except here and there in passing. But, given such a principle as is contained in Ezra's conception of the religion of Torah, Pharisaism was certain to appear sooner or later, and the Talmud itself was the implied, though distant, result of the process by which that conception was to be worked out.

Devotion to Torah, and the duty of regulating life, whether individual or national, according to its precepts, were of the essence of the Judaism which took its character from Ezra. This was the principle; and those who adhered to it sought to apply it over the whole range of action, public as well as private. The Sopherim would have their opinion as to the way, for instance, in which the Temple ritual should be performed; but it is likely enough that the priests would keep the control of such matters in their own hands, so that the Sopherim would have their main influence as the teachers of the people in the ordinary walks of life. Through the Synagogue, of which I shall have more to say in the next chapter, the Sopherim came into close touch with the individual Jew in his private capacity, and acquired there an influence which was never afterwards shaken. In this way, the religion of Torah, on the lines of Ezra, was made the religion of the majority of the nation. And, while it was held with varying degrees of understanding and attachment, we may note that there were two institutions or usages which mark the points where the religion of Torah took deepest and strongest hold upon the national mind. These were the rite of circumcision and the observance of the Sabbath. I do not mean that circumcision had not been practised, nor the Sabbath observed, in times previous to Ezra, but that these became especially prominent after his time as the sine qua non of Judaism, essentials to be maintained at any cost. The institution of the Synagogue provided a means of developing the spiritual life of the people in a way that the Temple ritual hardly could and certainly did not do. And although, as long as the Temple stood, that was regarded as the most sacred shrine and most glorious embodiment, or rather culmination, of the national religion, yet the religion of Torah learned to do without the Temple, but it never dreamed of doing without the Synagogue. With the Synagogue were associated the devotional outpourings of the Psalmists, and the earliest liturgy, also the regular reading of the Scriptures. These, together with exhortation or instruction, gave substance and meaning to the idea of public worship, which, in a form hitherto unknown in the ancient world, was in itself one of the most important of Jewish institutions. The study of Torah produced in course of time new practices which became traditional, or gave a new sanction to old ones; while the principles of exposition by which these results were produced-in other words, the teachings of the Sopherim-were accepted and recognised as legitimate by those for whose guidance they were given.

So far as the religion of Torah is concerned, the process of its development may be conceived to have gone on with no interruption, upon such general lines, during the centuries between Ezra and the Maccabees. When that period was reached, 167 b.c. and onwards, the main lines of Judaism were clearly defined, and the chief things known which were incumbent upon the Jew if he would be true to his religious profession. He knew not only what he should do, by way of service to God, but why he should do it. The ideal before him was the thought of that service, not as an irksome task imposed on him, but as a willing and glad devotion of himself and all his powers to God. That every individual Jew could or did rise to the height of that ideal, no one would maintain. In the nature of things the spiritual energy, which was mighty in Ezra, could not continue with unimpaired force through the centuries after he was gone. In fact, there is no one to compare with him in this respect until R. Akiba, at the end of the first Christian century. But it is far from true to say that the spiritual meaning of the religion of Torah, as above described, was lost sight of, or even greatly obscured, in the generations which succeeded Ezra. If that had been the case, there would have been no Maccabean revolt. For the tenacity of adhesion and the fierceness of resistance cannot be explained merely by blind loyalty to a tradition whose inner meaning was no longer understood and its spiritual power no longer felt. There must have been a real allegiance to the religion of Torah, in principle though not extending to minor details, on the part of the majority of the nation, a conscious acceptance of the essentials, though often without the zeal or perhaps the power to follow out those main principles to their conclusion. There would naturally be considerable difference in the degree of attachment to the religion of Torah, on the part of different individuals or sections of the nation, varying from enthusiastic devotion to a careless, almost nominal allegiance, that could easily transfer itself to some other religion whose demands were less severe and whose worldly advantages were greater than those of Judaism.

For a considerable time after Ezra, the nation was, in regard to its religion, homogeneous in this sense, that there was not, unless in individuals here and there, any question of another religion than Judaism. While the Jews were under Persian rule, the Persian religion may have influenced the Jewish religion in some respects; but there was never any question of a secession from Judaism to the religion of Persia. Within the range of Judaism the worship of the God of Israel was the only worship; and while some might be zealous and others lukewarm, some might be more concerned with the pomp and circumstance of the Temple, and others with the more homely piety of the Synagogue, yet all alike owned the religion of Torah as their religion, and felt themselves united as brethren in spite of fraternal discords.

But when, after the fall of the Persian Empire (332 b.c.), the influence of Greek ideas and practices began to be felt, a serious danger arose which threatened the very existence of Judaism. Whether it was the Syrian or the Egyptian king who for the time held possession of Judea, the result was the same in giving a strong impetus to the adoption of Greek civilisation. Greeks settled in the chief towns in large numbers, either as officials of the government or for trade. Greek art and learning had their representatives. Greek builders erected temples and theaters to be the visible symbols of a foreign religion, and of practices alien to Jewish ideas of morality. The Greek met the Jew at every turn; and the Jew would not have been human if he had been wholly unaffected by that close association. The brilliance of Greek culture made it attractive both on its good and on its bad side, its exquisite sense of beauty and its shameless gaiety of vice. Its natural fascination was increased by the fact that it was actively promoted by the influence of the court. The road to royal favour and civil advancement lay through the adoption of Greek manners and customs, and even dress. A Greek sovereign might think it prudent to tolerate the peculiarities of his Jewish subjects; but he had no sympathy with them, and could not understand them. He would welcome every indication of a desire to replace Jewish ideas and practices by Greek ones, and would use his influence accordingly.

During the hundred and sixty years from the fall of the Persian Empire to the revolt of the Maccabees, the virus of Hellenism was infecting the Jewish nation; perhaps for good, certainly for evil. Probably no class of society was wholly immune from it. Its effects were most conspicuous in the ranks of the wealthy and powerful, the nobles and the priestly aristocracy who came into closest relations with the court and depended most upon the royal favour. But Hellenism had its attractions for all, high or humble; its outward signs could be seen all over the land, inviting a comparison between the gaiety and freedom of Greek life and the moral restraints and sober seriousness of the Jewish.

What gradually resulted was, not a division between the upper classes and the lower, as if all the former went over to Hellenism while all the latter remained faithful to Judaism, but a decline towards Hellenism, on the part of a minority in which all classes were represented. Probably the number of those who went entirely over to Hellenism was only small, compared with the whole Jewish population. But there were many whose hold upon Judaism was more or less weakened; and there were only a few who remained unflinching in their loyalty to the ancestral faith. That this was really the case, is shown by the fact that a special name was applied to those who thus rigidly adhered to the principles and maintained to the fullest extent the practices of Judaism as the religion of Torah. If they had been the majority of the nation they would not have needed or received any special name. These faithful few were the ?asidim, the Assideans of the Books of Maccabees. Thus Hellenists and ?asidim represented the Extreme Left and the Extreme Right of the Jewish nation, with moderates of various shades in between. The name ?asid, which is a common word in Hebrew, indicates a type rather than a party.[1] The use of the word in the Psalms, where most of the instances of its occurrence in the Old Testament are found, does not warrant us, other reasons apart, in assuming that there is a special reference in those passages to the men who became conspicuous under Judas Maccab?us.

The rebellion against Antiochus Epiphanes was, of course, in the main a religious revolt, and, as such, it had the support of all in the nation except the avowed Hellenists. But there was this difference in the motive of the insurgents, that Mattathias and his sons, who started the rebellion, were fighting for political freedom as well as for their religion. The ?asidim only fought for their religion. It was dire necessity which turned them from passive resisters into active fighters. They joined Mattathias and his companions because only by fighting could the Torah now be defended, for whose sake hitherto they had been willing to suffer and die. Mattathias rebelled because the royal power was being used to undermine the national religion, and he wished to throw off the royal power. He would not have been content with permission to practise his religion undisturbed. He was as staunch, though not as strict, an adherent of the religion of Torah as any of the ?asidim; but he would have the Jews free to serve God, independent of any permission from a foreign ruler.

In the earlier stages of the war the political and the religious motives were too closely blended to be distinguished. But it is to be noted that the ?asidim were the first to desire peace (1 Macc. vii. 13). And later on, when the Maccabean princes reaped the fruits of the war in successful sovereignty, they were regarded with increasing ill-will by those to whom the religion of Torah was of supreme importance.

I cannot, of course, attempt to follow in detail the history of the Jewish people under the Maccabean princes. But the significance of the rebellion for my present purpose can be very soon explained.

The result upon the Jewish people generally was to renew its hold upon the religion of Torah. Hellenism for a time was greatly weakened. There was now at the head of the Jewish state a Jewish prince, able to hold his own against foreign powers. The religion of Torah was, nominally at least, the religion of all Jews, from the palace to the cottage; and it should be observed that the special name of the ?asidim dropped out of use.

But gradually a divergence appeared, not wholly unlike that which had led to the rebellion. The princes of the Maccabean house naturally looked for their supporters in the great families to whom belonged the chief positions of rank and wealth, especially those connected with the Temple. The religion of Torah was mixed up with politics to a degree which displeased those who did not belong to the governing class. There was, therefore, again a movement towards a stricter interpretation of the Torah and a more thorough-going obedience to its requirements, on the part of a minority on the one side, to correspond with the movement towards what might be called "worldliness" on the part of a minority on the other side. These two extremes had names by which they were distinguished. Those who formed the governing class, the great families and the chief priests, were the Sadducees. Those who maintained the full strictness of the religion of Torah were the Pharisees. They were virtually the ?asidim over again, under another name. They were in a minority, when compared with the whole nation; but the sympathy of the people in general was with them as against the Sadducees.

The particular reason why they were called Pharisees (Pherūshim, separated), was that they formed themselves into separate societies pledged to observe certain rules in the matter of meat, drink, clothing, etc., according as these were clean or unclean, allowed or forbidden. They thereby "separated" themselves from such as were less strict, or who at least did not take their pledge as a guarantee of strictness. But it is clear that there was practically nothing new in what the Pharisees did or in the religion they held, except the mere fact of association in pledged companies. The religion which they thus set themselves to realise in its full extent was essentially the religion of Torah as Ezra had moulded it. Successive generations of Sopherim had worked out into fuller detail the implicit contents of the Torah, as changing circumstances called for further interpretation of the original precepts. But there was no breach of continuity between Ezra and the Pharisees, either in principle or even in the means by which that principle was worked out. For there were in every generation the teachers and expounders of the Torah, as there were always those who depended on the guidance of such teachers. The name of the Men of the Great Synagogue had passed out of use, as it was believed that the institution itself came to an end. But the Rabbinical tradition recorded the names of those who successively handed on the teaching in which the meaning of the Torah was unfolded, and its application to new conditions indicated. The line of this descent is through the Pharisees and not through the Sadducees. Not because the Sadducees did not care about the religion of Torah; but because the Pharisees, strange as it may sound, kept the religion of Torah as a living principle, capable of being adapted and needing to be adapted to fresh developments of religious life, while the Sadducees held to the letter of the original scripture, and refused innovations. The practical bearing of this appears in the fact that the Sadducees kept in their own hands, as long as they could, not merely the governing authority, but the judicial power in criminal cases. And the hostility between Pharisees and Sadducees was expressed in a long struggle for the mastery. The Pharisees never obtained permanently the political mastery. But they did gain, for some of their representatives, a place in the Sanhedrin, the great assembly of the leading men of the nation. And, what was more, they did obtain a control over the Temple, to this extent that the ritual there was performed according to the requirements of the Pharisees, the Sadducean priests consenting to this as the condition on which they held their office. It is stated in the Mishnah (Joma iii. 5) that representatives of the Beth-Din, i.e. Pharisees, administered an oath to the High Priest on the day of atonement, saying to him: "'Sir, High Priest, we are the delegates of the Beth-Din, and thou art our delegate and the delegate of the Beth-Din, and we adjure thee, by Him whose name dwells on this house, that thou wilt not alter a thing of all that we have said to thee,' and he departs, weeping, and they depart, weeping." A singular touch, expressive, as it would seem, of mutual distrust.

The Pharisees also succeeded at last in wresting from the Sadducees the power of judicial decision in criminal cases; and the ancient calendar, known as Megillath Taanith, marks the 14th Tammuz (July) as a festival, because on that day the Sadducean penal code was abolished. This same calendar, which is a Pharisaic document, contains several other anti-Sadducean references.

The Pharisees, then, represent that element in the Jewish nation which was most zealous for the religion of Torah, and most thorough-going in the application of its principles. So long as the Sadducees existed, the name Pharisee also remained.

With the downfall of the Jewish state, after the war of a.d. 70, the Sadducees disappear from history. The Pharisees remained, as representing all that was left alive of Judaism; but the name was no longer needed, and seldom if ever used. The Jewish remnant were not indeed all Pharisees, in the strict sense of the term; but they were on the whole in sympathy with them, as they always had been.

If I have clearly indicated the relations of the Pharisees and Sadducees to each other, and to the mass of the nation, it will be easy to indicate the place of two other classes of persons bearing well-known names. The Essenes stand apart from the main body of the Jewish people; they were ascetics and recluses, of more than Pharisaic strictness (for asceticism was not a characteristic feature of Pharisaism either in practice or theory), and they combined with the religion of Torah certain mystical doctrines of their own. Whatever influence they may have had upon other elements in Judaism, they had little if any upon Pharisaism.

There remains the class called "Am-ha-aretz," or "the people of the land "-the "people that knoweth not the law" (John vii. 49). This title denotes, not a definite division, but simply those amongst the people who in fact were least influenced by the Pharisees, and least drawn to them. Such would be not only the careless and indifferent, but also those who, for higher reasons, did not readily fall in with the Pharisaic system, or to whom religion as presented by them was not acceptable. It is these mainly who are referred to when it is said that Jesus saw the people "as sheep without a shepherd" (Mark vi. 34). And it is only likely that those would most gladly hear him who were least inclined to follow the Pharisees.

From this sketch of the composition of the Jewish nation, in the time of Christ and thereabouts, it will be seen that the main line of development is represented by Pharisaism. It comes down from the time of Ezra, as the religion of Torah, expounded and administered by approved teachers, known from the first as Sopherim. The names ?asidim and Pharisee denote its most zealous representatives at two different periods; but they imply no change of principle, or even of method. What change there was is seen in the growth of a body of teaching, the decisions and interpretations of successive exponents of Torah, handed on and repeated from memory, for the instruction of those who should come after. This is what is known as the Tradition of the Elders, referred to in Mark vii. 5 and elsewhere. And when I come to deal with the theory of Torah in the next chapter, I shall show how this Tradition of the Elders was a sign of the continued vitality of the religion of Torah, not the gradual strangling of it. At present I am only concerned with the fact, not with the meaning of it. The Tradition of the Elders can be traced in the Mishnah up to the time of the early Sopherim, not far distant from Ezra; it is the thread which binds together the development, through ?asidim and Pharisaism, of the Jewish religion. And it marks the course of the main stream of Judaism far on through the centuries. The Essenes vanished. The Sadducees were swept away when the Temple was destroyed. It was the Pharisees who alone could or did weather that storm, and carry the divine treasure of the religion of Torah into safety. Already, in the time when Jesus was a boy, Hillel the Babylonian had applied his genius to the interpretation of Torah in ways which gave it a fresh power of ministry to spiritual wants. And when, seventy years later, the catastrophe came, the man was ready who should go forth from Jerusalem, and establish for the ancient religion a "temple not made with hands." Jo?anan ben Zaccai was that man. When he saw that the city was doomed, he went to the Emperor Vespasian, and made his submission to the force that could no longer be resisted (b. Gitt. 56b). The Emperor asked what he should give him, though he sought no reward. "Give me Jabneh and its wise men"-Jabneh being a town on the coast, where already there were some of the leading Pharisaic teachers. The request was granted, and Jo?anan b. Zaccai gathered in Jabneh the remnants of the learning and wisdom of Judaism. There he and his colleagues repaired the shattered fabric of the religious life of their people, and adjusted it to the new conditions. The Temple with all that belonged to it was gone for ever. But the Synagogue and the College remained, as the home both of worship and study; and the religion of Torah probably gained rather than lost by being finally cut loose from association with the Temple cultus. The assembly at Jabneh took up the task of developing the religion of Torah, and carrying forward the Tradition of the Elders, where it had been interrupted by the war. The teachers to whose hands that task was now committed were henceforth known as the Wise; the names Sopherim and Pharisee were seldom used, but the essential features of their work remained unchanged, and it was carried on in the ancient spirit.

In the interval between the capture of Jerusalem in a.d. 70 and the almost greater disaster in a.d. 135, when the revolt of Bar Coch'ba was stamped out, the assembly of the Rabbis met from time to time in Jabneh, or Lydda; and even during the persecution which followed on the failure of the last rebellion, when the Jewish teachers were hunted up and down, and Akiba, the greatest of them, was tortured to death, there were still left those who would carry on the tradition of their religion. These were young men who received ordination as Rabbis, when it meant death to be a Rabbi at all, if he should fall into the hands of the Romans. It is told (b. Sanh. 14a) of R. Jehudah b. Baba, that he took six of his disciples into a secluded spot and there ordained them, and that he had hardly finished before he was discovered by the soldiers, and fell, stabbed with Roman spears. The six young men all survived to become the teachers of the next generation. They handed on what had been committed to them as a sacred trust, the religion of Torah, and the tradition in which its meaning and contents were set forth in growing fulness and clearness.

This takes us out of the period covered by the New Testament. But I add the few words necessary to round off the bare account I have given of the development of Judaism through the Pharisees.

The Tradition of the Elders, as I have said, increased in volume and complexity as each generation of teachers added something to it. The necessity, therefore, gradually made itself felt of arranging and systematising the great mass of traditional matter. This was attempted first by the R. Akiba just mentioned, then by R. Meir, one of the six young men ordained in the time of the persecution. But it was only carried to completion, after long years of labour, by R. Jehudah ha-Kadosh, commonly called "Rabbi," par excellence. He collected all that he could find of the decisions and opinions of earlier teachers, sorted them out under different heads, noted those which were universally admitted and those which were doubtful, and thus framed a code of law for the guidance of all Jews. This collection is the Mishnah; and the text as we have it now represents, in the main, the code of Rabbi. There are, of course, interpolations and additions to it. There is another great collection known as Tosephta, containing a good deal of the same material; it is nearly contemporary, but it has never had the same authority as the Mishnah. The date of the Mishnah can be put at about the year 210. Rabbi died in 219. The Mishnah became in its turn the subject of study in the Rabbinical schools, and two fresh lines of tradition begin from this point, each of them starting with a disciple of Rabbi. One of them is the line of development of the Mishnah in the Palestinian schools, of which the chief seat was Tiberias; the other was the line of development of that same Mishnah in the Babylonian schools-Sura, Nehardea, Pumbeditha, and others. The result of each process was a mass of commentary on the Mishnah, and not merely commentary but accretions of every kind having any sort of connection with Judaism as a living religion. This development of the Mishnah is in each case called Gemara. And Mishnah plus Gemara is the Talmud. There is only one Mishnah, but there are two Gemaras, differently named according to the land of their origin. And it is usual to speak of the Palestinian Talmud and of the Babylonian Talmud respectively.

Neither of these two was ever completed. The Palestinian schools, at the end of the fourth century, had no one left who was capable of carrying on the work; and in Babylonia, though much more was done, a final completion was never reached. After the beginning of the sixth century nothing more was ever added to the Talmud; and even of what was in existence then, not all survives now.

In the Talmud is contained the main source for the knowledge of what Pharisaism meant; because it was made the storehouse in which all, or nearly all, that was held to be valuable in the Tradition of the Elders, the explicit religion of Torah, was stored up. There is a huge literature contemporary with the Talmud, to which the general name of Midrash is given; all of it is traditional, and all of it bears on the religion of Torah, in one way or another. This is the written deposit of Pharisaism, the mark which it has left upon the literature of the world. It is there, and not in the writings of those who did not understand its ideals or share its hopes, that its real meaning can alone be found. Those ideals and hopes first dawned in Jewish minds under the influence of Ezra. The Talmud is the witness to show how some of his countrymen, some of the bravest, some of the ablest, some of the most pious and saintly, and a host of unnamed faithful, were true to those ideals and clung to those hopes; and how, through good report and ill report, through shocks of disaster and the ruin of their state, ground down by persecution, or torn by faction, steadily facing enemies without and enemies within, they held on to the religion of Torah. They have not sought, and they certainly have not found, the praise of men for their steadfastness. For these are the Pharisees, and the world has for them only a contemptuous gibe. Who was it that said: "For every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment"?

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The Theory of Torah

In the preceding chapter I sketched the historical development of Pharisaism from its source in the work of Ezra to the time when it had found its literary expression in the Talmud and the Midrash. I said that from first to last what was developed was the religion of Torah. It is therefore essential to the understanding of Pharisaism that the reader should, first, obtain a clear conception of the meaning of Torah, and, second, that he should bear that conception always in mind in his further study of Pharisaism. It will be my task in the present chapter to show what Torah meant, and what form the religion of Torah actually, and perhaps necessarily, assumed. If I succeed, then the reader will understand how it was that Rabbinical devotion to Torah could express itself quite naturally in terms which to the unenlightened Gentile appear to be extravagant-as, for instance, when it is said that God studies Torah for three hours every day (b. A. Zar. 3b).

There would be no particular difficulty in understanding what is meant by Torah, if it were not that it is commonly supposed that the word "Law" is the just equivalent of it. The Greek, alike of the Septuagint and of the New Testament, renders "Torah" by ν?μο? [Greek: nómos]; and while the translators of the New Testament rightly rendered ν?μο? [Greek: nómos] by "Law," they nevertheless perpetuated what was a misconception on the part of those who used the Greek word to represent "Torah." It is to avoid that misconception that I have already used, and shall continue to use, the word "Torah" untranslated, as a technical term whose full implication cannot be expressed in any one English word. It is true that the word "torah" is simply and correctly translated by the word "teaching"; but, as used in the later Judaism, it denotes a particular kind of teaching, and also the sum-total of what was taught as well as the vehicle or medium by which it was given. It further denotes any particular portion of that teaching. In short, it is a word into which the Rabbis compressed more meaning than can be found in any other word in their language; and we shall more readily grasp that varied meaning if we keep to the word Torah, as being unspoiled by erroneous associations.

The original meaning, then, of the word Torah is simply "teaching," any kind of instruction given by any person to any other person; for instance, Prov. i. 8, "Forsake not the 'torah' of thy mother." More specifically, it was religious teaching, conceived as given either by God to Israel, or by man to his fellow-man. Thus, Isa. li. 7, "the people in whose heart is my Torah" (where the speaker is God); and, for human instruction, Deut. xvii. 11, "according to the tenor of the 'Torah' which they shall teach thee," "they" being the priests. This last passage gives the clue to the further developments of the word. It had been for ages the custom in Israel for the priests to give instruction to the people upon matters connected with religion, explanations of duty, decisions of disputes, intimations of the will of God. This was, of course, Torah; and it was Torah which was regarded as being given by God through human agency. The Torah which the Lord gave by the hand of Moses would not originally imply any code or book, but simply such ancient sayings, precepts or otherwise, as were traditionally ascribed to Moses as the great teacher of Israel in the days of old. The connection of Torah with Moses, though others might have given Torah as well as he, had this result, that gradually a body of traditional teaching was accumulated, ascribed to him and bearing his name; and the several attempts to collect and codify these are to be seen in the various strata of the Pentateuch. They are mostly in the form of precept and command, as was only likely, since they were intended for the guidance of conduct. But that was not why they were called Torah. If Moses had taught something that was not commandment at all, it would still have been Torah, because it was taught.

In this sense, Israel had never been without Torah; and the prophet no less than the priest owned that in it God had continually taught His people. Prophecy itself was only a form of Torah, for the prophet spoke the word of the Lord.

Now, whatever else Ezra introduced that was new, it was not Torah. If he had religious teaching to give, as of course he had, he only followed in the train of the prophets and priests from Moses downwards. And when he offered Torah to the people, they knew what he was referring to. Nor did the novelty consist in the fact that Ezra made known to them a larger body of Torah than they had previously been acquainted with. It does not greatly matter, for the present purpose, whether the book which Ezra read to the people was the Priestly Code, or the whole Pentateuch substantially, though not finally, complete. For even if the earlier documents had not been as yet welded into one whole with the Priestly Code, they were nevertheless in existence, and were already owned as Torah of Moses.

What Ezra did was to lay a much greater emphasis upon the need of obedience to what was contained in the book of Torah (or the books) as being the duty of every Israelite. What was in fact the collected accretions of centuries, was regarded by Ezra, and by all Israel, as Torah from God communicated by Moses, and therefore entitled to precedence over any Torah imparted to anyone else. The book, or books, in which it was recorded contained all that God had chosen to reveal for the instruction of His people. The five books of Moses were the written form of the Torah. They were not the Torah itself. It is only for convenience that the Pentateuch is often called the Torah. The two are not identical. The Pentateuch differs from the Torah as the vessel differs from its contents, even though there be but one unique vessel in which those contents are preserved. Ezra, then, offered for the acceptance of Israel, in the book that he read to them, what he believed to be the full revelation which God had made. But he went beyond those who had preceded him, beyond even those who had carried through the reform of which the book of Deuteronomy is the manifesto, by reason of the stress which he laid upon personal and individual acceptance of it. Deuteronomy, no doubt, contained over and over again the demand, "Thou shalt observe to do" according to all these commandments, and it enforced the demand by the appalling catalogue of curses upon the disobedient which may be read in the 28th chapter. But Deuteronomy was written before the Exile, and Ezra lived after it. The priests had given Torah, and the prophets had proclaimed God's revelation of His nature and of man's relation to Him and consequent duty. They had been pre-eminently preachers of righteousness. But yet, in spite of the zeal of the prophets and the teaching of the priests, the bitter lesson of the Exile had proved that Israel had not served his God as he ought to have done. It was Ezra's function to apply the lesson of the Exile and to direct the religious life of Israel into such lines that no similar disaster should again be experienced; or rather, that no such sin should again be committed as had led to that disaster. Ezekiel, indeed, had been the first to perceive the necessity of a change in the direction of Israel's life; but he had lived at a time too early for a real beginning to be made. Yet it can hardly be doubted that the seed, which Ezekiel sowed among the captives in Babylonia, bore fruit in the ideas which underlay the reformation of Ezra. When Ezra came forward with the book of the Torah, he did so not in any sense as an opponent of the prophets, or as making a breach between their ideas and his own. He came forward to enforce their teaching, to apply it, and to get from it a larger result of practical righteousness than it had produced in their time. It was just because the prophets had so splendidly revealed God to Israel, had proclaimed to him the full grandeur of his privilege, that Israel must now be taught to do his part as he had never done it before. The greater the privilege the greater the responsibility. So far from being at variance with the ideas of the prophets, Ezra was the one to complete them, or at least to put his people in the way of completing them. There is a difference of method between Ezra and the prophets; there is no difference of principle. And as the Pharisees and the later Rabbis did but carry out the method and the principle of Ezra, they stand in the same line with him as the legitimate successors and continuators of the prophets.[2] It may be said with truth that of the later types of Judaism-Hellenism, Apocalyptic, and Rabbinism-the last, and only the last, carried on and handed down the inheritance which the prophets had left. What Hellenism and Apocalyptic had to give went to Christianity, so far as it survived at all.

The purpose of Ezra was to lay stress on the embodiment, in the practical life of the individual Jew, of the teaching of the prophets (including Moses) concerning God and Israel. The main point for Ezra was that God had taught certain things-knowledge of Himself, knowledge of His will. What had been taught must be learned and taken to heart, and, so far as it was of the nature of precept, must be carried out in practice. It was not enough to know; the Israelite was required to do and to be.

The practical application of this idea needed the acceptance of it on the part of the people, and further, a definite undertaking to make certain changes in their manner of life. And, before all, it was necessary that they should, so far as possible, separate themselves from the "peoples of the lands" in whose midst they found themselves, on returning from the Exile. This is, of course, the meaning of the putting away of the foreign wives, and the forbidding of such marriages for the future. The general programme of the reform is set forth in Neh. x., which is nothing more than the logical corollary of the acceptance of Torah. Among the points there specified, besides the prohibition of intermarriage with foreigners, are the observance of the Sabbath, the payment of the tax for the service of the house of God, and the duty of bringing first-fruits and tithes. Of course these provisions do not cover the whole duty of the Jew, and they were not intended to do so. Their purpose was to set up the Jews as a closed corporation, distinct from the surrounding peoples, and to provide for the maintenance of the Jewish cultus. Within the limits thus drawn, this enclosure marked off from the Gentile world, the Jew was to live his whole life, and the Torah was to be his guide in doing so. The limits were drawn in order to make it possible for the Jew to live up to the Torah. The limits themselves are not part of the Torah; and hence it follows that a Jew could live with complete loyalty to the Torah, and yet be but little conscious of the limits within which he enjoyed his spiritual freedom and privileges. Unless occasion reminded him of the fact of separation between him and the Gentiles, he could give his whole mind to the immediate concerns of his religious life-meditation, prayer, and the doing of his duties towards God and man. His thought was not taken up with a painful study of precepts, but was free to range over the whole relation in which he stood towards God. The Torah was his guide to the whole meaning of that relation, not merely to the performance of specified duties. And therefore, when Ezra prevailed on the Jews to become a separate community, he was not condemning them to a life of barren legalism, cutting them off from a free communion with God; he was providing for them a means whereby they could enjoy that free communion, defended against the dangers which, in the past, had been so disastrous to the religious life of the people. It is, of course, true that in doing so he was at the same time cutting the Jews off from free intercourse with their fellow-men of non-Jewish race, and thereby restricting their development as human beings. And the Jews ever since have paid a heavy price for that separation. But in Ezra's time free intercourse with non-Jewish peoples did not seem at all a desirable thing, if the Jewish people were to survive. It is indeed difficult to believe that they would have survived, if the policy of Ezra had not been carried out. And if they had not, what would have become of the Jewish religion? And how would the great spiritual treasure of the prophets (to say nothing of the Torah itself) have become available for those who, in a later age, were to depend so largely upon it? Whether the policy of separation is to be for ever kept up, is a question which the future must decide. But that Ezra saved the Jewish religion and the Jewish people is hardly open to dispute.

Ezra, then, provided for the Jews an enclosure, marked off from the Gentile world, within which to live their religious life; and he gave them the Torah, as being the full revelation which God had made through Moses, for their guide in the life they should thenceforth live there. Clearly, no one would enter that enclosure, or remain within it, unless he really and seriously meant to live on the lines of Torah. And that is why, from the time of Ezra, the importance of Torah becomes so marked, and insistence on it so emphatic; why, in short, from that time, the Torah dominates the whole field of religion for those who followed the lead of Ezra. They virtually declared that they would stand or fall by the Torah. For them, the Torah was the medium through which religion became real to them; as it were, the glass through which they viewed all the dealings of God with their own race in the past, and with mankind in general. This will be more fully seen when we come to what the Talmud has to say about Torah. But that is only the expansion in detail, as pious imagination dwelt upon the theme, of the idea which Ezra planted in the mind of his people, that of the supreme importance of Torah as the revelation which God had made, the perfect guide, the source of all that could be known or required to be known, by him who would "love God with all his heart, and with all his strength, and with all his might."

The Jew who followed the lead of Ezra was, as before, a member of the community of Israel; but he was, in a far greater degree than before, aware of his own responsibility for the right living of his life in relation to God, the doing and the being of what was pleasing to Him. The Torah was given to Israel; but it was none the less addressed to each Jew. And that, not merely in regard to particular precepts but in regard to the religious teaching as a whole. It may be true that nothing in the Pentateuch rises to the height of spiritual grandeur attained by the great prophets. It may be true that their free inspiration denoted a power and fulness of religious life greater than could be developed by the Torah as a body of teaching, or even regarded as a final revelation. But however sublime the religion of the great prophets had been, the religion of the ordinary Israelite had by no means attained to the same degree of power and fulness. If it had done so, there would not have been the collapse of national religious life which brought about the Exile. The effect of making the Torah the guide of life, the seat of authority in religion, was to deepen the spiritual life of the ordinary Jew; it gave him a stronger sense of personal responsibility, and opened out to him regions of religious experience of which he had seldom if ever been aware. The effect of thus exalting the Torah was not, as it is so often said to have been, to cramp and harden the spiritual nature of the Jew, by confining it within definite limits and oppressing it by precise commands. I would not say that this never happened; because it is not wise to assert a universal negative. But it certainly was not the primary or the usual effect. The Torah made the religion of Israel personal and individual to a far greater degree than it had been before; and it did so by conveying to the individual Jew not merely the legal precept but the prophetic fervour, the joy and the inspiration of personal communion with God as well as the high privilege of serving Him. The introduction of the Torah was not the signal for a decline in the national religious life, but the beginning of a new and strenuous advance; and whereas, before, the prophets had towered high above the mass of the people, who had remained at a comparatively low level of spiritual attainment, henceforth there is a great development of the spiritual nature of the ordinary people, the individual Jew. There were no more prophets, because there was no further need of any prophets. Their work was done; and in respect of that part of their work where they had failed, Ezra and his followers succeeded. The prophets had declared the full meaning of the religion of Israel, its glorious hopes, its triumphant certainties, its boundless possibilities. The people had heard, but had too little heeded. Ezra, by means of the Torah, and expressly and intentionally by that means, drove all this home to the heart of the individual Jew, and so wrought it into the very texture of his religious nature that it has remained there ever since. It is high time to put away altogether, as one of the exploded errors of history, the notion that Ezra, by the exaltation of the Torah to the supreme place in Jewish religion, set that religion upon the down-grade. I believe it to be nearer the truth to say that after Moses, and Isaiah (or perhaps Jeremiah), Ezra is the third greatest man in the Old Testament.

It can scarcely be too often repeated that the Torah, as Ezra understood it, meant divine teaching upon all and everything that concerned religion. It was not confined to commands, positive or negative, but included everything that bore upon religion at all. This is evident on the face of it; because the contents of the Pentateuch (which is the written embodiment of the Torah) include much else beside precept. As a Rabbi pointed out, long afterwards, if the Torah had been only precept, it would have been sufficient to begin it at Exod. xii. 2, where the first precept occurs. "And why was it written (Gen. i. 1), 'In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, etc.'? To show the power of His might" (R. Jitz?ak, in Tan? 4a). The meaning of which is that the Torah is a revelation of more than the divine will.

The view that the Torah, as recorded in the Pentateuch, is the supreme revelation which God made to Israel, and that it covers the whole extent of the religious life, theoretical as well as practical, is implied in the position which it held in Judaism from the time of Ezra onwards, and underlies all that the Talmud says about it. There is no point in the long line from Ezra to the closing of the Talmud, at which it can be said: "Here the conception of the Torah was narrowed into the meaning of mere legal precept." It was at no time thus narrowed. And if, as is often admitted, Judaism, after Ezra and before Christ, allowed of a considerable degree of spiritual attainment on the part of those who were under the Torah, there is no ground for denying the possibility of such spiritual attainment on the part of Jews in or after the time of Christ, because the conception of the Torah remained the same in essence. What change there was, between Ezra and the Pharisees and the later Rabbis in the Talmud, was in the opposite direction to that of restriction of its meaning. They realised far more than Ezra did, or could do, the fulness and richness of the Torah as a divine revelation; and while they took a delight in glorifying it on its imperative side, as embodying divine commands, they never dreamed of saying that the Torah was precept and nothing more.

In his well-known book, Die alt-synagogale Theologie, p. 24, Weber says: "If we have to admit that this praise of Torah (in the Talmudic literature) is entirely in accord with similar praise of Torah in the Psalms, we must nevertheless not forget that here (i.e. in the Talmud) the Torah is praised as Law, while in Scripture the conception of Torah is wider and includes all revelation, alike of law and of salvation."

The opposition here alleged does not exist; and the statement that it does is the cardinal error of Weber's mischievous book. For the right understanding of Pharisaic Judaism, the fact that Weber is the usually accepted guide is well-nigh fatal. It will be observed, however, that Weber admits the wider conception of the Torah in the later books of the Old Testament, especially in the Psalms; and that is all that matters at present. It is of importance to realise that the spiritual life of Israel not merely ought to have done, but actually did increase and develop under the influence of that Torah which Ezra had exalted to the supreme place. There are two very important indications of the truth of this statement; one is the rise of the Synagogue, and the other is the growth and completion of the book of Psalms. It will be no digression, but an appeal to evidence directly bearing on the subject, to speak at this point of both these.

The origin of the Synagogue is to this extent unknown, that no precise date can be assigned at which it was first instituted. But it did not appear in Palestine before the time of Ezra, and it was already ancient and immemorial in the time of the Maccabees. It is possible, and even probable, that it arose amongst the captives in Babylonia. It is certain that it spread through the whole Jewish community in Palestine when it was introduced. The Synagogue, Beth-ha-keneseth, "meeting-house," was a place where Jews assembled for religious purposes. It is reasonable to suppose that what first led to the establishment of such places, by the captives in Babylonia, was the fact that they were cut off for an indefinite time from their native land, and the Temple of their God. It was not only that they were prevented by distance from "going up to the Temple to pray"; it was that the Temple itself was destroyed, and its services no longer performed. There was thus no national worship of God at all. Yet God was still there, to be worshipped. Trust in Him had not died out from Jewish hearts when Jerusalem fell. What more simple and natural, for all that it was in fact an unheard-of innovation, than that here and there a company of brothers in exile should meet together, and pray to the God of their fathers? So far as I know, there had never been, in the world's history, any form of congregational worship till the Synagogue appeared. Till then, worship had usually been performed in some temple or local shrine, and consisted in the offering of some gift or sacrifice, usually through the medium of a priest, and accompanied no doubt by some prescribed prayer. This was done in the Temple in Jerusalem, while the Temple yet stood. And the Synagogue did not set out to do the same thing on a small scale, but to do something entirely different. The time came when the Temple service was restored, and the ancient sacrifices offered again with the fullest pomp of ritual. But the Synagogue did not on that account suspend its operations, or show the least sign of declining in popular favour.

The idea of the Synagogue was twofold; it was a place of worship, i.e. congregational worship, and it was a place of teaching, i.e. religious teaching. It has kept that twofold character ever since, or at all events kept it till long after the Talmudic period. For the Synagogue had come to stay, and it has continued down to the present day. Of all the institutions that man has ever devised, the one with the longest continuous history is the Synagogue. And that it answers to a real and permanent religious need is shown by the fact that the Christian religion took over both the idea and the form of the Synagogue, in organising its own meetings for worship, and has retained them ever since; except where sacrificial ideas, derived partly from the Temple worship and partly from pagan ritual, have interfered with and spoiled the simplicity of the Synagogue type of service. It is highly remarkable that the same elements which are familiar in Christian worship-hymn, prayer, Scripture reading, and sermon-are found in the earliest Synagogue services so far back as the records go. And the reason why they have been retained, practically unaltered, is surely this, that they have been found to answer their purpose so well that no change was felt to be needed. Whoever first devised the form of the Synagogue service came, no doubt unconsciously, upon one of the fundamentals of the spiritual nature of man, made one of the discoveries which determine the future development of the race for all time. The Synagogue perhaps grew up rather than was intentionally created; and it was accepted because it so exactly met the needs of those who first made use of it. During some twenty-three centuries it has served the purpose of common worship, both in its Jewish and its Christian form; and when it is considered how enormous has been the influence of the practice of meeting for common worship, such as the Synagogue first provided and made possible, then it becomes highly significant that the Synagogue appeared in close connection with the labours of Ezra and the new emphasis laid on the Torah. Whether, on the supposition that the Synagogue arose on Babylonian soil, it owed its origin to the conception of Torah as Ezra understood it, we have no means of knowing. But it is certain that its rapid spread in Palestine took place when the idea of Torah was already made dominant. And the Synagogue was naturally adapted to embody that idea. As the Torah was the revelation which God had made to Israel, the study of it and the practical application of it were both associated with the "house of meeting." To study it was to ponder the meaning of the revelation. And to practise it was, amongst other things, to worship the God who had given it. The Synagogue was intended to develop through religious fellowship the whole nature of those who met there, spiritual and moral, and by no means only intellectual. And even if the Torah which they studied had been nothing but precepts, yet these included a personal devotion to the service of God which was practically unthinkable without worship of Him. It was as natural that those who met in the Synagogue should join in prayer together, as that they should read or hear the book of the Torah, and should edify one another by expounding its contents. That is what they did; and the Synagogue did not fail to become a most important factor in deepening and strengthening the spiritual life of the people at large.

Now if the effect of the exaltation of Torah, due to Ezra, had been, as it is usually said to have been, gradually to harden and cramp the spiritual freedom of the Jewish mind, then either the Synagogue would have ceased to minister in any way to spiritual needs, or else it would have represented a protest against the deadening influence of Torah. But in actual fact there has never been, at all events till quite recent years, any such opposition between the Synagogue and the religion of Torah. On the contrary, it was precisely the religion of Torah which the Synagogue, through all these centuries, has existed to promote; and it was the Synagogue, so inspired, which served as the type and model of Christian worship. The Synagogue is one of the first-fruits of that Judaism which, under the lead of Ezra, took its stand upon the Torah.

Further evidence in the same direction, namely, that the tendency of the religion of Torah was not towards spiritual decline, is afforded by the book of Psalms. That evidence would be more cogent than it is, if it were possible to fix with certainty the date of every Psalm. That cannot be done; but the fact remains that the collection of the Psalms, and the use of that collection as a lyrical expression of devotion, belong to the time after, and not before, the age of Ezra. It is often said that the book of Psalms is the hymn-book of the second Temple; and I do not challenge the general correctness of that statement. But some, at all events, of the Psalms seem to be less adapted to the Temple service than to that of the Synagogue. I mean that those utterances of intensely personal devotion which make the Psalms so wonderful a treasure of spiritual experience, are much more in keeping with the simple worship of the Synagogue than with the stately and official celebrations of the Temple. It might indeed be said that some of the Psalms are too personal even for the congregational worship of the Synagogue, if we did not know, from common usage, that hymns of that character are constantly sung in Christian worship. There is hardly any one of the Psalms which could not have been quite well sung in the Synagogue; while there are many which have no obvious fitness for the service of the Temple. But, in any case, it was not until after Ezra had made Torah the dominant factor in Judaism that the book of Psalms was collected and arranged, and in part composed, as we have it now. It contains hymns of an older date, in some cases perhaps a much older date. And it is possible that some smaller collections had been made in times before Ezra. But there are several Psalms which quite clearly owe their origin to the idea of Torah as the supreme revelation, besides others which bear witness to the influence of that idea; while the collection of the whole is best explained as due to the need, first brought to the Jewish consciousness by the Synagogue, of some means of giving united expression to the thoughts and feelings of a worshipping multitude. Of course it is not here implied that the collection or production of the book of Psalms took place immediately after the time of Ezra. The collection may have only been completed as late as the first century b.c. But the point is that the whole was collected, and much of it composed, under the influence of the religious ideas associated with Ezra and the Torah. And it should be observed that the later be the date assigned to the composition of some of the Psalms, and the final collection of the whole of them, the stronger is the evidence that the religion of Torah was not the unspiritual formalism that it is often supposed to have been.

I shall have more to say about the Psalms, as evidence for the meaning of the religion of Torah, in the last chapter, in which I shall deal with Pharisaism as a spiritual religion. For the present enough, perhaps, has been said to show that the Judaism to which Ezra gave its distinguishing character by raising the Torah to its supreme place there, was thereby enriched and not impoverished on its spiritual side; it did not sink but rise, it became not more shallow and poor, but more full and deep, with greater power than it ever had before as a determining factor in individual life.

It may be objected, at this point, "All this may be very true, in regard to the religion of Ezra, as conditioned by Torah; but does it hold good in regard to the religion of the Pharisees, of whom, in this chapter, nothing has as yet been said? Ezra may have been such as has been described; but it is the Pharisees who are commonly said to have been mere legalists in their ethics, and formalists in their worship." I am quite ready to meet that challenge; and it was for the purpose of preparing to meet it that I have been so careful to make clear the conception of Torah implied in the work of Ezra, and its effect upon the religion of those who followed his lead.

As has been said already, there was no divergence in principle between Ezra and the Pharisees. Both accepted with entire assent the conception of the Torah as the supreme revelation made by God to Israel; and they owned in like manner, with entire assent, the duty of conforming in thought, word, and deed to the divine teaching therein contained. In what, then, did the Pharisees differ from Ezra? In what directions was development possible from the idea of Torah as he conceived it? And in particular, what line of development was still open to the Pharisees when they first became a distinct element in the Jewish national life?

In the time between Ezra and the Maccabees that provision had been made of the Synagogue worship, to which reference has already been made; and within the lines of a liturgy whose simple beginnings are ascribed to the Men of the Great Synagogue, and which was further enlarged by the piety of later generations, that piety continued to find expression in public worship. Private prayer never confined itself to stated forms; and private prayer was always an essential element in the religion of Torah. It must never be forgotten, that in all the developments of Pharisaism and Rabbinism on the lines of theology and the practical conduct of life, the spiritual and devotional side is always involved. The men who built up the huge fabric of Talmudic casuistry were men who prayed to their Father in Heaven (calling Him by that name), and who, in simplicity of heart, "worshipped him in spirit and in truth." If this is challenged, (though it would not be challenged by anyone who really knows the Rabbis), then I ask, were the great men who built up the equally huge fabric of Christian doctrinal theology men in whom the spiritual nature was atrophied? Let Augustine answer for his brethren among the Christians; and if his answer be allowed, (and no one who has read the Confessions will dispute it), then let it be allowed that R. Akiba, a double-dyed Pharisee if there ever was one, and a master of Halachah, may also have known "the deep things of God," and "walked in the light of His countenance."

The development of the religion of Torah from Ezra to the Pharisees, and on to the Talmud, took place along two main lines, it being understood that through all the spiritual and devotional side was ministered to. The two lines of development are indicated by two words, of which I have just mentioned one-H?lāchah and H?ggādah. To grasp the significance of these terms is essential for the right understanding of Pharisaism. I will not give a definition of them, just at this point, but will rather describe the two methods by which the Torah was interpreted, and for which these two names were chosen.

The Torah, as recorded in the Pentateuch, was set up by Ezra as the supreme revelation made by God to Israel. It was Teaching intended to be learned. Now one of the first things that must be learned by any man who would serve God is How he shall serve Him. What shall he refrain from doing? How shall he know, if he is in doubt, whether he ought to do this or that? And again, many things are done as being customary; there are usages, observances, ceremonial acts of which the origin is not known. Are these to be approved or condemned, when tried by the standard of the right service of God?

On the lines laid down by Ezra, and followed by the Pharisees and the Rabbis, the answer to questions such as these was to be sought in the Torah. Answers to some of them were found at once. In many passages, the words were explicit: "Thou shalt do so," or "Thou shalt not do so." In other passages, minute directions were given for the performance of certain acts. But cases would arise which were not expressly dealt with in the written Torah; and in such cases it became the duty of those who had most deeply studied it, to give a decision according to what they believed to be the intention of the Torah. They would infer from what it enjoined in a given set of circumstances, what it would enjoin in a somewhat different set of circumstances. This is what the early Sopherim did, and probably Ezra himself. And these decisions were on the one hand interpretations of the Torah, and on the other hand rules of conduct, to be applied as occasion might require. On both accounts they were carefully handed down, for the guidance and instruction of posterity. This is the Tradition of the Elders, and it extends from Ezra to the closing of the Talmud.

Now let us examine that tradition at some suitable point, say the beginning of our era, when Pharisaism was fully established. The Tradition of the Elders had become by that time a considerable body of decisions, originally given by way of interpreting the Torah so as to apply it in particular cases. These decisions were not written down, but preserved in memory. A Pharisee would say that all these were part of the Torah. They were not something added on to it, of merely human as opposed to divine authority. They were successive unfoldings of what had been hidden in the Torah from the beginning. The particular teacher who had given such and such an interpretation, thereby rendered explicit what had till then been implicit in the Torah. The Torah was not merely the written word of the Pentateuch, but the divine thought behind it. And to interpret the Torah was not to read something fresh into the written word, but to get something fresh out of it. If a Pharisee were asked, Where is the Torah to be found? he would answer: "The written word and the unwritten tradition together make up the Torah." And he would further say that the unwritten was more important than the written, because the unwritten unfolded what was concealed in the written, and extended its application. But it was all the Torah; and however far the process might be extended, however detailed the interpretation might come to be, it would still all be the Torah. For the Torah was in itself inexhaustible, being the full revelation that God had made. And all the drawing forth and unfolding of its meaning was but the bringing into the consciousness of men what was and had been in the Torah from the beginning. This is the theory of Torah, as it was certainly held by the Pharisees, and embodied in the Talmud. Whether Ezra himself held it, there is no evidence to show, and I do not claim that he did. But it is clear that once the Torah is made supreme, this is one of the possible lines along which that idea could be developed. There are no doubt other lines; but the main characteristic of the Pharisees and of the Rabbis is that they followed this line, and no one can say that they did not do their work thoroughly.

What it amounts to is this, that the Torah was to be made, not merely in theory but in practice, a complete guide to life. The aim was to learn, from what God had revealed, His will in regard to every slightest action that a man might do. That could be learned from the Torah; and if it could be, it ought to be. No amount of study was too great, if, by that means, something more might be learned of how God willed that a man should live. Every fresh interpretation of the Torah, when once accepted as valid, was an extension of its meaning, or rather a transference of its meaning from the region of the unknown to the region of the known.

The result of this process was a detailed statement that such and such and such actions were to be done by anyone who would rightly serve God, because they were what God Himself had taught in the Torah, as being His will. This detailed rule of right conduct is what is denoted by the name Halachah.[3]

Halachah is the most conspicuous element in Pharisaism, partly because it was the object of its authors' most close and continuous thought, and partly because its results were immediately visible in the actions which it prescribed. It was the Halachah which gave rise to the common opinion that Torah is the same as Law. It is the Halachah which has laid the Pharisees open to so much misrepresentation and obloquy. And, if there was one thing more than another that a Pharisee would extol as divine, it was the Halachah; because it was to him the express direction of God how rightly to serve Him.

Evidently the greatest care would be needed in the interpretation of the Torah, to draw from it the right conclusion. If the result-the Halachah-was to be accepted as the divine teaching, made explicit upon such and such a point, it could not be left to chance or caprice to determine the form in which it should be expressed. It was not open to any teacher to give his own interpretation upon some point and straightway to say, "This is the Halachah," i.e. this is the Torah made explicit upon this subject. What was to be regarded as Halachah was only determined after careful deliberation, guided by the recorded opinion of earlier teachers, where known, and also by recognised rules of interpretation. The end proposed in such discussion was either to define in minuter detail some general rule of conduct derived from the Torah, or else to connect some already existing usage with the Torah so as to show that it had divine sanction. The masters of Halachah were not engaged upon the construction de novo of a system of ethics or a system of law. They were engaged in adjusting to the standard of Torah all the actions of life, so that in every one of them the divine will might be carried out. And when it appeared that such and such was the real meaning of Torah upon a given point, the Halachah ascertained by valid methods, then they were not free to decide otherwise upon that point. Which is only to say, what everyone must say, that he is not entitled to go against the authority which he personally regards as supreme.

The Halachah covered part of the ground which is usually occupied in a nation's life by the civil and criminal law. And this is another reason for the common identification of Torah with Law. Law there must be for the regulations of social life, the performance of contracts, the prevention of crime, and the like. The Jews needed a civil and criminal law, as any civilised people needs it. And though in certain respects they were subject to the Roman law, (at all events in the time of the Pharisees and the Rabbis), yet they devised a system of their own, because they would have their law based on the Torah. The Roman government they obeyed from compulsion; to the Torah they gave the full allegiance of heart and will. The Halachah accordingly is, to a large extent, a system of civil and criminal law based upon, or derived from, the Torah, and resting for its sanction upon the divine revelation therein contained. And if the Halachah, in dealing with such subjects as must be dealt with in a code of civil and criminal law, goes into minute detail, makes subtle distinctions, draws very fine lines between what is and what is not lawful, it only does what any adequate system of law is bound to do. And to say that the mass of detail and minute precept of the Halachah was, or must have been, oppressive to the ordinary Jew, is as true, or untrue, as to say that the ordinary Englishman is oppressed by the mass of detail and minute precept in the body of statute and common law by which his actions as a citizen are regulated, and which he is presumed to know. In the one case, as in the other, certain lines are defined by a recognised authority, for the regulation of action; but for any given person, it is seldom that he will be in a position to feel the constraint, or expressly to seek the permission, of the greater number of the laws under which he lives. If he is in that position, then the Englishman under the statute and common law, equally with the Pharisee under the Halachah, acknowledges a rule of conduct having authority over him, and not to be disobeyed with impunity. And the main difference is that, to the Jew, the authority of the Halachah was the authority of the Torah, and the Torah was the revelation of God. So that, to the Jew, the code of civil and criminal law was specifically sacred in a way that it is not to the Englishman.

But the Halachah, as the reader will wish to remind me, came very much more closely home to the Jew than a code of civil and criminal law could do. It was the rule of his private and domestic life, it defined his conduct both towards God and his fellow-man. Certainly it did. And the Pharisee would say, "Why not? Do I not need to serve God in everything I do, however small? And if the Torah can teach me exactly-yes, very exactly-what is most pleasing to Him, shall I not thankfully receive that teaching, and the more of it the better?" On this theory, it can easily be seen that there is no real distinction of great and small, important and trivial, in the things that are done in accordance with Halachah, because, in each case, what was done was regarded as a doing of God's will. In themselves, and apart from that, actions were trivial or important, great or small, and the Pharisees knew perfectly well that they were. But the Pharisee never regarded the mere doing of the action as sufficient; in all and every case there must be the purpose of serving God, the intention of pleasing Him. If he were assured that God had directed such and such a thing to be done, in a given case, then he would not say, "This is a trivial thing," or "This is a great thing"; but, "This is precisely what God would have me do at this moment and under these circumstances," and he felt a joy in doing it as exactly as he could. All this is widely different from what Christians are accustomed to, in determining their actions; but my object is to make clear the point of view of the Pharisees, and to show that on the lines of their theory they were perfectly justified in those precise definitions of conduct, even in matters which on other lines would be considered trifling. However small might be the details upon which the Halachah was defined, it was still Torah that enjoined the doing of the action in this way and not in that way, though, on the face of it, there might seem to be no reason to do it in one way rather than another. And the authority of Halachah was the will of God. It is easy to pick out from the Mishnah instances of minute regulation upon points of no apparent importance-such, for instance, as the rules for dealing with an egg laid upon the Sabbath. If a Pharisee were challenged upon that, or any similar case, he would say: "The Torah, the divine revelation, extends over the whole of life; and its principles, when drawn out and applied to that particular case, yield the results stated in the Halachah, bearing thereon. The divine will is taught me in regard to that; and what concerns me is the doing of the divine will, and not the smallness of the occasion in regard to which I do it."

The duties enjoined in the Halachah were called "Mitzvōth," i.e. commandments. And the essence of a "mitzvah" was that it was a thing which God willed to have done. It was an occasion of service, a means offered to man by which he could in a given instance please God. Therefore the Pharisee delighted in being able to perform a "mitzvah"; and it never occurred to him that he was burdened by the weight or oppressed by the number of them. "The 'Mitzvōth,'" said a famous Rabbi, "were only given in order to purify Israel. The things commanded made no difference to God" (Rab, in Ber. R. § 44, p. 89a). They were so many opportunities given, by the sheer kindness of God, for man to do his Maker's will. Why God should be pleased to direct that such things should be done just in that way and in no other, it was not for man to inquire. All that he had to do was to take the opportunity, and serve God in the manner which God enjoined. Merely to do the action, without the conscious assent of his will and the devotion of his heart, was no fulfilment of his duty; for what God desired was the harmony of the human soul with Himself in willing obedience, and not that, for instance, just 2000 cubits and no more should be the extent of a Sabbath day's walk.

R. Jo?anan b. Zaccai, a contemporary of Jesus, was once asked what was the reason for performing all the ritual of the sacrifices, and the other minuti? of the ceremonial law. He answered: "A corpse does not defile, and waters do not cleanse. But it is a decree of the King of kings. The Holy One, blessed be He, hath said, 'I have ordained my statute; I have decreed my decree. Man is not entitled to transgress my decree.' As it is written (Num. xix. 2), 'This is the decree of the Torah'" (Pesikta 40b). That is a far-reaching saying, and gives the clue to the whole meaning of the Halachah, as the rule of right conduct deduced from the Torah, and applied by the Pharisees.

It is obvious that a theory like that lends itself to abuse, because it makes a severe demand for constant devotion on the part of the man who lives under it. Undoubtedly it could, and in some cases it did, lead to that mere formalism and hypocrisy which have been charged upon the Pharisees as a class. The Pharisees themselves were perfectly well aware of the danger, and that it was not always successfully averted. But most distinctly, such formalism and hypocrisy were only the perversion of Pharisaism and not inherent in it. And not only so, but for the Pharisees as a class, on their own showing in the Talmud, the Halachah, with its abundant "Mitzvōth," was felt to be a help and not a hindrance to him who would walk with God, a joy and not a burden.

The Pharisees, as was explained in the previous chapter, were those in their time who interpreted most strictly the Torah which in some degree all Jews recognised. It was they who worked out the Halachah, as it was they who carried out its principle into the minutest details of practice. On their theory of Torah, it was clearly their duty to be as precise as they were in their food and their dress, in the "tithing of mint, anise, and cumin," the wearing of their phylacteries just so and not otherwise, in their scrupulous regard to "clean" and "unclean," "lawful" and "forbidden," and the like. And it was only for the sake of being in a position to carry out more fully what they deemed to be the will of God, in all these and many other matters, that they separated themselves from those who were less careful, and formed themselves into groups, societies, companionships, as they called them (?abūrōth). That separation is indicated by the name applied to them, Pherūshim, or Pharishaia in the common Aramaic speech. Their own name for themselves and each other was "?aberim," "companions," as they were "banded together for a full obedience" to what God had enjoined in the Torah.

It is easy to make Pharisaism appear ridiculous, a mere extravagance of punctilious formalism. But that is only possible to those who look at it from a point of view which is not that of its devoted adherents, or who judge it by a standard which they never recognised. Pharisaism is entitled to be judged according to what the Pharisees themselves meant by it, and its worth to be estimated by what they found in it, without comparison with other and widely different conceptions of the theory or practice of the service of God. I shall make no such comparisons, either now or later. My whole object is to present Pharisaism as I believe it really to have been to the Pharisees themselves, who, whatever else they were, were in deadly earnest about it all, and gave even to that Halachah, which more than anything else has brought scorn and ridicule upon them, the patient labour of at least six centuries.

I believe that, if the Pharisees had had nothing more than the Halachah, they would still have made a religion out of it. I mean, if they had developed from the Torah, which was to them the supreme revelation, only its Mitzvōth, they would still have been able to find in it some satisfaction for the spiritual wants of their souls. But they had much else, as will be shown in more detail in subsequent chapters. It was their task, or rather their absorbing delight, to elaborate the Halachah, to make it an ever more perfect exposition of the divine will in regard to the conduct at least of Israel; as it was their joy, in the obeying of those precepts, to "walk humbly with their God," as they certainly did. But it should be borne in mind that in addition to the Halachah, with its strenuous and salutary discipline of thought and action; there was the whole range of meditation upon divine things-speculation, imagination, inquiry into the mysteries of nature and human experience, devout wonder at the ways of God and the marvels of His world, all, by the light which He had given in His Torah. For great as the Halachah was, and divine and holy, the Torah was greater, for in it God had given all that He had to give. "Greater," said a Rabbi, "is one single word of Torah, than all the 'Mitzvōth' contained in it." And another: "All the world is not equivalent to one single word of Torah" (j. Peah. 15d), meaning that the beholding of the perfect revelation of God is more than the realisation in action of a part of it. Again, extravagance, it will be said. Yet only the extravagance of exalting in spoken word that which is owned as supreme in thought. The phrases may be to non-Jewish ears devoid of serious meaning; but in that way the Pharisees chose to express what in their hearts they owned as fully and perfectly divine, that Torah which to them was wisdom from God, the revelation of all truth, goodness, power, and love. It was to them the very expression of the mind and thought of God; and that is what they meant when they said that God looked upon the Torah when He created the world (Tanh. 2b), or that He Himself studies the Torah every day. It is His self-communing made known to man.

All this, which covers the whole field that is occupied in other religions by doctrinal and speculative theology, was included in the Torah and formed part of the religion of those who owned it as supreme. And all this had its place in their thought along with the Halachah.

And at the heart of those same Pharisees there was the piety which sought and found God in the worship of the Synagogue and the home, which looked to Him with love and humble trust, and knew Him to be not far off but very near, no mere abstract power, no hard taskmaster, but the Heavenly Father.

These things I believe to be true of the Pharisees; not of every individual, just as one would not say of every Christian that the full glory of his religion was realised either in him or by him, but true as the full expression of what Pharisaism meant, and true in a larger measure as the experience of those who professed it.

Beneath all that outward guise of unfamiliar phrase and uncongenial method, so far removed from all that to Christians seems the natural expression of religion, there was nevertheless the communion of living souls with the living God; and however different was the way in which they felt called to walk, from that in which other men walk, in that way they steadfastly continued; and, knowing in their hearts that God was with them, they "trusted in Him and were not ashamed."

* * *

Pharisaism and Jesus

It is from the New Testament that the ordinary Christian reader gets his ideas about the Pharisees. There is mention in the Gospels of frequent encounters between Jesus and the Pharisees; and the Epistles of Paul contain much severe comment on the Pharisaic conception of religion. No one, who desires to understand what the Pharisees themselves meant by their religion, can afford to pass by, without careful examination, these records of unfavourable criticism; and he must enter upon such examination not by any means with the preconceived intention of confuting the critics or of agreeing with them, but simply for the purpose of getting to know why there was such criticism, and what truth lay on each side in the controversy. With this object, I shall devote one chapter to the study of the opposition between the Pharisees and Jesus, and another to that between Pharisaism and the teaching of Paul. Incidentally, it will be possible to find room for various points which bear upon what has been said in the foregoing chapters.

It will be admitted that to discuss the relation of the Pharisees to Jesus is to tread upon delicate ground; for, whatever Jesus was, the place which he holds in the thought and reverence of Christians is shared by no one else; and it is less easy to say the right thing when he is regarded as a party in a controversy than when he is contemplated as in himself supremely great. It is less easy, because the controversy was one in which sharp and bitter things were said on both sides; and to regret that they were said, and still more to suggest that they were said without sufficient warrant, is to cast inevitable reflections on those who said them. It is easy to say that the Pharisees were wrong-that is only what is expected of them; it is another thing to say that Jesus was wrong, that even he did less than justice to his opponents, and, in his intercourse with them, showed upon occasion qualities which were extremely human but not obviously divine. I yield to no one in my reverence for Jesus; he is, to me, simply the greatest man who ever lived, in regard to his spiritual nature. Some may think that too little to say of him; others may think it too much. I do not stay to argue the point; I only wish to make clear, beyond any misunderstanding, my own position. What I have to do at present is to deal with the fact that between Jesus, being such as I have indicated, and the Pharisees, there was an opposition of thought and principle too great to be resolved into harmony; and I wish to study that opposition, so as to judge fairly-that is, without prejudice one way or the other-the real meaning of it. If, on the one side, the verdict is expressed in the phrase, "Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites," on the other it is summed up in the assertion, to be found in the Talmud, "Jesus practised magic and led astray and deceived Israel" (b. Sanh. 107b). To say offhand that one of those assertions is true and the other false is merely to beg the question. It is more to the purpose to understand how it came about that they were said. That such a statement should be made about Jesus is to Christians hard to endure. They feel it to be unjust and untrue. That such a statement should be made about the Pharisees is to Jews hard to endure. They feel it to be unjust and untrue. They are the weaker party, and they have the right to be heard.

In view of the sharp contrast expressed in the two sayings just referred to, it might seem that the Pharisees and Jesus had nothing in common. And indeed the final breach was inevitable and irreparable. Religion as the Pharisee conceived it could not come to terms with religion as Jesus conceived it. As to that I will say more presently. But it is well to bear in mind, and even to emphasise, the fact that there was nevertheless a considerable amount of common ground between them, much more than is usually supposed. With a great deal of what Jesus said about God, and about man's relation to Him, no Pharisee would feel disposed to quarrel, or, so far as the evidence goes, ever did quarrel. The discussions in the Gospels did not turn, for instance, on the question whether Jesus should or should not have referred to God as the Father in Heaven, or whether forgiveness was God's sure answer to repentance. No Pharisee ever challenged him on either point, or on many another of the directly religious and ethical sayings which he uttered. A Pharisee could not so have challenged him without disowning his own religion. Modern Jewish historians not unnaturally lay much stress upon the similarity between the teaching of Jesus and that of the Rabbis, at all events the best of them; and that similarity cannot be denied, whatever may be the explanation of it. Moreover, it is not merely a similarity of phrase, though no doubt in some cases it is nothing more. That proverbial sayings should be used alike by Jesus and the Rabbis is not wonderful. Such were, for instance: "It is enough for a disciple to be as his master" (b. Ber. 58b); "With what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again" (Sot. i. 7); "Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof" (b. Ber. 9b); "Physician, heal thyself" (Ber. R. xxiii. 4), which Jesus himself mentions as a familiar proverb (Luke iv. 23).

These were part of the common stock of daily speech, and are no evidence either for or against a similarity between the ideas of Jesus and those of the Pharisees. But when Jesus said, "Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand," he was referring to what was already familiar to his hearers, and had been, long before John the Baptist had begun to deliver his message. And when the Sermon on the Mount was first spoken, it was not all strange and new to the hearers. The general character of the sayings there grouped together is thoroughly Jewish; so much so that one could hardly imagine a Greek saying them. There are differences, certainly, between the sayings contained in the Sermon on the Mount and the Rabbinical parallels to them; and for some of them no Rabbinical parallels can be found. But, take it altogether, the Sermon on the Mount would seem to a Pharisee to be very like what he believed already. Even the Lord's Prayer would not be wholly new. Certainly some of its phrases can be paralleled in the Rabbinical literature; though no less certainly there are others which cannot. For the prayer as a whole, there is no parallel in Jewish sources-a very significant fact. But "Our Father which art in Heaven" is Jewish; so also, "Hallowed be Thy name. Thy Kingdom come"; "Give us this day our daily bread"; "Forgive us our debts"; "Deliver us from the evil." I am not sure about "Lead us not into temptation." And if "Thy will be done" means the same in the Lord's Prayer as it meant when uttered in Gethsemane, there is no parallel to it in Jewish sources.

This carries us into the very heart of the religion of Jesus. And in regard to these fundamental beliefs there was no disagreement between him and the Pharisees. I am perfectly well aware that the Rabbinical parallels, even those most complete, are found in literature which is later than Jesus, and I shall rightly be challenged to show on what ground I hold that these later Jewish dicta represent the beliefs of the Pharisees in the time of Jesus. I do not agree with Jewish scholars who say that Jesus borrowed them all from the Rabbis of his time. A man of such independent thought as Jesus certainly was, would hardly need to go in search of such ideas, as not having them already himself. It is inconceivable that Jesus should never have thought of calling God "Our Father in Heaven" until Hillel or Shammai had instructed him to do so. The point scarcely needs to be laboured. I put on one side altogether the theory that Jesus was indebted to the Rabbis of his time for the beliefs, and the verbal forms of them, which he shared with the Pharisees.

But with no less decision must the theory be rejected according to which these various beliefs and phrases were borrowed from Jesus. If they had been, i.e. if Pharisees who heard Jesus say these things had adopted them as their own, and even to some extent made them current in their own religious teaching, it is perfectly certain they would never have been allowed into the Talmud. Suppose, for instance (which is what a great many people suppose), that Jesus had been the first to use the phrase, "Our Father which art in Heaven," so that to Jewish ears that had been entirely unknown until he used it. In that case, the origin of the term would have been perfectly well remembered; and the feeling against Jesus in Pharisaic circles was far too strong to allow, for a moment, the use of a phrase known to have been coined by "the Sinner of Israel." The earliest occurrence of the term in the Mishnah, so far as I know, is at the end of chapter ix. of the treatise Sotah; and there the person who uses it is R. Eliezer b. Horkenos. This particular Rabbi is very well known. He lived at the end of the first century of our era. He got into trouble on one occasion; and the reason of his trouble, according to his own admission, was that he had unwittingly praised something that was told him, and which he afterwards learned was a saying of Jesus. He was filled with horror at the thought that he could ever have approved anything which had emanated from that teacher. Now R. Eliezer himself was probably too young to have seen and heard Jesus; but his old master, R. Jo?anan b. Zaccai, was a contemporary, and must have witnessed the tragedy in Jerusalem. If Jesus had invented the term, "Our Father in Heaven," that fact would be well within the knowledge of R. Eliezer, and he would have cut off his right hand sooner than have used the phrase. Instead of that, he used it with devout intention: "Who is there on whom to lean, except our Father who is in Heaven?" It was a phrase which expressed the ground of trust in God. And neither to himself nor to anyone else did it occur that he was using a phrase either recent or suspicious in its origin.[4]

All this goes to show that there cannot have been any borrowing from Jesus on the part of those who recorded in the Talmud sayings similar to his, or who used phrases implying similar beliefs. It is just conceivable that slight and unimportant sayings of his might have been picked up and made current amongst the Rabbis. But that phrases so important and so numerous as those which are offered as parallels to the teaching of Jesus, should have been borrowed from him, is, to anyone who knows the Talmud at all, a sheer impossibility.

There remains, accordingly, this alternative, that such phrases represent what was familiar to and accepted by both Jesus and the Pharisees, as ground truths about which there was no dispute. Jesus did not explain, as he had no need to explain to his hearers, why he called God the Father in Heaven. He took it for granted that they knew whom he referred to and what he meant. And no Scribe ever asked him to explain his meaning. It is clear that, wherever it came from, the term "Father in Heaven," as applied to God, was not new in the time of Jesus. It was part of the common stock of religious ideas, a natural element in the Jewish religion of that time. When and how it first came into use I do not know. It is not found, in so many words, in the Old Testament or the Apocrypha, though there is a broad hint of it in Isa. lxiii. 16, "Surely Thou art our Father, etc." If it be (and who will deny that it is?) one of the great watchwords of spiritual religion, then observe that it can only have come into use in the time between the Maccabees and Jesus; and no other source for it can be deemed so probable as the Synagogue, the home of the religion of Torah.

And much the same argument applies to the rest of what can be shown to be similar in the religious ideas of Jesus and those of the Rabbis. They cannot have been borrowed from Jesus. They were known in his time because he gave utterance to them, and was not challenged for doing so. They were known and devoutly believed by the Talmudic Pharisees; there is no indication of their being a novelty. They must therefore represent substantially what was held and believed by the Pharisees in and before the time of Jesus.

It may, of course, be argued that Jesus put a deeper meaning into the common terms than the Pharisees did. But this is extremely difficult to prove; and merely to say that he did is to beg the question. Who would venture to say that all Christians put precisely the same meaning upon the common terms which they employ, or that a given term will not mean to a deeply spiritual Christian much more than it would to a shallow and frivolous one?

I do not contend that all the Pharisees, or any of them, were the equals of Jesus in spiritual depth, just as I would not contend that all Christians, or any of them, were his equals in that respect. But there is certainly no warrant for saying that all Pharisees understood the common phrases of their religion in a low and narrow sense, as compared with the sense in which Jesus understood them. To say that "Our Father in Heaven" meant for the Pharisee only that God had chosen Israel to be His own people, and that the name Father "did not in the Jewish theology lead to a deeper insight into the nature of God as Love," is one of the flagrant misrepresentations with which Weber's book abounds (Weber, p. 150). There may have been Pharisees to whom the phrase meant nothing more; there certainly were Pharisees to whom it meant that God was near to each one of His children, in love and mercy and personal care. That the Pharisee thought of God only, or even mainly, as distant and inaccessible, or as a taskmaster whose service was hard, is a baseless fiction. Even, then, allowing that Jesus, by the depth and power of his own spiritual nature, did read into the common terms of Jewish religion a fuller meaning than had been previously found there, he nevertheless used those terms because they served to carry that meaning, as they stood and without alteration.

We have, then, reached this position, that both Jesus and the Pharisees shared in common a Judaism expressed in the terms of a spiritual Theism, developed in the Synagogue and the home, and learned there alike by the Pharisees and by Jesus. It was certainly not the creation of the Scribes, qua Scribes, so that Jesus, or anyone else, would need to have sat at the feet of some Gamaliel in order to learn it. It was the spiritual inheritance of the Jew, into which he entered by natural piety, and from which neither the simple and unlearned nor the Scribe versed in the subtleties of the Halachah was excluded. I shall have more to say about this in the concluding chapter.

Such, then, was the common ground which Jesus shared with the Pharisees. We have now to study the opposition between them, which finally drove them apart in irreconcilable antagonism. The true nature of that opposition, the cause and ground of it, did not appear at the outset. Indeed, it may be questioned whether either the Pharisees or even Jesus himself ever fully and consciously realised the inner meaning of it. That the Pharisees knew why they distrusted, feared, and finally helped to destroy Jesus, is true enough. And Jesus expressed, in the plainest terms, the ground on which he denounced the Pharisees. But whether on either side the real significance of the struggle was clearly seen, is to my mind doubtful. Jesus may have seen it. I do not think the Pharisees did, or ever have done, from that day to this. To bring out that meaning, or what seems to me to be that meaning, will be the point to which I shall lead up in the remainder of this chapter; and with that in view I shall survey the main incidents of the controversy as they are recorded in the Gospels.

The appearance of Jesus as the successor of John the Baptist, taking up his message and proclaiming it with a force of his own, was enough to draw immediate attention to Jesus, and to incline men to give him a favourable hearing. This is to put the matter from the point of view of the people in general, and the Pharisees in particular, who were in possession of a settled religion, and to whom Jesus was an unknown man who had to make his name. That he preached repentance, and proclaimed the near advent of the Kingdom of Heaven, would be only a reason for listening to him. No Pharisee, nor any other Jew, with the national history behind him, would question for a moment that God might at any time raise up some messenger to proclaim His will. What else had the prophets been, in the old days? And had not John the Baptist been much like one of them? That John, and after him Jesus, had called his hearers to repent, was no reason whatever for resenting his boldness, or for denying his right to speak. It was the natural thing for a prophet to do; as, in much later times, it is natural for a revivalist to convict his hearers of sin, and lead them to the mercy seat. They do not resent being called sinners, and are only grateful for the glad tidings of the mercy which saves them. So with the Pharisees; there would be no disposition on their part to find fault with Jesus for coming forward as a preacher of repentance, let alone a herald of the Kingdom.

The point at which distrust of, and uneasiness about, Jesus first entered the minds of the Pharisees, is probably indicated by the saying that "he taught as one having authority, and not as their Scribes" (Matt. vii. 29).

To the conservatism which is commonly found in the adherents of a religion long established and settled in its ways, there was added in the case of the Pharisees a special veneration for the principle of traditional authority. If at first they merely noticed that Jesus was very independent, and wanting in the deference which was due to the sages and elders of his people, they could not fail before long to discover that this was something more than unconventional freedom of speech and manner. If he had kept to his preaching of repentance, and the announcement of the Kingdom of Heaven, that might pass; but he spoke of other things besides repentance, and put forward views of his own as to what the Kingdom implied. It would seem that he was assuming the position of a teacher of religion in general, since he touched upon subjects which were not specially connected with his mission. To the Pharisees he appeared as a sort of unregistered practitioner, if the comparison may be allowed. Much of what he said they could not but agree with; but how came he to say it? Some things they did not agree with, and what right had he to set up his own opinion against the teaching commonly received and held? So they began to ask, "Whence hath this man this wisdom?" and "by what authority doest thou these things?"[5]

Christians are accustomed, and rightly, to regard it as one of the marks of the greatness of Jesus that he did speak out of his own mind and heart, as having his authority within himself. But I am trying to put the case as it presented itself to the Pharisees, looking at it from their own very different point of view. There was not amongst them any office exactly corresponding to the position of a clergyman or a minister. They were all laymen; and if the priests had special functions, that was only in connection with the ritual of the Temple, and not with the giving of religious instruction. After the Temple was destroyed, the priest was only distinguished from the rest by certain privileges of precedence, and certain disabilities: he had no ministerial function as leader of a congregation. Neither in the time of Jesus nor after it were the Pharisees a priest-ridden community.

Of far greater importance than the priest was the Scribe: but the Scribe was only a layman. He was not consecrated to a sacred office, and to that extent set apart from the rest of his fellow-men: he was indeed chosen and appointed by those who were competent to do so, but, in regard to what he might or might not do, he was in just the same position as any Pharisee who was not a Scribe. What distinguished him from the rest of his brethren was that he made it his special business to study the Torah, both written and unwritten, and to qualify himself to be a teacher of it. His proficiency was recognised and vouched for, by those who were already accepted religious teachers, by some form of ordination. To become a Scribe was not so much to take orders as to take a degree, though that is not an exact parallel.

I have explained in the preceding chapter the way in which the Torah was regarded as the embodiment of the full and final revelation which God had made to Israel. It was the source of all knowledge, the supreme authority, the regulator of all action. It included within its range the whole duty of man, his entire relation to God and to his fellow-men. The written Torah was contained in the Pentateuch. The other canonical books of the Old Testament were to be read in the light afforded by the Torah, and to be valued for the help they gave in illustrating its meaning, making clear what had been left obscure in the Pentateuch. That there could be any contradiction between the secondary scriptures and the Pentateuch was in theory impossible. And when in the case of certain books, namely, Ezekiel, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs, contradictions were alleged, the alternatives were to explain away the contradiction or to reject the books from the canon. The books were retained, by an exercise of dialectic subtlety which is graphically indicated in the statement that a certain Rabbi burnt the "midnight oil" to the extent of three hundred barrels, in his studies to reconcile the book of Ezekiel with the standard of the Torah (b. Shabb. 13b).

The unwritten Torah was the explication of what was implicit in the written Torah, the unfolding into fuller detail or greater clearness of what was barely suggested in the Scripture. Evidently, therefore, to know what was contained in the Torah, i.e. what God had revealed, it was needful to know the unwritten as well as the written Torah, the former even more perhaps than the latter. And this could only be done by learning and remembering what had already been taught and accepted as a valid interpretation by previous teachers. A Tradition of the Elders was a necessary result of a religion of Torah. If a Pharisee were offered some religious teaching or were invited to do some action as a religious duty, he would ask (supposing it was new to him), "Is this Torah?" And he would not be satisfied until he had been shown that it was. The proof would be, either that it had already been taught by such and such a recognised teacher, or that the instructor, being himself a recognised teacher, assured him that it was so. This was the constant, and even necessary, form in which instruction was given in the meaning of Torah. And it should be carefully observed (a point which is not usually understood) that this method of Tradition by no means excluded individual initiative or progressive development of thought on the part of those who handed on the Tradition. There was no finality in the Torah; the diligent and devout student of it was always discovering something new, and if he could show (as he usually could show) that his new truth was in the Torah, that was an addition to its known meaning, while yet the Torah remained unaltered in the infinite richness and fulness of its contents, the perfect and divine revelation. I have shown that progressive development was most marked along the line of the Halachah. But there was even more of free speculation, individual initiative of research into spiritual things, though there was less of methodical advance, along the line of the Haggadah, as will be explained more at length in the fifth chapter. But there also the method, or rather the form, of Tradition was the one mainly used, presumably as being that which gave greatest security for the validity of the results obtained. The Pharisees in the time of Jesus, no less than the Rabbis of the Talmud, were well able to think for themselves, and in fact did so, upon religious as upon other questions. And the reason why they uniformly employed the method of Tradition was not that they were hidebound slaves of custom, but that their religion was the religion of Torah. As the Torah was not a burden, so the Tradition of the Elders was not a constraint. Christians may, and usually do, think that the burden and the restraint must have been felt. But that is only because the religion of Christians is not a religion of Torah; and one who is accustomed to the conditions and conceptions of the former, is not likely to appreciate, and seldom tries to understand, the conditions and conceptions of the latter. Equally, of course, one who has grown up in the habit of thought congenial to the religion of Torah does not easily appreciate and may seriously misunderstand the manifestations of religion, in thought and speech, where the Torah is not the controlling element.

When, therefore, the Pharisees became aware that Jesus was one who "taught as having authority, and not as their Scribes," they were confronted with a fact which they were not in a position to understand, to the meaning of which they had no clue, and which could only appear to them as a contradiction of their own principles. It would be extremely perplexing to them to know what to make of Jesus, and how to deal with him. What he said seemed to be good; but was it Torah? It might be; but how could they know that? Some of it, of course, they were familiar with-the common terms of the spiritual Judaism to which reference has already been made. But some things were new. Their own accepted teachers, the Scribes, had not taught these things, i.e. had not declared them to be Torah. Jesus was not a Scribe. He did not say, "This is Torah because I have learned it from so-and-so." And, not being a Scribe, he was not competent to declare it as from himself. How could they receive his teaching, without being unfaithful to what they already believed? And if they were unfaithful to that? It should be constantly remembered that the religion of Torah meant to the Pharisee the whole of religion, all that was possible of communion with God, and not merely of obedience to precept. Within its characteristic form there was room for all of that spiritual Theism which, as has been shown, the Pharisees had in common with Jesus. If he did not hold that spiritual Theism under the form of Torah, they did; and it was in its essence much the same for both. They did not know that the form of Torah, with its corollary of Tradition, was not necessary to the retention of the religion which brought them close to God in love and obedience, in joy and trust. And it seemed to them that they risked the loss of all that, if they tampered with the conception of Torah, or listened to one, however persuasive and however eloquent, who taught "not as their Scribes." If this was the point of view from which the Pharisees regarded Jesus, when they began to make closer acquaintance with him, then it is easy to understand how their feeling towards him would be something much deeper than mere petty jealousy or the prejudice of stupid bigotry. No doubt there was some of that. Inability to understand can express itself in ways which are mean and contemptible, as is seen in religious polemic in every age. The Pharisees had no monopoly of ignorant spite. But what I contend is that the attitude of the Pharisees towards Jesus will bear a much higher interpretation than mere arrogant jealousy against an unauthorised intruder. It was a repugnance towards teaching which they could by no means bring within the frame of their religion, and they could not imagine any other frame for it; it was a shrinking fear of a teacher who, with holy and good words and deeds, seemed yet to be leading them away from the only ideal they could recognise. And leading not only them but also the people, who were less able to guard against the danger, and who, as they observed, "heard him gladly," and even "hung on his words listening." A religion so deeply wrought into the souls of the best part of the nation as the religion of Torah had been since the days of Ezra, so strongly held, so passionately loved, so marked in the individuality of its features, could not enable those who clung to it to unlearn the ways of their fathers, and to adapt its contents to a new and unfamiliar form. The religion of Torah, for all that it had much in common with the religion of Jesus, could never pass over into the form which he gave to his religion. And although Christians may say it was "blindness" on the part of the Pharisees, they are not justified in saying that it was also "hardness of heart," which made them shrink from Jesus.

The occasions upon which they came into conflict with him were probably numerous; but the following may fairly be taken as representative of the rest:-Healing on the Sabbath; the question of divorce; the argument about Corban. Along with the first may be included the defence of his disciples for plucking the ears of corn on the Sabbath. And as a supplement to all may be taken the long invective against the Pharisees in Matt. xxiii. Whether this list follows the chronological order I do not know, and for the purpose in hand it does not matter. The difference in principle is not affected by questions of date.

It will be noticed that I have not included the question of the Messiahship of Jesus. Of course the Pharisees, like everybody else in Israel at that time, speculated whether Jesus was "he that should come," or whether they were to "look for another." But they did not directly challenge him on that point, as they challenged him on the points I have already named. Their challenge about the Messiahship was indirect. Their position would be that a man who set himself against the Torah could not be the Messiah. Conceivably the Messiah might in some respects supersede the Torah, but he could never oppose it. And when Jesus was driven to declare that in certain points the Torah did not represent divine truth, it was from that moment impossible that the Pharisees should recognise him as the Messiah, and inevitable that they should regard him as a dangerous heretic. This may explain why the Pharisees did not ask him, in so many words, whether he was the Messiah or not, and also did not offer objections to any supposed claim to that position made by him or on his behalf. The question was only put to him directly by the High Priest at the trial, and therefore not by the Pharisees at all. And it is scarcely likely to have been put then as a challenge to argument; it was much more an attempt to get evidence on which to convict him out of his own mouth. Jesus was condemned and executed on a more or less political charge, for which the question of Messiahship provided a useful basis; but he was really rejected, so far at all events as the Pharisees were concerned, because he undermined the authority of the Torah, and endangered the religion founded upon it.

That Jesus really did so is beyond dispute. His final position was one which could not be reconciled with recognition of Torah as the Pharisees regarded it. But it may well have been, and I think it was, the case that he was only gradually driven to this position, and that when he began his ministry he was not conscious of any discrepancy between what he was teaching and what the Torah implied. That is presumably what he meant when he said: "Think not that I came to destroy the Torah and the prophets; I came not to destroy but to fulfil" (Matt. v. 17). His quarrel, at that time, was not with the Torah itself, but with the Scribes and Pharisees, as being unsatisfactory exponents of it. "For I say unto you, That except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no wise enter the Kingdom of Heaven" (Matt. v. 17, 20).

There is here no opposition between the conception of Torah and that of life under the Kingdom of Heaven. Jesus also regarded the Torah, at this time at all events, as being the supreme and final revelation that God had given to Israel. To fulfil it was not merely to obey its precepts but to make one's whole life, in thought, word, and deed, respond to that divine influence. And Jesus maintained that the Pharisees did not go the right way to attain that end. He himself came to fulfil the Torah, by making that complete response to its influence, and by showing how it could and ought to be made. Any notion of getting rid of it after having once and for all satisfied its claims, belongs to a circle of ideas of which it is safe to say that Jesus never dreamed.

But yet, if the explanation here offered be correct, it is evident that what he still supposed to be Torah, and the religion of Torah, was not so in fact. He had grown up with the conception of Torah, like any other devout Jew; and he did not at once become aware that what he conceived religion to be was something that could not be expressed in terms of Torah. The Pharisees perceived the discrepancy sooner than he did; and while he found another form for his religion, they adhered to the old form because that was what they knew, and they could not comprehend anything different. To them, what he was doing was not reconstruction or amplification or exaltation of the old religion, but destruction of it. And, so far as the conception of Torah was concerned, they were quite right. Torah and Jesus could not remain in harmony. The two were fundamentally incompatible. And the Pharisees, being determined to "abide in the things they had learned," viz. Torah, were necessarily turned into opponents of Jesus.

This cleavage showed itself only gradually; and what forced it on the consciousness, first of the Pharisees and then of Jesus himself, was shown in the several occasions of dispute, where appeal had to be made to first principles.

I take first the case of the cure of a sick man on the Sabbath, as it is recorded in Mark iii. 1-6: "And he entered again into the synagogue; and there was a man there which had his hand withered. And they watched him, whether he would heal him on the Sabbath day; that they might accuse him. And he saith unto the man that had his hand withered, Stand forth. And he saith unto them, Is it lawful on the Sabbath day to do good, or to do harm? to save a life, or to kill? But they held their peace. And when he had looked round about on them with anger, being grieved at the hardness of their hearts, he saith unto the man, Stretch forth thine hand. And he stretched it forth, and his hand was restored. And the Pharisees went out, and straightway with the Herodians took counsel against him, how they might destroy him." It is evident that the narrator of that story did not love the Pharisees, and it would not be unreasonable to take a heavy discount off it on the ground of prejudice. But we may leave all that out of account. Jesus challenged the Pharisees to say whether, according to the Torah, he might or might not cure the man on the Sabbath. If he got no answer, it was certainly not because they had no answer to give. They would say, "Why do on the Sabbath what could be done on another day, if the doing of it would break the Sabbath? The Torah says that the Sabbath is to be kept holy; and this is done by refraining from certain kinds of action, in themselves perfectly right and proper. We believe that the right way of fulfilling the Torah-doing the will of God-is to do so-and-so. And we believe that in order to save life, when it is in danger, it is the will of God that we should break the Sabbath, in any way that may be necessary. But that we should not break it for any less urgent cause. Here is this man with a withered hand. He is in no immediate danger. Certainly it is a good thing to cure him. But why not have cured him before? And if his cure should stand over for a day, is that so great a harm to one who has been some time in that condition that the Sabbath must be made to give way to it?" That is the sort of answer that the Pharisees would make. Of course, the rejoinder is ready to hand, that to do good is right on any day, Sabbath or no Sabbath. But that is not the point. The challenge of Jesus was, "Is it lawful?" i.e. "Is it in accordance with Torah?" And the Pharisees were perfectly justified in holding that it was not in accordance with Torah. If Jesus interpreted Torah in a different sense, that was his affair; and they would not be the more disposed to agree with him if it be true that he "looked round about on them in anger." His action was in effect an attack on Torah, whatever his intention might be.[6]

The question of Sabbath-breaking was raised in another form in the incident described in Mark ii. 23-28, and elsewhere. This is chiefly of importance because it is made the occasion for the declaration that "the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath." The action of the disciples in plucking the ears of corn on the Sabbath was challenged by the Pharisees. Jesus defended it by an appeal to Scripture, the relevancy of which is not obvious, and by the declaration just quoted, which is only a valid defence if it means that the Sabbath can be put aside by man for his own convenience, however slight the occasion. The Pharisees would certainly agree to the declaration about the Sabbath (it is found, b. Joma 85b), but they would not admit the interpretation which Jesus put upon it. They would say that the Sabbath was a divine institution, intended for the benefit of man; and that, while for grave reason it might be sometimes right to break the Sabbath, yet that was not left to the caprice of anyone who chose to break it. If that was allowed, the blessing of the Sabbath would be gone and the divine intention frustrated. From the point of view of Torah, no other answer was possible. And Jesus, in his treatment of the Sabbath, by dispensing with the obligation of the hitherto customary observance of it, was disclosing the fact that he did not now look at the matter from the point of view of Torah.

How far he was conscious of this divergence, or rather, when he became aware of it, can hardly be determined. But in the controversy with regard to divorce the divergence became unmistakable. The controversy was strictly not about divorce in itself, but about the attitude of the Torah towards divorce. Jesus condemned divorce (Mark x. 2 fol.). Whether he allowed the one exception or not, his general condemnation of the practice is not open to question. But the Pharisees also condemned divorce. They could not abolish it, but they sought to restrict what had been the immemorial freedom of the husband to put away his wife at his pleasure. It is often urged against Hillel and Akiba that they allowed divorce for frivolous reasons, and Shammai is praised because he would not allow divorce except for unfaithfulness. Neither the blame nor the praise is justified or even called for. The only difference between Hillel and Shammai on the subject was whether the Torah allowed divorce for trivial reasons, or restricted it to the one grave reason. It was a question of interpretation of the authority recognised alike by Hillel and Shammai. It was not a question of the private opinion of either of them upon the ethical character of divorce. If Hillel and Akiba had seen their way to interpret the Torah in accordance with their own ethical judgment, they would certainly have done so. And, in fact, the Talmudic treatment of the subject is in the direction of making divorce difficult, and of giving protection, where possible, to the wife against the caprice of the husband. But in face of the fact that the Torah, the written Torah, expressly allowed divorce (Deut. xxiv. 1), not even Hillel and Akiba could establish the contrary view.

So far as the condemnation of divorce on its own account was concerned, the Pharisees would be in agreement with Jesus, though probably not to the extent of admitting no exception, supposing that Jesus himself went so far. The point of controversy was in regard to the Torah as bearing on the subject. This is clear, because Jesus himself appealed to the Torah. He asked the Pharisees, "What did Moses command you?" And it appears that what he was thinking of was the passage, Gen. i. 27, "Male and female created he them." But the Pharisees quoted against him the express command, Deut. xxiv. 1, "Let him write a bill of divorce, etc." So that here there was Torah against Torah. The Pharisees would say, "We agree with you that divorce ought, so far as possible, to be restricted and avoided; but, nevertheless, we cannot condemn it outright, because the Torah, which is God's own teaching, expressly allows and even enjoins it. But you, who do condemn it outright, how do you reconcile that with Torah?" Jesus answered that the permission to divorce was a concession made to human imperfection, and that the real intention of God was expressed in the passage in Gen. i. 27. But that answer implied necessarily that the written Torah was, in this one case at all events, not divine and perfect, since it contradicted itself. And such an answer was fatal to a recognition of the supremacy of Torah, as the Pharisees understood it. To them, the fact that Jesus had, in this one instance, definitely repudiated the divine authority of Torah, would outweigh the fact that upon the subject of divorce itself they were to a large extent in agreement with him. The result of the controversy would be a deepened impression, alike on the Pharisees and on Jesus, that his standpoint was not that of Torah, and that his ground principle was irreconcilable with theirs.

Another phase of the opposition between Jesus and the Pharisees is shown by the incident described in Mark vii. 1-23, of which the catchword is "Corban." The Pharisees and Scribes ask Jesus "why his disciples did not follow the Tradition of the Elders, but ate their bread with unwashed hands." Jesus turned upon them and charged them with making void the word of God by their Tradition. "For Moses said, Honour thy father and thy mother; and, He that speaketh evil of either father or mother, let him die the death. But ye say, If a man shall say to his father or mother, That, wherewith thou mightest have been profited by me, is Corban, that is to say, Given to God, ye no longer suffer him to do aught for his father or his mother; making void the word of God by your Tradition; and many such like things ye do." Now, even if the charge brought against the Pharisees were true, that they would not allow a man to be released from a vow in order to honour his parents, they would not thereby be "making void the word of God by their Tradition." On the contrary, they would be upholding it. For, while Exod. XX. 12 says, "Honour thy father and thy mother," Num. xxx. 2 says, "When a man voweth a vow unto the Lord, or sweareth with an oath to bind his soul with a bond, he shall not break his word, he shall do according to all that proceedeth out of his mouth." No provision is made for annulling vows, except those of a wife by her husband or her father under certain conditions. The practice of annulling vows generally was introduced by the Rabbis, and they admitted that it had no direct sanction in Scripture. If, therefore, in the case of a man who had made a vow to the detriment of his father and mother, they refused to release him, they would be upholding Scripture against their Tradition. True, Scripture would be opposed to Scripture; but the responsibility for that rested on Moses, not on them; and the practice of annulling vows would have the effect of removing that contradiction, and was perhaps so intended. However that may be, the charge against the Pharisees of making void the word of God by their Tradition would not be borne out in this instance, even if it were true that they refused to release a man from a vow of the kind described.

But the assertion that they did so refuse is contrary to the express statement of the Mishnah, which is the codified Tradition; and is moreover entirely at variance with the spirit of Rabbinical ethics in regard to respect to parents. The crucial passage is M. Nedar. ix. 1, and it runs thus: "R. Eliezer says, 'They open a way for a man on the ground of honour to his father and mother.' The Wise forbid. R. Zadok said, 'Before they open a way for him on the ground of honour to his father and mother, they should open it for him on the ground of honour to God. If this were so, there would be no vows.' The Wise agree with R. Eliezer, that in a matter which is between a man and his father and mother they open a way for him on the ground of honour to his father and mother." Two cases are here distinguished; in the first, if a man makes a vow of any kind, he is not to be released from it on the ground that it would bring reproach on his parents to have such a rash and foolish son. He must be made to keep his vow. But in the second case, if a man make a vow upon a matter between himself and his parents, i.e. one which, if he keep it, will occasion injury or loss to them, then he is to be released from it on the ground of honour to his parents. The commentators on the Mishnah all agree in this interpretation, and there is no doubt as to the intention of the Mishnah. Moreover, there is no indication that there ever had been a different opinion, as if the statement now made in the Mishnah had taken the place of an earlier statement. There is no evidence that the Pharisees ever held or taught the doctrine attributed to them by Jesus, while it is contradicted in the most definite manner by the declarations of their own legal authorities.

The charge is all the more pointless because the Pharisees, whatever else they may have failed in, always showed the most devoted respect to parents. A more unfortunate ground of attack could hardly have been chosen than that which is taken in the Corban incident; and the Pharisees would not have had the slightest difficulty in repelling the charge brought against them. Whether the error involved in the account of the incident be due to the Evangelist or to Jesus himself, an error it remains. And it is not fair, on the strength of the New Testament text, however it came to be written, to hold the Pharisees guilty of denying that which they themselves expressly enjoin. That is the fact. How the misstatement[7] came to be made, I do not know and will not speculate. Of course this does not in any way affect the truth of the principle enunciated by Jesus: "There is nothing from without the man which going into him can defile him, etc." That marks, in practical effect, though possibly not in theory, a complete breach with Pharisaism, since the Torah did, in the most explicit manner, distinguish between clean and unclean, and did teach that outward things caused defilement. The Pharisees held by the Torah; Jesus, at this point, threw it over. Yet the Pharisees could and did say that the defilement was not caused by the outward thing itself, but expressed the will of God that certain actions and contacts should be avoided. Why He had so willed, they did not know nor inquire; enough that He had so willed, and included it in the Torah which He had given. If it be said, "So much the worse for a religion and an ethic which are based on Torah," the question is taken down to first principles, and will be answered variously according to the view held of those first principles. I only observe that the religion of Torah was hampered by the fact that it applied a sublime theory to material some of which was originally quite independent of that theory and unworthy of it; and the Pharisees were unable to recognise that fact, while doing their best, and a very splendid best, to overcome a difficulty of whose nature they were not, and could not be, aware.

The opposition between Jesus and the Pharisees finds its most emphatic expression in the long speech contained in Matt. xxiii., the keynote of which is: "Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!" It is sometimes argued that Jesus himself did not say all the hard things in that speech, but that they represent the hostility of the early Church towards the men who had destroyed her founder. That is possible; and certainly the Evangelists do not incline to a favourable view of the Pharisees on any occasion. But I do not feel free to evade the duty of dealing with that speech by availing myself of that argument. Moreover, I do not see anything to make it impossible, or even unlikely, that Jesus did say all those things. Having in effect broken with the religion of Torah, and being in the position of a man driven to bay, fighting, as the saying is, with his back against the wall, it is only human nature that he should so speak as to hit hard. And, if it were the case of any other man, who would take the words spoken under such conditions as expressing the calm and deliberate judgment of the speaker upon the persons addressed, or as weighty evidence of the truth of the statements made? I am not going to go through the various charges in order to estimate the truth or the exaggeration of them. I shall make no suggestions that perhaps the Pharisees in that time were very bad, though they were more respectable before, and, in a curious way, recovered their character afterwards. Nor will I admit that it was perhaps true of the rank and file, but that men like Hillel and Gamaliel and Jo?anan b. Zaccai were honourable exceptions. If it was true at all, it was most of all true of Hillel and Gamaliel and their compeers, because these represented Pharisaism in its perfection, and their religion was the religion of Torah in all its height and depth and length and breadth. Whatever could be truly said of Pharisaism, either good or evil, was true of the religion by which they lived.

I take all that sweeping denunciation as the final expression of irreconcilable opposition between Jesus and the religion of Torah. And I shall content myself with making a few observations upon the fact and the meaning of it. As for the term "hypocrites," the justice of the implied charge is not established by the fact that the charge is made. That hypocrisy is possible under the religion of Torah is undeniable; but there is certainly no necessary connection between the two. The Pharisees themselves were quite aware that there were hypocrites in their ranks.[8] The retort would be justified that hypocrites have been found amongst professing Christians also. But recrimination is not argument. The hypocrisy question is not really difficult to understand, if the explanation already given of the religion of Torah be borne in mind. The theory of that religion, when put into practice, necessarily involved the doing of many acts in a particular way. Even actions in themselves of little or no importance became important when the Torah directed a specific way of doing them. They were done as a fulfilment of the will of God upon that particular point; and His will was not fulfilled unless there was, on the part of the agent, the conscious intention of serving Him. The mere opus operatum was worthless. To the Pharisee, starting from Torah as his ground principle, the doing of a multitude of apparently trifling acts was the obvious way of putting religion into practice, and he rejoiced in doing them. But one who did not start from Torah as a ground principle would have no clue to the understanding of what the Pharisees did, or why they did it. If such a one took as his ground principle the immediate authority of conscience and his own direct intuition of God, and if he then judged the Pharisees by his standard and not by their own, then he would easily draw the conclusion that they were hypocrites, because he would see them treating as of great importance things which conscience would pay no attention to; and he would judge that men who could be satisfied to discharge the obligations of religion in such a way, must either be ignorant of what religion really is, or pretenders to a piety they did not possess. The religion of Torah lays itself open to the misconstruction which charges its adherents with hypocrisy. But, apart from particular instances where the charge could be established, the charge only shows how far those who make it are unable to comprehend the Pharisaic conception of religion. To urge that their conception of religion was defective is legitimate; to condemn them as hypocrites on the strength of a different conception of religion is not legitimate, no matter by whom it is done.

And this leads me to the conclusion of what I have to say about the opposition between Jesus and the Pharisees. The conflict was one between two fundamentally different conceptions of religion, viz. that in which the supreme authority was Torah, and that in which the supreme authority was the immediate intuition of God in the individual soul and conscience. The Pharisees stood for the one; Jesus stood for the other. The particular occasions of dispute, some of which have been noticed, mainly served to bring out this fundamental opposition; at all events that is their chief importance.

The conflict was unequal, because it was one in which an Idea was matched against a Person. The idea of Torah was sublime, and deserved all the devoted loyalty that was given to its expression and defence. But it was an idea, mediated in the consciousness of those who held it. Jesus was a living soul, with the spiritual force of a tremendous personality; and against him the idea of Torah could not prevail. This was the real meaning of the fact that he taught "as one having authority, and not as their Scribes." This was the ground of his claim to forgive sins, a claim which the Pharisees could only interpret as blasphemy (Mark ii. 7). And this appears in all his relations with the Pharisees, as the force which opposed them, and which they could neither comprehend nor overpower. They could not at the same time retain the conception of Torah as the basis of their religion and admit the authority of Jesus. They saw no reason why they should abandon Torah; they could not therefore do other than reject Jesus. And when the verdict of the Pharisees is expressed in the saying of the Talmud, already quoted, "Jesus practised magic and deceived and led astray Israel," that contemptuous dismissal shows how completely they failed to realise that what had opposed them had been the strength of a great personality. And I do not think that on the Jewish side this ever has been realised from that day to this. If the Pharisees had realised it they would have met him with arguments quite different from those which they did use; possibly they would have refrained from controversy altogether. As it was, they remained within the circle of religious ideas which they knew, and continued to find in the Torah the satisfaction of their spiritual wants-a real satisfaction of real wants, such as men might feel who were not hypocrites and impostors, but earnest and devout, and chiefly concerned to do the will of their Father in Heaven, in what they believed to be the way He desired.

If there was on the part of the Pharisees a complete inability to comprehend the religious position of Jesus, there was also on his part an inability[9] to comprehend the religious position of the Pharisees. If he had realised what Torah meant to the Pharisees, he might, and doubtless would, have desired to show them a "more excellent way," but he would not have taken the line which he did of denunciation and invective, since to do so would defeat his purpose.

This I believe to be the real truth about the inability of both the Pharisees and Jesus to understand each other, or, in other words, the impossibility of harmony between the religion of Torah and the religion of the individual soul, if I may so describe it. That incompatibility is fundamental. Christianity, in all its forms, is a religion founded on personality, one in which the central feature is a Person. And Judaism, at all events since the days of the Pharisees, is a religion in which the central feature is not a person, at all events not a human person, but the Torah. It is near the truth to say that what Christ is to the Christian, Torah is to the Jew. And alike to Christian and to Jew it is almost impossible to comprehend the religion of the other. Even Jesus could not do it. And if he could not do it, what wonder that his greatest disciple, Paul, in passing from the one conception of religion to the other, should have failed to carry with him into his new faith the remembrance of what the old faith had meant to him while he lived in it?

To the further consideration of this essential opposition between the religion of Torah and the Christian religion I shall proceed in the next chapter, when I shall deal with the criticism of Torah in the Epistles of Paul.

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