21 January 2024
I felt the need to stitch together some things addressed in this week's community Bible lesson in Galatians 2.
The Talmud has roots all the way back even before the Exile. However, during the Exile it began to take formal shape, since the common language of the Hebrew people shifted away from the classical Hebrew. The Scriptures needed some slight translation, and a body of commentary arose in the process (called "targum"). It was generally good work at first. The rabbinical synagogue system grew, which in turn came under the sway of Greek philosophy when Alexander the Great marched through Palestine. That's what corrupted the whole process of developing commentary.
The Hellenist shift was pervasive, but not uniform. There remained a lot of debate. From time to time, movements arose to restore the ancient Hebrew mystical approach and roll back some of the legal precedent that was becoming common Jewish civil law. The ministry of Christ and following explosion of disciples seems to have provoked another round of this renewal of the ancient Hebrew way. We should hardly be surprised when some of these folks joined the disciples, embracing what Jesus taught about ditching the legalism for a genuinely Hebraic understanding of the Law of Moses.
But old habits of mind die hard. Those who hung around the Apostles would have been pretty tame about their Jewish racism; Peter had broken that wall already. Peter stayed with a tanner (a Jewish outcast) and visited a Gentile home to share the gospel. When Peter had to go underground, James took the lead, and his teaching on this matter didn't change.
At the Last Seder, Jesus had openly declared the Jewish identity at an end. He gave his followers a new Covenant, a new Law -- love each other as Jesus loved them. This didn't sound so terribly new at the time because it echoed a rather common rabbinical teaching that feudal submission to God and loving your covenant brothers was the core of Moses. Jesus echoed that common teaching when He said, "On these two commandments hang all the Law and Prophets" (Matthew 20:40). He was hardly the first to say that. It took awhile after His resurrection for it register on His disciples that this was a new covenant altogether.
But they got it. If the Jews rejected God's Messiah, then the Jews were no longer God's people. Still, that didn't relieve the Jerusalem church of the practical necessity of obeying the Talmud as the basis for Jewish civil law. The Talmud was the law of the land, but Christ was the living law of God. They had to go underground for a while to avoid prosecution under the civil law, and so had to maintain a Jewish pretense in the public eye most of the time. It wasn't that hard to do, but it made it really difficult to keep in front of their minds how their loyalty to Christ meant theoretically denouncing their Jewish national identity. They would have been very careful to keep that kind of talk private. They would have been reluctant to discuss it with new converts, because espionage was a problem very early on.
So, it should surprise no one that some of those later converts brought with them a false notion of how following Jesus didn't actually mean a complete break with Judaism. This was likely part of the group that hung out with James, who would have been careful about what he said. The whole thing had echoes of groups like the Essenes and others that aren't named in historical sources, a collection of purist revivals.
The group that showed up on Paul's doorstep in Antioch likely included some of this bunch. They didn't have a commission from James to teach anything, only to take a look. The thrust of their talk was that Gentiles had to become Jews to follow Jesus, as He was the Messiah of the Jewish nation. They were missing the concept that following Christ meant renouncing their Jewish identity.
The presence of such a group influence would have captured the attention of Jewish government spies who were looking for a way to derail this whole purist thing, including the teaching of Jesus with it. They probably lumped Jesus in with the likes of the Essenes and similar groups. All of these movements had the effect of weakening the people's confidence in Jewish government. That's what would get the Sadducees' attention, and they were the first to act against this threat. This was a direct threat to Sadducee power.
The Pharisees came later, and their motives were a bitter religious spite against what they saw as an attack on their God's reputation and the implication of who could claim to represent Him. They no longer knew God, but arrogantly asserted they were the only ones who did. Zealous, but wholly misguided. It was less political and more purely religious and nationalist idealism.
Thus, the first Judaizers were spies working for the Sadducees, and this is what had hit the churches in Galatia. It was politically driven. Eventually, this effort was hijacked by the Pharisees when the Sadducees began losing power as things got shaky with Rome. The Sadducees disappeared, while the Pharisees took over the entire meaning of Jewish identity. Judaism is simply Pharisaism. And Pharisaical Judaizing was more spiteful and sinister. This is what shows up in latter New Testament letters. Thus, we see where the Masoretic text of the Old Testament was clearly edited to change the meaning of passages on which Christian teaching relied. It was a spiteful attempt to undercut the New Testament quotations from the Septuagint (Greek Old Testament translation from a couple of centuries before Christ).
The word "Judaizer" refers to a program aimed at making Christian religion more Jewish. At first it was a Sadducee operation, political and not based on idealism at all. They faded from the scene and the program continued on the basis of nationalistic idealism. As noted in my writings before, this effort succeeded in subverting the original otherworldly mission of Christian religion. Early Church Fathers quickly drifted into Pharisaical thinking.
Oddly enough, Zionism amounts to a sort of rebirth of the Sadducees. It's more political then religious, though it uses religion in the same cynical way the Sadducees did in New Testament times. The broad Jewish nationalism/racism is still alive and does not align perfectly with Zionism. The two overlap, but they are not the same thing.
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