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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
N.T. Wright
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August 19, 2017 - May 8, 2020
The event which precipitated all the major trends in first-century Judaism was, as we have seen, the Maccabaean crisis. It was, first, the backward reference-point for continued speculation about Israel’s eventual deliverance from pagan rule.
most Jews of the period cherished the hope that the covenant god would again act in history, this time to restore the fortunes of his internally-exiled people.
the Maccabaean crisis was also, second, the cause of some of the divisions within Judaism. Dissatisfaction with its outcome was the reason for the rise and agenda of at least some of Judaism’s different parties.
How and when Israel’s god would rescue his people were questions whose answers, in reflecting different perceptions of what it meant to be the people of the covenant god, divided one Jewish group from another.
Geographical factors were of some weight. There were considerable differences between the pressures upon, and consequent cultural, social and religious needs and viewpoints of, Jews in the Jerusalem area on the one hand and Jews in Galilee on the other.1 The former could focus attention most naturally on the Temple, on the problems of pagan overlordship and the threat to the sanctity of the capital, and on the maintenance of cult, liturgy and festival as symbols of a de jure national independence in the face of de facto sub-servience. The latter, Galilee, was three day’s journey away from
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the features of Torah which loomed largest were those which functioned specifically and obviously as cultural, social and religious boundary-markers, i.e. sabbath, food-laws and circumcision.
Adherence to Torah was obviously even more significant when Jews were living away from the land of Israel, among aliens and pagans in the Diaspora.3 There, and in Galilee, Jewish life centred on the local community, and its worship and institutions assumed an importance which, closer to Jerusalem, were overshadowed by the Temple itself.
If we had to guess where one would be most likely to encounter Jewish violence directed at other Jews who seemed to be compromising Torah, we should not look in the first instance at Jerusalem, but at Galilee, and perhaps even more those parts of the Diaspora wh...
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So it was that the maintenance of traditional Torah-based boundary-markers in Galilee, or in the Diaspora, had little to do with a detached theology of post mortem salvation, let alone the earning of such a thing by one’s own religious or moral efforts, and a great deal more to do with the preservation of traditional Jewish identity.
Some of the party divisions in first-century Judaism clearly reflect socio-economic divisions directly, with theological debates as fairly obvious rationalizations.
It is not insignificant that when the rebels seized power at the beginning of the war in AD 66 one of their first acts was to burn the records of debts.7 Hatred of Rome was not the only anger that characterized many Jews of the period: hatred of the wealthy aristocracy sometimes became more important.
The hope of Israel, and of most special-interest groups within Israel, was not for post mortem disembodied bliss, but for a national liberation that would fulfil the expectations aroused by the memory, and regular celebration, of the exodus, and, nearer at hand, of the Maccabaean victory. Hope focused on the coming of the kingdom of Israel’s god.
The Essenes, claiming (most likely) to be the real heirs of the Zadokite priestly line, refused to have anything to do with the ‘cleansed’ Temple, and established their own community elsewhere. The Pharisees worked within the system, but constantly reminded those in official power of the ancestral traditions which they were in danger of flouting, and reinforced their reminders with the threat implicit in their popular backing.
By the middle of the first century BC the problem of brigandage had become so acute, helped no doubt by the power vacuum while Rome was occupied with civil war and the threat from Parthia, that it was a major achievement to bring it under some sort of control, albeit temporary. Credit for this was given to Herod the Great, whose rise to power in the 40s BC was marked by his putting down of serious brigandage, notably killing the archilestes (‘chief brigand’) Hezekiah, whose family (arguably) continued the struggle in later generations.12
But it was between the death of Herod the Great and the destruction of Jerusalem (4 BC to AD 70) that movements of revolt came to a head, creating problems for governments at the time and headaches for scholars two millennia later. That there was widespread disaffection and readiness to revolt in this period is not in question. Exactly which groups were involved, however, has provoked considerable controversy.
We begin with our main source, Josephus. As is well known, he tries hard to shift the blame for the eventual catastrophe of AD 70 on to one particular rebel faction, exonerating the rest of the Jewish people. The Romans formed a major part of his intended audience, and Josephus hoped that they would look with clemency on the post-destruction Jews as the innocent victims of the violence of the few. Despite this clear agenda, however, Josephus continually reveals that resistance to Rome was far more widespread than just one rebel faction.
This flurry of rebellions in 4 BC was clearly occasioned by the proximity, and then the fact, of Herod’s death, which allowed the persistent hope for a new order of things to come to the surface. This illustrates one main principle of Jewish revolt: the seething unrest which was normally held down tightly by repressive government and brute force could boil over when a power vacuum appeared. It is, in addition, significant for the whole story that several such movements often took place specifically at times of festival, when Jews were thronging Jerusalem to celebrate their god-given status as
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The second, more serious, incident was occasioned by the imposition of a Roman census, whose implications were not merely economic but, to a Jew, theological: enrolling in Rome’s system meant admitting that the land and people were not after all sacred to Israel’s god.
Most of the revolutionary activity during the next sixty years was of the latter type, i.e. response to perceived provocation. The removal of Archelaus meant that Judaea became a Roman province in its own right rather than a client kingdom overseen from neighbouring Syria. Successive ‘procurators’ acted in more or less crass and heavy-handed style, which naturally had the effect of inciting Jews towards revolt. We know of at least seven such incidents in the ten years of Pontius Pilate’s procuratorship (AD 26–36):
This broad base of revolutionary activity is particularly the case in the main Jewish War itself (AD 66–73). The history of this war is bewilderingly complex, not least because it was as much a civil war as a war of resistance against Rome. Groups and factions formed, fought one another, regrouped, held different bits of Jerusalem at different times, called themselves and one another by different names, and generally made life as difficult for the historian as they made it miserable for their contemporaries.
But who, then, constituted these movements? Here there is no agreement in sight. We may distinguish three broad strands of interpretation that have been taken in recent scholarship. These are (a) a pan-Zealot theory; (b) a theory that blames the aristocrats for being the real trouble-makers; (c) a theory that sees several quite diverse groups.
First, there is the case for an overall unity of movement and ideology, a broad stream of resistance which, begun (as Josephus says) by Judas the Galilean, continued among his family and related groups until it reached its nemesis in the war. This position, massively argued by Martin Hengel, has a great deal to be said for it.58
Second, a parallel case has been made out by Martin Goodman, who agrees with Hengel that there was widespread resistance to Rome, but claims that the initiative and leadership in such movements came almost entirely, not from the lower orders of society as is usually supposed, but from the ruling class of the Jews.
Third, a case has been made for a much more diverse account. Richard Horsley, in a string of articles and two books, has argued for the distinctiveness of several groups, with different social backgrounds and agendas.
Horsley succeeds, I think, in showing that the start of the war was not due to the work of a single organized and long-standing Jewish resistance movement, but rather came about through the confluence of many streams.
It seems to me, in conclusion, overwhelmingly historically likely that there were, throughout the first century, many movements which laid claim to the tradition of active ‘zeal’, a tradition that went back, through the Maccabees, to the memory of Phineas and Elijah.
The sources for the study of the Pharisees are, as is well known, full of problems.
The cryptic references to the Pharisees in the Qumran scrolls are sufficient to confirm that the Pharisees held considerable influence at least in the latter half of the first century BC, and that they were regarded as a dangerous rival by a group which was itself manifestly an independent sect at the time.
The rabbinic evidence is massive, scattered, and highly complex, and taken by itself suggests a picture of the Pharisees as a group concerned above all else with purity, especially the kosher requirements: they are seen as the direct precursors of the rabbis themselves, and their disputes are recalled within the context of debates whose immediate relevance is to the very different situation of Judaism after the destruction.
Particularly in his early work, the Jewish War, Josephus seems clearly motivated to exonerate the Pharisees (and almost everyone else except the lowest orders) from blame for the war. It has often been supposed that this is a pro-Pharisaic bias, reinforced from a different angle by his longer account in the Antiquities which, despite letting the mask slip a little as regards the Pharisees’ involvement with revolution, stresses how influential the Pharisees always were.
It is usually thought that Josephus was bent on persuading the Romans to entrust the Pharisees’ successors, the rabbis, with ruling what was left of Judaism.
a different and very attractive hypothesis has now been proposed by Mason, as follows: (a) Josephus did not claim to be a Pharisee, but to have decided as a matter of expediency rather than conviction that, upon entering public life (as a young aristocrat in his own right), he would follow their general line;86 (b) Josephus did not like the Pharisees at all, but regarded their popularity as an unpleasant fact of life; (c) it is Josephus himself, not a source, who is responsible for vilifying the Pharisees, though when he discusses them as a ‘school’ he does so, as with the others, without
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The rabbinic material was not collected in fixed form until the end of the second century AD, with the compilation of the Mishnah, and consists for the most part of reported debates on the minutiae of Torah-observance, often between the ‘houses’ or ‘schools’ of the great teachers of the Herodian period, Hillel and Shammai. To argue from the silence of the rabbis is precarious in the extreme.
What started off (for instance) as a discussion of the biblical canon, with Shammai taking the stricter line (Ecclesiastes is not part of scripture) and Hillel the more lenient (Ecclesiastes is included), turns up as a discussion about purity, since if a book belongs to the canon it ‘makes the hands unclean’, i.e. one must wash after touching it.
Shammai, who was quite clearly a major figure in his day (the late first century BC), is presented either as too extreme to take seriously, or he is presented as agreeing with the school of Hillel over against—the school of Shammai!
By contrast, no story out of the vast collection of material about Hillel is unfavourable to him: ‘Hillel was everywhere claimed as the major authority—after Moses and Ezra—for the oral Torah.’
For these reasons, therefore—incompleteness, change of meaning, and evident bias—the rabbinic traditions about the pre-70 Pharisees cann...
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The stories in the synoptic tradition were similarly handed on in a context (whichever that may have been) which highlighted this emphasis. Such a perspective, like the rabbinic view of Shammai, makes it very difficult to use the New Testament as basic material in our reconstruction of the Pharisees.
Taking first this issue of identity, and the reference of particular technical terms, it is now generally recognized that, though many Pharisees were scribes, and vice versa, there were probably many who belonged to only one of the two groups.
The hasidim, again, may merge into the Pharisees, but the category remains imprecise, referring originally to the followers of Judas Maccabaeus but quite possibly admitting of a wider reference later on.
As for the haberim, they have sometimes been identified with the Pharisees,99 and sometimes with a smaller, more intense group for whom the Pharisees and their successors laid down regulations: all haberim were Pharisees, but not all Pharisees were haberim.
The continuing uncertainty on this point constitutes, in fact, one of the central problems in using the rabbinic material as a source for the pre-70 movement.
the name ‘Pharisee’ itself is a matter of considerable controversy, not to be resolved here;102 though Baumgarten’s case for the meaning ‘accurate, sharp’ (sc. in interpretation and application of Israel’s laws) remains attractive.
The major questions about the Pharisees in current debate concern two closely related areas: what was their agenda, and how widespread was their influence?
Josephus, as we noted above, emphasizes in his later writings that the Pharisees hold considerable de facto power in the early part of the first century BC. When it comes to the first century AD, things are not so clear. At one extreme (now normally abandoned) they have been held to be virtually the ruling party in Judaism, obeying strictly all the Mishnaic rules for haberim and enforcing them on as many Jews as they were able to.
Another possibility is the view that, though the Pharisees may still have been quite numerous in the first century AD, their focus of interest had shifted, in Neusner’s phrase, ‘from politics to piety’, so that Josephus’ picture of the Pharisees intervening in major social and political events is anachronistic if applied to the generation before the destruction of the Temple.
Sanders’ current position is defined, in a complex way, by his disagreements with both of these. Over against Jeremias’ view of the Pharisees’ widespread authority, he suggests that, in the first century AD, the Pharisees were a small group, based only in Jerusalem, with little political significance, following their own limited agendas and without taking much interest, at least qua Pharisees, in the major movements of the day.105 Over against Neusner, however, he contends tha...
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I wish to suggest a different combination of elements within a historical account of the Pharisees and their agenda. Briefly, I shall argue (i) (with Sanders) that the Pharisees, though never a Jewish ‘thought-police’ in the first or any other century, did concern themselves with matters wider than private or ritual purity; (ii) (against Sanders) that these concerns often embraced political and revolutionary action, such that the idea of a self-contained Jerusalem-based group with little influence, and not much interest in who was doing what elsewhere, is out of the question; (iii) (between
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1. It is beyond a doubt that for quite some time before 63 BC there existed a pressure-group, known at least by its enemies as ‘Pharisees’. This group, not necessarily numerous, seems to have arisen around or after the time of the Maccabaean revolt, though its connections (if any) with that event are impossible to trace with any accuracy.
Whatever the disputes about details, it is clear that the great issues of the day had to do with the proper stance for a Jew to take up when faced with (what seemed to them to be) the encroachments of non-Jewish ways of life.
