The New Testament and the People of God (Christian Origins and the Question of God Book 1)

by N.T. Wright

Here the most attractive thesis seems to me the following: faced with social, political and cultural ‘pollution’ at the level of national life as a whole, one natural reaction (with a strong sense of ‘natural’) was to concentrate on personal cleanness, to cleanse and purify an area over which one did have control as a compensation for the impossibility of cleansing or purifying an area—the outward and visible political one—over which one had none.

Ceremonial purity functions almost as a displacement activity when faced with the apparent impossibility of national purity. Just as, for the Maccabaean martyrs, refusing to eat pork and refusing to obey the pagan ruler were one and the same thing, so the concern for purity functioned as a means of symbolically enacting that resistance to pagan rule which was nursed secretly and maintained in readiness for revolutionary opportunities, whenever they might be afforded.

It is vital, however, that even in this period, at the height of their influence, we do not imagine the Pharisees acting, or even thinking of themselves, as a kind of secret thought-police. They were not an official body. They were not even the official teachers of Torah: that was one of the functions of the priesthood, both in Jerusalem and in the local community.

The Pharisees sought to bring moral pressure to bear upon those who had actual power; to influence the masses; and to maintain their own purity as best they could. Their aim, so far as we can tell, was never simply that of private piety for its own sake. Nor (one need scarcely add) was it the system of self-salvation so often anachronistically ascribed to them by Christians who knew little about the first century but a lot about the Pelagian controversy. Their goals were the honour of Israel’s god, the following of his covenant charter, and the pursuit of the full promised redemption of Israel.

2. The arrival of Roman rule in 63 BC, and the rise of Herod in the late 40s and early 30s, curtailed the possibilities of the Pharisees exerting actual power either in any official capacity or through exerting influence on those with de jure power.

The Pharisaic agenda remained, at this point, what it had always been: to purify Israel by summoning her to return to the true ancestral traditions; to restore Israel to her independent theocratic status; and to be, as a pressure-group, in the vanguard of such movements by the study and practice of Torah.

Claiming to speak for Israel and her genuine tradition, they maintained a polemic against the ruling élite in Jerusalem and, though continuing to worship at the Temple, regarded its present officials and guardians as dangerously corrupt.

Increasingly, like other Jewish sects of the period (including the Essenes and the early Christians) they regarded themselves and their own groups as in some sense or other the replacements or the equivalents of the Temple.118 They also appear to have regarded themselves in some sense as prophets, whose traditional role always included speaking out on ‘political’ issues.

As a result, their agenda always pushed in one of two related and parallel directions. Either they would make common cause with the out-and-out rebels, continuing the tradition of ‘zeal’ which we examined earlier. Or they would withdraw into the deeper private study and practice of Torah, creating an alternative mode of Judaism which achieved its liberation from Rome, and from corrupt Judaism, by living in its own world where neither pagan nor renegade could corrupt it. It seems to me highly likely that these two options, the sword and the ghetto, were among the real points at issue between the Pharisees of different schools in the Roman and Herodian periods, even though later memory depoliticized the controversy and, in a period when revolt had been abandoned as having twice led to disaster, translated it into the less threatening debate between stricter and more lenient understandings of the Torah’s code of purity.

We may sum up the position so far as follows. We have found that in the period between the arrival of the Romans in 63 BC and the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70 there is a good deal of evidence for continuing political and revolutionary activity on the part of the Pharisees—evidence which Josephus has included in his account despite his clear wish to exonerate the party as a whole. Equally, it is clear from the broad drift of the post-70 accounts of pre-70 Pharisees that there were major divisions within the movement, and it is highly likely that one of the key issues concerned precisely the extent to which involvement in practical politics in general, and in revolution in particular, was appropriate for members of the movement.

At one point on this continuum we find Hillel, with his successors being Gamaliel in the 40s AD and Johanan ben Zakkai after 70. Each, it seems, was prepared to argue against revolution and in favour of retreating from the political sphere into the world of Torah study. (This too, of course, is a ‘political’ stance.) Let the Romans rule the world, as long as we can study and practise Torah.

At quite another point on the continuum we find Shammai and his house, advocating some kind of revolutionary ‘zeal’.

Although the discussions at Jamnia moved rabbinic Judaism firmly towards Hillelite rulings, we have every reason to think that up until 70 it was the Shammaites who dominated, and that they may have continued to be a vocal and sometimes victorious presence in the period between 70 and 135.141 The Pharisaic movement as a whole was dominated in this period by those at this point on the spectrum of opinion, whose inclinations brought them near to, and quite possibly right within, the revolutionary movements which, though coming to fullest expression in 4 BC, AD 6, 66–70 and 132–5, smouldered ceaselessly throughout the period.

When did this split within Pharisaism arise? Alon suggests143 that the two strains, one pro-zealotry, the other ready to accept Roman rule, arose in the time after the reign of Agrippa I and before the war (i.e. between 44 and 66).

I am not sure that we have enough evidence to say precisely when the split(s) occurred, except that it was at some stage between 63 BC and AD 66; I think it most likely happened when Herod took over from the Hasmoneans. This fits perfectly with the likely date for Hillel and Shammai as the founders of two new ‘schools’ within Pharisaism.

Sanders has shown just how difficult it is to be absolutely sure precisely which bits of later purity laws were observed by Pharisees in this period. But that they tried to maintain purity at a degree higher than that prescribed in the Hebrew Bible for ordinary Jews under ordinary conditions is not in question.

As we shall see later, the Temple functioned as the controlling symbol for Pharisees no less than for other Jews; and the purity codes functioned as a key means of granting to ordinary domestic life, and in particular the private study of Torah, the status that would normally only accrue to those who were serving in the presence of Israel’s god within his Temple.

The level of such influence is impossible to gauge accurately, but the fact that some Pharisees at least were clearly respected political figures (Gamaliel, Simon ben Gamaliel, and others during the war) should incline us to think that they were not without a voice in the official councils of state; and, a fortiori, it is highly likely that their influence as de facto teachers of the masses (even though the priests remained the de jure teachers) will have remained considerable.

the revolution of Judas the Galilean was in all probability closely bound up with the Shammaite wing of the Pharisees.

As to their numbers, the only figure we have is the ‘over 6,000’ mentioned in Antiquities 17.42 as refusing to take the oath to Caesar. But this figure, coming most likely to Josephus from Nicolas of Damascus, and referring to an event which took place in Jerusalem in the latter years of Herod’s reign (roughly 10 BC), can scarcely be used to give an accurate assessment of the number of Pharisees in Jerusalem, let alone in the country as a whole, let alone spread across Judaism in the Diaspora, half a century later—especially when that half-century had contained at least two major revolts which might well have encouraged others to join the movement.

But it does mean that they were, in this period, in all probability reasonably numerous, reasonably widespread, and reasonably influential.

It has even been speculated that the revolt in 132 was itself one result of the achievement of Jamnia: the Jews felt sufficiently united and consolidated to risk a further engagement with Rome.154

It is only when the revolutionary option has finally and visibly been excluded—i.e. after 135—that an actual split between ‘politics’ and ‘piety’ begins to make some sense (despite the anachronisms of those who try to push such a split back not only before 70 but into the Hasmonean period).

In any case, we may assume that between 70 and 135 the situation remained far more fluid than the later rabbinic traditions admit. Had the house of Hillel prevailed as thoroughly as those writings suggest, there would have been no support for bar-Kochba’s rebellion. As it was, it was supported by Akiba himself, who in retrospect is perhaps the greatest transitional figure of them all: clearly standing in the line of the politically active and revolutionary-minded Pharisees from the days of the Hasmoneans and Herod, he is then looked back to and reverenced as a great Torah-teacher by those who, in a drastically changed situation, highlighted concerns of which he would undoubtedly have approved but which he would have set in a completely different context.

After the second revolt there began the period which marked the real beginning of what we know as rabbinic Judaism. From then on revolutionary talk was taboo. It was rabbi Nehunya ben ha-Kanah, a disciple of Akiba, who gave voice to the changed mood: ‘He that takes upon himself the yoke of the Law, from him shall be taken away the yoke of the kingdom and the yoke of worldly care,’ and vice versa. In other words, study of Torah means that one need not be concerned about political power.

Those who study Torah in that mood will not need a Temple: Torah will do instead, as is said in the very next Mishnah saying, ascribed to rabbi Halafta ben Dosa, a sage of the second half of the second century: ‘If ten men sit together and occupy themselves in the Law, the Divine Presence rests among them’: in other words, study of Torah has the same effect as worship in the Temple. In either case one is in the presence of the Shekinah, the localized dwelling-place of Israel’s god.

First, if we know anything about the Pharisees we know that they prayed, and we know more or less what they prayed for. They prayed the Shema; they prayed the Shemoneh Esreh, the Eighteen Benedictions. But these prayers, in their origin, are very far from being the articulation of an escapist piety.

The second more general consideration concerns the Pharisaic belief-system. Josephus’ account of this gives prominence to the idea of resurrection.164 This belief, however, is not merely to do with speculation about a future life after death. As we can see from some of the early texts which articulate it, it is bound up with the desire for a reconstituted and restored Israel.165 This, as we shall see later, is probably the real reason why the Sadducees rejected it.166 The last thing they wanted was a major upheaval which might well snatch away their precarious power.

The doctrine of the Essenes, he says, ‘is wont to leave everything in the hands of God’;168 the Sadducees, on the other hand, believe that everything comes down to the exercise of human free will.169 The Pharisees take a middle position, believing that, though everything is brought about by providence, humans still possess free will.170

The Sadducees proclaimed by their very existence that they believed in seizing and maintaining political power for themselves. This much is clear from what we know of the Essenes and Sadducees. Reasoning in parallel, we may take it that the Pharisees’ belief was as follows: Israel’s god will act; but loyal Jews may well be required as the agents and instruments of that divine action.

we cannot simply agree with the idea that a shift from politics to piety took place, as described by Neusner and his followers in relation to the time of Hillel, and then transfer such a shift from this period to the time after 135. It is likely that the two ‘houses’ of Hillel and Shammai already represented two alternative ways of being Pharisees. Both were concerned with Israel’s liberation, and with the maintenance of purity on the part of those committed to this cause. But the former was happier to leave the issue to Israel’s god, and the latter eager to become the zealous agent of the divine action. Both were devout; both were, in the senses already described, ‘political’; they simply had different ways of putting the two things together.

But the last decade or so has seen this consensus under increasingly heavy fire. The double equation ‘Qumran community = Essenes = writers of the Scrolls’ is no longer held across the board. Many now argue that those who lived at Qumran were a subgroup, perhaps a splinter-group, of a much wider Essene movement, or perhaps the original group from which that wider movement grew.

Detailed study of the Scrolls themselves indicates that they come from subtly but significantly different communities: the Damascus Document, in particular, represents a different community and organization from the Community Rule.

They are arguably the work of (some part or parts of) a multiform Jewish sectarian group, the Essenes, which seems to have come into existence some time in the second century BC, or possibly somewhat later, and who, according to Philo and Josephus, numbered over 4,000.183

If it is true that the Qumran community, and/or those who wrote the Scrolls, were part of a wider Essene movement, we have no evidence for the continuation of such a movement after the fall of the Temple.187

Of the regular praxis of the community, one feature in particular deserves special comment: the community described in the Community Rule (as opposed to that in the Damascus Document) offered no animal sacrifices.189 Building on this, and piecing together the ideology of the movement from hints and statements, we reach the clear conclusion that at least one branch regarded itself not just as the true Israel but as the true Temple.190 The existing Temple might have been ‘cleansed’ by the Maccabaean revolt, but it was still polluted as far as this group was concerned.191

Just as the Pharisees and their putative successors developed an alternative to the Temple, offering ‘spiritual sacrifices’ through prayer, fasting and almsgiving, so the group that practised the Community Rule developed a theology in which Israel’s god had called them into being as an alternative Temple.

According to Josephus, Herod was sufficiently impressed by the Essenes to allow them exemption from the oath of loyalty to himself. One explanation for the site of Qumran being vacated in the latter years of the first century BC is that during Herod’s reign the community lived in Jerusalem itself, in the so-called ‘Essene quarter’, enjoying political favour and (no doubt) hoping for Israel’s redemption.194

If we press this group for answers to the basic worldview questions, they are not slow in coming. Who are we? We are the true Israel, the heirs of the promises, ignored at present but with a great future before us. We are the elect ones of Israel’s god, the bearers of Israel’s destiny. Where are we? We are in exile, situated (whether actually, at Qumran, or metaphorically, in one of the other Essene groups) away from the rest of Israel, demonstrating by our wilderness existence the fact that the promises of restoration and redemption are yet to be fulfilled. What is wrong? Clearly, that Israel is still unredeemed; that the wrong people are in power, the wrong high priests are ruling the Temple, and Israel as a whole is blind, without knowledge and insight, deaf to the call of her god. What is the solution? Israel’s god has begun to act. In calling this movement into existence he has prepared the way for the final showdown with his enemies. Soon he will send his anointed ones, a king and a priest, who will be Israel’s true rulers and will lead the Sons of Light in a great war against the Sons of Darkness. Not only the Gentiles, but also all renegade Jews, will be defeated; and the Sons of Light will reign for a thousand generations. Then, and only then, will true worship be restored, as a new Temple is built in place of the present corrupt one, to be the dwelling-place of Israel’s god for all generations. In the mean time we, the advance guard, must stay at our post in pray...

Second, Israel is the chosen people of this god, not simply for her own sake but in order to be his means of furthering his work for the reordering of his world. This election of Israel, of which the covenant is the instrument, has now been focussed on the group, who collectively form the people of the new covenant, the new elect. It should be noted at this point that discussions of ‘predestination’ can throw the emphasis of such a view of ‘election’ in the wrong direction, evoking questions of individual election which are quite foreign to concerns expressed in the Scrolls. The emphasis, rather, is that what was true of Israel as a whole—she was the elect people of the one true god—is now true of the group.

Two points need to be made here. (a) It is quite clear from the content of the group’s devotional literature that this piety and purity were not regarded as ‘earning’ membership, or salvation. They merely expressed it.197 (b) The purity regulations of the group give several indications that they regarded themselves as in some senses analogous to, or on a par with, priests in the Temple.

As I shall argue in chapter 10, ‘apocalyptic’ is a type of literature which was both available to all in principle as one way of saying things that might be difficult to say otherwise, and most likely cherished and read, in the case of individual writings, by a comparatively small group. That is, any Jew might read, say, 1 Enoch, and might find there meanings of which he or she could approve; but the chances are that most Jews, including many who cherished wild dreams about the future, did not in fact know most of the works now collected in Charlesworth’s Pseudepigrapha, and that many Jews, if they had come across such literature, would have regarded it with great suspicion. That is why one cannot base an account of Judaism on such writings, but must always start at least with the things we know to have been common to all Jews.

The eschatology of the group who produced the Scrolls, while sharing some common features with other ‘apocalyptic’ writings, must not, then, be read simply as ‘dualistic’, or as expecting ‘the end of the world’. Sanders seems to me exactly right: ‘From the Scrolls, we learn that the sect looked forward to a dramatic change in the future, which modern scholars often call “the eschaton” …, which is slightly misleading, since like other Jews the Essenes did not think that the world would end.’200 Rather, the exalted language about a coming great day was intended to refer to the time when Israel’s god would act within history to redeem his people and re-establish them as his people, within his holy Land and worshipping in a new Temple.

Davidic king, to be the Messiahs of his people. This belief in two Messiahs may be startling to those accustomed to think of Jews as expecting ‘the Messiah’ simply, but it is perfectly consistent with the group’s firmly held belief in a renewed Temple. It would be quite wrong for a Davidic king, descended from Judah, to preside over the true Temple; only a descendent of Levi, Aaron and Zadok would do. The Epistle to the Hebrews faced exactly the same problem, and simply solved it in a different way (Hebrews 5–7).

It has been interestingly argued that the group’s chronological calculations may have led it to hope that the Messiahs would appear around the time of the death of Herod the Great.

The sect thus held a form of what later scholarship has called ‘inaugurated eschatology’. Most Jews in our period seem to have believed that their god would act in the future to liberate Israel from her continuing exile.

Josephus, writing at the end of the first century AD, says that there were at least twenty thousand priests, far more than the figures given for the party of the Pharisees (6,000) or the sect of the Essenes (4,000).203

The great majority of the priests were not aristocrats, or particularly wealthy. They, and the Levites who served as their assistants, were dependent on the tithing practised by the rest of the population. Most of them lived away from Jerusalem, going there in groups, by turn, for the performance of the regular rituals. For the rest of the time, they functioned in a way which has, again, often been ignored: they were the main teachers of the law, and the group to whom ordinary Jews turned for judgment and arbitration in disputes or legal problems.

by the time Judaea became a Roman province in AD 6, the ruling high-priestly family was firmly established, but without any solid claim to antiquity.

Just as I am inclined to think that Josephus’ description of the Pharisaic blend of free will and fate is a depoliticized code for their balance between waiting for Israel’s god to act and being ready to act on his behalf if necessary, so I am inclined to think that the Sadducean belief in free will has little to do with abstract philosophy and a great deal to do with the politics of power: Israel’s god will help those who help themselves.211