A Rebuke to the Pharisees

The anti-Jewish reading starts with Luke, who sets the trio of parables as a response to the Pharisees questioning Jesus's choice to dine with tax collectors. One could easily read this as a discussion, rather than a war, in which the Pharisees issue a criticism, Jesus responds, and the conversation continues. There's little point, after all, in trying to have a conversation with people who are acting in bad faith, or hostile beyond reconciliation. Like other Pharisees, Jesus was unlikely to debate with people whose morals or ideology were incompatible with his own, but rather with those who were largely on the same page but differed on details. Luke, of course, is stacking the deck by not allowing the Pharisees a response; most likely, they responded to Jesus's parables with their own.

But most Christian commentators seem to want to read this exchange as being the height of hostility, and can't imagine the Pharisees as anything other than mustache-twirling villains.

​

THOSE WHO DO NOT NEED TO REPENT

​

Blomberg (Interpreting the Parables) gets stuck on his horror at the idea of Pharisees as people who aren't particularly sinful:

​

One controversial exegetical conclusion has been assumed in the foregoing analysis. The phrase "persons who do not need to repent" (Lk 15:7) has been taken at face value. But if Jesus had the Pharisees and scribes in mind as those who were not rejoicing at the salvation of sinners, how could he refer to them so positively? Many assume that Jesus' reference to those who do not need to repent reflects irony or sarcasm; by the "righteous" he really meant the "self-righteous." 

​

As he notes, however, the term "righteous" isn't used sarcastically or ironically elsewhere in Luke, and there is nothing in the stories that suggests that either the 99 sheep who don't stray or nine coins that aren't lost are somehow less valuable than the lost ones, merely that the owner rejoices more over reclaiming a lost possession than in the continued ownership of the other possessions.

​

But Christian commentators remain both insistent that the parable trio was addressed to the Pharisees and indignant at the idea that Jesus could have been serious in characterizing them as those who need no repentance. David Wenham (The Parables of Jesus), an Anglican professor at Trinity College in Bristol, is almost incoherent:

​

There is ... no need to infer that Jesus' reference to "ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance" means that he saw the Pharisees and their ilk as really righteous. It is obvious from other things he said, for example from the parable of the Pharisee and the tax-collector ... that he did not. But Jesus' words are both an explanation of his ministry to those who saw themselves as the ninety-nine—which was logical on their own premises—and also an explanation of God's priorities as they truly are, since he really does rejoice more over the bringing back of the lost than over anything else.

​

Jared C. Wilson (The Storytelling God) tries to have it both ways, taking Jesus at his word while also insisting that he's somehow being sarcastic about the Pharisees:

​

[I]t is quite possible Jesus means for the ninety-nine persons who need no repentance to both positively refer to saved sinners already in the sheepfold (as the father assures the older brother that all he has is his) and negatively refer to the smug self-satisfaction of the grumbling Pharisees and scribes who believed they needed no repentance.

​

Wilson makes the common Christian move of associating the people with whom Jesus hung out and the marginalized in today's society, by using the term "undesirables" to characterize them (a term which I'm sure has never been used in good faith about other human beings, and not one which we have any record of Jews using to characterize collaborators).

​

The horror, the horror! Didn't Jesus's mama teach him any better? What possible good could come from consorting with these undesirables? Certainly no good to the self-righteous religious establishment.

​

It's worth noting, again, that the term "sinner" is rarely defined in the gospels, but on most occasions when we're given a sense of what someone's "sin" is, it's in reference to a wealthy person failing in their obligations to the poor. One could argue that wealthy tax collectors were "marginalized" in the sense of being pushed to the margins of Jewish society, having chosen to side with the Roman occupiers instead of their occupied kinspeople, but mob enforcers aren't exactly marginalized in the same way the disabled, LGBT people, racial and religious minorities, and other oppressed groups are marginalized. (And tax collectors were, in no sense, "the least of these," as Wilson suggests.) To pretend that social consequences for choosing to enrich yourself at the expense of already suffering people is the same as genuine persecution is disingenuous. One needn't be "self-righteous" to object to welcoming Pharma Bro to one's dinner table, especially if one has family members who've died because they couldn't afford medication. 

​

Strangely, one of the few Christian commentaries I could find that at least made some effort to understand why Jesus's Jewish neighbors might have ostracized some of their kinspeople without simply dismissing it as snobbery or religious mania was in a book I would have assumed, from the title, was going to be an example of authoritarian, patriarchal, and bigoted Christianity, Osmond A. Lindo, Sr.'s Real Men Read Jesus' Parables:

​

The tax collectors were hated as traitors because they were Jewish men who collected taxes from their own people for the occupying Roman Empire. They paid taxes to Rome upfront and had to get their money back with a profit by charging more than was due and becoming rich in the process... they were in essence loan sharks (Leviticus 25:36-38)...

Tim Ware (The Parables of Jesus), at least, acknowledges that it's not like these people had stopped doing the harms that made their neighbors decline to socialize with them:

​

Don’t make the mistake of assuming that these so-called sinners Jesus was hanging around with had reformed. The Bible does not indicate that. This has enormous implications for how we view Jesus.

​

We do, however, run up against Jewish law when Wilson characterizes Jesus as advertising forgiveness from sins and approval from God and himself as a one-stop shop at which people could get both. In Jewish law, God can forgive offenses against God (generally, ritual failures), but God cannot forgive harm done to other people on behalf of the victims. Forgiveness for sins against other humans must come from those other humans. For Jesus to claim that one could receive it from him, instead of from those to whom the harm was actually done, was potentially something with which the other Pharisees might have taken issue. 

​

One imagines that the victims of those harms might have joined them in taking issue with it. 

​

WHAT ABOUT THE VICTIMS?

​

Blomberg addresses feminist criticism of this trio of parables, which he usually avoids acknowledging, when it touches on how the victims of serious harm might feel about their abusers being offered forgiveness on tap.

​

Beavis, from a feminist perspective, is again rightly concerned that victims of abuse who have continued to remain faithful to Christ could, on this interpretation, appropriately identify themselves with those who need no repentance but object that their perpetrators who sincerely repent are said to be more favored by God. For that matter, other faithful believers who have not been so abused could be similarly upset, without falling into the egocentric trap of the older brother in the parable of the prodigal son...

​

Beavis correctly points out how well-meaning Christians have too quickly applied the model of welcoming back the prodigal to people in positions of power who deliberately sin against the vulnerable and claim cheap grace because they liken themselves to prodigals. The concern for such abuse of the parable is very legitimate but the better way to avoid it is to recognize that the father in the story is not the prodigal, and that abusive individuals who take no substantive steps toward changing their behavior have not even begun to "return home" and thus dare not be treated like the younger son in this story.

Ironically, this is exactly the position of the Pharisees: those who wish to be forgiven must take substantive steps toward changing their behavior, and the most likely root of disagreement between Jesus and other Pharisees. The tax collectors with whom Jesus dines have not ceased to be tax collectors. They have taken no substantive steps toward changing their behavior. Forgiveness without repentence is exactly the "cheap grace" Beavis is worried about.  

​

It takes, as we might say, a certain amount of chutzpah to turn around and endorse the same position that you claim puts another group outside of divine approval. 

​

One might note that for all the Christian claims that Jesus's teachings are difficult and radical, most Christian interpretations of them are relatively banal. It's hardly radical to suggest that one should have compassion for other human beings, or that one should be forgiving. Such banalization has the effect of positioning anyone who isn't an adherent as especially stupid, or especially evil. After all, who can reasonably argue against basic compassion? Yet, as Beavis's concerns demonstrate, the position is disingenuous.

​

The backtracking on this particular issue is, in that light, actually understandable: to take the traditional Christian interpretation of this parable as representing radical forgiveness, even in the absence of repentance, let alone recompense (the prodigal returns not because he's sorry, but because he's starving)—let alone the privileging of the returned wrongdoer over the never-straying wronged—is indeed difficult. That position might, unlike most of what Christians claim is radical about Jesus' teachings, be truly utopian. For to create a community that engages in that kind of radical forgiveness without devouring those who are harmed, a community that is safe for the powerless, Christians would have to create a society in which systemic harm isn't possible, and in which harms between individuals cannot be repeated. It's a noble dream, but one can presumably understand why in the absence of perfect justice, reasonable and compassionate people might prefer to pursue achievable accountability instead of an ideal.

​

UNDESIRABLES

​

Wilson then expands upon the supposed "undesirables" with whom Jesus was willing to associate:

​

When Jesus went around extending the right hand of fellowship to tax collectors, prostitutes, adulteresses, lepers, dernoniacs, and half-breeds, the Pharisees and scribes could sense that their monopoly on "God's favor" was in serious jeopardy. Jesus clearly taught with authority and clearly commanded serious power, and now he was tapping into a virtually untouched demographic.

​

With the exception of collaborators like tax collectors and potentially some sex workers with Roman clientele, these are not groups with which the Pharisees refused to work, so they're hardly a "virtually untouched demographic." (One might note the Torah's position on lepers is that, far from being untouchable, they merit the personal attention of the kohanim.) The Pharisees had no issue trying to help people find their way back to God; they did, however, require more than lip service as repentance. And "half-breeds"? Where, exactly, are they mentioned in the gospels? 

​

J. Ellsworth Kalas (Parables from the Backside) comes close to acknowledging that there might have been a reason that most Jews didn't want to have a friendly dinner with tax collectors.

​

It's hard to know just how bad these sinners were. Some, like the tax collectors, were patently dishonest and were traitors to their own people. Others were women of the street. But most of the group that laid the strongest claim to Jesus were run-of-the-mill sinners: people who didn't fulfill the rather intricate requirements of the Jewish ceremonial and religious law, particularly as the meticulously religious interpreted it.

​

Oddly, even in acknowledging that sins may differ in magnitude, he seems to class "women of the street" with "traitors to their own people" rather than "run-of-the-mill sinners." While the implied association of the two in the gospels should make Christians curious about why two seemingly unrelated classes of wrongdoing seem to be related in the eyes of the Pharisees (an association which, again, I think can be explained by the fact that sex workers in Roman-occupied Judea served Roman clientele—placing them, like tax collectors, in the category of (suspected) collaborators), they seem content to accept that these two categories are equal in severity. That acceptance, I think, says more about Christian attitudes toward sex than it does about Pharisaic views. 

​

Christian theology seems to be self-contradictory on whether all sin is equally bad, as exemplified in this article from the universal-sounding Christianity.com. On one hand, it acknowledges that sins may result in different degrees of harm, but it also declares that all sin cuts one off from God, and that all sin is equal on the cross. (In Judaism, by contrast, all wrongdoing may create degrees of distance between oneself and the Eternal, as harm or a breach of trust in any relationship does, but it's not a binary in which one is either cut off or whole.)

​

PAINFUL RESTRICTIONS

​

Most of these commentaries seem to be trying to make Judaism appear unreasonable, claiming that what the Pharisees cut people off for was minor failures to fulfill a labyrinthine and incomprehensible set of alien rules. 

​

As Kalas describes it:

​

But most of them had lost the feeling for the commandments characterized by the psalmist when he sang, "How love I thy law!" Instead, they had come to see the Law as a set of painful restrictions which not only must be obeyed but also carefully scrutinized to determine if the restrictions could be made even more exact and demanding.

​

This attitude seems to come from Paul, who characterizes Jewish practice as impossible to follow and painfully demanding. (This attitude led at least one early Christian sect, the Ebionites, to claim that far from being a Pharisee, Paul was actually a failed convert to Judaism.)

​

However, this is not how most Jews—especially Jews who live in Jewish communities—experience Judaism. Keeping kosher in contemporary times, with pork belly on every fancy menu and bacon practically used as a spice instead of a meat, isn't particularly hard, even when one isn't living among other Jews, if one eats a vegetarian diet. It also wasn't likely very hard for first-century Jews living in exclusively Jewish communities. One can't easily eat pork when the nearest pig is several days' journey away. Contemporary Orthodox Judaism does, indeed, have a system of kashrut that is highly demanding, but most of those details were developed considerably later. Keeping kosher, for a first-century Jew living in Jerusalem or Bethlehem, likely wasn't any more difficult than following the dietary customs of ancient Athens was for Athenians. Nor were most other practices, like attaining a state of ritual purity before visiting the Temple, likely particularly difficult when one was living in a society centered around them. 

​

And the point of restrictions beyond what is in the Torah isn't to "determine if the restrictions could be made even more exact and demanding." The difficulty wasn't the point. The point was to ensure one didn't accidentally transgress. Thus, if the Torah says don't boil a kid in its mother's milk, the rabbis said just don't eat meat and dairy together to ensure you're not combining the flesh of an animal with milk from its mother. Today, the likelihood of that happening might seem slim; in a time when people raised and bred their own animals, the chance that the fatted calf for dinner might have come from the same cow one milked this morning was anything but slim. 

​

Yet Kalas insists that Jewish practice was so labyrinthine (and unpleasant!) that any ordinary person would inevitably screw it up, and that the Pharisees would have nothing to do with anyone who did so.

​

The Pharisees and scribes, who were considered the best people around (especially in their own eyes), wouldn't have anything to do with such people. These people were forbidden to eat in their homes or to be their guests.

​

Wm. F. Bekgaard (The Parables of Jesus Revisited) imagines the Pharisees as having complete "revulsion" for most human beings (no sources are cited, of course, for his claims about normal Pharisaic practice):

​

Within this group, it could be expected that along with the despised tax collectors there might well have been harlots, drunkards, and any of low morality or social standing, such as those of certain trades or disreputable callings... The Pharisees had a very strict code of conduct for themselves when they were in a position to be confronted by sinners. If they saw such persons while walking, they would cross to the other side, away from them, to utterly avoid any contact or speech with them. This practice by the Pharisees even extended to women walking on the street.

​

A theme we'll see a lot in these claims is, of course, that this revulsion had to do with ritual purity, as in Maxie Dunham's Twelve Parables of Jesus:

​

That is just the scandal of Jesus’ gospel that the Pharisees couldn't tolerate. Jesus was accepting sinners who had no understanding of the law or of what purity required, who made no attempt to conform to religious requirements, and—instead of first reforming them—Jesus ate with them.

​

Wilson expands on this idea:

​

It was in fact his primary demographic. Jesus was enjoying popularity among a great number of the common folk; now he was enlarging his constituency by treating outsiders like—gasp!—normal people. Which is to say, he treated all people like they needed forgiveness for sins and approval from God and like they could get both directly from him.

​

Yet the Pharisees also enjoyed popularity—and considerable affection—among the common folk, which they hardly would have obtained if they couldn't treat them like—gasp!—normal people. If Wilson's and Kalas's characterization of the Pharisees as unwilling to associate with anyone who failed to keep up with a nearly impossible-to-satisfy set of demands were accurate, the Pharisees would have been able to associate with no one, including each other, and would hardly have enjoyed the widespread popularity among the common people that Josephus and other Sadducees found so threatening. 

​

A few commentators allow that there might have been a few Pharisees who weren't completely evil. John Zehring (Favorite Parables of Jesus of Nazareth), a United Church of Christ pastors, acknowledges that:

​

We must not presume all Pharisees were on the wrong track. There were Pharisees who attempted to live a life of faithfulness to God. Some of Jesus’ supporters were Pharisees, like Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea.

​

Bekgaard, while assuring us that most Pharisees were murderous enemies of God, is willing to salvage a handful:

​

To have such a view implies that he ignores the need these religious leaders had for the truth and also implies that they were beyond repentance or help. It is certainly true that some of these leaders hated him, plotted against him, and as a final rejection, orchestrated his death. But this was not the attitude of all of that company, for some did come to seek the truth and did believe (John 3:1, 2; the account of Nicodernus; and Acts 13:3). Christ's mission was not to provoke the Pharisees to jealousy and sin but to save. 

​

Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea are, of course, two NT figures who are presumed by Christians to have converted to Christianity and are venerated as saints in Catholicism. In other words, the only good Jew is one who's stopped being Jewish.

​

That's an understandable attitude, however, given that they seem to be unable to imagine a Judaism that any sane person would want to practice. Here's R.T. Kendall (The Parables of Jesus): 

​

The Pharisees had no appreciation of the Father's love and no sympathy for a profligate sinner...  Did you ever think about the fact that it took courage for Jesus to do this? It must have taken a lot of courage to welcome people whose reputation and appearance offended the Pharisees. 

​

Kalas goes even further:

​

Basically, as William Barclay has pointed out, the scribes and Pharisees didn't really want such persons to be converted; they would rather they be destroyed. They despised them for their failure to fulfill the Law as they interpreted it, they wanted nothing to do with them, and they wished that they would disappear from the face of the earth.

​

Brad Young (The Parables of Jesus: Jewish Tradition and Christian Interpretation) departs from the norm here and actually offers a corrective to the Christian trope that the Pharisees opposed the idea of sinners repenting and being welcomed back into the divine embrace and that of the community:

​

[T]he fact that the Pharisees themselves highly valued the return of the sinner... In all events, Jesus' response to criticism is not unlike the major trends toward spirituality in the teachings of the Pharisees. The piety, spirituality, and welcome for the sinner who truly repents is the same for both Jesus and the Pharisees. The success of Jesus' energetic outreach to sinners such as Levi should be received with joy rather than skepticism. Skeptics, however, do emerge from every tradition. Joy over a person who repents is in perfect harmony with traditional Jewish values... The issue was Jesus' willingness to search diligently for the lost. He sought spiritual renewal for others through personal involvement with them. He did not wait for the undesirables of society to approach him as a religious leader for spiritual guidance. Rather, he sought them out and demonstrated love and compassion through his personal association with them.

​

David Flusser, a Jewish NT commentator, explains in Reflections of a Jew:

​

Many modern theologians increasingly attempt to define the message of Jesus over against Judaism. Jesus is said to have taught something quite different, something original, unacceptable to the other Jews. The strong Jewish opposition to Jesus' proclamation is emphasized. To deal with such views is not the task of New Testament scholarship but belongs to modern research of ideology; yet Jewish parallels to the words of Jesus and the manner in which he revised the inherited material clearly refute the above assumptions. Even though he gave his own personal bent to Jewish ideas, selected from among them, purged and reinterpreted them, I cannot honestly find a single word of Jesus that could seriously exasperate a well intentioned Jew.

​

However, most commentators seem to find it easier to position the Pharisees as a foil to Jesus's message of forgiveness by insisting that they hated sinners and didn't want them to seek repentance or gain forgiveness. It's amazing how, in Christian eyes, Jews are clannish and tribalistic one moment, and wishing death and destruction upon each other the next. 

​

By the time we get to Lauri Thuren (Parables Unplugged), a Finnish theologian, the Pharisees aren't just muttering about or arguing with Jesus: they're potentially going to murder him in broad daylight:

​

He seeks to protect himself, at least in order ro save his reputation. Perhaps he speaks for his life, wanting to avoid being stoned. Simultaneously, the story is a verbal counterattack. By demeaning the Pharisees and scribes in the eyes of the audience Jesus (and Luke) seek to dissociate the audience from persons who are labeled as villains. 

​

Despite bloodthirsty Christian imaginings of Jewish mobs stoning people at the drop of a hat, executions required a full trial and sentencing, and the rabbis made obtaining a capital sentence considerably more difficult than we make it in contemporary America. Moreover, it's not clear that Jewish courts actually had the authority to carry out capital sentences under Roman rule. To claim that the Pharisees might have stoned Jesus immediately for telling a story is akin to claiming judges in modern society haul a gurney out of their car and lethally inject anyone they think they see committing a crime. This appears to be yet another example of the protean nature of the Pharisees in Christian hands: obsessively legalistic one minute and lawless the next. 

​

Young is exasperated at this line of thinking, dismissing it flatly:

​

No one crucified rabbis for telling parables.

​

He adds in a footnote: 

​

When one considers the vast amount of parabolic teaching in talmudic literature and the identity of theological con-structs between Jesus and the Jewish sages, it is difficult to maintain a theology of hostility. The parables are a point of solidarity between Jesus and the Jewish people of his time. 

​

He goes on to explain:

​

The community would rejoice when a wayward one was restored by repentance. In fact, as will be seen in the study of rabbinic parallel parables, the concept of God's mercy to receive a repentant sinner was a major doctrine in Jewish theology. God loves the wrongdoer and receives each one who repents. The necessity of forgiving one another, as a prerequisite for seeking forgive-ness from God, is also a major tenet in Jewish thought, one that appears already in Sirach.

​

He even calls out Bailey directly to refute him:

​

First-century Judaism viewed God as full of compassion for those who sought forgiveness and reconciliation.

​

He finishes off with a refreshingly clear-eyed, text-centered conclusion:

​

The sectarian polemic against the Pharisees emphasized by many commentators does not appear in the body of the parable itself. Jesus may have criticized the hypocritical practices of some Pharisees, but he did not attack Pharisaism as a religious movement. The profound message of this story is intimately related to the Jewish theological understanding of God and people. This worldview was the legacy of Pharisaic thought. 

Christian commentators' imagined Pharisaic hostility toward most other Jews doesn't align with any of the major throughlines of Jewish history. Jewish culture is communitarian. Our covenant with the Eternal is a collective one, and we're exhorted again and again to remember that we're responsible for each other. Moreover, our very name for ourselves, the Children of Israel, emphasizes that we are all the descendants of one man. We're family. Rabbinic thought doesn't rejoice in the idea of the destruction of any Jewish souls—it insists that one must do anything one can to help a fellow Jew return to the community. 

​

Even one of more egregiously anti-Jewish lines from the gospels, Matthew 23:15, acknowledges this: "Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves."

​

So which is it? Were the Pharisees against anyone "converting" to their form of Jewish practice because they hoped their fellow Jews would be destroyed, unwilling to have anything to do with other Jews, wishing they would disappear from the face of the earth? Or were they crossing land and sea to change one heart?

​

From Barclay, who (with Wilson) is one of the more openly antisemitic commentators I read, this hostility encompasses not just Jews who fail to uphold the law (Barclay imagines that punishment for breaking it was something in which Jews took "grim and sadistic joy"), but the rest of the world to an even greater degree:

​

There was the barrier between Jew and Gentile. At their most extreme and most arrogant the Jews believed that they were the only nation in the world for which God cared. They could and did say the most terrible things... The Jew looked with contempt on the man of any other race. 

​

Needless to say, no sources are cited for any of this. 

​

One wonders why Christian commentators are so afraid to let Jesus's stories stand on their own merits, as carrying a message that people found compelling even when there were other attractive alternatives out there, instead of attempting to construct a horrifically cruel Judaism as a foil for them. 

​

Christians can't have it both ways: either Jesus's message is radical, in which case one must accept that reasonable, non-malicious people might disagree with it, or it's something as basic as "be nice to people," in which case they should stop claiming that it was any different from anything the Pharisees—not to mention members of communities the world over—were teaching. 

​

If you truly want to claim Jesus's teachings as radical and hard to accept, let them be radical, instead of positioning anyone who didn't unquestioningly accept them as profoundly stupid or evil. 

​

SHEEP FROM ANOTHER FOLD

​

One suspects that this insistence that the most Jewishly educated audience for Jesus's parables was unrelentingly hostile is because Christians want to read in a ministry to gentiles in passages where Jesus is speaking only to Jews, to imagine the parables as proof that the real good people out there, the real intended audience, was the gentiles who weren't even present. Jesus, in this framing, has to offer Jews his message as a sort of right of first refusal, but is just going through the motions until he can break free of his Jewish obligations and get to the people God really wants. There might even be an undertone of schadenfreude in these readings: look at Jesus casting these pearls of wisdom before those arrogant Jewish swine who spurn them, while the humble gentiles are waiting in the wings to scoop them up. Wilson offers a pretty textbook example of this reading:

​

This is another example of the way Jesus's parables confound and subvert those without the ears to hear. The more direct picture is this: the kingdom is for sinners from both sides of the tracks. It is for the Jew first, but also for the Gentile. "I have other sheep that are not of this fold," Jesus says. "I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd."

​

That's nice, but sheep from outside the fold don't appear in the sheep parable, coins from outside sources don't appear in the coin parable, and the only place gentiles appear in the sons parable is as the callous employers who are willing to let the younger son starve to death.

​

Indeed, whatever one belives about the ultimate goal of Jesus's ministry, he seems to have been focused on talking to other Jews, not to expanding his project to gentiles, during his lifetime. He states baldly that he was sent only to the "lost sheep" of the house of Israel (Matthew 15:24), and tells his disciples to avoid preaching in gentile communities (Matthew 10:5). 

​

Wilson caps off his contempt with a sneering reference to an image that, chillingly, has far more to do with contemporary Jews than first-century Pharisees. 

​

The promise of the gospel is for those near and for those far away. And ironically enough, in the economy of the kingdom, those farthest away turn out to be those "Hebrews of Hebrews" (see Phil. 3:5) huddled around the Torah. 

​

When Jews still lived in a Jewish country, even one under Roman rule, Torah readings were most likely public and well-attended by people who were mostly farmers and craftspeople. It wasn't until most Jews had been enslaved and carted off to Europe that Jewish practice became centered around studying. In exile, the Torah became a sort of portable homeland that allowed our people to survive as a distinct and cohesive culture longer than any other group in similar circumstances. We huddle (and dance! and stand! and walk!) around the Torah in small synagogues and in study halls because that is how we have survived as Jews and kept our languages, history, traditions, stories, and peoplehood alive. 

​

But as a negative descriptor, "you'll find them huddled around the Torah" has also been a directive for when to commit pogroms, vandalism, and massacres to maximize the amount of harm and death one can cause to a Jewish community (weddings being the other favored target). 

​

To evoke the image of Jews huddled around the Torah as the image of people who are farther than any other from God is to echo centuries of blood libel and decide slander that have resulted in the deaths of millions of Jews. 

​

Impurity and Outcasts

​

Most of these commentators are also convinced that the Jewish scorn for tax collectors and sex workers has something to do with ritual purity, Wilson provides a fairly representative example of how when Christians try to bring purity into parable interpretation, they get it completely wrong:

​

By personally restoring the ceremonially unclean and by establishing the ubiquity of sinfulness in every human heart, he was systematically dismantling the Rube Goldberg justification machine the religious leaders had made out of the law.

​

First, nothing about Jesus "personally restoring the ceremonially unclean" makes him any different from any other Jew with expertise in the law, and nothing about it would have put him at odds with the Pharisees. If one could help a fellow Jew who wanted to go to the Temple (the main reason for needing to achieve a state of taharah) or leave behind the quarantine required for some forms of diseased-based tumah, one should in fact do that. Far from flouting the rules around taharah and tumah, Jesus reinforces them by returning people in a state of ritual impurity to one of taharah. 

​

If one is to characterize the system of ritual purity as a "Rube Goldberg justification machine," one should also note that Jesus does anything but dismantle it. His healings restore tamei people to ritual purity, but he doesn't give them further instruction about how to restore themselves in the future, he doesn't tell them can abandon the system, and he doesn't demystify it in any way. He doesn't share power, or obviate the need for it, he simply establishes himself as a person who possesses it. 

​

Wilson's statement that Jesus was dismantling the system by restoring people to ritual purity and "establishing the ubiquity of sinfulness in every human heart" is nonsensical. (For starters, these two actions are unrelated in Judaism.) Christians often use the idea of ritual purity to divide humanity into discrete categories of pure and impure, but ritual purity and ritual impurity are both transient states through which the average Jew would pass hundreds or even thousands of time in their life. While gentiles had no reason to seek out a state of ritual purity, and thus were most likely ritually impure for their entire lives, no human is inherently ritually impure. Someone who has never shaved their head is no more inherently hairy than someone who has; they simply have never bothered to achieve a state of (temporary!) hairlessness. 

​

Ethical versus Ritual

​

Christian commentators are also doggedly devoted to the idea of dividing up Judaism into the supposed ethical principles that Jesus supposedly followed versus "ritual" or "ceremonial" laws that he flouted.

​

Tim Ware (The Parables of Jesus) states it baldly:

​

Jesus did not observe the laws that they believed came straight from God Himself, so how could Jesus be from God?... 

But let's look closer at those laws Jesus didn’t observe. They are the same kind of laws we encountered in the Parable of the Good Samaritan. When we studied that parable we talked about the purity laws and said if the priest and Levite had touched the man lying on the side of the road, they would have been unclean. It’s the same situation with not eating with Gentiles and sinners. If you ate with Gentiles and sinners, you were considered unclean. It's important to remember those are what are called ritual observances. They are not laws that regulate moral or ethical behavior, they only have to do with religious rituals.

Let’s think more about the law. When the New Testament speaks of “the law,” it is, in general, talking about laws regarding ritual observances. If you look at the Old Testament law, you'll find that laws regarding ritual observances comprise a major portion of the law. The law is not so much do this and don’t do that in the sense of personal moral behavior. It outlines ritual observances like not touching dead or wounded bodies, not eating with Gentiles and sinners, etc. That is, in general, what the New Testament means when it talks about the law. It is talking about laws regarding ritual observances.

​

First of all, apparently Ware hasn't actually read the gospels, because they portray Jesus as a Torah-observant Jew. When it appears that he has broken a Jewish law, such as in the grain-picking incident in Luke 6, and other Jews challenge him on it, Jesus offers an explanation as to why his behavior actually complies with it. Nothing could be more Pharisaic: a rabbi stating that something doesn't comply with Jewish law and other rabbis pointing out ways in which it does, or vice versa, is most of the content of the Talmud. 

​

The bigger point, however, is that Judaism does not make such a formal distinction. One of the eternal favorite "ritual" Jewish practices, along with ritual purity, for Christians to sneer at is kashrut (the kosher laws). Kashrut, however, has both "ritual" and ethical dimensions without some sort of bright line between them. 3500 years or so ago, when the system was instituted, it may also have protected the health of participants. 

​

But regardless of whatever reasons about which we might speculate for its origins, the system also gives us explanations for some of its practices, such as the prohibition on eating blood. Blood is life, the Torah tells us, and life belongs to God. We are permitted to kill and eat in order to survive, but we are not allowed to think for a moment that other life exists purely for our consumption. It is life, of the same sort that animates us, it is sacred, and it is not to be taken lightly. 

​

This is what we might call, in contemporary thought, mindfulness practice or gratitude practice. Now, does this mean that a Christian chowing down on a blood sausage is necessarily less respectful of the life of the animals he consumes than an Orthodox Jew kashering chicken in her kosher kitchen? Not necessarily, but one of those people is engaged in a practice that requires her to think about what she's eating, and one isn't. 

​

Similarly, both the prohibition on boiling a kid in its mother's milk and the requirement to send a mother bird away from the nest before taking her eggs or young remind us that animals, like us, have maternal feelings for their young, and while we're allowed to eat eggs and baby animals, we must do what we can to minimize the mother's suffering and grief. 

​

These rules aren't just "ritual" or "ceremonial." They're ethical. They may derive from an ethical system that Christians have chosen not to follow, but to attempt to claim that another culture's ethical system is merely a frivolous, arid "ceremonial" practice simply because it differs from one's own is, to put it simply, slander. 

​

Pure and Impure; Saved and Unsaved

​

One suspects that this Christian obsession with the idea that Jews divided human beings into The Pure and The Impure is another case of projection, as Christian theology has, at times, posited that The Saved and The Unsaved are inherent, immutable categories that divide humanity (see, for example, Calvinism, the idea of predestination, the Elect, and so on). That division of humanity may have been the origin of modern conceptions of race and the idea that members of different races have inherent qualities so immutable that a single drop of blood can "corrupt" the purity of another. 

​

In Blood: A Critique of Christianity, Gil Andjar traces the beginnings of this line of thinking: 

​

Along with the spread of Galenic medicine and the rise of Aristotelian, hematocentric embryological conceptions, the so-called Middle Ages witnessed the conjunction of medical knowledge with genealogical claims made on the basis of blood lines (together with the sedimentation of perceptions of kinship as “blood” ties—as if blood was the natural locus of genealogy), and the seeds of what was to become “scientific” racial thinking. What was occurring was the unification of thinking.

What was occurring was the unification of the entire Christian community into an immanent, organic whole: the community of blood. More directly relevant here is the fact that Christian blood became completely distinct, completely good, and, more importantly, completely pure—if also vulnerable (“If thou dost shed / One drop of Christian blood …”). Announcing a similar shift in Christian attitudes toward money, blood—Christian blood—was thus transvalued. Whereas along with flesh and blood (carnal as opposed to spiritual), along with kinship and money, blood had been the object of an explicit taboo, it now became the bearer of a new, positive valuation. Blood became, as it were, the liquid ground or underground upon which would be drawn drastic and radical distinctions between bloods. And “beneath the apparently solid surface, they betrayed oceans of liquid matter, only needing expansion to rend into fragments continents of hard rock.”

​

Jews of Jesus's time might have had xenophobia characteristic of the ancient Mediterranean—the idea that others' customs were strange and inferior to one's own—but nothing suggests that they thought of those outside their extended family as inherently and permanently other. Far from it: as befits the Hebrews, whose name refers to crossing borders, they allowed outsiders to join the Jewish people, as the original Jewish families had done, as some of those who accompanied the Israelites out of Egypt had done, as Ruth had done, and as the "strangers" in their midst continued to do. The borders of identity could always be crossed, as could the borders of purity. 

​

Similarly, the idea that everyone "sins" (the term in English has a very different sense from any of the Hebrew terms into which it is translated) was hardly revolutionary. Indeed, the entire sacrificial system in Leviticus was as much about normalizing both falling away from the way and finding it again as it was about anything else. Sacrifice was a way of signaling that one had completed the process of return: one had admitted one's wrongdoings, made amends, and now wished to close that chapter. The Torah doesn't have categories of "sinners" and "non-sinners." It has everyone, day after day, week after week, year after year, seeing their friends and neighbors publicly atoning for their screwups and doing the same themselves. It has a system that holds people accountable for their failings, but doesn't treat those failings as some kind of damnation, but rather as a normal part of life. 

​

It's Christianity, not Judaism, that has claimed that any sin cuts one off from God so completely that no sacrifice but a god would be significant enough to allow the relationship to be restored. There are certainly types of wrongdoing in Judaism that are considered severe enough to shatter that relationship (although never irreparably; while acknowledging that some forms of harm break human relationships too completely to be restored, the Eternal is always willing to welcome back the truly repentant). But for the most part, just as most bumps in a marriage—let alone a parent-child relationship—don't warrant a severance of the bond, even when they weaken it or create distance in it, human relationships with the Eternal are both fluid and resilient. 

​

"Neither Jew nor Greek": Christianity and Cultural Erasure

​

So what ultimately explains this Christian obsession with dividing Judaism up into the "good" ethical laws that Jesus supposedly followed and the "painfully restrictive," "Rube Goldberg" [how convenient that the name they're evoking so negatively is a distinctively Jewish one!] "justification machine" of ritual law, which has no connection to "personal moral behavior" that he supposedly didn't follow?

​

To boil it down, the good "ethical" laws are the ones that make sense to Christians, and that got carried over into Christianity, while the bad "ritual" laws are every other aspect of Christianity. "Love your neighbor as yourself" (Leviticus 19:18)? Good ethical law. "Don't cut the corners of your beard" from a few verses later (Leviticus 19:27)? Bad ethical law.

​

This Christian urge to parcel out Jewish tradition into profound ethical teaching versus arid legalism carries ugly undertones, and not only because it approvingly suggests that early Christians looted Judaism of everything of value before splitting off, and whatever was left was worthless. 

Cultures aren't made up of a list of discrete practices. They're systems, and culture exists as much in the interactions between those practices, the spoken and unspoken principles behind them, the polish of meaning accreted over generations, and the way they both shape and are shaped by worldviews as it does in a particular practice. (That's why we usually treat appropriation—wresting a particular practice out of its cultural context to serve the needs of someone outside the culture in which it originates—as a bad thing.)

​

Most cultures have practices similar or even identical to those in other cultures; most also have principles or elements of a worldview that match those of cultures elsewhere in the world. Generally speaking, those universal or widespread practices or principles are not what we're talking about when we talk about a culture or tradition; what makes it recognizable is the ways in which it is distinct. 

​

The underlying message of Christian commentators' division of Judaism up into "good" ethical practices and "bad" ritual ones is that anything distinctively Jewish is bad. If it doesn't make immediate sense to gentiles, there's something wrong with it. It's evidence that they've lost touch with the spirit of the Psalmist who sang "How I love thy law!" and that they have "no appreciation of [divine] love." 

​

We have a word for the idea that anything another culture has that is good is ripe for the taking, and that everything else about it is inferior or worse: colonialism. 

​

To divide others into the things we understand and want to take and the things that are "worthless" isn't to love them; it's to consume them.

The true challenge of loving one's neighbor, let alone the stranger (Leviticus 19:34), as oneself isn't to stamp out what's different. It's to learn to accept that others will always be Other to some degree, that we won't be able to fathom every last nook and cranny of their soul, that parts of them will remain intentionally private from us and others will remain unintentionally mysterious to us, that what they do or love may not be something that we want to do or love. Love is accepting that we don't need to make others just like us, or even fully understand them, to value them as we value ourselves, to see them as full human beings, and to see the divine in them.