I, pharisee 2: Too Legit to Quit

“‘There’s more to good or bad than what’s written in the Ruleboook.’

‘That’s just not true,’ I replied, shocked by the notion that there might be another, higher arbiter of social conduct. ‘The Rulebook tells us precisely what is right or wrong – that’s the point.’”

Jasper Fforde, Shades of Grey (2010)

 

Although I’m used to calling this kind of measuring device a ‘ruler’, it’s technically simply a ‘rule’. Still, it’s probably not a very good idea to get too caught up in technicality.

I’m currently reading a book called Shades of Grey. This piece of information is proving a somewhat problematic one to communicate to people as they tend, understandably, upon hearing the title, to make associations with a Certain Other Book of remarkably similar title, compelling me to hastily explain that Shades of Grey is actually a comedic dystopian sci-fi novel set in a world where people’s social standing is determined according to their perception of colour, and written by Jasper Fforde in his usual hilarious tone of mild-mannered surrealism, as if the story is simply too Britishly polite to presents its contents as anything out of the ordinary even when they clearly are.¹ (The title is, as far as I can ascertain, an unfortunate coincidence; indeed, Shades of Grey was actually published first.)²

The world of Shades of Grey is run according to a copious compendium of rules written down by someone called Munsell following the Something that Happened. Adherence to the Rules is not just strict, but absolute, to the point that anything Apocryphal, namely defying explanation according to the Rules, must be ignored and never spoken of. There is, however, a certain room for flexibility provided that the rules are technically obeyed. Early on in the story, protagonist Eddie Russett has a conversation on a train with a Yellow stranger named Travis, who has got himself into severe trouble on account of his opposition to the pointlessly elaborate system of postal redirection made necessary by the Rule that postcodes be allocated at birth and for permanence:

“That’s the Rules,” said the Yellow, “and the Rules are infallible, remember?”

This was true too. The Word of Munsell was the Rules, and the Rules were the Word of Munsell. They regulated everything we did, and had brought peace to the Collective for nearly four centuries. They were sometimes very odd indeed – the banning of the number that lay between 72 and 74 was a case in point, and no one had ever fully explained why it was forbidden to count sheep, make any new spoons or use acronyms. But they were the Rules – and presumably for some very good reason, although what that might be was not entirely obvious.

“So where do you come into this?” I asked.

“I used to work in the main sorting office in Cobalt. I attempted to circumvent the Rules with a loophole to stop redirections for long-deceased recipients. When that failed I wrote to Head Office to complain. I got one of their ‘your request is being considered’ form letters. Then another. After the sixth I gave up and set fire to three tons of undeliverable mail outside the post office.”

“That must have been quite a blaze.”

“We cooked spuds in the embers.”

“I suggested a better way to queue once,” I said in a lame attempt to show Travis he wasn’t the only one with radical tendencies, “a single line feeding multiple servers at lunch.”

“How did that go down?”

“Not very well at all. I was fined thirty merits for ‘insulting the simple purity of the queue-line’.”

“You should have registered it as a Standard Variable.”

“Does that work?”

Travis said that it did. The ‘Standard Variable’ procedure was in place to allow very minor changes of the Rules. The most obvious example was the ‘Children under ten are to be given a glass of milk and a smack at 11 a.m.’ rule, which for almost two hundred years was interpreted as the literal Word of Munsell, and children were given the glass of milk, and then clipped around the ear. It took a brave Prefect to point out – tactfully, of course – that this was doubtless a spelling mistake, and should have read ‘snack’. It was blamed on a scribe’s error rather than Rule Fallibility and the Variable was adopted. Most loopholes and Leapback circumvention were based on Standard Variables. Another good example would be the train we were riding on now. Although ‘The Railways’ had been banned during Leapback III, a wily travel officer had postulated that a singular railway was still allowable – hence the gyro-stabilised inverted monorail in current usage. It was loopholery at its very best.

For the inhabitants of Jasper Fforde’s dystopian future, the whole of morality is precise, pedantic, and practical. The Rules point to no higher, more absolute morality beyond themselves: to obey the Rules, however nominally, is the definition of right, to disobey them is the definition of wrong. For this reason, one is quite free to exploit as much wriggle-room as one can find within their limits; motivations and attitudes are really neither here nor there.

Now, the thing to understand about the Pharisees’ relationship with the Law³ is that it was really absolutely nothing like that.

Last week, I made an attempt at deconstructing some elements of the false impression I formed of the Pharisees when I was younger.⁴ A further facet of this false impression – one that developed some time after the generic Bad Guy stereotype – was that the Pharisees were somehow labouring under the delusion that, provided they stuck to the Law, and all the extra rules they added to it, intentions and concerns and attitudes of heart and mind and soul were of little consequence. In other words, I thought they were rather like the inhabitants of the world of Shades of Grey. This view is simply untenable. For one thing, it’s made abundantly clear throughout the Old Testament that God is massively more interested in genuine inner worship than superficial outward signs of it.⁵ On top of that, however, those of you with extremely good memories may recall that I included in last week’s list of potentially surprising characteristics of the Pharisaic sect a belief that scripture should be interpreted according to the spirit of what it said, rather than by unthinking adherence to the letter of the Law. This week, I’d like to go a bit further into the details of that belief.

According to the Pharisees, the written Law was not the only authoritative source of spiritual truth; it was accompanied by an oral Law, given by God to Moses at the same time as the written Law, and preserved in spoken tradition. (This was a specifically Pharisaic belief; the Sadducees maintained that the written Law was the sole source of divine revelation.) The existence of this oral Law allowed for the possibility of continuing revelation – that the written Law could, by means of the oral Law, be reinterpreted and reapplied according to every new set of circumstances. The extra details the oral Law could provide also went some way to solving the problem of the written Law’s lack of specificity. The example that was used in the relevant lecture of the Early Jewish Biblical Exegesis module I took earlier this year was the issue of what to do with the corners of one’s field.⁶

 

A field. I can’t see any of its corners, though.

The Law says not to reap the corners completely, so that that part of the harvest might be left for the poor.⁷ Straightforward enough, until one actually starts trying to do it, at which point all sorts of practical questions are thrown up. For instance, how big is a corner? What happens if two people are jointholders of a field? How poor exactly does one have to be to go and gather crops from other people’s corners? What if someone harvests half his field, then thieves steal the rest of his crop – does he have to give the equivalent of the corners he would have left unharvested from what he has already gathered in?

The answers to all these questions and more (sometimes given in the form of a general consensus, sometimes that of each side of an unresolved debate) are found in a text called the Mishnah, the canonical written form in which the oral Law eventually ended up.⁸ (The oral Law wasn’t written down for an extremely long time – until about 200CE – basically because it was felt that would kind of defeat the point of it being an oral accompaniment to the written Law.) Consider that last question: the answer the Mishnah gives is that the owner of the field is exempt from the corners rule, the implication being that he had every intention of leaving the required unharvested corners but was thwarted. The next section, however, deals with the scenario of thieves stealing the first half of the crop, in which case the field owner is not exempt from the corners rule, because he still has an opportunity to obey it when he harvests the latter half.

So what? Well, notice the focus on intentions. These kinds of interpretations of the written Law are not just more rules for the sake of more rules; they are a genuine attempt to reach behind the substance of the written Law to the concerns that underlie it, and so to apply the contents of the Law in a manner consistent with the character of the Lawgiver. Perhaps a more obvious example comes a few sections later, where it is stated that the amount of crop left in fulfilment of the corners rule should correspond to the number of needy people about. It’s pretty clear from the written Law that the purpose of the corners rule is so that the poor might be provided for; the point of all the extra rules laid out in the Mishnah is therefore to clarify how this purpose might best be achieved. There is an assumption that the reader is on board with this concept; no space is left for trying to get away with leaving as little as possible. Now imagine the same rule was in place in the world of Shades of Grey. I expect people would probably leave the smallest sliver of crop that could plausibly be called a corner and not feel the slightest shred of guilt about it, because they acknowledge no moral authority beyond the exact contents of the Rules. Quite a contrast.

On the one hand, I don’t think the Pharisees were right about the existence of the oral Law; it’s a case of sola scriptura or bust as far as I’m concerned. On the other, however, there’s a lot to be commended about the way they approached the Law, not just as Rules, but as a way of getting to know the character of the higher moral authority behind them. So, again, we should be shocked when we read about Jesus turning round and saying this kind of thing to them:

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others. You blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel!⁹

The Pharisees knew they should be pursuing justice and mercy and faithfulness. They knew these were the weighty matters of the Law. Tithing mint and dill and cumin was actually one way in which they were trying to pursue these things; such tithes were not specifically required in the written Law, but the Pharisees went above and beyond. They were committed to conducting themselves in a manner not just nominally compliant with the Law, but reflective of the character of God revealed in it, even in the tiniest aspects of their lives. And yet, according to Jesus, they were still getting it horribly, horribly wrong.

That’s the thing, though. We’re all getting it horribly, horribly wrong. The Pharisees were veritable paragons of living according to scripture, yet they still failed miserably. In that light, none of us stands a chance of living in a way God is happy with. In fact, only one human being has ever lived who actually managed it. If only there was some way we could have his righteousness bestowed upon us without us having to achieve anything by ourselves to make us worthy of it … oh, wait a second, that’s the gospel, isn’t it?

Footnotes

¹ On the subject of British politeness, I commend to you the work of Very British Problems: http://www.verybritishproblems.com/. Although I can’t comment on the fairly new TV programme, there is much hilarity to be had browsing the relevant Facebook and Twitter pages.

² It also has a pretty snazzy website for a standalone novel of limited fame: http://www.jasperfforde.com/grey/grey1.html.

³ In this post, I use ‘Law’ (capitalised) to refer to the Torah, a.k.a the Pentateuch, a.k.a the first five books of the Bible, with a particular focus on the rules laid out therein.

⁴ Link in the box on the right, but I’m sure you already figured that out.

⁵ Try Isaiah 1:11-17, as just one random example: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=isaiah+1&version=ESVUK. I guarantee you won’t regret reading past verse 17, either.

⁶ The argument of the next three paragraphs (up until I start talking about Shades of Grey again) is entirely and very gratefully purloined from the lecturer in question, aside, of course, from any heretical corruptions on my part.

⁷ Primarily Leviticus 19:9 and 23:22: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=lev+19&version=ESVUK.

⁸ This stuff is in the section called Zeraim (‘seeds’), in the subsection called Peah (‘corner’), if you would like to check it and happen to have a copy of the Babylonian Talmud lying around.

⁹ Good old Matthew 23 again: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+23&version=ESVUK.

I, pharisee 1: A Case of Mistaken Identity

“In the dark of the night, I was tossing and turning

And the nightmare I had was as bad as could be.

It scared me out of my wits –

A corpse falling to bits –

Then I opened my eyes and the nightmare was me.”

Anastasia (1997)

Strangely enough, it’s a bit tricky to find stock images of Pharisees, so I decided to run with the idea of perception instead.

The Pharisees, of course, had no idea they were pharisees.

Much as the spellcheck feature on my word processor stubbornly insists with its wavy red underlining that the latter is not a real word, my good friend dictionary.com begs to differ:

“Pharisee

/ˈfærɪˌsiː/

noun

1. (Judaism) a member of an ancient Jewish sect that was opposed to the Sadducees, teaching strict observance of Jewish tradition as interpreted rabbinically and believing in life after death and in the coming of the Messiah

2. (often not capital) a self-righteous or hypocritical person”¹

So, not every Pharisee was a pharisee, nor every pharisee a Pharisee; indeed, these days there aren’t any Pharisees about any more, but there are plenty of pharisees. The two meanings are ultimately pretty unrelated, and that they should share a word at all would surely be completely illogical if not for the existence of the New Testament.

If, like me, you grew up going to Sunday school, I hazard that you may, like me, have encountered a plethora of stories featuring Pharisees before you had even the faintest idea what one actually was. Granted, I probably wouldn’t expect the average Sunday school session to include, in amongst all the crayons and puppets and glue, a nuanced discussion of the characteristics of various Jewish sects active in the first century, but some sort of indication of what the term referred to would have been nice. As it was, all I really picked up was that the Bible seemed to cast the Pharisees as the Bad Guys, and so, in my mind at least, they simply took up residence in the same box as Lord Voldemort, Gargamel, and an assortment of wicked stepmothers, and that was that.

It’s a tough first impression to shake. Even later, when one moves on to studying the Bible without the aid of such devices as crayons and puppets and glue,² and it dawns on one, by whatever means, that the Pharisees were in fact a group of respected religious leaders, there seems little reason to question their comfortable position in the Bad Guy Box. After all, pretty much every time they show up, Jesus has something distinctly uncomplimentary to say to them, and so that becomes the sum of how we imagine them. Of course the Pharisees were self-righteous hypocrites; of course they cultivated a flawless exterior image while internally putrefying; of course they heaped up burdens on others while refusing to lift a finger to help; of course they ostensibly honoured God while being, in reality, so out of sync with him that they ended up arranging his Son’s execution. Of course the Pharisees were pharisees. That was what they did.

But in actual fact, of course, being a pharisee was not the defining feature of being a Pharisee. Indeed, some of the key traits of the Pharisaic sect may surprise you; they did me.

The Pharisees made a point of maintaining their Jewish distinctiveness while others assimilated more into the prevailing Greek culture. They believed in life after death – including a doctrine of resurrection for the righteous and everlasting punishment for the wicked – while others, notably the Sadducees, didn’t. They believed in God’s sovereignty over events while the Sadducees didn’t. They believed that it was possible for worship to take place outside the Temple and specific Temple rituals, and that all God’s people, rather than just a select group of priests, had a role to play in religious practice; again, the Sadducees didn’t. They placed emphasis on prayer and scriptural study. They tried to understand and apply scripture according to the spirit of what it said, rather than blindly following the letter of the Law, and were huge fans of reasoned debate. They considered someone’s learnedness to be a better indication of his capacity for leadership than his background, so that, while the Sadducees were seen as elitist, the Pharisees enjoyed a huge popular following.³

The above list is by no means exhaustive, but is hopefully sufficient to demonstrate that the Pharisees were actually getting an awful lot right. Much of what they stood for essentially equates to much of what Bible-believing Christians stand for now; in fact, I don’t think it would be totally inappropriate to call them the evangelicals of their day. Turning back, then, to the kinds of things Jesus said about them, we need to bear in mind how desensitised we are to those grave rebukes simply because of their prevalence, and try to imagine how utterly shocking Jesus’ statements would have been at the time. Suppose Jesus called that church leader you really respect a hypocrite and a blind guide; suppose he compared a Christian author or speaker whose work you find enormously valuable to a whitewashed tomb full of bones and uncleanness; suppose he turned round to someone whose godliness you really admire and asked how he or she expected to escape being sentenced to hell.⁴ Now, better still, suppose he said the same thing to you. And give some thought to what your response would be.

See, it’s not only that the Pharisees had no idea they were pharisees; pharisees have no idea they’re pharisees either, or at least, aren’t prepared to admit that they’re pharisees. There’s actually a rather lovely little paradox here: if my response to being called out as a pharisee is to insist that I’m not one, on the contrary, I prove that I am. Only in admitting that I’m a pharisee do I really stand any chance of not being one, even as I expose all the reasons why I am one. Think of the famous parable Jesus told of the Pharisee and the tax collector who both went to pray in the Temple:

The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed thus: ‘God I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.’ But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ I tell you, this man went down to his house justified, rather than the other. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.⁵

If I look at the Pharisees and think to myself, Wow, those guys were awful – thank goodness I’m not like them, I’m doing exactly what Jesus so berated the Pharisee in this parable for doing. If, on the other hand, I look at them and think to myself, Wow, those guys were awful – I’m so sorry I’m so much like them, I’m actually on much safer ground. In other words, to swing back round to my opening quotation, I have to open my eyes and realise that the nightmare is me.⁶

The bad news is that, in and of myself, I really am a pharisee – a judgemental snob elevating myself over others for the stupidest of reasons and thinking myself acceptable before God by some virtue or other of my own, even as I harden my heart against him. The bad news is that, left to my own devices, I really would reach the point of being so out of step with Jesus that I would want him killed. But the good news is that, on the cross, he took on even these sins as well as every other, claimed the blame for them, suffered the punishment for them, and broke their power over me permanently. The good news is that there is grace for pharisees like me. Praise God.

Footnotes

¹ Check for yourself: http://www.dictionary.com/browse/pharisee?s=t.

² I’m not espousing the view that there is categorically no place for crayons or puppets or glue in adult Bible teaching, merely observing that they tend to feature less heavily than in children’s.

³ A key source here is Josephus, particularly The Wars of the Jews 2, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0148%3Abook%3D2%3Asection%3D162, and Antiquities of the Jews 18, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0146%3Abook%3D18%3Asection%3D12. I had a look at the odd encyclopaedia article too: http://www.britannica.com/topic/Pharisee. Do please feel free to do further research and see whether you think my point is accurate.

⁴ All concepts taken from Matthew 23: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+23&version=ESVUK.

⁵ Found in Luke 18: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=luke+18&version=ESVUK.

⁶ All right, all right, it’s a little bit tenuous, but I was going to end up quoting Anastasia at some point and I couldn’t come up with anything better. By the way, Anastasia has been adapted into a stage musical and is set to hit Broadway at some point this or next year: http://www.broadway.com/buzz/184545/anastasia-stage-adaptation-will-land-on-broadway-in-2016-17-season/. Hopefully it’ll appear in the West End not too long afterwards.