Hyam Maccoby, Jesus
the Pharisee (London: SCM Press, 2003)
Reviewed by Robert M. Price
This,
one of the last books by the late, great Hyam Maccoby, is typically
fascinating. In it the author pursues an agenda familiar from and
anticipated in some of his previous work. He aims to separate the
historical Jesus from Christianity and to reclaim him for Judaism,
hermetically sealing him off from Paul, the real founder of
Christianity, an alien religion that has about as much to do with
Judaism as Sabazianism did. And, like a recurring video echo on the
screen, we can see an ongoing debate between Maccoby and today’s
preeminent authority on Judaism, Jacob Neusner. It is to Maccoby’s
credit that he manages to keep the tone of this latter discussion as
cordial and collegial as he reminds us the debates among the rabbis
were. Though Maccoby finds various minor bones to pick with Neusner, his
major gripe is Neusner’s notion that Rabbinical Judaism began with Yavne,
not with the first-century Pharisee movement, and that the former merely
proof-texted the latter, back-dating various traditions, laws, and
quotations into the earlier period in order to claim the prestige of the
Pharisees for their own, rather different enterprise. Instead, Maccoby
defends the position that the Rabbis were the genuine successors of the
Pharisees (not that there were no innovations made necessary by changed
circumstances), and that Jesus’ halakhic positions as recorded in the
gospels are so closely parallel to those of the Rabbis that he must be
considered a prime exemplar of a Rabbinical-style Pharisaism that
extends back into the first century. As to why the Pharisaic character
of the historical Jesus has not been evident from the start, Maccoby
takes up the theory he has espoused before, basically that of S.G.F.
Brandon, that Jesus viewed himself as King Messiah and hoped to bring
about the expulsion of the Romans, albeit by precipitating a divine
miracle, not by taking up the sword. Christians saw the failure of the
Jewish Revolt, in which they must have participated, and thereafter they
transformed their faith in the fallen Jesus into a purely spiritual
salvation cult, under heavy (Pauline-brokered) influence from the
Mystery Religions. Seeking to avert Roman hostility, which they and
their Master had earned, Christians sought to rewrite history, driving a
fictitious wedge between Jesus and Judaism (Pharisaism) already in his
lifetime, making him a rejector of Torah, the very portrait that has
served Protestantism so well ever since. This redefinition of Jesus and
Christianity entailed the vilification of the Pharisees, originally
Jesus’ colleagues, as his deadly enemies, and the caricaturing of their
positions to the point where the gospels show Jesus espousing the actual
views of the Pharisees against bizarre opinions no real Pharisees, as
far as we know, ever held.
This effort to reclaim
Jesus for Judaism is part of a larger program by which Maccoby seeks to
restore Rabbinic (= Pharisaic) Judaism to the place it used to hold in
scholarly reckoning as the mainstream of first-century Judaism. Here
again Maccoby clashes with Neusner, who has (with others) made clear
that the Pharisees, even if they were the major and most popular Jewish
sect, were just that: one Judaism among many. And this despite the
cataloguing by Jewish, Christian, and Islamic writers of over a score of
Jewish sect names from the early period. Maccoby even resists the
conclusions of Jewish scholars who have demonstrated how originally
loose-canonical figures like the rain-making Hasidim Onias the
Circle-maker and Hanina ben Dosa were later “rabbinized” (much as Elijah
and Elisha were subsequently domesticated by the Deuteronomic
Historian). For Maccoby, even John the Baptist was a Pharisee! Here and
elsewhere one detects an apologetical agenda on behalf of Rabbinical
Judaism analogous to that of N.T. Wright and Luke Timothy Johnson on
behalf of conservative Christianity. Of course, that by itself makes no
difference; his arguments must stand or fall on their own, no matter how
they happened to occur to him or why.
Maccoby calls attention to
what seem to him items of data which go against the general redactional/apologetical
tendencies of the Hellenizing, Romanizing gospel writers. These he
considers loose ends owing their survival to a napping redactor who
failed to notice their inimical implications for the case he sought to
make. And that, in itself, is sound critical thinking. His favorite
example is the caution of Rabban Gamaliel in Acts 5:34-39, according to
which the chief of the Pharisees (though Acts doesn’t tell us that)
sticks up for the early Jewish Christians, entertaining the possibility
that their movement might after all be divinely inspired, so that to
persecute them might turn out to be opposing God. Maccoby feels that
this scene, left intact by Luke, gives the lie to the notion of a
Pharisee hatred of Christianity right from the start. And it also means
that Christianity cannot yet have contained doctrinal features later
repugnant to Judaism, such as divine incarnation, eucharistic
blood-drinking, or Torah-apostasy.
The trouble is that (here
and elsewhere) Maccoby is entirely too credulous of the texts that come
in handy for him. In this case, any historical value of the scene is
completely vitiated by the plain fact that it is borrowed lock, stock,
and barrel from literary sources. The summary of previous
flash-in-the-pan messiahs (Theudas Magus and Judas the Galilean, in that
order) comes right out of a too-hasty reading of Josephus, who discussed
the two messiahs in reverse order, employing a flashback, which Luke
missed. The advice not to persecute the propagators of the new gospel
comes straight from Tiresias’ warning Pentheus not to risk opposing God
by persecuting Dionysus worship in Thebes, in Euripides’ Bacchae.
Besides these borrowed elements, there is nothing left. How interesting
that Maccoby flatly rejects as a Pauline lie Acts’ report that Paul had
studied with Gamaliel (Acts 22:3). Too bad he is not as properly
skeptical of the earlier Gamaliel mention.
Maccoby similarly takes as
history the altercation in Mark 7 over purity laws, maintaining (quite
properly) that Jesus is in fact not shown there “declaring all foods
clean,” since these words are in any case editorial and should probably
be read as referring not to “he,” Jesus, “declaring” anything, but
rather to the latrine which renders all foods clean in the end. The
trouble is, the scene is predicated, as all men know, upon Jesus and
Palestinian scribes arguing from the Greek Septuagint, not the Hebrew
text of Isaiah. Yikes.
Did Jesus believe himself
to be the messiah? Maccoby thinks so. But then what about the discovery
of Wrede and Bultmann, that Jesus cannot have taught his messiahship
when the early Christian conviction of the same was only gradual in
dawning, replacing an earlier belief that Jesus had become
messiah-designate at the ascension, as well as a subsequent stage
whereby Jesus officially became the Messiah as of the resurrection? How
can these stages of belief ever have occurred if Jesus had simply taught
(even privately) that he was already the Messiah?
Maccoby is even willing to
accept Matthew’s amplification of Mark’s (already fictive--see Gerd
Thiessen) Caesarea Philippi scene in which Jesus bestows vizier-like
powers upon Peter, the keys of the kingdom. This will come in handy to
explain that Peter was subordinate, in the reckoning of Jesus himself,
to James, Jesus’ regent in the Jerusalem caliphate. Maccoby needs the
structures and beliefs of Jerusalem Christianity to go back to Jesus,
not to be merely one of several mutations of Jesus-faith after his
death. But he is building upon pretty sandy soil.
In just the same way,
Maccoby mounts a doomed argument that Matthew 5:17 and 19 represent an
authentic saying of Jesus, who therefore must have envisioned no
Pauline-style abrogation of the Torah. Now it is clear that the
underlying Q saying Matthew 5:18 (also Luke 16:17) does mean to
attribute just such a position to Jesus (whether correctly or not, who
knows?). But it seems impossible not to take the adjacent verses as
Matthean embellishment. That they cannot go back to Jesus in any case is
evident from the fact that verse 17 already knows of a rival
Christian opinion that Jesus “came to” abolish the scriptures,
theological language interpreting the ministry of Jesus, a figure of the
past. Jesus cannot have said this.
Matthew 23:1-2, where Jesus
urges his disciples to accept all the teachings of the scribes and
Pharisees, though not to emulate their personal conduct, falls prey to
archaeology, for the Cathedra of Moses was a literal throne in the
chancel of the synagogues—of the second century, not the first. But
Maccoby ascribes the whole business to Jesus, who therefore must have
been an orthodox Pharisee.
Maccoby claims Matthew
9:10-13 as a rare glimpse of Jesus’ true regard for his Torah
colleagues: if he were to spend his time with them he would be like a
physician wasting his time on the healthy, neglecting his sick patients.
Thus Jesus must have regarded the Pharisees as the “righteous who need
no repentance.” But why should we assume the Pharisees are in view? What
Jesus’ critics want to know is why Jesus consorts with a bad element
instead of with upstanding folks. Neither they nor he say anything
implying the “righteous” are the Pharisees.
In order to salvage such
friendly but dubious texts from the cutting-room floor, Maccoby proposes
to go John Dominic Crossan one better and to extend the latter’s
criterion of multiple attestation, in other words, to make the holes in
the net wider so more fish can make it through. In company with other
form-critics, Crossan had proposed accepting the authenticity of any
saying that was to be found in two or three unrelated early Christian
sources, say Mark and Q. Maccoby says that we ought to include sayings
that appear even in related sources, like all three Synoptics. Why?
Apparently because Matthew and Luke could have edited a Markan saying
had they wanted to, and the fact that they left it alone must mean they
set their imprimatur on it. But this is to misunderstand the nature of
redaction criticism. All it means for Matthew and Luke to have left Mark
alone is that they did not see the Markan material as undermining the
new emphases they wanted to add. It has nothing to do one way or the
other with how accurate a reporter Mark was.
Maccoby rightly sees in the
gospels a polemic against the Pillars/Heirs/Desposunoi of Jesus
and the Jerusalem Christianity they headed. He echoes F.C. Baur (whom
otherwise he excoriates) and Oscar Cullmann in seeing the significance
of the fact that the Sanhedrin persecution of Hellenistic
Stephen-Christianity left the Twelve unmolested (Acts 8:1). Surely this
means that there were two very different kinds of Christianity
struggling in the Jerusalem womb, and that the Sanhedrin saw nothing
particularly objectionable in that headed by the Twelve. But Maccoby
dismisses as absurd Baur’s conjecture that Jerusalem Christianity had
“re-Judaized” the more radical, less nationalist, Torah-indifferent
gospel of the historical Jesus. It seems obvious to Maccoby that if
Jesus’ own brothers (James the Just and, after him, Simeon bar Cleophas)
led the Jerusalem faction, aided by the Twelve, their version of the
faith must stem from Jesus himself. And that does make sense on the
surface. But one ought not neglect possible historical analogies to the
development as Baur pictured it. For instance, the eighteenth-century
Hasidic movement begun by the Baal Shem Tov was at first
anti-legalistic, disdaining the letter in favor of the Spirit. They
denounced what they perceived as fossilized Rabbinical orthodoxy. But it
was not long before they shed this radicalism and became some of the
most zealous students of Torah and Talmud. It is natural to understand
Jesus this way, as Geza Vermes and others do. Suppose he was like the
Galilean Hasidim who performed miracles and yet sat loose to the
niceties of the Law, for which laxity they received scorn from the
Pharisees. Not coincidentally, Maccoby has already challenged Vermes’s
reconstruction of the Hasidim as a possible precedent for a
non-legalistic Jesus. It is a strategic move, eliminating a dangerous
chess piece from the board before one’s opponent can use it.
Also, one might posit that
the very same survival instinct evidenced in the Pauline/Markan
Christian attempt to Romanize Christianity in order to avert Roman
persecution had earlier led to Jewish Christians jettisoning the
radicalism of Jesus in order to buy the very toleration by the Sanhedrin
that Maccoby rightly indicates that they enjoyed.
There is another
thought-provoking parallel farther afield. I am thinking of what
happened in India in the aftermath of the Upanishadic revelation.
Kshatriya sages, weary of the ritual formalism and the caste domination
of the priestly Brahmin elite, sought the solitude of the forests to
meditate. Looking within, they realized the invisible power thought to
reside in the Vedic rituals performed by the priests, a power called the
Brahman, was instead to be located in the innermost self, the atman,
of every sentient being. The only requisite “sacrifice” was that of the
introspective heart. This conclusion would seem to have rendered the
whole Vedic system obsolete, and so most of the priests opposed it. But
some Brahmins liked what they heard, and they understood it all as the
esoteric truth of the Vedas, not a repudiation of them. So, while many
Kshatriyas, like the Buddha and Mahavira, flatly rejected theVedic
scriptures and rituals, and most Brahmins rejected the Kshatriya heresy,
there were some Brahmins who “re-Vedicized” the new doctrine, writing
massive commentaries (Brahmanas, Aranyakas, Upanishads) on the Vedas,
expounding them in accord with the new revelation, actually filling the
old skins with new wine and holding them together as best they could. Is
that not how Mark 2:18, 21-22 sees the matter? Not that it’s necessarily
correct.
Maccoby rejects another
Judaism-Hinduism parallel that has become practically an axiom of
Politically Correct Jesus scholarship over the last couple of decades.
Many have grossly misconstrued the notion of Jewish purity laws as if
they established socio-economic caste divisions within Jewish society in
Jesus’ day. The gospel “sinners” were, we are often told, whole
professional classes whose members were stuck in a perpetual state of
ritual uncleanness because their work involved constant contact with the
dead, with wounds, animal corpses, etc. As a result, the historical
Jesus can be depicted as a first-century Gandhi, seeking out the Shudras
and the Untouchables and declaring them harijans, children of
God. This, for instance, is the party-line view of Jesus propagated by
network television and the talking heads they interview. Jesus as Dr.
King. One hesitates to say it, but it looks like Liberal Protestantism,
unsatisfied with a Jesus who is a relic of ancient concerns and debates,
is remodeling Jesus after modern heroes whom they would really prefer.
(In short, they do not make Gandhi and Dr. King into Christ figures, but
rather they make Jesus into a Gandhi figure or a King figure. Maybe they
should just be up front about it and set up a new religion based on the
Mahatma and Dr. King. Many of us would join up.)
Maccoby is right: what
these perilous modernizers of Jesus miss is that purity laws did not
forbid all acts incurring impurity. Instead, they took for granted that
many needful acts regularly incurred ritual impurity and stipulated what
to do to negate it, sometimes washing your hands, sometimes just waiting
till sundown, etc. Undertakers might find themselves “unclean” more of
the time than other folks, but it was absolutely necessary, and a major
charitable act, to bury the dead. And to recognize this obvious fact (at
least it should have been obvious) is to stultify all those chic
interpretations that Jesus was courageously and “radically” reversing
contemporary norms when he allowed lepers or menstruating women to touch
him. As Maccoby says, no such issues are mentioned in the narrative.
They have to be read in by modern exegetes who sometimes seem to know
too much about the background of this or that pericope. The gospel
writers seem to be unaware of such factors, either because we have got
the facts wrong, or they did and are writing anachronistically.
At first Maccoby himself
seems to fall victim to the same error when he discusses Jesus’ defense
of his disciples’ gleaning on the Sabbath by an appeal to the scriptural
precedent of David feeding his famished men with the reserved sacrament
(Mark 2:23-26). Maccoby notes the silliness of the reply if all Jesus
was defending was his disciples’ convenience. The Davidic case would
only be relevant if they were in danger of starving. So maybe
they were: perhaps the story silently presupposes that Jesus and
his lieutenants are on the run from a persecuting Herod, their lives in
danger as rebels. At first one thinks: Maccoby is reading in a concern
of which the text seems innocent. But no. What he is doing is applying
to a puzzling narrative a paradigm which has proven quite productive in
solving other such puzzles. Suppose the narrative, which makes little
sense as it stands, is missing something that would make sense of it,
but which would be too dangerous to say aloud. On the Brandon
hypothesis, we can readily imagine the censoring of precisely this
element of explanation: Jesus and his men were in genuine need because
of political persecution, the kind he is now in retrospect never
supposed to have undergone. It is one of Maccoby’s many fresh insights.
However, one still needs to take into consideration Bultmann’s insight
that the text shows scribes questioning and Jesus defending the actions
not of Jesus but of his disciples, i.e., of early Christians, and
that this implies the pericope, together with the issue itself, arose
post-Jesus. It is not evidence for the historical Jesus after all.
I have already called
attention to Maccoby’s twin goals of defending Rabbinic Judaism as the
direct continuation of Pharisaism and of establishing Jesus as a typical
first-century Pharisee. For both purposes he needs to discount Neusner’s
argument, confessedly learned from Bultmann, that one cannot trust
Rabbinical/redactional ascriptions of oft-recurring sayings to any
particular name. If a saying is ascribed to Rabbi A in this document but
to Abba B in that one, we must approach the ascriptions synchronically,
not diachronically. What function does a particular ascription serve in
the document in which we find it? Presumably there will be different
purposes behind different attributions. And neither will necessarily be
merely one of historical inquiry. Maccoby does not like this kind of
talk (p. 209). For him, attributions must be taken seriously, and this
means the traditions of the Rabbis are rooted squarely in the soil of
first-century Pharisaism. Yet Maccoby feels free to disregard Rabbinical
ascriptions when he reasons that, if a Jesus parable sounds like a
Rabbinical parable first attributed to a rabbi living centuries after
Jesus, it may yet be much older, already available for Jesus to have
borrowed it. (Jeremias thought the same thing.) Sure, a parable may
first appear in a later Rabbinic source, but that only means that the
disciple attributed the parable to the master from whom he had initially
heard it, not that he has ascribed it to its actual originator (p. 93).
But doesn’t this land Maccoby in a fatal contradiction? Surely, given
the tradition-oriented character of Rabbinical learning, a disciple
would have heard the parable (or other saying) as attributed to its
ostensible originator. His own master would have said, “Rabbi
So-and-so used to say…” If, then, a saying or parable meets us
attributed first to a later figure, we have no right to back-date it to
Jesus’ day. Rather, we must take the Rabbinical parable as the source of
the gospel parable (provided the gospel version appears to be later,
e.g., garbled) and admit it is anachronistic for Jesus.
And remember, we have no right to date the gospel version as older than
the earliest manuscript or patristic citation in which we find it.
Neusner, then, suggests
that sayings which originated later have been retrojected into the
mouths of more ancient sages, to give the sayings added antique
authority. He infers this, I think, from the fact that, were the saying
known to stem from the earlier author, we would never find it attributed
also to a later one. If it were known to have come from first-century
Rabbi A, who would ever have ascribed it instead to the less
authoritative because more recent Abba B? This seems sound critical
thinking to me. And thus Maccoby is not merely inconsistent but wrong as
well. The Maccoby who implicitly agrees with Neusner that an attribution
to an earlier source (e.g., to Jesus) as its originator may be fictive
is right. The Maccoby who rejects the same Neusner axiom (when it comes
to first century Pharisees) is wrong.
Throughout the book one
anticipates seeing Maccoby say something about an earlier book with the
same title, Jesus the Pharisee by Harvey Falk, who argued pretty
much the same case. In fact, Maccoby for some reason never mentions him
by name, though he does at length reject an important piece of Falk’s
argument. Like Falk, Maccoby is busy demonstrating that virtually every
halakhic judgment ascribed to Jesus in the gospels is attested also for
more or less contemporary Pharisees. Where they differ is that Falk sees
Jesus being depicted as a liberal Rabbi in the tradition of Abba Hillel,
pursuing a policy of leniency that brought him into fatal collision with
the Pharisees of Shammai’s more severe faction. Maccoby, on the other
hand, points out that the gulf between the factions of Hillel and
Shammai was not that wide, and that, at least on divorce, Jesus is shown
as closer to Shammai than to the easy-going Hillel.
Maccoby seems to step
beyond all possible evidence and to betray the wishful character of his
project when he gratuitously asserts that John and Jesus “were regarded
by the Pharisees as well-meaning, loyal, and breathtakingly courageous
Jews, making claims that had an honored place in tradition and would
someday be fulfilled, even if the present claimants, like so many before
them, turned out to disappointments” (p. 66). Here we have supposition
made into fact, the same process by which the fictive gospel tradition
grew in ancient times. Not only that, but we also have a prime case of
the very “re-Judaization” process against which Maccoby himself rails.