Chapter 7: The Developing Diversity

[This is an ongoing project that is analyzing N.T. Wright’s 5 volume series, Christian Origins and the Question of God. This series is widely read and bridges the gap between the academic and devotional world. It is therefore worthy to be carefully analyzed so that all readers can understand his key points while at the same time gaining a critical eye to some of his rather bold claims. This series of posts are concerning volume 1 – The New Testament and the People of God.]

N.T. Wright works hard to avoid many of the standard pitfalls of New Testament scholars discussing the various sectarian groups of second temple Judaism. He rightly points out that making the Pharisees, Essenes, Sadducees, and Zealots into ideological groups is a tendency that New Testament scholars often fall into which are not completely appropriate for the social groups that are represented. He attempts to show their basic commonality in the hope for the kingdom of God in Israel as well as discussing their differences as reactions and views of that same hope. It is this narrowness of focus that causes Wright to be very close to a productive discussion of Judaism, but allows such gaping holes that he keeps from clarifying the groups for the reader. His characterization is helpful because he presents some ideas that are widely held among practitioners of Christianity.

First, Wright attempts to show why it was that sectarian groups developed in the first place. Wright focuses upon the fallout of the Maccabaean revolt and subsequent government that caused many of these groups to develop.

The event which precipitated all the major trends in first-century Judaism was, as we have seen, the Maccabaean crisis…But the Maccabaean crisis was also, second, the cause of some of the divisions within Judaism. Dissatisfactions with its outcome was the reason for the rise and agenda of at least some of Judaism’s different parties.[1]

Wright firmly sets the Maccabaean crisis as a major “turning point” of Jewish history which was a causal element in the nature of second century Judaism.

Using this crisis as the “turning point,” Wright expands upon this idea and argues that the revolutionary attitude of different Jewish groups had their origin in this event. Wright argues that the Maccabaean revolt created a model that later Jewish groups used to organize their own identities:

Once again the story starts with the Maccabees. They set the context, and provided the model, for a tradition of movements which sought to overthrow oppression and bring about the divinely intended kingdom for Israel.[2]

It is certainly true that the Maccabaean revolt did cause some sectarian splits – such as has been hypothesized concerning the Qumran community.[3] Further, it was certainly true that Jews after the Maccabaean period did expect a revolt that would eventually lead to an independent Israel was also true.

While Wright is not wrong that the Maccabaean period was important, he does not put enough emphasis on other reasons that Judaism divided and the general hope of Israel was found in its expectation of Israel. First, just because people expected the rise of Israel as a kingdom after the revolt does not mean that they were not thinking that same thing before the revolt – indeed, this is why the revolt occurred. The Maccabees were certainly more successful than other attempts to create group solidarity, but that does not mean that this was the only model for what such a revolt would look like. Many believed that God would come and fight for the people and destroy evil as depicted in apocalyptic literature. That would be formatively different than the kind of war waged in 1 Maccabees. Therefore, Wright has a good idea focusing on Maccabaean period, but one must be careful not to focus too much on it.

Second, he argues that the Maccabaean period was the cause of division within Judaism. There is no question that the Maccabaean government’s actions caused some sectarian division; however, there were other very significant issues that forced the issue of sectarianism. Far more important than a strange government that might not have been acting completely properly in regard to temple worship was the challenge of identity caused by geography. When the people were allowed to come back from the Babylonian exile in 539 B.C.E., many people did not return. Instead, they continued to live in diaspora around the world. Further, the people who did return found themselves amongst a group of people already living in the land. They wanted to define themselves as separate from that group. The different Jewish groups began to develop with varying rigidity as early as the return – as depicted in the books of Ezra, Nehemiah, Ruth, and Jonah in the Hebrew Bible. All of the different books have different attitudes concerning how open the group would be to others who wanted to be included.

More concerning was that based on the theology of Deuteronomy, it was absolutely set that there was to be only one temple and that temple was to be the worship center of all religious devotees. The problem then developed due to proximity – it was not possible for most people to travel to Jerusalem at any time. Judaism had to try and understand who they were as an international organization. Wright seemingly knows this as he briefly discusses the point:

So it was that the maintenance of traditional Torah-based boundary-markers in Galilee, or in the Diaspora, had little to do with detached theology of post mortem salvation, let alone the earning of such a thing by one’s own religious or moral efforts, and a great deal more to do with the preservation of traditional Jewish identity.[4]

Here Wright is interested in trying to show that the primary interest of the Jewish groups was not salvific per se, rather, the primary interest was that of identity. However, when he discusses the crisis, he considers the geographical problem very locally – he tends to discuss it in regard to the issue of the Galilee:

Surrounded and permeated as it was by paganism, Galilean Jewry naturally looked, more than its southern compatriots needed to, to the symbols of distinctiveness which mattered in the local setting. The Torah assumed new importance in border territory. As we shall see, it acquired some of the functions and attributes of the Temple itself.[5]

He is certainly right that the Torah filled many of the functions of the Temple, but his focus on the Galilee diminutizes the problem. The Galilee was a 3 days walk to Jerusalem making the temple impractical. However, there was a far larger problem of people who were farther away. While the Galilee in the north was remote in regard to Jerusalem, the Galilee was a historic territory of Israel. Those Jews living in complete diaspora were living in areas that were not part of Israel at any time. The challenge of identity was not so much that the temple could not practically be reached (contingencies for such a situation can be found in the book of Deuteronomy), the challenge was that the people of Israel had to find a way to remain a solidified group while not tying that idea to any specific land.

The concept of an Israel that was not bound by land was aggressively difficult to manage and it is from this interest that many different Jewish groups presented new ideas of what it meant to be Jewish. Wright does not spend enough dealing with this issue and instead focuses solely on the land of Israel itself. This focus is understandable given his interest in presenting the world of Jesus, but unfortunate in that he keeps himself from seeing the complete picture.

Most groups addressed the issue of land by focusing on the coming kingdom of God wherein Israel is restored. Wright focuses on this aspect of the restored Israel as his focus for understanding each of the different factions:

Hope focused on the coming of the kingdom of Israel’s god. I shall therefore begin by looking at the movements of revolt that characterize the period, and then assess the place of the different ‘parties’ in the light of the more general aspiration.[6]

This is a fine method for understanding the different groups – and frankly better than many Christian characterizations of them – but the problem is that Wright does not explain why that focus on the coming kingdom was present. He is able to understand the issue of righteousness of Jews within and oppression from Romans without, but he does not address a primary concern – the goal of uniting a very divided people – politically, geographically, and spiritually.

Rather than going through many of the specific points concerning Wright’s characterization of the different rebellious groups and their relationship with the actual revolt, here I will focus only on his characterization of the Pharisees to show what it is that he addresses well and what portions he misses due to his interest in how they were involved/not involved in the coming kingdom of Israel.

First, Wright should be credited with a very good discussion of the challenges of understanding the Pharisees given the data we have left.[7] We simply do not have good data from the group. There are several different sources, all of them extremely biased. However, scholars can reconstruct what we are relatively sure the Pharisees held. The first point that Wright develops is the focus on Torah as way for the group to see themselves as the preservers of tradition:

The Pharisees saw themselves as standing firm for the old ways, the traditions of Israel, against paganism from without and assimilation from within. Their extreme focus on Torah makes perfect sense within this setting; and so does the increasing concentration, in this and the subsequent periods, on issues of purity.[8]

The Pharisees certainly did focus on observation of Torah and daily ritual purity law in order to preserve a kind of Judaism. Wright does not explain the practicality of this dictum – it was not only a way of preservation, it was also a practice that anyone could do at any place.

Wright comes close to presenting the idea that the Pharisees focused on Torah and purity for practical reasons when he pushes them into the political front (given that he wants to analyze each group as they responded to the political force of the reestablishment of Israel):

What matters is the ideology that motivated them to focus so strongly on purity and to relate it in any way to the purity demanded in the Temple. Here the most attractive thesis seems to me the following: faced with social, political and cultural ‘pollution’ at the level of national life as a whole, one natural reaction (with a strong sense of ‘natural’) was to concentrate on personal cleanness, to cleanse and purify an area over which one did have control as a compensation for the impossibility of cleansing or purifying an area – the outward and visible political one – over which one had none. The intensifying of the biblical purity regulations with Pharisaism may well therefore invite the explanation that they are the individual analogue of the national fear of, and/or resistance to, contamination from, or oppression by, Gentiles.[9]

Here Wright shows that purification was a way of “owning” a space that one did not own. It was a way of controlling and managing spiritually what one could not manage politically. Here, he is focusing on Pharisees living within Israel who are decrying the current governmental system. What is more, though, this same process would have been equally true and even more the case for Judaism that was completely outside the confines of Israel itself.[10]

What is more striking is the way that purity is treated. Wright, focusing on the concept of a political movement, does not carefully explain the significance of the focus on Torah and purity rituals. He offhandedly mentions that the purity rituals were rather important and were set as commensurate with the purity rituals found in temple worship:

The Temple functioned as the controlling symbol for Pharisees no less than for other Jews; and the purity codes functioned as a key means of granting to ordinary domestic life, and in particular the private study of Torah, the status that would normally only accrue to those who were serving in the presence of Israel’s god within his Temple.[11]

This passage is key. It shows that the reason that the Pharisees were going through these religious acts was that they were attempting to achieve the same status as those who were serving in the Temple.

What makes this so important – and what is completely missing from Wright’s presentation -  is the religious statement being made by equating personal purity rituals (mostly concerning the dinner table and Sabbath rituals) and study of Torah with Temple worship. Not only was Temple worship usually the restricted “highest kind of worship” but it was also restricted as to who could worship. Not just anyone could worship in the temple – only the priests – and in some cases only certain priests. They followed particular purity rituals that the larger population did not. The Pharisees then were making a bold statement – the priesthood was no longer necessary and the whole population of followers of God could be in nearly direct relationship with God himself – the priests were not “separate” in nearly as many ways as they used to be.[12]

Wright ignores this vital aspect of what the Pharisees held because he is monothetically interested in the focus on the reestablishment of Israel. The reason that this discussion of Wright is helpful is because it is all too common among Christians today – it is easy to discuss the different Jewish groups in regard to the coming kingdom of God – after all, that is what Jesus focused upon and therefore it is easy to contrast the groups. It is much harder, however, to focus on the groups’ actual messages and focuses. For those who study the New Testament, it is imperative that we actually understand the Pharisees before understanding Jesus. Jesus did not know these figures as rhetorical antitheses – he dialogues directly with them and challenges their direct issues. A critical reader of the New Testament must be aware of the context as it truly was (rather than how we would prefer it would be in a logical argument) in order to understand what the New Testament is trying to say.

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[1] NTPG, 167.

[2] Ibid., 170.

[3] For the argument that the Qumran community was fundamentally opposed to the Hasmonean priesthood, see Lawrence H. Schiffman Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls: The History of Judaism, the Background of Christianity, the Lost Library of Qumran (Jewish Publication Society, 1994).

[4] NTPG, 168.

[5] NTPG, 168.

[6] Ibid., 170.

[7] Ibid., 181-184.

[8] Ibid., 187.

[9] Ibid., 187-188.

[10] I should note that there is little evidence to show that there were any Pharisees outside the land itself; however, the Pharisees clearly set up a plan so that those outside the land could be in relationship with them. It was important that those who were abroad could be viewed as “the same” as those at home. The fact that there was little sociological success is merely an accident that they assumed would be solved in time.

[11] Ibid., 195.

[12] Priests remained, of course, still very much religiously taught individuals who had an important role in the community, but the importance of their role in temple worship – which was restricted to only some priests – was called into question.