Download The Q People and Burdens Hard to Bear

The Q People and Burdens Hard to
Bear: Polemic against the
Pharisees and the lawyers in Q
11:39-52
Raimo Hakola
[email protected]
University of Helsinki
Theological Faculty
Department of Biblical Studies
The Pharisees and Burdens hard to bear in
Christian theology
 “The Pharisees killed nature through statute. … The sum
of the derived regulations stifled the source; the 613
commandments of the written and the thousand other
commandments of the unwritten law left no place for the
conscience.. … An ethical and religious materialism was
rampant. … Such are the signs of the age; the once
young and fermenting wine settled on the lees. Examples
are abundant. I am saying nothing new here. …In this
caste, Jewish educational arrogance has its most
outstanding representatives.”
 Welhausen,
The Pharisees and Sadducees, 15.

“a masterpiece of interpretation”,

“a milestone in biblical studies”
The Pharisees and Burdens hard to bear in
Christian theology
 Roland Deines, Die Pharisäer, 1997.
 Wellhausen
… the only monograph written in the 19th
century that has not lost its significance today
 Pharisees
had made the fulfilling of the law extremely
difficult with their various legal interpretations. … their ideals
remained unattainable for the most of the people
Pharisees as a Part of Diverse First-Century
Judaism
 The early rabbinic movement as a relatively powerless
group who were not representative of Judaism
 For
literature, see Hakola 2005: 55–65
 James Charlesworth 1990: 37

“There was not one ruling, all-powerful group in Early
Judaism; many groups claimed to possess the normative
interpretation of the Torah. … We should not think in terms of
a monolithic first-century Palestinian Judaism.”
Pharisees as a Part of Diverse First-Century
Judaism
 Pharisees in Qumran
 “those
who seek after smooth things”
- Pesher Nahum, cf. Josephus Jewish War 1.88–98, 110–
114 and Jewish Antiquities 13.372–383, 398–415
 see
Hakola, “Social Identities and Group Phenomena in the
Second Temple Period.”
 “looking
for easy interpretations, not the full and perhaps
harsh meaning of a law” (VanderKam 2004: 302).
 4QMMT
B 55-58
- flowing liquids
- the Pharisees “declare clean an unbroken stream of
liquid” (m. Yad. 4:7; cf. also m. Toh. 8:9)
Pharisees as a Part of Diverse First-Century
Judaism
 Mishnah Erub.
 the
practise of “fusion” or “interweaving” of houses
 Sadducees
rejected m. Erub. 6:2
 “Sadducees
believed in upholding the written law, they
opposed pharisaic traditions which got around it, and they
must have regarded most Pharisees as transgressors of the
sabbath laws.” (E. P. Sanders 1990, 9).
Woes against the Pharisees in Q
 Q 11:39–52 Seven Woes
Q
11:29–32 “this generation is an evil generation”
Q
11:49-51 “this generation may be charged with the blood
of all the prophets shed since the foundation of the world”
 Kloppenburg 1990; 37–38
 “The
redaction of the woes emphasizes not simply a
disagreement with Pharisaic halakah, but a sharp polemic
against all Israel for her rejection of Q’s prophetic preaching
(Q 11:49–51). That is, what may have begun as controversy
with Pharisaic groups has been broadened substantially at
the stage of the assembling of the woes into the present
form of Q 11:39–52.”
Woes against the Pharisees in Q
 :“Rather than taking on the Pharisees on what might be
considered their own ‘turf,’ i.e., legal interpretation, Q uses
the prophetic form of the woe oracle, but turns it into an
instrument of lampoon. Without posing clear alternatives
to the Pharisees’ practices … Q engages in ridicule and
hyperbole designed to undermine the credibility of the
Pharisees’vision of society.” (Kloppenburg, 1991, 97.
 “The document thus engages several specific markers of
Jewish identity, but does so more, it appears, in the
interest of contesting its opponents’ self understanding
than in developing its own.” (Arnal 2007, 147).
Woes against the Pharisees in Q
 Vaage 1994, 105
 “The
Pharisees were chosen as the brunt of Q’s … “cultural
criticism,” mainly because the Pharisees, better or more
zealously than anyone else in the context of first-century
C.E. Galilee, promoted the Jewish people’s officially
sanctioned “covenanted” way of life. An it was precisely this
belief in the need for a normative ethos as the basis of a
divinely “blessed” existence that the woes … set out to
scrutinize.”
Woes against the Pharisees in Q
 Q 11:39-41

you Pharisees clean the outside of the cup and of the dish
 Q 11:42

you tithe mint and rue and herbs of all kinds
 Neusner 2007, 315
 “which
laws pertained primarily to Pharisaism, and which
were part of the law common to all of Palestinian Jewry.”
 both
early rabbinic traditions and gospel traditions make
obvious that purity laws and agricultural laws differentiated
the Pharisees from the larger community
Woes against the Pharisees in Q
 Q 11:52

 Q 11:43
 Q 11:44
Woes against the Pharisees in Q
 Reed 2000, 61
 “Although
the Pharisees and scribes had close historical
connections with Jerusalem and are perceived as a threat in
Q (3:7–9, 11:39–51), this threat was not perceived as
problematic to most Jews in Galilee. It seems that the
earliest Christians in Galilee marginalized themselves.”
 Goodman 1999, 19
 “Pharisees
did have their own distinctive doctrines but what
they taught the people more generally was correct behaviour
in accordance with ancestral customs…. Their endorsement
of ancestral tradition gave them great popularity among
members of the wider population who valued the approval of
such conspicuously pious and accurate interpreters of the
Q and the Social Identity Perspective
 The Social Identity perspective
 Tajfel
1981, Tajfel & Turner 1979, Turner & Reynolds 2001
 Applications to Jewish and Christian sources
 Jokiranta
2005, Luomanen 2007, Hakola 2007, Hakola &
Reinhartz 2007
 “the mere perception of belonging to two distinct groups –
that is, social categorization per se – is sufficient to trigger
intergroup discrimination favoring the in-group.” (Tajfel &
Turner 1979, 38)
Q and the Social Identity Perspective
 “The need for social differentiation between groups “is
fulfilled through the creation of intergroup differences
when such differences do not in fact exist, or the
attribution of value to, and the enhancement of, whatever
differences that do exist.” (Tajfel 1981, 276)
 “Groups are likely actively to seek and propose additional
comparative dimensions as a strategy for coping with a
lack of positive group distinctiveness on the focal
dimension.” (Branscombe et. all 1999, 46)
Parallels to the charge “you load people with
burdens hard to bear”
 Diogenes Laertius 6.27–28
 “And
[Diogenes] used to wonder that the grammarians would
investigate the ills of Odysseus, but to be ignorant of their
own. Or that the musicians would tune the strings of the lyre,
but leave dispositions of their soul discordant; that the
mathematicians would gaze at the sun and the moon, but
overlook matters at their feet; that the orators would make a
fuss about justice in their speeches, but never practice it; or
that the avaricious would cry out against money, but love it
excessively.”
Parallels to the charge “you load people with
burdens hard to bear
 Aelius Aristides To Plato: In Defense of the Fou 644ff.
 “Yet
what man in the ranks of the living would endure this
from them, who make more grammatical mistakes than
statements, and despise others as much as they themselves
should be despised, and examine the lives of other men, but
have never thought that their own lives should be examined,
and praise virtue, but do not at all practice it.”