In Quest of the Historical Pharisees

CHAPTER 14. The German Theological Tradition

CHAPTER 14 THE GERMAN THEOLOGICAL TRADITION Susannah Heschel 353 The Pharisees have long served as a metonymy for Judaism in Christian scholarship, so that studies of their history and beliefs have presented the Pharisees as the Jews par excellence, an essence of what Judaism, especially rabbinic Judaism, proclaims and practices. As a result, scholarship on the Pharisees by Christians in pre-World War II Germany was often infused with political and cultural biases toward Judaism, just as Jewish scholarship on the Pharisees often functioned apologetically. Interest in the Pharisees on the part of German Protestant scholars1 was prompted in particular by issues related to the gospels and the origins of Christianity, especially the question of Jesus’ relationship to the rabbis of his day. Did Christianity arise as a Jewish—even Pharisaic—religion, taught by Jesus, or as a movement in opposition to it? Jesus’ relation to the Pharisees was the pivotal point in arguing not only for the nature of Jesus’ own religiosity, but also for the relationship between his faith and the Christianity that subsequently developed concerning him. For Jews, Pharisee scholarship constituted a defense of rabbinic Judaism against Christian hostility, but the scholarship also was intricately bound to the newly arising reforms of Judaism, especially Jewish law. Whether Jews advocated Orthodoxy or Reform, Pharisaism was claimed as the justification and inspiration for their theological position. Abraham Geiger, whose work on the Pharisees “set the terms for the debate in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,”2 inaugurated modern scholarship in the field not only because of his radically new conceptualization of the nature of Pharisaism, but because he introduced a new set of primary sources, the Mishnah and the Targumim, and claimed to find references to Pharisee-Sadducee 354 SUSANNAH HESCHEL debates in apocryphal and pseudepigraphical literature. His redefinition of Pharisaic Judaism as a liberalizing, progressive movement and of Jesus as a representative of that movement combined both to undermine claims to Jesus’ originality and to assert a Pharisaic spirit of liberalization as guiding contemporary reforms of Jewish law. Although his conclusions were accepted by most subsequent Jewish scholars, they won almost universal dismissal by German Protestants, including Wellhausen, Schürer, Bousset, and Meyer, who presented the Pharisees as legalistic and religious materialists against whom Jesus protested. Rejecting rabbinic literature as a basis of information about the Pharisees, Protestants adhered to Josephus and the gospels as the primary reliable sources and used those texts to describe what they claimed was the negative and often degenerate nature of Pharisaism. Few nineteenth- and twentieth-century Christian scholars in Germany applied the rigorous historical-critical methods common to scholarship in other fields to their analysis of sources regarding the Pharisees. The testimonies of Josephus concerning the Pharisees were accepted without skepticism, and the gospel texts, despite their polemical and theological nature, were allowed to define the nature of early first-century Pharisaism, despite problems with dating those texts. For example, the Pharisees were assumed to be identical to the rabbis; no historical development within Pharisaic Judaism was described; Pharisaism was presented as identical with postrabbinic Judaism; and the Pharisees were described using adjectives drawn from modern anti-Jewish literature. Little suspicion was brought to the later rabbinic texts or to the Christian literature that claimed to reveal the origins and nature of Pharisaic concerns. Few Christian scholars cited rabbinic texts or constructively engaged the work of contemporary Jewish scholars. Most Christian scholarship made Pharisaism representative of Judaism and characterized it as superficial , legalistic, materialistic, and religiously degenerate. A typical example is the comment of Gustav Volkmar, one of the leading figures in the Tübingen school of the nineteenth century, who wrote in 1857, “The Pharisees represent a wish to deceive oneself and, on top of it, God, [a wish] which turned out to be no more than an evergrowing despair, the tighter and more hardened the shackles of the idolatrous power, which one hoped to evade through hypocrisy.”3 THE GERMAN THEOLOGICAL TRADITION 355 Given the sharply historicist commitments of the Tübingen school, which dated the gospels’ composition very late and viewed their claims not as historical but as theologically tendentious evidence, Volkmar’s comments are particularly disturbing. Most important among the issues debated in pre-World War II Pharisee scholarship was whether Mishnaic texts constituted a usable source for first-century Pharisaism, and how to weigh evidence that conflicted with the gospels and Josephus. Given the importance...