Wednesday, June 28, 2017
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE TORAH AS CONSTITUTION?
I just want to make one brief
comment in this month’s post. There is an imbalance in historical Jesus
studies. When I call it an imbalance, that is an understatement. You can see it
in discussions of historical Jewish culture and in views of the historical
Jesus.
The most common scholarly analysis of the
culture states that the three most important things to Jews were Temple,
rituals, and purity concerns. That is very far from the truth. As for the
historical Jesus, we are often told that the three important political issues
of the day were “kingship, priesthood, Temple,” as Paula Fredriksen puts it. I
would not entirely dismiss these categories, but their value and accuracy is
highly overrated.
Whatever happened to the Torah as
Constitution? Academics forget that Torah was the foundation of everything else
in Jewish culture—not Torah as a collection of statutes, but Torah as a
collection of constitutional principles.
If you really want to understand ancient Jewish culture and the
teachings of the historical, Jewish Jesus, that might be the most important
category of all, and yet, it receives hardly any attention from
scholars. It would not be an exaggeration to say that most scholars erase it
from history altogether.
All of Matthew 5 is a perfect
illustration of Jesus as a constitutional lawyer. He is deeply immersed in the
controversy between Pharisees and Sadducees about how liberally or narrowly the
Constitution of Israel should be interpreted. Jesus takes the Pharisaic
position that every verse in the Torah is a constitutional principle and should
be interpreted so as to fulfill its spirit. Jesus and the Pharisees believed
that God gave the Torah so that we could be creative with it and not merely
follow it slavishly. A good interpretation upholds the spirit of Torah and a
bad interpretation is one that abrogates it. The Torah is a living thing that
must constantly be developed. I discussed this in enough detail in my book True Jew, so I won’t go over it again
here.
What the Pharisees and Jesus
stood for is that Jews should be governed by a humane Constitution and not by
kings or priests. Even a king, even a Messiah, has to follow the Constitution,
otherwise he’s out. We are ruled by this Constitution, and that means we are
ruled by debate over its meaning. In Jewish society, the rule of power must
always be challenged by the rule of law (constitutional law, that is). If you miss that about Jesus, you miss
the most important thing about him.
© 2017 Leon Zitzer
