Pharisees and Burdens: Polemic in Q 11:39-52

1. The Q People and Burdens Hard to Bear: Polemic against the Pharisees and the lawyers in Q 11:39-52 Raimo Hakola raimo.hakola@helsinki.fi University of Helsinki Theological Faculty Department of Biblical Studies

2. 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”

3. 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

4. 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.”

5. 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)

6. 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).

7. 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.”

8. 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).

9. 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.”

10. 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

11. Woes against the Pharisees in Q • Q 11:52 • Q 11:43 • Q 11:44

12. 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 Torah.”

13. 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)

14. 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)

15. 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.”

16. 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.”