THE Sabbath School Magazine. NO. VII.] JULY 1, 1882. [VOL. XXXIV. Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes. By REV. JOHN F. EWING, M.A., Free West Church, Glasgow. The THE aspect of the times of Christ we are to consider is the character and ideas and aims of the men who had the religious teaching of the Jewish world of the time in their hands. The religious life of the time was not absolutely identical with the influence of these men. deepest religious life of that time, as of other times, was a secret thing, fed directly by God himself. And whatever were the peculiarities or perversions of the religious teachers, true religious ideas could be drawn and were drawn from a purer religious tradition-from the pages of David and Isaiah. Still, the influence of the popular teachers of Christ's day was enormous; and it is not too much to say that the prevalent religious conceptions were what they made them. The men who mould the religious life and direct the religious teaching of a community are generally the priests—the official ministers of religion. But the religious leaders in the time of our Lord were not the priests. Many, probably most of the Sadducees were priests, and some of the Pharisees might be priests. But it was not as priests they wielded their influence. The peculiarity of the Jews at all times had been, that their true religious leaders had not been the priests. Their true religious leaders, from Moses' time onwards, had been the prophets; and greatly as the leaders of Christ's time differed from the prophets, it was the place of the prophets that they aspired to and claimed to fill. Christ said on one occasion, "The Scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moses' seat." Haughty and exclusive as the religious leaders of our Lord's time were, it was not the exclusiveness of hereditary caste. The Theocracy had always been democratic, and the Theocracy which Ezra and Nehemiah had restored was democratic still. A man became a religious authority and leader still, just as in the old prophetic days, not by the accident of position, but by his gifts, by his genius, by his resolute application. The G man in the highest seat in the synagogue might have risen from the humblest ranks. Hillel, in some respects the greatest of the Rabbis, had been a day labourer. It is singular that in this, as well as in other respects, there is so close a parallel between the Jewish religious system which prevailed in the first century, and the great system of Romanism which has lasted through so many centuries. There is not merely the externalism and the traditionalism, but the democratic basis. Through the dark ages, when the Church of Rome was strongest, it was in the power of any poor boy who had acquired a smattering of learning to rise to the Bishop's bench or the Cardinal's hat, or even to the chair of St. Peter. It is with the Pharisees, of course, that we have chiefly to do. They were, out of all comparison, the most powerful and influential of the religious parties of Christ's time. The Sadducees and Essenes were remarkable religious phenomena of their day. They were significant, but not influential. The Sadducees seem to have had very little religion about them. They were a small conservative opposition, whose action rather intensified the dominant Pharisaism. They were a group of men powerful mainly through their wealth and official connections. they should have been at once conservative and sceptical, orthodox and materialistic, sounds to us very strange, and yet it is true. That The Essenes were a genuinely religious phenomenon, but an isolated one. They do not seem to have had much influence on the general Jewish life of Christ's time. Their influence was felt far more afterwards. It is to the Pharisees that our attention must be mainly directed. In speaking of them I shall sometimes use the convenient term-Pharisaism, to denote the system rather than the men. It is with Pharisaism, of course, on its religious as opposed to its theological side that we have to do. On its theological side as a doctrine of the Schools it was Rabbinism, a subject which was discussed lately by Professor Bruce. Rabbinism and Pharisaism were in one sense the same, for most if not all the Rabbis were Pharisees. Yet they were distinct, for Rabbinism was a system of scientific theology; Pharisaism was a popular religious system. You must not, however, suppose from my saying this, that that old Jewish system had what some systems had, an esoteric and an exoteric side,-one set of doctrines for the initiated, and another for the uninitiated. However hollow Pharisaism was, it had not this kind of double face. It had no secrets. The popular religious teaching was the scientific teaching popularized. It is this that we have to do with, with the Pharisees as a party, and with Pharisaism as a popular religious teaching. Our sources of information are chiefly the New Testament, Josephus, and the Talmud. The Pharisees appear, you remember, at the beginning of the Gospel record on the banks of the Jordan, among the audience who listened to John the Baptist, and are denounced by him in scathing language as an offspring of vipers; while the demand made by them as the religious authorities, that he must justify his position and exhibit his credentials, is treated with contempt. When they ask him what it is; he replies, he is a voice. We find them soon afterwards crossing the track of Jesus; the first encounter being when He cleared the Temple courts at the opening of His ministry. Though we are told that one of them came immediately after to a midnight interview with the new teacher, the position of the mass of them is one of antagonism, an antagonism which is constantly being sharpened by the way in which Jesus openly defies their prejudices, breaks many of their most cherished rules, and begins, finally, to denounce their character and teaching to the people. The public life of Christ becomes latterly, to our eye, a great dramatic contest, in which He, as the teacher of a new religion, is pitted against them, as the teachers of the old and dominant religion. It is a contest which, we see from the first, can only end in one way, seeing that He will not exert His supernatural power in self-defence. Exasperated to madness, they so completely forget their ordinary antipathies as to form a coalition with the Sadducees for the purpose of destroying Him; and by exerting their great influence with the mob and the Roman governor, they crush their opponent. The Our most vivid and most unfavourable conception of the Pharisees is derived from the polemic of Christ against them. The description which has seated itself deepest in the popular imagination is, unquestionably, that exquisite miniature portrait-that unrivalled fragment of satire,— the story of the two men going up into the Temple to pray. practical points on which our Lord most frequently came into conflict with them were His observance of the Sabbath, and His neglect of the stringent rules they made about contact with what was unclean. He treated their scrupulous washings with a good deal of contempt, and mingled familiarly with people who, they believed, brought ceremonial defilement. The notes of warning and rebuke directed towards the Pharisees in our Lord's discourses are unceasing. In familiar talk or parable, He is always touching on their "leaven," or their more conspicuous faults. His first great discourse-the Sermon on the Mount-we feel, has constant tacit reference to them; they are used throughout as a foil to set off what the true spirit of religion is. In the last great discourse-near the close of Matthew-His denunciation of them rises into language of almost unexampled severity. They are blind guides, whiteď sepulchres, devourers of widows' houses, serpents, men hurrying on to the condemnation of hell. The Pharisees re-appear, though not with anything like the same prominence and vividness, in the Acts. We see them in the person of Gamaliel, hesitating to commit themselves to severe measures against the new religion. When, however, Stephen had given a fresh extension to Christianity, and announced the abolition of the Temple and of the whole <ceremonial law, they threw themselves fanatically into the work of persecution under the leadership of young Saul of Tarsus. The defection of Paul from their ranks, and his appearance as the most active missionary of Christianity, whetted their hatred of the new faith; and their animosity, especially against the renegade, shrank from no meanness of malice. From Paul himself we get a good deal to supplement our conception. His mental and moral fibre always retained traces of what his training as a Pharisee had made him, though as a spiritual man his attitude was |