The Influence of Eastern Philosophies on Rabbinical Judaism and Early Christianity, Assignments of Philosophy

Download The Influence of Eastern Philosophies on Rabbinical Judaism and Early Christianity and more Assignments Philosophy in PDF only on Docsity! ANALYSIS OF RABBINICAL JUDAISM. BY REV. JAMES SCOTT, D. D., Aberlour, N. B., Scotland. We propose in this article first to trace the origin of the principal writings of the earlier Judaism, and especially of the Pirke Aboth, and next to analyze their substance or component elements. Among all the uninspired and non-canonical writings of the Hebrews, there are few that have been more generally esteemed both by Jews and Christians than the Ethics of the Fathers. They consist mainly of the choice sayings of the wise men of the Great Synagogue and Jew- ish Church who flourished between the return from the exile in Baby- lon and the compilation of the Mishna towards the close of the second century after Christ. They were collected for the most part by Rabbi Nathan the Babylonian about the year of our Lord 200 into a small volume of six chapters full of the moral maxims of the traditionists, and must not be confounded with a subsequent commentary on them by the same author, consisting of 41 chapters and entitled, "Treatise on the Fathers by Nathan." The latter is of a more mixed, fragmentary and fabulous char- acter than the former. The Pirke Aboth forms the 41st treatise in order of the Talmud, and is to be found not only there and in several separate reprints, but also translated into English by Dr. Robert Young of Edinburgh, together with a succinct and suitable introduc- tion to the Talmud. The sources of this little work, which contains a good sample of the collective wisdom of the Fathers, are various. It is gathered chiefly from the Massorah or tradition of the Jews, but a few portions have been taken from such formal works as the Mishna, the Gemara and the Targums, and probably even from the Jerusalem Talmud itself. We may pave the way for an analysis of rabbinical Judaism, by stating at the outset not only the relation of these writings to the Pirke Aboth, but also their own proper definition and mutual correla- tion. Now it is evident from the form of quotation or introduction of most of these sayings of the Fathers by Nathan that they are gener- ally taken from tradition. But the peculiar mode of their introduction would not determine whether they are citations of oral or of written tradition, because sayings and writings are frequently identified not only by the Jewish and Christian Fathers, but by the inspired authors T'IHE OLD TESTAMENT STUDENT. of the Old and New Testaments, so that a person is reported as saying what he has written, if not as having always written what he spok.e. This is a point of biblical philology of primary importance in con- nection with the proof of the historicity, divine inspiration and author- ity of the Scriptures. The rabbinical writings already referred to may be thus defined and their relation stated to each other and to the Pirke Aboth. The Mishna, or repetition of the inspired text of the law, a kind of dupli- cate-development of it contains the opinions of more than I30 Rab- bins, compiled and digested into one complete code of laws by Jehudah about I90 years after Christ. The primary design of this work was to declare the true doctrine of the divine Torah, to disprove the conflicting dogmas regarding Jewish law and practice, which issued from the rival schools of Juda- ism at Sephoris, Lydda and Tiberias, and thus to serve as a book of reference in all subsequent controversies regarding the true meaning of the Hebrew law. The authority of this work ultimately became so great that it was regarded as divine or equal to the Hebrew text by all Jews except the Karaites, who have steadfastly rejected its author- ity and clung tenaciously to the literal interpretation of the Torah in contradistinction to the allegorical method by which the divine law has been caricatured and biblical exegesis travestied. The Targums (Targ-'min) from the Hebrew verb Ragemz through the Chaldee quadriteral Targcrin, trajicere, transfer or translate from one language to another, were first verbal translations and afterwards exegetical paraphrases or interpretations of the sacred text of Scrip- ture. They are as old in point of fact, if not of literary form, as Ezra, who stood on a pulpit and read in the hearing of the assembled people the text of the Hebrew Torah, which the priests interpreted by ren- dering the pure Hebrew into the Aramaic or Chaldee vernacular with which their long exile in Babylon had made them familiar. And as the priests not only gave the sense of the Hebrew text, but caused the people to understand the reading, it is probable that they not only gave a version, but a paraphrase or word of explanation-Neh. vIIi., 4-8. More particularly we find that certain officials of Artaxerxes hostile to the Jews wrote a letter of complaint against them in the Syrian or Aramaan tongue, which was interpreted in that tongue. Sethzirgam-Ezra IV., 7. The most ancient versions of the Hebrew text, including not only the Aramaic and Arabic, but the Greek Septuagint, are frequently so * John v.. 45-47, Heb. ix., 19. 346 ANALYSIS OF RABBINICAL JUDAISMI. the Oriental dogma of the emanation or development of all things from the absolute impersonal or indeterminate unity, and of the dual- ism of Persia and of the Platonic school. The mystical philosophy ot Philo on this point, which was a manifest departure or decline from the pure theism, or personal God of the Old Testament and of the earlier authors of the Apocrypha and Septuagint, found its way into patristic Judaism, thus not only paving the path for error in religion, theology and ethics, but leading logically to Pantheism. Benedict Spinoza in the sixteenth century logically developed from this fundamental principle or postulate of the Cabbala his whole system of rigid Pantheism. The emanation theory is closely associ- ated, if not even causally connected with another in cosmogony, held by the leading Alexandrian philosophers and some of the Rabbins, and even in a modified form by the Christian Gnostics and Platonizing Christian Fathers, that the world or Cosmos was made by the abso- lute Deity through the medium of a series of intermediate potencies or subordinate agencies denominated respectively ho Logos, Pneumata, Angeloi, and Aioones, some of which were regarded as personal beings, others as mere personifications of the divine perfections or of the powers of nature. The dualistic principle of the necessary antagon- ism of spirit and matter, and the dogma of the inherent evil of matter, the latter of which is involved in the emanation principle, and more fully developed in the Cabbala and in Docetic Gnosticism, are not only presupposed in the Sadducean denial of a superintending providence or present God and in the selfmortification of the Essenes, but in a latent tendency of the rabbinical writers and leading philos- ophers of the Jewish-Greek school to conceive God as the transcendent rather than as the immanent cause of the world, as existing beyond His works and not as present to imperfect and intractable matter. Then, underlying all these philosophical speculations, and less or more pervading or producing them, is the allegorical principle, which like a bird of passage winged its way from its native home in the East and nestled and brooded in the western schools of profane and sacred learning. Literal and figurative forms of language, which are not antagonistic but mutually consistent and subservient, are common to all human speech and writing and therefore natural to the human mind. These two complementary principles of interpretation are as necessary as the two corresponding forms of human language, but they have both been carried to extremes in philosophy and religion by the riotous excess of human imagination and religious sentiment. They existed and operated in the Jewish Church and Schools from the beginning, like the Baconian method of philosophy, long before they 349 TIIE OLD TESTAMttENT STUDENT. became current and counter principles of formal interpretation. The allegory of the Orient was specially applied by Pythagoras and Plato to the facts and forms of Greek philosophy, by the Jewish Fathers to religious Judaism, and latterly not only by the Gnostic Christians, but by Ammonias Saccas and the Platonising Christian Fathers of Chris- tianity. Aristobulus the Jew in the middle of the second century before Christ formally introduced the allegorical method to the fathers of Judaism, and Philo may be said to have put the capstone on the structure which was thereby reared. It was used even by some of the apostolic Fathers, such as Hermas and Barnabas, to interpret the Old Testament, by Ammonias in the second century to harmonize and unify all the conflicting forins of philosophy, and thereafter by the Christian Fathers and especially by the ingenious Origen not only to reconcile Scripture with itself, but Christianity with Platonism. This vicious principle is the chief source of the huge mass of putrescent rubbish by which later Judaism and early Christianity were covered and buried in dishonorable graves. We may also find not only in Aristobulus and Philo, but in the Apocryphal and Rabbinical writings generally, faint traces of the numerical symbolism of the East and the mystic numbers of Pythagoras, whereby not only the numbers 7 and 10, the sacred symbols of the perfect sabbath and perfect law of the Io words, were employed to represent and reckon ideas and events. but also other numbers both multiple and unequal, for which no mys- tic or memorial significance could be claimed. 2. The theology of the later Jewish Schools, being closely con- nected with their philosophy, may be described generally as a system of pure deism tending to pantheism in Philo'and others, whose theism was founded on the Platonic dogma of the Unconditioned. Their long and lamentable captivity in Babylon not only effectually cured the Jews of foul idolatry, but has filled them ever since with a rooted aversion to polytheism. Idolatry, the chief cause of all their miseries in the early ages, is now universally regarded as the most heinous and hate- ful sin. They contend as strongly for the unity of God as Christians of whose creed it is one of the first and fundamental articles, or as Mohammedans who have made it the war-cry of their religion. The motto on the standard of the Maccabees, consisting of the initial let- ters of the Hebrew text, " VWho is like unto Thee among the gods, Jehovah," has ever since been the national banner with the grand device of Judah. But some of the rabbinical writers, and especially the Cabbalists, have construed this text in a sense not strictly compa- tible with pure biblical theism, or the unity of God. The theology of Jutdaism lamentably declined under the baneful influence of national 33)50 ANALYSIS OF RABBINICAL JUDAIS[M. corruption, external persecution and even intestine disorder, but espe- cially of the Oriental and Hellenic philosophy, operating mainly through the Graco-Alexandrian School. God is generally represented in the chapters of the Fathers and in the Mishna not only as the one living God, but as holy, just, wise and good. His unity and uniper- sonality are stated, but not his tripersonality as in the Old and New Testaments, where it is not only indirectly taught in some passages, and logically deducible from others, but directly declared in the bap- tismal formula and even in the prophetic announcement, "And now the Lord God, and His Spirit, hath sent me,"' the Messiah. The bib- lical phrases, Messiah, Son of God, and Word of God, Angel of Jeho- vah, and Spirit of the Lord in the Apocryphal books, especially of Wisdom, and in the writings of the Fathers, begin to lose their weight and ring in the sacred Canon, where they denote the attributes and works of divine persons. They are no longer divine persons with a distinct divine consciousness, but either the perfections of God per- sonified, or God manifested in creative and redemptive acts. They are not properly persons but merely personifications of God, or God revealing himself in gracious acts and influences. It may be both difficult and dangerous to present a philosophy of history, yet it can be shown that theology, or the doctrine of God, and Christology, or the doctrine of the Logos, declined apace with Judaism as a living and true religion. We find first the pure theism of the Canon, one Jehovah, the Creator of all things, and the Redeemer and King of Israel and of the whole world. Then as vital godliness declined, the natural perfections of God, such as his all-presence, power and knowledge, were brought into relief rather than his justice, truth and covenant love to his people. Thereafter, the persons of the god- head, or the tripersonality of God, which not only underlies the whole of the Old Testament from Creation and the Covenant of Sinai to the close of the Canon, but shines forth as the morning sun in many pas- sages, suffered eclipse in the non-canonical writings of Judaism, where the Son of God, and the Word and Spirit of God appear as mere per- sonifications of the revealed Jehovah, or of his revealed perfections. Next during the rise and prevalence of the Alexandrian philosophy the Hellenic conception of God as the absolute unity, beyond person- ality and definite existence and incapable of relation to finite things, appears in a distinction made between the absolute, impersonal and supreme God, and the personal Logos, the manifested world-maker and mediator between the absolute God and Israel. 351 * Is. xxxxviii., 16.