Winter 1984 - 1985 - Quarterly Review

JEWS AND CHRISTIANS
Central to the Pharisee challenge to the established form of Judaism
after the rebuilding of the Second Temple stood a new outlook on the
relationship between God and the human person. It was one marked
by a notion of a far more personal and intimate divine-human link
than previous expression of Judaism could conceive. This new
perception represented so fundamental a change in religious
consciousness that the Pharisees felt obligated to replace the names
for God found in the Hebrew Scriptures with ones more expressive of
the new union between God and the human family which they had
uncovered. Among the principal names they applied to God was
"Father." While this term has definite limitations in our era because of
its inability to express fully the femininity of God, in its setting it spoke
not of gender superiority but of a heightened sense of the profoundity
of God's link to each individual person.
This new sense of divine-human intimacy ultimately undercut the
basis of the intermediary/hereditary system of religious elitism which
prevailed in the older Sadducean temple/priesthood concept of Jewish
religion, up till then the dominant form of Judaism. As the Pharisees
saw it, all men and women, no matter what their social status or
bloodline, had such standing in the sight of God that they could relate
to God on a personal basis without further need to use the temple
priests as intermediaries. The prominent Jewish scholar on Pharisaism,
Jacob Neusner, has written the following about the ultimate
implications of this aspect of the movement in his volume From Politics
To Piety: The Emergence of Pharisaic Judaism (Prentice-Hall, 1973): "The
Pharisees thus arrogated to themselves—and to all Jews equally—the
status of Temple priests, and performed actions restricted to priests
on account of that status. The table of every Jew in his home was seen
as being like the table of the Lord in the Jerusalem Temple. The
commandment, 'You shall be a kingdom of priests and a holy people,'
was taken literally: everyone is a priest, everyone must keep the
priestly laws."
The consciousness transformation regarding the God-human
relationship led the Pharisees to undertake a major overhaul of the
liturgical, ministerial, and institutional life of Second Temple Judaism
and, in so doing, lay some of the groundwork for the early Christian
church. Picking up the mantle of the prophets, the Pharisees hoped to
translate prophetic ideals into the daily lives of the Jewish people of
their time.
Among the revolutionary changes brought about by the Pharisees
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