Did Jesus Exist? - The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth Bart Ehrman (books to read in your 20s txt) 📖

detailed in places. In fact, it is notoriously vague and ambiguous, not like, for instance, the American legal code. For example, the Ten Commandments indicate that the Sabbath day is to be honored and kept holy, but the Law does not go into great detail about how to do that. The Pharisees were intent on making sure they did what God wanted. But if the Law itself does not say how, then one has to come up with some guidelines.

Suppose it is agreed that honoring the day of rest means that on that day no work should be done, as the Torah states. Fair enough. But what constitutes work? Is it work to harvest your fields? Yes, probably so. So you should not harvest on the Sabbath. What if you don’t work all day but just go out into the field to harvest enough to have a bite to eat: is that work? Well, yes, that’s virtually the same thing as working all day except you’re not doing it as long. So that too should be forbidden even if the Law does not explicitly say so. What about if you are in your grain fields on the Sabbath and you knock off some of the grain just by walking through? Is that the same as harvesting? That’s the kind of question that does not have an easy answer: some people might say, no way, and others might say, yes indeed. And so different Jewish teachers argued about such things.

Their arguments were not meant to make life difficult. They were meant to help everyone know how to keep the Law. Keeping the Law was the main thing. The Pharisees developed a number of interpretations of the Law that were intended to make sure that Jews followed what Moses commanded. These interpretations came to be known as the “oral law.” Pharisees thought that if you followed the oral law (for example, by not walking through your grain fields on the Sabbath), then you were certain not to violate the written law of Moses. And that was the point of the religion, so it was all to the good.

We don’t know as much about Pharisees in the days of Jesus as we would like since none of them left any writings and we have to use later sources—very critically—to figure out what they stood for. But they are significant in the pages of the Gospels because Jesus is often in conflict with them. Jesus apparently did not think that being overly concerned about keeping the Law to the nth degree is what really mattered to God. He did think it was important to do what God commanded, but not in the ways that mattered to the Pharisees. And so they had some serious fallings-out. But it is important to remember that when Jesus opposed Pharisaic interpretations of the Law—for example, over what could and could not be done on the Sabbath—he was not opposing Judaism. He was simply opposing one interpretation of Judaism. Other Jews as well disagreed with the Pharisees.

The Sadducees

The real power players in Palestine in Jesus’s day were not the Pharisees—despite their prominence in the Gospels—but the Sadducees. Again we are handicapped in our ability to know much about the group because we have no writings that clearly come from any of them. What is certain, in any event, is that they had a different set of concerns from the Pharisees and that they were the ones who held power in Judea.

The Sadducees were closely connected with the priests who ran the Temple cult, and it is widely thought that many of them were themselves priests. Unlike the Pharisees, most Sadducees were apparently wealthy aristocrats. From their number was chosen the “high priest,” who was the ultimate authority for all things religious and civic in Jerusalem. The high priest was the chief liaison with the Roman ruling authorities, and it appears that Sadducees were by and large willing to compromise with the Romans in order to keep the peace and enjoy the freedom of exercising their religious prerogatives. Contrary to what is widely thought, Romans were not much of a physical presence in Palestine, or even in Jerusalem, most of the time during the days of Jesus. The Roman governor, Pilate, had his headquarters on the coast in Caesarea, where he kept his small contingent of troops. The real armies were up in Syria. There was no need for a greater Roman presence in the land so long as there was peace and the taxes kept rolling in.

As was their wont throughout the provinces, the Romans allowed the Jews of Judea to operate more or less under local rule. Except for instances of capital punishment, Romans appear to have let the local authorities do what needed to be done. The local Jewish council, which was authorized to run the political and civic affairs in Jerusalem, was called the Sanhedrin. It was headed by the high priest and appears to have comprised mainly other Sadducees, since these tended to be the wealthy and well-connected Jews.

In terms of religious commitments, the Sadducees placed no stock in the oral laws developed by Pharisees. They were instead interested strictly in what the Torah itself commanded, in particular with respect to the worship of God. Their focus was on the Temple in Jerusalem and on properly following the commandments of Moses concerning how the Temple cult was to be run and its sacrifices carried out. As we will see, even though Jesus apparently had a number of controversies with Pharisees during his public ministry, it was the Sadducees who spelled his demise. He openly showed opposition to the Temple and the sacrifices being performed there, and it was the local ruling authorities—the Sanhedrin and its Sadducees—who took greatest offense. They appear to have been the ones who had Jesus arrested and turned over for trial to the Roman governor Pilate, who was in town to keep peace during the incendiary times of the Passover