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  • From: Loren Rosson <rossoiii AT yahoo.com>
  • To: Corpus-paul <corpus-paul AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Re: Paul a Pharisee?
  • Date: Sat, 22 Sep 2001 05:26:20 -0700 (PDT)


Hyam,

Thanks for the reply. You write:

>You suggest that Paul could have been a
>Shammaite Pharisee, and that is why he did
>not share Gamaliel's tolerant attitude to
>the EC. But remember the grounds put forward
>by Gamaliel for tolerance of the EC (Acts 5).
>He saw Peter as the follower of a messianic
>movement comparable with other messianic
>movements, eg. those of Theudas and Judas of
>Galilee. Gamaliel did not even mention any
>question of whether Jesus had challenged any
>tenet of Judaism...

You mean "according to Luke" he didn't mention any
question of this. But Gamaliel may have been urging
leniency with the Christians precisely on account of
their various unorthodoxies, against hard-liners like
the Shammaites. That he saw the Christians as
comparable with other messianic movements was simply
the bottom line -- which, indeed, was aimed at
undercutting the Shammaites' intolerant position.

>he simply took it for granted that Jesus, like
>Theudas and Judas, had made a bid for Messiahship
>(i.e. a political bid to to oust the Romans).

Yes, I agree.

>Given the grounds on which Gamaliel urged leniency to
>Peter, these grounds would have been supported even
>more strongly by Shammaites than by Hillelites.

Again (pursuant to my previous post), the opposite
would have been true if the Christians were
significantly unorthodox. What good were
revolutionaries like these?

>I would point out also, that without the support
>of the Shammaites, Gamaliel would not have been
>able to secure a majority of the Sanhedrin against
>the High Priest. A divided Pharisee party would
>never have outnumbered the Sadducee supporters of
>the High Priest.

This depends on the makeup of the "Sanhedrin" during
this time, but you make a fair enough point. We should
also be careful about attributing monolithic
perspectives to either party. Most Hillelites probably
felt as Gamaliel did, but a few may have needed a good
amount of persuasion. Some Shammaites may actually
have been won over by Gamaliel, despite inclinations
to the contrary. But aggressive hard-liners like Paul
would have remained unyielding.

Now with regards to Jesus and the temple,

>Jesus said he would destroy the Temple and
>then rebuild it. This was expected of any Messianic
>claimant. All Jews expected that a new Temple
>would arise in the messianic era...

Again, I'm wary of monolithic views you feel
comfortable attributing to "all Jews", since we know
that messianic beliefs were very fluid and diverse. We
do not know, in fact, that Simon of Perea, Athronges
of Judea, and Judas of Galilee (for instances) all
expected a new temple to replace the old. One of the
most diligent works on 2nd-Temple messianic beliefs
has come in the work of Collins' "The Sceptre and the
Star", in which four basic messianic types are
presented, with variances among each type --
warrior-kings, prophets, priests, and heavenly
arch-angels. Would we say that "parting the waters of
the Jordan" was expected of all prophetic messiahs,
just because Theudas and others enacted on this
belief? The Egyptian prophet evidently disagreed,
targeting instead the walls of Jerusalem. The
messianic view you attribute to Jesus is certainly
possible, but not certain.

Loren Rosson III
Nashua NH
rossoiii AT yahoo.com

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