Pharisaism insisted that one could never know that the food served on such a table was properly killed and properly prepared. If one went into the house of a sinner or a Gentile one faced presumptive defilement. Jesus regarded such a risk apparently as of no importance. (2) Acts and Galatians show us that this is exactly the position of Peter until the time when "those from James" remonstrated with him-perhaps as the leading apostle to the Jews. Peter stayed at the house of Simon, the tanner, an outcast by occupation; he ate with Cornelius; he ate freely with the Gentiles at Antioch, and Paul's public rebuke to him there reads: "If thou being a Jew livest as a Gentile, and not as the Jews, how compellest thou the Gentiles to live as do the Jews?" In connection with this I would also remark that Paul's discussion of this subject in Galatians is to the effect that the early church was by no means meticulous in their observance of the Law until there came in later "false brethren to spy out the liberty which we have in Christ Jesus." Was it not just this looseness as to the law which aroused Paul the Pharisee to his task of persecution? (3) We have closely related evidence as to Jesus' attitude toward foods from other passages in the Gospels. On the one hand we are told in two sources that Jesus and his disciples refused to adopt a custom of handwashing before meals. The exact nature of the rite is in some doubt, but the fact of the episode can hardly be doubted and throws light upon Jesus' lack of interest in the cleanness or uncleanness of foods. Furthermore, there are preserved two forms of an earlier Aramaic tradition that Jesus declared that vessels could not make food unclean provided the one who ate was clean of heart. (4) The struggle in the early church over the law centered primarily on the issue of circumcision. This is the testimony both of Paul's letters-see especially Gal. 2 3-7; 5 2; 1 Cor. 7 18, 19-and of the Book of Acts (151). We would expect, there 2 Galatians 2 14: Εἰ σὺ Ἰουδαῖος ὑπάρχων ἐθνικῶς τῇς καὶ οὐκ Ἰουδαικῶς, πῶς τὰ ἔθνη ἀναγκάζεις Ἰουδαίζειν; fore, a logion, the origin of which is to be traced to Gentile Christianity's consciousness of freedom from the law, to deal rather with this central issue of circumcision. In the light of these facts it is not so clear that Mark 7 15 is a later addition to the story, though it may not have been couched in quite so sweeping a form as we now have it. It probably was uttered in connection with some controversy such as that over vessels, or over presumptive defilement in the houses of sinners or over food eaten with unwashed hands, to which controversy it is now related in our text. In the last case, we may see a reason why the saying plays no part in the controversy over the law until at a later date, for rabbinic scholars are agreed that the cleansing of hands before eating was at this time not a requirement of the law for laymen. But in any case we may feel sure from the analogy of other cases that Jesus' thought on this topic was along lines that have been outlined-that foods and the rules about them were not vitally involved in that obedience of the heart which God desired. A generation later a great rabbi, Johanan ben Zakkai, uttered the same thought: "A corpse does not defile nor water make clean," though his training, his logic and his philosophy made him add: "but it is a command of the King of Kings." It is just this addition which represents the difference between Jesus and the rabbis in their attitude toward the law. Judaism had inherited from the more primitive stage of its history a collection of laws dealing with all aspects of the nation's life, and these laws had become invested with the sanctity of the divine revelation. Professor Moore has recently shown how the scribes were gradually transforming these laws along lines of the teachings of the prophets, using the principle of interpretation by the oral law as their instrument. But Judaism was retarded in this development by two factors which were both its strength and its weakness. On the one hand, religion was socially interpreted, and the individual conscience thus was subject to correction by the rulings of 3 Tanhuma ed. Buber, Hukkat § 26, and elsewhere. the majority of scribes. In the second place, the scribes were scholars, men of the classroom, men who insisted on the test of logic. But in the light of the premises as to the law which Judaism had inherited, logic was not perhaps the most valuable tool for religion. The scribes were eminently logical in their criticisms of Jesus. They pointed out that he accepted the Torah but disregarded or eliminated certain sections of it. Jesus was a man of the people. He was untrained in the schools. He was not a theologian nor a doctor of the law. He was engaged in a mission of great urgency and moral intensity. His message came from his own conscience; he submitted it to no earthly authority, but the elements out of which it was built were in the Torah. Thus he did not appear teaching a new law, as the early Church liked to picture him, but as teaching Torah in its real nature. He did not begin with certain premises and make logical consistency the test of truth. He began rather, I think, with the commandment, "Thou shalt love the Lord, Thy God, with all thy heart and thy neighbor as thyself," and he made ethical consistency with that principle his test. Judaism was struggling toward the expression of this ideal in its manifold law, but it needed the prophet of the people to break through its shackles to the past.* [Editor's note: A vital point in the discussion of this subject, particularly in the use of Mark, our earliest witness, is the fact that in Jesus' debate with the scribes in Mk. 7 1-23 the distinction between the torah of God and "ordinances of men" is made basic (so again Mk. 10 2-9) with explicit appeal to "Isaiah" (quoting Is. 29 13). It may be worthy of note that Paul (Col. 2 22) and the Nazarenes of Aleppo in the time of Apollinarius of Laodicea and Jerome (Comm. ad loc.) made the same application of the same passage.] The views presented in this article will be presented in fuller detail in a forthcoming volume on the topic. PETER'S VISION OF THE RISEN CHRIST SELBY VERNON MCCASLAND THERE is no room for dogmatizing about the nature of the experience of Simon Peter when he saw Jesus alive again and became persuaded that he had risen from the dead. We may not hope to attain ultimate finality in the interpretation. But there is no reason why the study may not be kept within the limits of a strictly empirical method, and that is the best instrument, even with all of its well recognized inadequacies, that science has yet been able to devise. The explanations of the visions of the early disciples that have been suggested in the past may be stated under three heads: the objective manifestation to the physical senses of men who were still living a normal physical life of a living spiritual being that had survived the death of the physical body; the so-called telegram from heaven, suggested by Keim;1 and the subjective vision, which is really a visual hallucination, in which the object is real to the seer but has no objective reality. I The traditional interpretation from the beginning has held that Jesus survived the grave as a spiritual being and made himself known to the disciples on various occasions; and in recent times this theory has been supported by some who do not hold the usual traditional view of the Bible, but claim 1 Jesus of Nazara (1883), vol. vi, p. 364. to be empirical scientists, who undertake to demonstrate the theory by the séances of spirit mediums. But no one can make the assumption which has underlain the traditional view, that departed spirits have objective ontological existence and are able to make themselves known to living persons, or that one has done that in the past, and make claim to an empirical method, for that method does not start with such assumptions. This does not deny the right of faith to believe the traditional assumption but simply that science has a right to make it. And those who have attempted to prove their case by recourse to the séance have not yet succeeded. This is, no doubt, a legitimate field for investigation and the scientist should explore it, but no finality has been reached thus far, at least none that has been accepted by the recognized psychologists.3 Lake allows for the possibility that this type of investigation may take the study of the resurrection in the future into a new field or place it upon a different plane. But thus far it is pointed out that the phenomena of spiritism have explanation according to the recognized principles of psychology; the communications from the dead may be due to the reawakening of communications that have taken place before death and have lain dormant in the subconscious phase of personality.5 This is in harmony with the neutral theory of the subconscious. Moreover, the entire assumption on which the conception of communication with the dead rests is the primitive idea of human nature, when it was thought that personality was of more than one distinct part; that the soul lived in the body as a dwelling place until death, and then continued its life in other places; that the soul's life was by no means 2 F. W. H. Meyers, Human Personality and its Survival beyond the Grave; Lodge, Hibbert Journal, April 1908; Hoffmann, Das Geheimnis der Auferstehung Christi (1925). 3 George A. Coe, The Psychology of Religion, 1918, p. 292. 4 Lake, The Historical Evidence for the Resurrection of Christ, 1907, p. 265. 5 Coe, op. cit. p. 202; Lake, op. cit. pp. 253 ff. |