| <head>III.<hi rend="italic">The Procedure of Research on the Pharisees</hi></head><p>Narrowing the field of admissible evidence goes some way toward providing a common base for discussion, but not all the way; for the three sources agreed upon are still vastly different from one another in motivation, religious outlook, genre, and even language of composition. Josephus, the Jewish historian under Roman auspices, who may have been connected with the Pharisees at some point, stands over against the rabbinic heirs of the Pharisees on the one hand and their Christian adversaries on the other. Whereas Josephus's narrative speaks mainly about the Pharisees' public activities and "philosophical" beliefs, one might infer from the tannaitic writings that their sole concerns were religious-halakhic. It is not even clear that the rabbinic<span class="greek">HERBREW TEXT HERE</span>can be simply identified with the<span class="greek">Φαρισαῖοι</span>of Josephus and the NT.<note id="p1_c1_n52" place="foot">Cf. R. Meyer, "<span class="greek">Φαρισαῖοι</span>",<hi rend="italic"><span class="abbr" title="Theological Dictionary of the New Testament">TDNT</span></hi>, 12f. A similar difficulty in reconciling the Greek and Hebrew sources presents itself in the study of the Sanhedrin; cf. H. D. Mantel,<hi rend="italic">Studies in the History of the Sanhedrin</hi>(Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1965), 54ff., and S. B. Hoenig,<hi rend="italic">The Great Sanhedrin</hi>(Philadelphia: Dropsie College, 1953), xiiif.</note>Neusner's judgement meets the point:</p><p><q>Almost nothing in Josephus's picture of the Pharisees seems closely related to much, if anything, in the rabbis' portrait of the Pharisees, except the rather general allegation that the Pharisees had 'traditions from the fathers', a point made also by the Synoptic story-tellers.<note id="p1_c1_n53" place="foot">Neusner,<hi rend="italic">Rabbinic Traditions</hi>, III, 304.</note></q></p><pb n="11" /><p>The obvious and trenchant incongruities between the sources have evoked at least three responses.</p><p>The traditional response was to select one source as preferable to the others, whether on a criterion of religious authority or of supposed historical objectivity, and to give that source pride of place as the "base text". All three of our witnesses have enjoyed the prestige of such a position. Thus R. T. Herford called rabbinic literature "the real and only true source of information as to the Pharisees".<note id="p1_c1_n54" place="foot">Herford,<hi rend="italic">Pharisees</hi>, 14.</note>5 And L. Finkelstein opted for "the objective, almost scientific, approach of the Talmud, and its kindred writings" for his analysis.<note id="p1_c1_n55" place="foot">Finkelstein,<hi rend="italic">Pharisees</hi>, I, xxiii; cf. Elbogen,<hi rend="italic">Religionsanschauungen</hi>, pp. IV, 2-4, and Kohler, "Pharisees",<hi rend="italic"><span class="abbr" title="Jewish Encyclopaedia">JE</span></hi>, 661.</note>W. Bousset considered the NT to be the best source on the Pharisees and disparaged the meagre (in his judgement) evidence of the rabbis.<note id="p1_c1_n56" place="foot">Bousset,<hi rend="italic">Religion</hi>, 187; cf. Wellhausen,<hi rend="italic">Pharisäer</hi>, 21, 33f. For the documented accusation that Christian scholars have often relied too heavily on the NT for their understanding of Pharisaism or Judaism in general, cf. Herford,<hi rend="italic">Pharisees</hi>, 11f.; Moore,<hi rend="italic">Judaism</hi>, I, 13f.; J.F. Parkes,<hi rend="italic">The Foundations of Judaism and Christianity</hi>(London: Vallentine - Mitchell, 1960), 134f.; and Sanders, Paul , 33f.</note>Josephus has usually been adopted as a more "neutral" supplement to either the NT<note id="p1_c1_n57" place="foot">Wellhausen,<hi rend="italic">Pharisäer</hi>, 33f.</note>or the rabbis,<note id="p1_c1_n58" place="foot">R. Marcus, "Pharisees", 156; A. Guttmann,<hi rend="italic">Rabbinic Judaism in the Making</hi>(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970), 124f.</note>but he also finds his own partisans.<note id="p1_c1_n59" place="foot">W. W. Buehler,<hi rend="italic">The Pre-Herodian Civil War and Social Debate</hi>(Basel: Friedrich Reinhart, 1974), 5<hi rend="italic">et passim</hi>; O. Holtzmann,<hi rend="italic">Neutestamentliche Zeitgeschichte</hi>(Freiburg: J. C. B. Mohr, 1895), 158-162.</note></p><p>A second way of handling the disparity between the sources is more sophisticated inasmuch as it recognizes that no document is free of bias. It sets out, therefore, to consider the three source collections synoptically, in order to isolate their common testimony concerning the Pharisees. A. I. Baumgarten, for example, finds the idea of "precision" or "specification" behind both the<span class="greek">ἀϰρίβεια</span>-forms used of the Pharisees or "specification" behind both the<span class="greek">ἀϰρίβεια</span>-forms used of the Pharisees in Josephus and the NT and in the rabbinic<span class="greek">HERBREW TEXT HERE</span>.<note id="p1_c1_n60" place="foot">Baumgarten, "Name", 413-420.</note>A. Guttmann and J. Bowker attempt to fit all the sources together with their theories of the history of the Pharisees' name.<note id="p1_c1_n61" place="foot">Bowker, Jesus , 36; Guttmann, Rabbinic Judaism , 162ff.</note>The virtue of this synoptic approach is that it represents the overthrow of parochialism in dealing with the problem of the Pharisees.</p><p>It still falls short, however, in one crucial respect, namely: it continues to reflect an old but false assumption that the statements of the sources are so many raw data that can be selected and combined at will, without full regard to their meanings in their original frameworks. Thus a large<pb n="12" />part of Bowker's book is an anthology of Pharisee passages from the various sources; the supposition appears to be that these are the colours, as it were, with which one may paint one's portrait of Pharisaism.<note id="p1_c1_n62" place="foot">Bowker concedes, vii, that "the passages necessarily occur out of context, and may require the context for their full understanding". This does not yet meet the criticism, however, for the question is whether any particular statement of a source can be understood at all, or be directly usable, without reference to its context in the author's thought and purpose.</note>This approach was taken already by Schürer, who began his chapter on the Pharisees and Sadducees by citing relevant portions of Josephus and the Mishnah. The whole conception, now often labelled the "scissors and paste" method, stemmed from a positivistic concern for objective facts, which were considered to be embodied in documentary sources.</p><p>The third response to the disparities among the three sources is that taken by Neusner and Rivkin. Neusner prefaces his work with the judgement that "all previous studies of the Pharisees are inadequate because, in general, the historical question has been asked too quickly and answered uncritically".<note id="p1_c1_n63" place="foot">Neusner,<hi rend="italic">Politics</hi>, 6.</note>What does he mean by saying that "the historical question has been asked too quickly"? We can only surmise from his own approach. Before posing any questions about who the Pharisees really were (<hi rend="italic">wie es eigentlich gewesen ist</hi>), Neusner proceeds to devote whole chapters to the examination of how each source presents the Pharisees. His brief chapter, "The Pharisees in History", comes only at the end of this single-source analysis. Thus we find in Neusner a two-stage historical inquiry which involves, first, listening to each source's presentation and only afterward asking historical questions. Similarly, Rivkin sets out his procedural intentions:</p><p><q>Each of these sources will be cited, for the most part, in full and thoroughly analyzed, source by source, in successive chapters. . . . Only after we have constructed three definitions, independently drawn from Josephus, the New Testament, and the Tannaitic Literature, will we then compare each of the definitions with the others.<note id="p1_c1_n64" place="foot">Rivkin,<hi rend="italic">Revolution</hi>, 31f.</note></q></p><p>We are confronted, then, with a purely exegetical phase of historical research. This phase is called for by the realization that every written source is limited by its author's perspective; it is not, therefore, a collection of bare facts but is already an interpretation and formulation of events that needs to be understood in its own right. As A. Momigliano observes, "Between us (as historians) and the facts stands the evidence".<note id="p1_c1_n65" place="foot">A. Momigliano, "Historicism Revisited", in his<hi rend="italic">Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography</hi>(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977), 368f.</note>The source conveys only<span class="greek">δόξα</span>, opinion. It is conditioned<pb n="13" />negatively by the author's imperfect perception of events<note id="p1_c1_n66" place="foot">Cf.M. Bloch,<hi rend="italic">Apologie der Geschichte oder der Beruf des Historikers</hi>(2d. edn.; E. Klett J.G. Cotta, 1974), 65, who points out the limitations of eyewitness evidence, even under the most favourable circumstances. See now G.L. Wells and E.F. Loftus (edd.),<hi rend="italic">Eyewitness Testimony: Psychological Perspectives</hi>(Cambridge: University Press, 1984).</note>and, positively, by his conscious purposes in writing and by his own style.</p><p>How accurately an author perceived events is not a question that exegesis can answer. The author's style and intentions can, however, be uncovered, for literary analysis seeks to answer the question: What does the author mean to convey?<note id="p1_c1_n67" place="foot">Cf. B. F. Meyer,<hi rend="italic">Aims of Jesus</hi>(London:<hi rend="italic">SCM</hi>, 1979), 89f.</note>In exegesis, the author's motives and purposes, the genre and structure of his work, his emphases, key terms, and characteristic vocabulary all come under scrutiny. The interpreter considers, as a stimulus to grasping the author's intention, how the original readership would plausibly have understood the document. All of this is familiar to the biblical exegete. But it is a necessary first step in the probing of any historical problem; to bypass the literary analysis, as Neusner says, is to ask the historical question too quickly.</p><p>Applied to the problem of the Pharisees, these considerations will require that the passages bearing on the Pharisees in each of the relevant sources cannot be seconded as data for any historical reconstruction until they have first been understood within their original frameworks. Documentary references to the Pharisees may serve as ingredients of larger narratives, as with Josephus and the Gospels, or they may appear within an ordered collection of traditional sayings, as with the rabbinic literature. Either way, they owe their existence to the design of an author or editor and possess little immediate meaning outside of that design. Therefore, the historian is only entitled to make use of documentary statements about the Pharisees when he has first understood the literary meaning and function of those statements.</p><p>We are now in a position to specify the desiderata of an analysis of Josephus's Pharisee passages. Before doing so, however, we must complete the picture begun above by giving a proleptic answer to the question: How does the historian convert the several<span class="greek">δόξαι</span>of his sources into<span class="greek">ἐπιοτήμη</span>, knowledge?<note id="p1_c1_n68" place="foot">Cf. Collingwood (<hi rend="italic">Idea</hi>, 20-30) on ancient attempts to grapple with both the philosophical and historical aspects of this problem.</note>Having listened to the claims of each source, how can the critic discern what really happened?</p><p>Rivkin's own procedure becomes inadequate at this point. In the end, he expects simply to compare the resulting presentations of the Pharisees in the hope of finding agreement among them:</p><pb n="14" /><p><q>Should it turn out that these definitions are congruent with one another, then shall we not have cogent grounds for postulating that such a definition is truly viable and as objective as the nature of our sources will allow?<note id="p1_c1_n69" place="foot">Rivkin,<hi rend="italic">Revolution</hi>, 32.</note></q></p><p>Despite his clear perception of the two-tiered nature of historical research, therefore, Rivkin ultimately falls back into positivistic assumptions about how the second phase of the programme is to be carried out, namely, by a simple comparison of the different portraits. He can only expect such a result because his proposed "thorough analysis" of each source<note id="p1_c1_n70" place="foot">Ibid., 31.</note>turns out to be less than thorough. He still regards the statements of the sources as "raw material for a definition of the Pharisees".<note id="p1_c1_n71" place="foot">Rivkin,<hi rend="italic">Revolution</hi>, 54.</note>In principle, however, it is futile to hope that the sources will yield "congruent" presentations, since each source has its own aims and interests, as different from those of the other sources as they are from those of the historian.<note id="p1_c1_n72" place="foot">Cf. B.F. Meyer,<hi rend="italic">Aims</hi>, 89f.; M. Bloch,<hi rend="italic">Apologie</hi>, 125f.</note>Any points of intersection will, of course, be welcome. One must, however, anticipate divergences and be prepared somehow to exploit those also in one's search for the truth.</p><p>Nor is it enough to hope that, once each author's aims and proclivities have been identified, they might simply be evaporated off to leave a residue of bare fact. To hope for such a result would be, first, to underestimate the complexity and pervasiveness of an author's<hi rend="italic">Tendenz</hi>. For that bias is not restricted to some obvious themes overlaid on the material; it comprises rather the whole network of processes by which the author has (a) imperfectly perceived events, (b) found the motivation to record them, (c) exercised his will in selecting, omitting, and shaping the material to serve his ends, and (d) imparted his style, both conscious and unconscious, to the whole production. The author's viewpoint cannot be excised from the facts because the facts are only available through that viewpoint.<note id="p1_c1_n73" place="foot">Cf. M. Bloch,<hi rend="italic">Apologie</hi>, 65, 76f.</note></p><p>Second, the attempt to strip off the author's concerns in order to expose the facts assumes, gratuitously, that those concerns necessarily contradict the reality of the past and were not themselves shaped by the facts as the author perceived them. This fallacy is well known in historical-Jesus research.<note id="p1_c1_n74" place="foot">I refer to the logic of the "criterion of discontinuity", a trenchant critique of which is offered by B. F. Meyer,<hi rend="italic">Aims</hi>, 84ff.</note>In the study of Josephus, critics from R. Laqueur to S. J. D. Cohen have displayed a marked tendency to dispute one or another of Josephus's claims on the simple ground that Josephus wanted<pb n="15" />his readers to believe it.<note id="p1_c1_n75" place="foot">R. Laqueur (<hi rend="italic">Der jüdische Historiker Flavius Josephus</hi>[Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1970 (1920)], 246) claims that Josephus's autobiographical statements in<hi rend="italic">Life</hi>1-12, because they serve an apologetic purpose, are of dubious worth (<hi rend="italic">allerunsicherste und unzuverlässigste</hi>): "wo Josephus eine Tendenz hat, da pflegt er es mit der Wahrheit nicht genau zu nehmen". Similarly, S. J. D. Cohen ( Josephus<hi rend="italic">in</hi>Galilee<hi rend="italic">and</hi>Rome [Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1979], 107, 144) views Josephus's claim to Pharisaic allegiance as spurious because (allegedly) apologetic. M. Smith ("Palestinian Judaism", 77) is more cautious. Arguing that Josephus's statements in<hi rend="italic"><span class="abbr" title="The Jewish Antiquities">Ant.</span></hi>about Pharisaic influence are apologetically motivated, he remarks: "Such motivation does not, of course, prove that Josephus' statements are false, but it would explain their falsity if that were otherwise demonstrated."</note>It is enough for these historians to connect a particular claim with one of Josephus's discernible motifs in order to cast doubt on its validity. The doubtful assumption here is that an author's intentions always, or regularly, arise from somewhere other than his own experience of the "facts".<note id="p1_c1_n76" place="foot">Cohen himself unwittingly proves the fallaciousness of this assumption in two cases, by ultimately accepting data that he first disputes because of their apologetic character. (a) He argues (p. 197) that Josephus's account of the selection of generals for the revolt (<hi rend="italic"><span class="abbr" title="The Jewish War">War</span></hi>2:562-568) is "suspect" because "motivated by apologetic considerations": it assumes that all of the generals were chosen at one time. On the same page, however, one reads: "Nevertheless, even if Josephus has exaggerated and simplified, we have some reason to follow his account. It is inherently plausible." And finally (p. 198): "In the following discussion I assume that all the generals were chosen at one time although I admit that it is uncertain." (b) A more fundamental contradiction lurks in Cohen's accusation that Josephus is guilty of reductionism in portraying the Jerusalemites as divided into a "war party" and a "peace party". Says Cohen: "There must have been a wide variety between the two extremes, the desire to surrender to the Romans as soon as possible and the readiness to die in a blaze of glory" (p. 183). But Cohen employs the very same reductionism as a major criterion of his study, for he refuses to countenance Josephus's claim that he and other aristocrats wanted peace, on the ground that Josephus was a general in the rebel army and therefore could not have wanted peace (pp. 152ff.). Cohen himself thus excludes any possibility of ambivalent loyalties.</note></p><p>For these two reasons, it would be naive to hope that we might discover facts about the Pharisees by taking each source, filtering out its "tendentious" elements, and accepting the residue.</p><p>How, then, to convert the "potential data"<note id="p1_c1_n77" place="foot">The phrase is from B. F. Meyer,<hi rend="italic">Aims</hi>, 90.</note>offered by the sources into historically probable information about the Pharisees? An adequate approach must certainly take into account the tendencies of the sources (Laqueur, Cohen) and any coincidence of detail that might emerge between them (Rivkin), but it cannot enlarge either of these factors into a complete system for reconstructing the past. Such a system requires a method and this can only be imparted by the historian as a thinking subject.<note id="p1_c1_n78" place="foot">Cf. M. Bloch,<hi rend="italic">Apologie</hi>, 79f.</note>What is required is that the critic, having now listened to each of the sources' presentations of the Pharisees, step forward to pose his own<pb n="16" />questions and develop his own reconstruction of events.<note id="p1_c1_n79" place="foot">Cf. Collingwood,<hi rend="italic">Idea</hi>, 218f.</note>Thus B. F. Meyer proposes, "The technique of history is the hypothesis."<note id="p1_c1_n80" place="foot">B. F. Meyer,<hi rend="italic">Aims</hi>, 88.</note>The critic seeks to formulate a hypothesis as to what really happened that will account for all of the relevant presentations in the sources. As Momigliano puts it, the historian "has to assess the value of his evidence not in terms of simple reliability, but of relevance to the problems he wants to solve".<note id="p1_c1_n81" place="foot">Momigliano,<hi rend="italic">Essays</hi>, 368f.</note></p><p>This formulation and demonstration of hypotheses requires of the interpreter a fundamental shift in perspective from the exegetical phase of the investigation. Then, he was concerned with grasping the author's meaning; now, he will present his own account. Then, he was looking for the witness's intentional statements; now, he seeks the unintentional evidence that will expose the witness's biases and limitations.<note id="p1_c1_n82" place="foot">On the value of unintentional evidence, see M. Bloch,<hi rend="italic">Apologie</hi>, 76-84.</note>Thus, historical analysis has often been compared to a courtroom crossexamination.<note id="p1_c1_n83" place="foot">So already Polybius 4.2.4; cf. Collingwood,<hi rend="italic">Idea</hi>, 26, 281ff.; A. W. Mosley, "Historical Reporting in the Ancient World",<hi rend="italic"><span class="abbr" title="New Testament Studies">NTS</span></hi>12 (1965), 11-15; and Momigliano,<hi rend="italic">Essays</hi>, 162f.</note>Once the witnesses have all been heard on their own terms and have given their own interpretations (the exegetical phase), the investigator steps forward to pose his questions, in order to rediscover the events that stood behind all of the accounts.</p> |
