Saturday, March 12, 2022

Matthias Skeb on Justin Martyr's Comments about the Pharisees in Dialogue with Trypho 80

  

JUSTIN MARTYR, DIALOGUE WITH TRYPHO 80.4:

THE CATALOGUE OF HYPOCRITES

 

The first catalogue that mentions the Pharisees and that has clear heresiological interests is Justin’s “Catalogue of Hypocrites” in the Dialogue with Trypho (80.4). The Dialogue is “the oldest surviving Christian apology addressed against the Jews.”

 

The catalogue of the Jewish heresies in Dial. 80 reads:

 

One, after careful examination, would not acknowledge as Jews, the Sadducees or the similar sects of the Genistae, Meristae, Galileans, Hellenians, and the “washing” Pharisees (Φαρισαιων βαπτιστων).

 

The text seems to suggest that for Justin, Pharisees, or at least “washing Pharisees,” are not Jews.

 

Far-reaching sociological conclusions have been based on this assumption. According to Shaye Cohen, the “expulsion” of the Pharisees in Dial. 80 mirrors the decision of the rabbis at the synod of Yavneh (Jamnia) (ca. 100) to exclude sectarian movements in favor of a liberal, open-minded new form of orthodoxy (“The Significance of Yavneh: Pharisees, Rabbis, and the End of Jewish Sectarianism,” HUCA 55 [1984]: 48-49). Daniel Boyarin goes one step further: for him, Dial. 80 reveals that the religious division is not between Christianity and Judaism but rather between Christian and Jewish orthodoxy on the one hand and the Christian and Jewish sects on the other (Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity, 40-44).

 

It is highly doubtful that Justin simply wants to say: Pharisees are not Jews. He considers them as teachers of the (contemporary) Jewish community (Dial. 102.5), and this only makes sense if they are acknowledged to be Jews.

 

The key to understanding Dial. 80 is Justin’s concern for distinguishing reality from appearance. The section begins with Trypho’s attack on Justin, in which he asserts that Justin does not really believe what he has claimed regarding millenarianism; he was, Trypho suggests, making only a strategic move (§1). Justin’s answer adduces this concern for appearance and reality: he argues that he—and Christians in general—have the ideal of not saying one thing (externally) and thinking another (internally) (§2). While there are indeed persons who are called Christians (λεγομενους . . . .Χριστιανους) “but in reality are godless and impious heretics,” Justin wants to prove his own trustworthiness by promising a treatise on the topic of his debate with Trypho (§3). He then continues his defense (§4) with an attack on Typho that has the rhetorical form of a retorsio argumenti (anticategoria) (Dial. 80.4):

 

If you have ever encountered any nominal (λεγομενοις) Christians who do not admit this doctrine, but dare to blaspheme the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob by asserting that there is no resurrection of the dead, but that their souls are taken up to heaven at the very moment of their death, do not consider them to be Christians; just as (ωσπερ) one, after careful examination, would not acknowledge as Jews the Sadducees or the similar sects (αιρεσεις) of the Genistae, Meristae, Galileans, Hellenians, and the “washing” Pharisees [cf. Mark 7:4] (please take no offence if I say everything that I think), but would realize that they are Jews and children of Abraham in name only (λεγομενους), paying lip service to God, while their hearts, as God Himself declared are far from Him [cf. Mark 7:6; Matt 15:8; Isa 29:13]. (Justin, Dial. 80.4 [Falls and Halton])

 

Justin turns Trypho’s accusation, the hypocritical “difference between appearance and reality,” against the Jews by attacking one of their most important representatives, the Pharisees, as hypocrites; they are like heretical Christians. For the sake of this attack he also uses the mocking formulation “washing Pharisees” (Luke 11:39 and Matt 23:25 criticize the Pharisees’ purification rites as expressions of a discrepancy between the external action and the [more important] internal state).

 

The word ωσπερ (“like”/”as”) indicates that Justin is comparing groups that appear to be Christian (but in his view are heretics) with groups that appear to be Jews (but in his view are not). A correct interpretation of a comparison (παραβολη) has to find the tertium comparationis, the special aspect of the comparison. This aspect can be found in the “difference between appearance and reality” and in its biblical application in Mark 7:6-7 and Matt 15:7-8, citing Isa 29;13 in relation to the Pharisees (!) and scribes (cf. Matt 15:1): “You hypocrites! Isaiah prophesied rightly about you when he said: ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me’” (Matt 15:7-8).

 

For Justin, the Pharisees and scribes exemplify people whom God or Jesus condemn as “hypocrites” because of the difference between their external behavior and their internal attitude, between their appearance and their reality. Scripture offered the means of argument that Justin was able to use a retorsion argumenti. He, like his biblical authority, is not making sociological distinctions between Jews and non-Jews, Christians and non-Christians, orthodoxy and heterodoxy; he is making spiritual distinctions between a (real) interior and a (seeming) superficial religious affiliation. He offers an authoritative biblical reinterpretation of religious affiliation based on the (Christian) idea of internalization, and he knows that the Jew Trypho can accept neither this reinterpretation nor the retorsion argumenti in general. Therefore, he says “Please take no offence if I say everything that I think.”

 

But this retorsio argumenti works only if the Pharisees are considered to be Jews by both Trypho and Justin. The text does not support the far-reaching conclusion that Justin is establishing “interreligious” borders between orthodoxy and heresy and that the Pharisees and the other groups he mentions belong to a “Christianized” catalogue according to the criterion of faith in resurrection. The Pharisees and their colleagues are simply examples of “hypocrites” Justin’s catalogue is a rhetorical application of the common patristic verdict “Pharisees are hypocrites” based on the theological principle of internalization and used as a retorsio argumenti against Trypho. (Matthias Skeb, “’Pharisees’ and Early Christian Heresiology,” in The Pharisees, ed. Joseph Sievers and Amy-Jill Levine [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2021], 258-61)