Friday, May 26, 2023

Avram R. Shannon on Matthew 23:2-3

  

The apparent meaning of Matthew 23:2 is actually the best reading here—namely, Jesus acknowledges the validity of the Pharisees’ interpretation. Jesus could have urged the people to go and live the written law of Moses and not to listen to the interpretations of the scribes and Pharisees since they were certainly not the only ancient Jews who taught and interpreted the law of Moses. The New Testament is full of stories of Jesus and his followers learning from the scriptures and interpreting them, including the living of the Sabbath. In Matthew, Jesus tells the people to listen to the Pharisees (v. 3). A reading that Jesus is condemning the Pharisaic halakah is necessary only if one assumes that Jesus is opposed to the oral law and halakic discourse as a concept. This does not mean that Jesus even needs to agree with the specific halakah of the Pharisees (indeed, he often does not, especially when it comes to the Sabbath). It does mean, however, that Jesus approves of the process of discussing and interpreting the commandments which he himself gave on Mount Sinai (see 3 Nephi 15:5).

 

Indeed, this difficulty may perhaps be explained most easily by suggesting that the “heavy burdens” in Matthew 23:4 do not refer to halakic discussion of the commandments, but instead are being presented as evidence for Jesus’s actual condemnation of the scribes and the Pharisees: the fact that “they say, and do not” (v. 3). In this reading the “heavy burdens” are actual physical burdens. The Pharisees make other people lift things for them but do not work themselves. The Pharisees’ failing is grounded in the tendency of elites to have others do their physical labor for them. Thus Jesus’s problems with the Pharisees as religious leaders is not their interpretation of the commandments as such, but their unwillingness to follow even their own interpretations, just like they are unwilling to do their own work. This explains how Jesus can both tell the people to do whatever the Pharisees instruct them to do as well as warn them against the actions of the scribes and the Pharisees. (Avram R. Shannon, "The Sabbath in Rabbinic Judaism: Exploring the How of Keeping the Commandments," in Sacred Time: The Sabbath as a Perpetual Covenant, ed. Gaye Strathearn [Provo, Utah: BYU Religious Studies Center; Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2022], 154-55)