. (Continued.)
The apologist allows that the process of drawing new precepts from the old may have been too freely applied. “Yet, while the Talmudical Code practically differs from the Mosaic, as much as our Digest will some day differ from the laws of Canute, and as the Justinian Code differs from the Twelve Tables, it cannot be denied that these fundamental laws have in all cases been consulted, carefully and impartially as to their spirit, their letter being but the vessel or outer symbol. The often uncompromising severity of the Pentateuch, especially in the province of the penal law, had certainly become much softened down under the milder influence of the culture of later days.” (p. 432.)
No Christian reader can weigh the spirit of this extract without feeling that it betrays infidelity as regards the Old Testament; and the man that slights the divine authority of the Hebrew scriptures will never be found true to the claims of the New Testament, as will soon be evident in the reviewer. Who but an unbeliever would dare to compare the statutes of Moses (even those relating exclusively to the people and land of Israel) with the laws of Canute or the twelve tables? It is not merely the notion of development into the Talmud (like the civil law of the empire, or the British Digest some day) which is so evil, but the blindness which fails to apprehend the essential difference between the Mosaic institutes, and every other law of every other nation. Was not the law given by Moses God's law?—God's law throughout? Was it so with Canute's? or the twelve tables?
Again, the idea of development, natural in the growth of the human mind and of the collective wisdom of ages, is precisely negatived by the fact of a divine revelation. It is here that ritualists and rationalists find their common point of meeting. They are both of them infidel as to God's word, and in disparagement and dislike of its unswerving authority they sympathize: the one setting up the ever accumulating traditions of men, mainly of the past; the other asserting their own right of free handling in virtue of human progress.
But God's word, whether for Israel in their rudimentary place, or in its fullness of light for the Christian, is itself and refuses admixture. Marvelously adapted by human instruments for man's heart and conscience, it is the revelation of God, as nothing else is. It may be explained, well or ill, but it admits of no development. Its divine perfectness is such, that to add to God's word what is of man is to be found a liar. The teacher may unfold, the exhorter enforce; but the truth is there fully revealed for unfolding and enforcement. The Lord works by those He raises up and sends to minister; but the thing ministered is His own word, the only source and standard of truth.
Of the truth the Church is the responsible keeper, not the teacher but the guardian of it. The Church is taught by instruments given of the Head; the Church never teaches: otherwise development would follow to the denial of a complete revelation from God. The Church is bound to be the pillar and ground of the truth; but it is of truth not latent in the Church or to be evolved by human skill; it is of truth revealed of God. Hence the written word is the resource for the believer in the perils of the last days, not the Church, nor a teacher, not even the blessed Spirit of God, but scripture, though the Holy Spirit alone makes wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus. (2 Tim. 3)
To return, however: the believer will not admire the estimate which insinuates the contrast of the mildness of later Judaism with the rigor of the Pentateuch. The truth is, that in divine things the enemy's effort (alas! too successful) is to enfeeble the absolute authority of God's word by every means and at all cost; hence, to bring in changes and shifts, development and tradition, anything rather than what God says—needless ceremonies where God has left liberty; and laxity, more or less, where He demands uncompromising severity. Thus, in result, faithless man, in contempt of the divine revelation which it is his privilege to possess and his responsibility to obey, claims credit for the softening down of old barbarism, especially in the penal law, under the milder influences of the culture of later days. Alas! for poor proud man. Does he not know that as many as have sinned in the law shall be judged by the law? How will the plea of “later days” with their boasted improvements stand in the day when God shall judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ the Lord?
It is not necessary here to trace the process of this development of the law in the hands of the scribes. Let us turn to the reviewer's statement of the relation of the Talmud to Christianity.
“Were not the whole of our general views on the difference between Judaism and Christianity greatly confused, people would certainly not be so very much surprised at the striking parallels of dogma and parable, of allegory and proverb, exhibited by the gospel and the Talmudical writings. The New Testament, written, as Lightfoot has it, among Jews, by Jews, for Jews, cannot but speak the language of the times, both as to forms, and, broadly speaking, as to contents (!) There are many more vital (!) points of contact between the New Testament and the Talmud than divines yet seem fully to realize; for such terms as ‘redemption,' ‘baptism,' grace,' ‘faith,' ‘salvation,’ ‘regeneration,’ ‘Son of man,' ‘Son of God,' ‘kingdom of heaven,' were not as we are apt to think, invented by Christianity, but were household words of Talmudical Judaism, to which Christ gave a higher and purer meaning.”
Is it not manifest that it is the reviewer whose notions are both confused and dishonoring to Christianity through his desire to apologize for Rabbinism? He that dooms himself to explore the weary waste of the Talmud will travel far to discover a real parallelism to the gospel in dogma and parable, allegory and proverb, save where drawn unquestionably from the Old Testament. Almost all the terms cited are borrowed directly from the earlier volume of inspiration. The main difference is that the rejection of Jesus by the Jews gave occasion to the Holy Spirit to bring them out in a new and incomparably deeper light, so as to be the form of expressing Christian privilege before “that day” dawn when the old promises in their primary import shall be fulfilled to the restored and repentant people of Israel, then looking on Jehovah-Messiah whom they pierced.
Thus “redemption,” which in the Old Testament is mainly the application of God's power to deliver His people from their foes, is, as characteristically though not exclusively, in the New Testament by the blood of Christ. Take Psa. 14 and Isaiah and compare their connection in the Old Testament with the use made in Rom. 3 In the psalm, the awful picture of the people's sin ends with the desire that the salvation of Israel were come out of Zion, and the anticipation of their joy when Jehovah brings back the captives. In the prophecy, a similar picture of their moral ruin closes with the distinct prediction that the Redeemer shall come to Zion. In both it is redemption by power. But if we examine what follows the citation of these scriptures by the apostle Paul, it is plainly God's gratuitous justification by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. But how? Is it His coming in power and glory to deliver? Nay; “whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood.”
Similarly we might trace how each of the terms quoted is transfigured when seen on the holy mount with Jesus in their midst, as compared with their use in that vast collection of mummies, the Talmud. Founded on the Old Testament, if not directly borrowed from it, the Rabbis degraded what the inspiring Spirit of the New Testament transformed with vivifying power and made them to be, as Christ said, spirit and life. Even the advocate of the Talmud is compelled to own the power of His name in this respect. What was ἀγάπη in the dialect of Attica before the Holy Ghost made it to be the chosen expression of such love as was seen in Christ, and described in 1 Cor. 13 or 1 John 4? It is the truth conveyed which is the real matter, and not the words as employed by Greeks or Jews. Who ever used them as they are used in the New Testament?
We are next told that “no less loud and bitter in the Talmud are the protests against ‘lip-serving,' against ‘making the law a burden to the people,' against ‘laws that stand on hairs,' against priests and Pharisees! The fundamental mysteries of the new faith are matters totally apart; but the ethics in both are, in their broad outlines, identical. That grand dictum, ‘Do unto others as thou wouldst be done by,' against which Kant declared himself energetically from a philosophical point of view, is quoted by Hillel, the president, at whose death Jesus was ten years of age, not as anything new, but as an old and well-known dictum that ‘comprised the whole law.' The most monstrous mistake has ever been our mixing up, in the first instance, single individuals, or classes, with a whole people; and next, our confounding the Judaism of the time of Christ with that of the time of the wilderness, of the Judges, or even of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The Judaism of the time of Christ (to which that of our days, owing principally to the Talmud, stands very near) and that of the Pentateuch are as like each other as our England is like that of William Rufus, or the Greece of Plato that of the Argonauts.” (pp. 437, 438.)
Can anything exceed the calm unbelief of such sentiments as these? the constant glorifying of man and his progress? the solemn fact, along with this and not very consistent with it, but most true, that the Judaism of to-day morally identifies itself with the Judaism of the time of Christ? The believer at once feels how fatal is the confession; for the rejection of Jesus demonstrates that “that generation” thereby manifested to the full their hatred of the Father and the Son, as His own lips of grace and truth laid to their charge. (John 15) Nothing more certain! But in an organ which, though said to be at present edited by an Independent, is the staunch support of the established religion, and boasts of articles by Anglican bishops, professors of divinity, and other eminent functionaries, who could have expected that a paper should be received, approved, and applauded, which dares to single out for a favorite stage of progress and attainment, singularly like the state of our day (the usual theme of vaunting to the human mind), the age which crucified the Lord Jesus, and sealed its guilt in blaspheming the Spirit's testimony to the suffering but exalted Son of man? Had he owned that the Jewish nation (save the remnant that received Jesus and so escaped) became then, through their unbelief and God's judgment of it, a pillar of salt, and that the Talmud has largely contributed to perpetuate to this hour so awful a monument of sin and shame, it had been nearer the truth.
That there are in the Talmud beautiful moral apothegms of right and wrong borrowed from Moses, no man who values and upholds the honor of God's law could or would deny. But it is utterly false that the New Testament does not go far beyond, not the Talmud only, or any other code of religious tradition, but even the inspired Old Testament. The presence of a divine Person, a man, on earth among us was in itself the introduction of what was necessarily new and beyond all past experience: still deeper was the change for others in virtue of the mighty work of redemption He wrought on the cross, made known and made good in the faith of those who since then are born of God, by the operation of that other Paraclete, the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven. Thus, what the law could not do in that it was weak through the flesh, God, sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh, that the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. The very ground of proper Christian holiness was unknown before the death and resurrection of Jesus; and the power was wanting till the Spirit of promise was given. Hence, in Old Testament times, however we may delight in ways of faith, and love, and obedience (which far transcend mere power, be it what it may), no saint before Christ did or could count himself dead to sin and alive unto God, as every real Christian is privileged and exhorted to do. None then could take the place of a worshipper once purged and having no more conscience of sins; none was called as we are to imitate God as dear children and walk in love as Christ loved us. How incalculably this distances loving one's neighbor as oneself, good and right as this was! Christ is the measure as well as pattern now for the Christian, not self.
This suffices to show how entirely the reviewer overlooks the real character of Christianity as well as the awful condition both of the Jews that crucified Jesus and of the Judaism of our day that is confessed, through the Talmud's influence, to resemble it strongly. “The misconception (we are assured) as if a God of vengeance had suddenly succeeded a God of love, cannot be too often protested against. ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,' is a precept of the Old Testament, as Christ Himself taught His disciples.” No Christian doubts that God is and has always been both love and light, as Scripture speaks; but government by a law, however righteous (and this unquestionably was the principle of His dealings in Israel), is as different from His display of grace in Christ, as earth is from heaven. It is a just demand that man should not steal, murder, or covet; but what is the law that justifies the ungodly through the faith of Jesus? which quickens those dead in sins, raises them up, and seats them in heavenly places in Christ? Certainly it is the one and only true God; but it is God now, not merely dealing with the propensities of the first man, but blessing in His mercy the merest sinners because of redemption in Christ, the Second Man. It was not by the law, but by the grace of God, that the Savior tasted death for every man.
Even this reviewer owns that the “law was developed to a marvelously and perhaps [!] oppressively minute pitch,” though he is bold enough to say “only as a regulation of outward actions.” What will the Christian reader think when he next hears that “the faith of the heart” —the dogma prominently dwelt upon by Paul—was a thing which stood much higher with the Pharisees than this outward law?” Was Paul then in error? or the Lord Jesus? Is the Christian who reads Matt. 3; 9:12; 15:23, to believe these scriptures? or should he take the reviewer's word that the wholesale denunciations of scribes and Pharisees have been greatly misunderstood? “There can be absolutely no question on this point, that there were among the genuine Pharisees the most patriotic, the most noble-minded, the most advanced leaders of the party of progress.” It would have been more to the point if he could have affirmed with truth that they bowed to God in a just estimate of their sinfulness and fled for refuge to that only name given under heaven whereby we must be saved. Christianity does not deny many and excellent qualities in Pharisees. Mark 10 lets us know how Jesus beheld with love the rich young ruler who had a good conscience as to the law, but turned away in sorrow from Jesus who claimed a self-renunciation and a following of Himself in His path of suffering and shame, which nothing but the mighty power of God's grace can give any soul to take and keep. Does the reviewer believe the Lord's declaration that the tax-gatherers and harlots go into the kingdom of God before those most patriotic, noble-minded, advanced leaders he admires? What is the good of a “party of progress” which deceives the soul in this world and turns you into a deadlier rebel against God's kingdom than the most despised of men and dissolute of women?
Alas! it is evident where the heart is from the sentence that follows: “The development of the law itself was nothing in their hands but a means to keep the spirit as opposed to the word—the outward frame—in full life and flame, and to vindicate for each time its own right to interpret the temporal ordinances according to its own necessities and acquirements.” A more dangerous and delusive fancy there cannot be. There never breathed the man who walked and taught in the spirit of God's will as Jesus did; yet none ever honored as Jesus the word of God. And Jesus branded the scribes and Pharisees of Jerusalem with setting aside the command of God because of such traditions as fill the Mishnah. They were not temporal ordinances, but injunctions of God, which the Judaism of Christ's age annulled, from no necessity whatever save the licentious will and pride of man. No time, no man, has a right to weaken the authority of God's word. This is no question of “black sheep” among the Pharisees, but of the principle of human tradition which made them all a party of declension from scripture. The Talmud must inveigh against its own existence if it upheld divine revelation against the traditions of men.
(To be continued)