There is a short story in the Talmud about a military victory won by the Hebrew ruler King Yannai. It is not very exciting as stories go but it is important because of its polemical significance. The Talmud doesn’t report on history in the way we are used to; it often uses history to discuss current events. This is one of those stories:
King Yannai, or Alexander Jannaeus as he is sometimes known, summoned the sages of Israel to join him in celebrating his military victory. One of his advisers warned him that the Sages were not well disposed towards the king and were unlikely to give him the honour he wanted. So Yannai, who was also High Priest in the Jerusalem Temple, dressed himself in his priestly robes, forcing the Sages to stand up in front of him out of respect.
The Sages rebuked Yannai, telling him that a king could not be a priest; that temporal and spiritual power could not both be in the hands of one person. In a rage, the king expelled them from his kingdom and since there was no longer any one to teach it, the Torah was lost from Israel. The world was desolate until Shimon ben Shetach restored the Torah to its place.
That’s the story. It is simple, but it masks a lot of history.
King Yannai was a Hasmonean king, one of the last members of the dynasty which ruled Israel after the defeat of the Greek King Antiochus IV in 164 BCE. (Their victory is commemorated by the festival of Hannukah). The Hasmoneans were the descendants of a priestly family. They took control of the Temple and appointed themselves as High Priests, effectively becoming the spiritual leaders of the country as well as its rulers. But they were a controversial and often corrupt regime; they had little interest in spiritual matters and were ill equipped to deal with the theological questions beginning to be asked by the educated classes among their subjects. Things were changing in the world, ideas were flowing freely between different cultures and people were speculating about issues they had had paid little attention to before, like the immortality of the soul, divine providence and the afterlife. These speculations were the beginning of a spiritual and intellectual revolution.
The spiritual revolution was dominated by two factions. The Sages in the Talmud’s story led one faction. They became known as Pharisees. Their opponents were known as Sadducees. Each group claimed to represent the true Hebrew religion; to be the guardians and representatives of the Torah. Yannai was a Sadducee.
The Pharisees and Sadducees differed fundamentally over the question of what was revealed to Moses when he received the Torah on Mount Sinai. The Sadducees believed that the Torah he was given was to be followed literally, even when it seemed to contradict itself or made demands that were no longer palatable to most people. The Pharisees were more radical. They argued that the Torah contained secrets and instructions that could not always be taken literally; they needed to be decoded to understand their true meaning. They believed that when Moses received the Torah he was also given verbal instructions on how to interpret and decode it. These instructions were known as the oral Torah. There are two Torahs; the written and the oral. The written Torah can only be fully understood by referring to its oral companion.
The story in the Talmud about King Yannai and Shimon ben Shetach describes, in very sketchy terms, an event that happened during the spiritual revolution. It is written from the perspective of the Pharisees whose successors, known as the Rabbis, compiled the Talmud. It explains that when the Pharisee sages were expelled, knowledge of the oral Torah was lost. The knowledge was recovered when Shimon ben Shetach, one of the Pharisee leaders, returned from exile.
The story assumes that there were only two religious factions in ancient Israel: the Pharisees and the Sadducees. We now know this is not correct. The 1st century historian Josephus writes about a third sect called the Essenes. There were also the people who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls (who may have been the Essenes, but possibly were not). And there were other sects too. Many mystical and allegorical books were written during the 1st and 2nd centuries which seem to be the sole surviving records of sects and factions of whom we know nothing else.
And of course there were the Christians. They seem to have existed in an embryonic form even before Jesus; they weren’t yet called Christians but John the Baptist was initiating followers and telling them of the imminent arrival of Jesus even before the birth of Christianity . It is quite likely that his followers formed the original core of the Christian movement, that they were a sect of pre-Christians.
So it seems that by the turn of the eras, when BCE became CE, the religious landscape of Israel was that of a mosaic of different religious communities, each with their own outlook and belief. But apart from just two, they all disappeared. By the time the Romans destroyed the Jerusalem Temple in the year 70 CE, the only sects that we have any record of were the Christians and the Rabbis who succeeded the Pharisees. The Sadducees, Yannai’s sect, had disappeared. So had every other sect, or at least they had left no trace.
The interesting thing about the first Christians is that before Jesus was proclaimed as Messiah their approach to religion and religious law didn’t seem to be too different from the Pharisee/Rabbis. They didn’t believe in an oral Torah but like the Rabbis they relied on interpretations of the written Torah for their theology.
The Rabbis recorded their interpretations of the Torah in the Talmud and the rabbinic literature. The first Christians were not as methodical about recording their system of interpretation but several of Jesus’s teachings are Pharisaic in nature. They include the permission to heal on the Sabbath, the reinterpretation of ‘an eye for an eye’ and the singling out of the Shema as the most important of all commandments. One of Jesus’s teachers, Rabban Gamaliel the Elder, St Gamaliel in the Catholic tradition, was a Pharisee. And it is possible to argue that John the Baptist’s baptism ceremony came from a Pharisee-like interpretation of the Torah.
The similarities between the Pharisees and the first Christians were so close that each sect felt threatened by the other. The discomfort is expressed in the Gospel of Matthew: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you shut the kingdom of heaven in people's faces. For you neither enter yourselves nor allow those who would enter to go in. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you travel across sea and land to make a single proselyte, and when he becomes a proselyte, you make him twice as much a child of hell as yourselves.”
The Pharisees first emerged as a distinct group round about 150-200 BCE. We date the pre- Christians as far back as John the Baptist’s movement, around the year zero. The similarities between the two groups, together with the later date of the pre-Christian movement, suggests either that they broke away from the Pharisees or that both movements emerged from a common ancestor which we no longer know about. The Pharisees and the pre-Christians were intellectual siblings.
This brings us back to the story in the Talmud with which we started. By the time it was recorded, probably around 400 or 500 CE, the only Jewish sect that remained was rabbinic Judaism. Christianity was no longer a Jewish sect. But the compilers of the Talmud knew that the two religions had a common origin. And in its partisan way the Talmud is telling us that their common origin depended upon the Sages’ challenge to a king who was also a High Priest.
To understand why this particular challenge mattered to the Talmud we need to look at the Letter to the Hebrews, the New Testament text that argues most forcefully for the superiority of Christianity over Judaism. Addressing itself to Jesus the Letter quotes Psalm 110: “You are a priest forever, according to the order of Melchizedek”.
Melchizedek appears in the book of Genesis as the “king of Shalem”. He was both a king and a priest. The Letter to the Hebrews states that Jesus was a member of the “order of Melchizedek” and therefore also a king and priest. It was the fact that Jesus was both a priest and king that made Christianity superior to Judaism, in the eyes of the author of the Letter.
The Talmud’s story is written as a historical challenge to a man who claimed to be a priest-king. But that just masks its true intention. The purpose of the story was to challenge the author of the Letter to the Hebrews. To show that the lesson from history is that one cannot be both a priest and a king.
Loved this one!
Melchizedek's parentage was irregular. As I examine in my book, there was a cloud over the parentage of Moses, as well as both Jesus and John the Baptist. The Gospel of Luke highlights the complexity about who fathered both figures, with special attention to the consequences for their mothers. Matthew's genealogy of Jesus intentionally breaks the father to son genealogy pattern by including 3 women whose male offspring were engendered in 'irregular' circumstances. The underlying question of 'legitimacy' is veiled but apparently significant for the complex issue of who could be a priest or king or both. https://www.bibletalkclub.net/who-is-the-father-of-melchizedek-in-the-bible/