(4) Rule of faith and practice. — The Pharisees bound spiritual and moral living also under law. But law cannot produce affection, or Avin the heart, or Hnd place for the Holy Spirit, or be a vessel of grace. The idea of religion as a supreme impulse from the depths of man's nature, as Jesus taught it, independent of both superstition and ethics, was peculiarly foreign to the Pharisaic Jew (cf. Chamberlain, ii. 29). He said : ' To do right and wrong is in the work of our hands, and in Thy righteousne.ss Thou chastisest the children of men. He who works righteousness obtains life from the Lord' (Ps-Sol 9'"**). Do the best you can, and submit to God's punishment for your defects, was the substance of such legalism. One sad result of this national legal religion was that it had one standard for the Jew and another for the Gentile. Adultery with a Gentile was trivial compared with such offence against a J ew. Pharisaic ethics taught to hate Gentiles as enemies ; their morality had no unifying principle of application to man as man — while Jesus taught love even to enemies and Gentiles.
(5) Jesus and the Law. — Even the best legal maxims of the Pharisees fall far short of the teachings of Jesus. Hillel's golden rule was negative, while that of Jesus Mas positive, show- ing all the difference between justice and love. The greater jjrinciple of love to God and one's iieigiibour, which the scribe (Mk 12^-), and Jesus, and St. Paul, and Akiba all regard as fundamental (Gal 5^^; Bacher, Die Agada d. Tannaiten, 1884, i. 7, 285), became a new thing in the application of Jesus. He made love to man a test of love to God ; He united organically the two OT texts, Dt 6' and Lv 19'^ ; He put love to man on the same level with love to God ; He widened the conception of neighbour from haber to 'am-ha'arez, from 'am- haarez to Samaritan (Lk 10^''), and to all men — thus moving in direct opposition to that separa- tion which underlay all Pharisaic holiness. Jesus dropped the whole Law as a way of salvation, — a way the Pharisees themselves could not keep (Ro 7**), as appeared in their numerous evasions of it, such as ' blending of courts,' and their ostenta- tious putting of appearance in place of reality. He threw aside the endless civil, ceremonial, and ethical rules of the Pharisees, and went back to the spiritual religion of the OT as fulfilled in Him and transformed in the gospel. The Law was, at its best, but a 7rat5a7w76s to the gospel. Salvation
by way of the Pharisees wks impossible, hence Jesus declared they were either blind or hypocrites in claiming to please God in that way. The best Jews admitted this (Ps-Sol ^^-'^ 13" 14i-6). Jesus led men to God as Father tlp-ough a new birth by the Holy Ghost, into a family of loving children, by way of repentance, faith,' and union with Him- self (Mk p-^-is, Jn 3=^-). This gospel of the loving father and the prodigal son, of the penitent publi- can and the proud Pharisee, was as a honeymoon compared with the funereal legalism of the Phari- sees (Mk 21^). Gamaliel said : ' Get thyself a teacher that thou mayest be free from doubt ' (Aboth i. 16) ; but Jesus showed Nicodemus that all Pharisaic learning could not give the new life of the Spirit of God and the Son of God. He brought a new cup of blessing full of the wine of the Kingdom, a sweet blending of religion and ethics as inseparable in thought as the inside and outside of the holy cup itself. Here was ' the appearance of a new kind of humanity,' springing from contact with Jesus, ' for through Him for the first time humanity received a moral culture ' (Chamberlain, i. 204, 207). It was because the gospel was utterly incompatible with Pharisaic Judaism that Jesus gathered discii^les, taught them, gave them His Spirit (Jn 20^^), and sent them out to evangelize the world (Mt 28^"- ^**).
3. Religious hopes of the Pharisees.— (1) Their vieios of the Messiah and His Kingdom. — The void between God and man was partly filled from Daniel onwards by Apocalypses of the Messianic Kingdom. This hope roused the godly in Israel to greater obedience, that the coming of the Son of David might be hastened. Law and Messiah were two centres of Jewish thought when Christ appeared. The burden of the one led to greater expectation of the appearance of the other. In this expecta- tion, the nature of the Messiah also took a more universal, and at the same time more personal character, corresponding somewhat to the growing sense of personal responsibility in religion among the Jews. The Messiah, as Son of Man, ajjpeared sharing the majesty,. glory, and heavenly nature of Jehovah (Enoch 47^ and often). 'The identifica- tion of Divine hypostases with the Messiah had already taken place in pre-Christian Judaism.' It was not related at all to Philo and his A670S doctrine (cf. Baldensperger, p. 88). But there Avas also the human Messiah, the Son of David ; and two con- fused accounts arose among the Pharisaic theo- logians respecting these two views of the Messiah and His Kingdom (cf. Stanton, The Jewish and Christian Messiah, 1886, p. 135 f.). The one was more earthly, national, material ; the other more spiritual and universal. The material was usually regarded as leading up to the spiritual, and the millennium appeared as a transition from one to the other. A full accoimt of the ordinary expecta- tion is given in Ps-Sol 17-'^"^*^. The Pharisees had no idea that the Messiah would be a Saviour of all men. Even the Baptist thought He would come only to separate by judgment the evil and the good in Israel, and establish the latter in the Kingdom of God. That He would bring a new revelation, and by temptation and suffering attain victory, as Jesus did, was utterly foreign to them. Especially foreign was the conception of a suffering and dying Messiah, as Dalman has shown [Der leid. u. sterb. Mess. 1888, pp. iii, 22 f.). Even the Apostles did not know it (Mk 8^1 g^^-si lO^^). The usual explana- tion of two Messiahs did not arise till two centuries after Christ (Dalman, ^.c).