We continue our journey through Scripture, examining the roles of men and women. Part 1 of this series looked at God’s original design as displayed in the Garden of Eden, all of which was corrupted by the Fall. We now arrive in Jesus’ time. He has come to be mankind’s Redeemer, to restore us (and eventually all creation) to the original perfection of God’s will as outlined at the Beginning. Some of the strongest opposition to Jesus’ ministry, and subsequently the ministry of the Church, came not from the pagan but from the religious establishment. It is on some of these competing “traditions of men” that we will focus next.
When Jesus arrived on earth, He ministered to people who had been living subject to the curse for thousands of years. Everything was viewed through the cracked and dirty lens of the fallen human condition. Everything had been tainted. God had given the Israelites the Law, but the Law was unable to save them. It could not lift the curse of sin but only point it out (Galatians 3:19-24). The Law had a limited scope. It addressed behavior but could not change the heart. As such, the Law cannot actually produce righteousness. The Law is a tutor, not a savior. The only cure for a heart dead in sin is rebirth, and that is something the Law cannot produce. Even with “correct” behavior, what comes out of the heart can still defile a man (Mark 7:20-23).
Unfortunately, in true human fashion, by the first century AD God’s Law had undergone extensive “clarifications” and ever more thorough “explanations” by generations of industrious “experts” focused only on controlling behavior, without much regard for the heart behind it. Jesus rebuked the Pharisees, the law experts of His time, for putting heavy burdens on the people, for doing hypocritical things such as tithing even the mint leaves out of their herb gardens while ignoring the weightier matters of justice which are actually important in the sight of God. These legalistic leaders not only added to God’s Law but completely subverted it in the process. Jesus told them, “All too well you reject the commandment of God, that you may keep your tradition!” (Mark 7:9).
The Jews had built an entire profession around interpreting and applying God’s Law. These extensive traditions, first known as the oral law, were gradually developed by generations of rabbis. This law held, and still holds, as much or more power over Orthodox Jews as the actual Torah, the Scripture itself. In fact, the common opinion of the rabbis is that one who reads only the written Torah but does not serve Torah scholars (i.e. the rabbis/Pharisees) and follow the traditions of the Sages is comparable to an unclean Samaritan (Mishnah Sotah 22a). Such a person falls short of true righteousness. From this position, the rabbis elevate their traditions above God’s own words. Rightly Jesus said, “And so you cancel the word of God in order to hand down your own tradition” (Mark 7:6-13).
So what are some of these rabbinical traditions?
The written Jewish Mishnah, or rabbinical exposition, we have available today was formally compiled around 200 AD. Although this was about 150 years after the Apostle Paul’s time, the source material for the Mishnah is oral rabbinical law that was developed and preserved over many years before eventually being collected and compiled into the format we have today. This body of traditions was contributed to by many sages, including those from the first century AD and before.
Rabbi Eliezer is the sixth most frequently mentioned sage in the Mishnah. He was considered a great scholar by his contemporaries, eventually becoming known as Eliezer the Great. He was a Levite of the priestly line, a kohen. He lived and studied in Jerusalem in the latter half of the first century, until near the end of the Roman siege of Jerusalem (70 AD) when he helped smuggle himself and some others out. Rabbi Eliezer’s lifetime would have overlapped with that of the Apostle Paul, although Eliezer was likely quite a bit younger. He was the brother-in-law and professional colleague of Gamaliel II, grandson of the esteemed Rabbi Gamaliel whose academy Paul had studied in and served before he encountered Jesus.
After establishing his own academy of Jewish law following the fall of Jerusalem, Eliezer became a member of the Jewish Sanhedrin under the presidency of Gamaliel II. Rabbi Eliezer had a reputation for being severe, conservative, and somewhat domineering, eventually clashing with some of his colleagues to the point of being excommunicated from the Sanhedrin. He went into retirement, though his influence remained and the excommunication was ultimately reversed at his death. He has subsequently been quoted more frequently in the Mishnah and the Talmud than any of his contemporaries.
Interestingly, multiple rabbinic accounts relate that at one point in his life Eliezer was arrested by the Romans for “heresy” or civil dissention after agreeing with the religious teachings of a man named Yaakov, a follower of Jesus. He was released after appearing before a penal tribunal and being questioned by the Roman governor. Records of Eliezer’s life and sayings after this event do not support him actually being (or at least remaining) a Christian.
Some sayings attributed to Rabbi Eliezer, which are relevant to our study on men and women’s roles, include:
“Instructing a woman in the Law is like teaching her blasphemy” (Mishnah Sotah 3:4)
and also:
“A woman’s wisdom is limited to the handling of the spindle . . . Let the words of the Torah be burned rather than entrusted to women!” (Jerusalem Talmud Sotah 3:4).
These ideas did not necessarily originate with Eliezer however, for he always maintained that he never taught anything which he had not learned from his own teachers; his positions and traditions were inherited from those before him (Yoma 66b:12). His statements give us insight into prevailing Jewish rabbinical thought and culture during the early Church period.
The effects of Jewish rabbinical tradition were far-reaching. Every aspect of a devout first-century Jew’s life was governed by it. From the outset of Christianity, the early apostles frequently battled this rabbinical law that many early believers – likely those faithful Jews who had grown up in it – tried to bring with them into the churches. The Apostle Paul, in particular, was plagued with battling incursions of Jewish legalism into many of the Gentile churches he established. He went so far as to say certain preachers followed him deliberately, describing those “who came in by stealth to spy out our liberty which we have in Christ Jesus, that they might bring us into bondage” (Galatians 2:4).
The Apostle Paul was a key figure in the early years of the Church. He was appointed by God as the first major messenger to the Gentiles. Paul was converted to Christianity, out of Judaism, sometime after the Jerusalem church was established, probably within its first few years.
Paul is a beautiful example of God’s transformative power. He had been brought up utterly devoted to Jewish rabbinical law. It even became his career. Prior to submitting to Jesus, Judaism was his entire life. Paul said, “I advanced in Judaism beyond many of my contemporaries in my own nation, being more exceedingly zealous for the traditions of my fathers.” In true Jewish rabbinical tradition, Paul would have carefully followed his human teachers of the law, studying their every point. But after God called him, he said, “I did not immediately confer with flesh and blood, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me, but I went to Arabia, and returned again to Damascus” (Galatians 1:14-17). Paul just went home. This behavior would have been a complete break from the way he studied religion before. For a total of 17 years, according to his account to the Galatians, Paul lived and worked separately from the church in Jerusalem.
Jerusalem was important to the first believers; it was the site of the very first church assembly, established when Peter preached his first sermon to the Jews during the Feast of Pentecost recorded in Acts chapter 2, a few weeks after Jesus’ ascension. Jerusalem was in many ways the original or “mother” church of all other assemblies, the source of missionaries and the home base of nearly all the first apostles. Unfortunately, as the years passed, an element that remained very Orthodox, very “Jewish,” in their mindset rose up within this predominately Jewish group of believers. When Paul did eventually establish a relationship with those at Jerusalem, recorded in Galatians chapter 2, he publicly confronted the legalism being accepted among them.
In those formative years apart, God had done a work in Paul which purged the old wine and the old wineskins, preparing him for ministry. Concerning his message and ministry, Paul said, “I neither received it from man nor was I taught it, but it came through the revelation of Jesus Christ” (Gal. 1:12). God brought Paul out of legalism into total freedom. Paul then spent his ministry and his life spreading and steadfastly defending that freedom. Paul, of all people, had left legalism completely behind.
Paul’s battles against the legalistic element in the early Church are recorded for us in some of his letters. The church in Galatia at one point became infiltrated by these Judiazers and many succumbed. Much of Paul’s letter to the Galatians was a repudiation to those who were preaching this man-made law and a rebuke to those falling for it. “Oh foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you?!” (Gal. 3:1a). “You ran well. Who hindered you from obeying the truth?! . . . he who troubles you shall bear his judgement, whoever he is.” (Gal. 5:7, 10b). Paul similarly warned the Colossian church, “Beware lest anyone cheat you through philosophy and empty deceit, according to the tradition of men, according to the basic principles of the world and not according to Christ. . . you are [already] complete in Him” (Col. 2:8, 10a).
The Ephesian church faced similar problems. Paul’s letters to Timothy were written to encourage Timothy, who had been left in Ephesus, to guard and defend doctrine that is true and pure. He told Timothy to turn away from those who were presenting a hypocritical form of godliness, one without the actual power of the Spirit of Truth. “For among them are those who enter into households and captivate silly women weighed down with sins, led by various impulses” (2 Timothy 3:6).
Paul’s letter to Titus, written c. 66 AD, is in the same vein, “For this reason I left you in Crete, that you should set in order the things that are lacking” (Titus 1:5). Paul knew the churches in the cities of Crete were vulnerable, that these purveyors of the Jewish law and traditions would eventually come to them. “For there are many who are not submissive, both idle talkers and deceivers, especially those of the circumcision [preachers converted from Judaism] whose mouths must be stopped, who subvert whole households [and the churches meeting in them] teaching things which they ought not, for the sake of dishonest gain.” (Titus 1:10, 11). “So rebuke them sharply, that they may be sound in the faith, not giving heed to Jewish fables and commandments of men who turn from the truth.” (Titus 1:14).
We can infer some details of these Jewish fables from the specific points in Paul’s letters rebutting them. In general, these preachers tried to bring in different points of the law to serve as substitute for, or supplement to, salvation by faith in Jesus alone and a life actively lead by the Holy Spirit. They attempted to fit their new life in Christ under the umbrella of Jewish law they had always lived under. These were Jews who added Christianity to their doctrines. They continued to give certain Jewish rabbinical laws and the traditions of their fathers the same weight and place in their lives that they always had. They just added Jesus to the list. And they sought to entangle others – even Gentiles who historically shared none of their legalistic baggage – to become like them. Even the Apostle Peter drifted that direction at one point. For this, Paul corrected him pubicly, “when I saw that they were not acting line with the truth of the gospel, I said to Peter in front of them all, ‘You are a Jew, yet you live like a Gentile and not like a Jew. How is it, then, that you force Gentiles to follow Jewish customs?’” (Galatians 2:14).
It was among all these traditions of men, amidst the fervor of the zealous Judiazers, that the Apostle Paul contended for the faith.
