The Case for God

by Karen Armstrong

  The rabbis knew that miracles proved nothing. One day, during the early years at Yavneh, Rabbi Eliezer was engaged in a fierce argument about a legal ruling (halakah) arising from the Torah. When his colleagues refused to accept his opinion, he asked God to prove his point with a series of miracles. A carob tree moved four hundred cubits of its own accord, water in a nearby canal flowed backward, and the walls of the house of studies caved in, as if on the point of collapse. But the rabbis remained unconvinced and seemed somewhat disapproving of this divine extravaganza. In desperation, Rabbi Eliezer asked for a bat qol, a heavenly voice, to support his case, and obligingly a celestial voice cried, “What have you against Rabbi Eliezer? The halakah is always as he says.” Unimpressed, Rabbi Joshua simply quoted God’s own Torah back to him: “It is not in heaven.”57 The Torah was no longer the property of heaven; it had descended to earth on Mount Sinai and was now enshrined in the heart of every Jew. So “we pay no attention to a bat qol,“ he concluded firmly. It was said that when God heard this, he laughed and said, “My children have conquered me.” They had grown up. Instead of meekly accepting opinions foisted on them from above, they were thinking for themselves.58

  Revelation did not mean that every word of scripture had to be accepted verbatim,59 and midrash was unconcerned about the original intention of the biblical author. Because the word of God was infinite, a text proved its divine origin by being productive of fresh meaning. Every time a Jew exposed himself to the ancient text, the words could mean something different. By the 80s and 90s, the rabbis were beginning to persuade their fellow Jews that this—rather than Christianity—was the authentic way for Israel to go forward. It was Rabbi Akiva who perfected this innovative style of midrash. It was said that his fame had reached heaven and that, intrigued, Moses decided to come down to earth and attend one of his classes. He sat in the eighth row behind the other students and discovered, to his embarrassment, that he could not understand a word of Akiva’s exposition of the Torah that had been revealed to him, Moses, on Mount Sinai. “My sons have surpassed me,” Moses reflected ruefully, like any proud parent, as he made his way back to heaven.60 Another rabbi put it more succinctly: “Matters that had not been revealed to Moses were disclosed to Rabbi Akiva and his generation.”61 Some people thought that Rabbi Akiva went too far, but his method carried the day because it kept scripture open. A modern scholar may feel that midrash violates the integrity of the original, but this kind of textual “bricolage” was a creative method of moving a tradition forward at a time when new material was harder to get hold of and people had to work with what they had.

  The rabbis believed that the Sinai revelation had not been God’s last word to humanity but just the beginning. Scripture was not a finished product; its potential had to be brought out by human ingenuity, in the same way as people had learned to extract flour from wheat and linen from flax.62 Revelation was an ongoing process that continued from one generation to another.63 A text that could not speak to the present was dead, and the exegete had a duty to revive it. The rabbis used to link together verses that originally had no connection with one another in a “chain” (horoz) that, in this new combination, meant something entirely different.64 They would sometimes alter a word in the text, creating a pun by substituting a single letter that entirely changed the original meaning, telling their pupils, “Don’t read this … but that.”65 They did not intend the emendation to be permanent; like any teacher in antiquity, they were mainly concerned with speaking directly to the needs of a particular group of students. They were happy to interpret a text in a way that bore no relation to the original, so that the Song of Songs, a profane love song sung in taverns that did not even mention God, became an allegory of Yahweh’s love for his people.

  Midrash was not a solitary exercise; rather, like the Socratic dialogue, it was a joint enterprise. The rabbis had retained the ancient reverence for oral communication and in the early days at Yavneh did not commit their traditions to writing but learned them by heart. Graduates of the academy were called tannaim, “repeaters,” because they recited the Torah aloud and developed their midrash together in conversation. The House of Studies was not like a hushed modern library but was noisy with clamorous debate. As the political situation deteriorated in Palestine, however, the rabbis decided that they needed a written record of these discussions, and between 135 and 160 they compiled an entirely new scripture, which they called the Mishnah, an anthology of the oral teachings collected at Yavneh. The Mishnah was deliberately constructed as a replica of the lost temple, its six sections (sederim) supporting the literary edifice like pillars.66 By studying the laws and ordinances now tragically rendered obsolete, students could still honor the divine Presence in the post-temple world.

  It had been one thing for the early Pharisees to base their lives on an imaginary temple when Herod’s temple was still a fully functioning reality, but quite another when it had been reduced to a pile of charred rubble. In the Mishnah, the rabbis amassed thousands of new rulings that regulated the lives of Jews down to the smallest detail to help them become aware of the Shekhinah’s continued presence in their midst. They had no interest in “beliefs” but focused on practical behavior. If all Jews were to live as if they were priests serving the Holy of Holies, how should they deal with gentiles? How could each household observe the purity laws? What was the role of women in the home that was now a temple? The rabbis would never have been able to persuade the people to accept this formidable body of law had it not yielded a satisfying spirituality.

  The Mishnah did not cling nervously to the Hebrew Bible, but held proudly aloof and rarely quoted the old scriptures. It felt no need to discuss its relation to the Sinai tradition, but loftily assumed that its competence was beyond question. The rabbis continued to love and revere the older scriptures, but knew that the world they represented had gone forever; like the Christians, they took from them what they needed and respectfully laid the rest to one side. Religion must be allowed to move forward freely and could not be constrained by misplaced loyalty to the past. Divine revelation, they decided, had come in two forms: a written Torah and an ongoing Oral Torah that evolved from one generation to another. Both were sacred, both came from God, but the rabbis valued the Oral Torah more than any written scripture because this living tradition reflected the fluctuations of human thought and kept the Word responsive to change. Undue reliance on a written text could encourage inflexibility and backward-looking timidity.67 The insights of all Jews—past, present, and to come—had been anticipated symbolically in the Sinai revelation, so when they developed the Oral Torah together in their discussions in the House of Studies, the rabbis felt as though they were standing beside Moses on the mountaintop, and were participating in a never-ending conversation with the great sages of the past and with their God. They were the recipients of God’s word just as surely as were the ancient prophets and patriarchs.68

  The two Talmuds moved even more firmly away from the Bible. The Jerusalem Talmud, compiled during the fifth century, and the more authoritative Babylonian Talmud (known as the Bavli) a century later, were commentaries on the Mishnah, not the Bible. Like the New Testament, the Bavli was regarded as the completion of the Hebrew Bible, a new revelation for a changed world.69 As Christians would always read the Hebrew Bible from the perspective of the New Testament, Jews would study it only in conjunction with the Bavli, which completely transformed it. The author-editors felt free to reverse the Mishnah’s legislation, play one rabbi off against another, and point out serious gaps in their arguments. They did exactly the same with the Bible, even suggesting what the biblical authors should have said and substituting their own rulings for biblical law. The Bavli gave no definitive answers to the many questions it raised. We hear many different voices: Abraham, Moses, the Prophets, the early Pharisees, and the rabbis of Yavneh were all brought together on the same page, so that they seem to be on the same level and taking part in a communal debate across the centuries.

&n
bsp; The study of Talmud is democratic and open-ended. If a student finds that none of these august authorities resolve a problem to his satisfaction, he must sort it out for himself. The Bavli has thus been described as the first interactive text.70 Because students are taught to follow the rabbinic method of study, they engage in the same discussions and must make their own contribution to this never-ending conversation. In some versions of the Talmud, there was a space on each page for a student to add his own commentary. He learned that nobody had the last word, that truth was constantly changing, and that while tradition was of immense importance, it must not compromise his own judgment. If he did not add his own remarks to the sacred page, the line of tradition would come to an end. Religious discourse should not be cast in stone; the ancient teachings required constant revision. “What is Torah?” asked the Bavli. “It is the interpretation of Torah.”71

  As Christianity spread in the Hellenistic world, the more educated converts brought with them the insights and expectations of their own Greek education. From an early date, they regarded Christianity as a philosophia that had much in common with the Greek schools. It took courage to become a Christian, as the churches were subjected to sporadic but intense bouts of persecution by the Roman authorities. When Jesus had failed to return, Jewish Christianity petered out, and by the beginning of the second century, Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism had parted company. Once Christians made it clear that they were no longer members of the synagogue, they were regarded by the Romans as impious fanatics who had committed the cardinal sin of breaking with the parent faith. Christians were accused of atheism because they refused to honor the patronal gods of the empire, so some tried to prove that Christianity was no superstitio but a new school of philosophy.

  One of the earliest of these apologists was Justin (100–160), a pagan convert from Samaria in the Holy Land. He had dabbled in Stoicism and Pythagorean spirituality but found what he was looking for in Christianity, which he regarded as the culmination of both Judaism and Greek philosophy. Philosophers also saw their great sages— Socrates, Plato, Zeno, Epicurus—as “sons of God,” and Christians used the same kind of terminology—Logos, Spirit, and God—as the Stoics. In the prologue to his gospel, Saint John had said that Jesus was the incarnate “Word” or “Logos” of God72—the very same Logos, Justin argued, that had inspired Plato and Socrates. There was no Greek equivalent to the Hebrew Shekhinah, so increasingly Christians used the term Logos to describe the divine Presence that they could experience but that was essentially separate from God’s inmost nature. Justin was not an intellectual of the first caliber, but his conception of Christ as the eternal Logos was crucial to the theologians who developed the seminal ideas of Christianity and are therefore known as the “fathers” of the Church.

  The Greek-educated fathers sought references to the Logos in every sentence of the Hebrew Bible. Finding the Hebrew texts difficult to understand and the ancient biblical ethos somewhat alien, they transformed them into an allegory, in which all the events and characters of what they called the Old Testament became precursors of Christ in the New. The Christians of Antioch preferred to concentrate on the literal sense of scripture and discover what the biblical authors themselves had intended to teach, but they were not as popular as the exegetes of Alexandria, who followed in the footsteps of Philo and the Greek allegorists.

  One of the most brilliant and influential of these early exegetes was Origen (185–254), who had studied allegoria with Greek and Jewish scholars in Alexandria and midrash with rabbis in Palestine. In his search for the deeper significance of scripture, Origen did not cavalierly cast the original aside but took the plain sense of scripture very seriously. He learned Hebrew, consulted rabbis about Jewish lore, studied the flora and fauna of the Holy Land, and, in a mammoth effort to establish the best possible text, set the Hebrew alongside five different Greek translations. But he believed that it was impossible for a modern, Greek-educated Christian to read the Bible in a wholly literal manner. How could anybody imagine that God had really “walked” in the Garden of Eden? What possible relevance to Christians were the lengthy instructions for the construction of a tabernacle in the Sinai wilderness? Was a Christian obliged to take literally Christ’s instruction that his disciples should never wear shoes? What could we make of the highly dubious story of Abraham selling his wife to Pharaoh? The answer was to treat these difficult texts as allegoria, the literary form that describes one thing under the guise of another.

  Indeed, Origen argued, the glaring anomalies and inconsistencies in scripture forced us to look beyond the literal sense. God had planted these “stumbling blocks and interruptions of the historical sense” to make us look deeper. These “impossibilities and incongruities … present a barrier to the reader and lead him to refuse to proceed along the pathway of the ordinary meaning.”73 Origen never tired of telling his readers that exegesis was hard work and that, like any philosophical exercise, it required discipline and dedication. Like any philosopher, the exegete must live a life of prayer, purity, sobriety, and virtue; he must be prepared to study all night long.74 But if he persevered, he would find that “in the very act of reading and diligently studying” these outwardly unpromising texts, he would feel “touched by the divine spirit (pneuma).”75 For the Christians as for the rabbis, scripture was a symbol, its words and stories merely the outward “images of divine things.”76 For Origen, exegesis was a musterion, an initiation that required hard labor but finally brought the mystes into the divine presence.77

  Like a human person, scripture consisted of a body, a psyche, and a spirit that transcended mortal nature; these corresponded to the three senses in which scripture could be understood. The mystes had to master the “body” of the sacred text (its literal sense) before he could progress to anything higher. Then he was ready for the moral sense, an interpretation that represented the “psyche,” the natural powers of mind and heart: it provided us with ethical guidance but was largely a matter of common sense. The mystes that pressed on to the end of his initiation was introduced to the spiritual, allegorical sense, when he encountered the Word that lay hidden in the earthly body of the sacred page.

  But this would not be possible without the spiritual exercises that put the mystes into a different frame of mind. At first Origen’s exegesis seems strained and far-fetched to a modern reader, because he reads into the text things that are simply not there. But Origen was not asking the reader to “believe” his conclusions. Like any philosophical theory, his insights made no sense unless the disciple undertook the same spiritual exercises as his master. His commentaries were a miqra. Readers had to take the next step for themselves, meditating on the text with the same intensity as Origen, until they too were “capable of receiving the principles of truth.”78 Without long hours of theoria (“contemplation”), Origen’s exegesis was both incomprehensible and incredible.

  Origen’s method of reading scripture according to the literal, moral, and spiritual senses became standard throughout the Christian world. The monastic reformer John Cassian (360–435) introduced this type of exegesis to western Europe and added a fourth sense: the anagogical, which described the eschatological dimension of any given text. This fourfold method remained in place in the West until the Reformation. It was imparted to the laity by preachers in the pulpit and used by monks when they meditated on the biblical text. You began always with the literal reading but then progressed up the ladder of the moral, allegorical, and anagogical senses in a symbolic “ascent” from the physical to the spiritual levels of existence. Until the modern period, nobody thought of confining their attention to a literal reading of the plain sense of scripture. When Christians started to insist on the literal truth of every word of the Bible in the late nineteenth century, many would find that it was as alien, incredible, and paradoxical as Origen had described.

  For the fathers of the Church, scripture was a “mystery” not because it taught a lot of incomprehensible doctrines, but because it direct
ed the attention of Christians toward a hidden level of reality. Scripture was also a “mystery,” because exegesis was a spiritual process that, like any initiation, proceeded stage by stage until the final moment of illumination. You could not hope to understand it without undergoing this disciplined ascesis of heart and mind. Scripture was not just a text but an “activity;” you did not merely read it— you had to do it.79 Scholars and lay folk alike usually read it in a liturgical setting, which separated it from secular modes of thought. As we know from Paul’s letters, the early Christians had developed their own rituals. Baptism and the Eucharist (a reenactment of Jesus’s last supper with his disciples) were also “mysteries,” not because they could not be understood by natural reason but because they were initiations, during which the congregation were taught to look beneath the symbolic gestures to find the sacred kernel within and thus experience a “change of mind.”

  In the lectures of Cyril, bishop of Jerusalem (c. 315–86), we have one of the earliest accounts of the way candidates were introduced to the rituals and doctrines of the church.80 In Cyril’s church, the ceremony of baptism took place in the small hours of Easter Sunday morning in the Basilica of the Resurrection. During the six weeks of Lent, converts had undergone an intensive period of preparation. They had to fast, attend vigils, pray, and receive instruction about the kerygma, the basic factual message of the gospel. They were not required to believe anything in advance. They would be instructed in the deeper truths of Christianity only after the initiation of baptism, because these dogmas would make sense only after the transformative experience of the ritual. As in any philosophical school, theory was secondary to the rites and spiritual exercises that had produced it. Like any mythoi, the doctrines of Christianity were only ever imparted in a ritualized setting to people who were properly prepared and were eager to be transformed by it.81 Like the insights of any initiation, the doctrines that were revealed at the end of the ritualized process would seem trivial or even absurd to outsiders. It was only after they had been through the transformative process that new Christians were asked to recite the “creed,” a proclamation not of “belief” but of commitment to the God that had become a reality in their lives as a result of this rite of passage.