Dunn's Partings 2: The Four Pillars

A quick summary of chapter 2 of James D. G. Dunn's The Partings of the Ways. This chapter sketches the central principles of Second Temple Judaism--Judaism as we define it rather than the word Ioudaismos as the Jews would have understood it at the time of Christ. As I mentioned in the previous post, Dunn believes that this term was coined in direct opposition to the term hellenismos and thus that it is a term born of the distinction between Jewish practice and Greek, particularly when it comes to the ethnic distinctives of the Law like circumcision, food laws, sabbath observance.

Dunn refers to these things as "common Judaism" in the absence of later rabbinic "orthodox" Judaism, which would represent significant pruning of an earlier diversity (and I remain inclined to think that rabbinic Judaism--as indeed the current Jewish canon--is largely the continuation of the Pharisaic tradition. The Protestant Old Testament, perhaps ironically, is thus the Pharisaic canon rather than the canon of Jerusalem Christianity, which I suspect was more along the lines of the Essene canon (including books like 1 Enoch as Scripture).

It seems to me that N. T. Wright truncates Dunn's list to three pillars, leaving off land. I don't know if he gives rationale for this somewhere, and I'm not in my office right now to look. In any case, the four or three pillar idea is an interpreter's construct. The Jews themselves did not use this language. They are scholarly reconstructions and must therefore be considered very tentative and amendable.

Monotheism
Like Hurtado and Bauckham (and Wright), Dunn considers monotheism one of the key distinctives of Jewish identity in the first century. This was mostly an exclusivist monotheism, meaning that YHWH was not equated with Zeus or Jupiter but was considered God with them not being gods at all. It is true that we do find some incidents of syncretism like this (Letter of Aristeas). Others considered these sorts of powers to be demonic powers of the other nations (cf. Ps. 82). Dunn mentions that at other times the virtues of other gods were captured as the virtues of God himself (e.g., wisdom).

Election
Also common to most of the surviving Jewish literature from this period is the sense that God had called Israel apart to be a special people to Him in distinction from the other nations. Dunn cites here excerpts from Jubilees and the Psalms of Solomon, as well as from the Eighteen Benedictions. The first two are, of course, largely texts that stand on the exclusivist side of Judaism from the time. But our common sense tells us that people groups in a collectivist culture consider themselves special in distinction from others, that syncretism in the matter of gods did not play itself out into any sense that all peoples were equal.

Covenant (based in Torah)
In this section, Dunn confirms the idea of "covenantal nomism" in perhaps slightly broader terms that the way E. P. Sanders used the phrase. The idea is basically that Israel understood its covenant to be the connection between monotheism and election. God had singled out Israel from among the nations, and Israel had YHWH alone as its God. The relationship was codified in the Torah.

The covenant involved certain obligations on Israel's part. If Israel would keep these obligations, God would bless them. If Israel did not keep them, God would curse them until they repented.

We can see the time of the Maccabees as the most important backdrop to the Judaism of New Testament days. Israel was on the brink of complete assimiliation to Hellenism (not to be confused with hellenization in general, which did take place--even 2 Maccabees was written in Greek). "Zeal for the law" was the winning hand, following in the spirit of Ezra, by the time of Christ.

[For those of you who know the chapter, it's clear that I'm doing a targum on Dunn, merging my own thoughts with his]

Dunn suggests two features of the common Jewish understanding of Torah at the time:
1) The law came to be understood as a basic expression of Jewish distinctiveness.

He cites Jubilees, Aristeas (! - pluralist yet big on the distinctiveness of Israel), and Philo. Thus, words like "lawless" came to refer to the Jews in the sense that they do not follow the Jewish law.

2) A sense of privilege as Jews.

This of course plays into Dunn's "new perspective" on Paul. He understands the boasting of Romans to be not an individualistic boasting in good works but a nationalistic boasting in ethnic privilege (so also Wright--"nationalistic righteousness"). A Gentile is thus a sinner by definition.

Naturally, argues Dunn, this distinctiveness and privilege led to a focus on aspects of the law that distinguished Jew from Gentile. As we know from elsewhere, Dunn believes these are the things that would have immediately come to mind when someone used the phrase "works of law": circumcision, Sabbath, and food laws.

Land (centered in Temple)
In Deuteronomy, the focus of Israel's blessing for keeping the covenant is its keeping and flourishing in the land. The temple was seen as the focus of the blessing.

a) The temple was the political center of Israel. The word "Jew" originally meant "Judean," and it is hard to tell when it stopped having this precise connotation. A "Judean" is thus someone connected with the territory in which the temple was located.

b) The temple was the economic center of Israel. In crass terms, Jerusalem was a tourist center. It had little to offer economically except for its temple. The temple drew pilgrims to the three central feasts and a half-shekel tax from Jewish males all over the Mediterranean. Its mount served as a center for trade.

c) The temple was a religious center.

Dunn ends the chapter by considering various aspects of the Jewish world that might be taken as arguments against considering the temple as a pillar of common Judaism:

1. The Essenes decried the temple. But Dunn rightly notes that it is not the institution of the temple per se that the Essenes opposed, but its current priesthood, practice, and general defilement.

2. The Jewish temple at Leontopolis in Egypt that existed at the time of Christ came from about the same time as the Maccabean crisis when the Syrians ended the hereditary priesthood. Dunn thus does not see it as against the Jerusalem temple per se but a similar protest to that of the Essenes.

3. The rise of synagogues in the Diaspora similarly were not against the Temple but the attempt of Jews to maintain their religion at a distance from it. We might note that synagogue at the time of Christ likely does not refer to a building necessarily. It refered merely to a gathering, which of course could take place in a dedicated building but at this time more often than not probably did not.

Sorry to say but I doubt very seriously that any of the synagogues Wilbur Williams shows on tour were buildings of worship at the time of Jesus.

Friday I'll return (hopefully) to the next chapter of Hurtado. Tomorrow I might have to miss because of other obligations...