Support Team Study – The Chair of Moses: Part 2

Pip: So, you can’t always infer… somebody has a bad interpretation of this passage and it’s like, “No, that’s not really good.” You can’t necessarily judge the state of their soul before God based on the bad interpretation.

Nehemia: Mm-hmm.

Pip: That’s not exactly what we would say in line with the doctrine of providence. You can’t just say that. But what I am saying is, when you do see bad fruit, so to speak, in history, what you’re not going to connect it to is the Scriptures. What you are going to connect it to is the fact that God can use His word in any way that He chooses, both to bless and to curse. And so, there’s a sense of… maybe it’s supposed to encourage us to have a sense of fear and trembling, or what I call “a humbled sensitivity” to the way that the text, in my hands, could be misused.

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Nehemia: Shalom, I’m back with Rev. Dr. Philip Thomas Mohr, who goes by the name Pip. Guys, if you missed the first episode we did with him, you need to go listen to it; it’s an amazing and profound conversation. It went to places I didn’t expect it to go. I never know where these conversations will go, but it was a great conversation. He’s Assistant Professor of Biblical and Theological Studies at Erskine College in Due West, South Carolina. He’s also a Minister of the Word at the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church, and his PhD dissertation was on a topic that is very dear to my heart in my research and investigation, it’s called The Chair of Moses Saying (Matthew 23:2–3): Historical Concerns, Providential Applications [which I hope we’ll get to] and Present Understanding. He did it at the Catholic University of America, but I found out he’s not Catholic.

So, thank you for joining us again, Pip, who has in Hebrew, his name Nehemiah, which… that’s the Hebrew name he uses when he teaches Hebrew. So, tell us about… what is providential history? Tell us what that means as you work it out in your dissertation. Maybe let’s start with, what is providence? Other than a place in Rhode Island.

Pip: That’s right, that’s right. Yeah, so, at its most basic… I’m going to try to stay very basic here, and then I’ll maybe get into the weeds a little bit. But providence is just this idea that God is in control of history, the beginning and the end. And there are different kinds of levels, or degrees of consistency, in which people would hold that to be true. And this is not just in Christian theology, but more broadly, people could have a very strict, even a belief in fate that’s close to providence; this idea, like, everything is predetermined. That’s close to providence, but it’s very impersonal. It’s very… well, there’s no appeal to the, say, the love of the divine Creator or anything like that in that. Or maybe you could have a softer idea of providence, where you’ve got, you know, God is in control in sort of a very indirect sort of influencing kind of way, you know, suggestions here and there, little sparks of inspiration along the way to kind of move history forward in certain directions. But allowing it to sort of work its way out in a very loose way. So, I’d say really anywhere in that spectrum is where you find the doctrine of providence in different thinkers, different theologians throughout the…

Nehemia: What’s the opposite of providence? Give us that. Because it’s helpful to contrast it.

Pip: Yeah, yeah. So, there are many opposites. So, one of them would be a sort of strict materialism, where you’ve got a… and this could go along with fate, an idea of fate, where you’ve got a sort of determined series of cause and effect. There’s no purpose, there’s no telos, there’s no goal to…

Nehemia: Ooh, telos. You’ve got to translate that Greek word.

Pip: Oh, yeah, goal. Yeah, goal, yeah.

Nehemia: Alright.

Pip: So, there’s no end in mind for the way things are, it’s just one ball hitting the next ball. And you know, there are some ancient philosophers, Epicurus, and then Lucretius after him, who talk about, “You know, it’s just a swerve of particles that starts it all off, and then one particle hits the next and then you get the world.”

Nehemia: And there’s a word in Jewish literature, apikorus, which is an epicurean…

Pip: Oh, yeah.

Nehemia: And it’s taken on the meaning of heretic. But what it meant is somebody who said, “God’s not in control of the world, it’s just all random particles.”

Pip: That’s right.

Nehemia: And it’s just random happenstance, and God is not directly intervening in history, either on a large scale or a small scale, which we can talk about if you want to. Meaning, in Judaism, we have this idea of hashgacha pratit, individual providence, and hashgacha klalit, general providence. So, general providence is, God really cares about giraffes, and He makes sure giraffes don’t go extinct. But the individual giraffe in that particular safari, He doesn’t care about. He doesn’t interact with. And the same thing with… He cares about Israel, but He doesn’t care about Nehemia Gordon, right? That’s, general providence, right? And that’s Epicureanism and Jewish heresy.

Well, that’s actually even more than Epicureanism. Epicureanism says He doesn’t even care about the nation of Israel or the nation of, you know, Germany. And then individual providence is when… and this is, again, a Jewish perspective; I’d love to hear if there’s a difference, as you’re understanding it, from a Christian perspective, maybe even historically. The individual providence is when Hagar is praying, God individually hears her prayer and responds to her prayer, right? And when I pray, God individually hears my…

And look, I once heard a rabbi say… and it was an Orthodox rabbi. I was very surprised. He’s like, “Look, the prayer isn’t for God. God doesn’t need my prayer; He’s not responding to my prayer. It’s for me.” And I heard this and I was horrified. And to be fair, that’s not the view of, I would say, most Orthodox Jews, but that was this particular Jew’s perspective.

So, in Judaism, we have what I would call a maximalist and a minimalist view, right? And I’m not sure which is which, actually. The minimalist view is, God created nature, and then He sets it in motion, and He lets things play out.

Pip: Right, sort of a deistic idea.

Nehemia: Well, not dei…

Pip: Later deists…

Nehemia: You can call it deistic, sure. And Maimonides famously was called a heretic by other Jews for supposedly saying this; whether he did or not is beyond the scope of our discussion. And then there’s the maximalist view, that says, “No, when you stub your toe, that’s because God was intervening directly for you to stub your toe for some grand reason that He has that we may not understand.” Okay, so what is the Christian perspective?

Pip: Well, yeah, there’s a similar variety. So, what I was talking about with, like, all these different, you know… and I’ve used the words maximal and minimal in the dissertation to talk about, you know, broad variety. So, you can have…

Nehemia: I skimmed the dissertation, just to be honest here. Okay.

Pip: There are some professing Christians who would be fine with an idea of, like, theistic, God-directed evolution from, you know, a sort of a big bang, you know, all the way up through blah, blah, blah. And then there are other Christians who are going to say, “Well, Genesis 1 says the earth was created in this time period of six days and God rested on the seventh, and that’s what creation looks like. And if God’s in control of creation to that degree, then why would He not be in control of everything else the way that He says he is?” And so, there’s a sense of, like, God is actually behind the stubbed toe in a way that’s mysterious. You can’t always infer the divine mind from the event. That’s one of the messages of the Book of Job, right?

Nehemia: I was about to say, that’s the message of Job. I literally was going to say that, but I’m glad you said it first.

Pip: Yeah, yeah. So, in this maximalist idea, even the maximalist is going to say there is deep mystery, even if you can say, “Well, God is actually in control.” And so much so, you know, this would really draw heavily on something like Genesis 37 to the end, or the story of the toldot Ya’akov, and really focusing in on Joseph’s announcement that, what you designed for evil, God used for good.

Nehemia: Oh, I love that you said that, because I’ve taught that many times!

Pip: I mean, I’d say that’s a fundamental… that’s not the only… and in fact, you can find it even earlier, but that’s a fundamental statement about this sort of maximalist position that God is so much in control of history that, even though there are things that He has allowed to happen that we would call evil, bad, unpleasant, and everything in that box, the bad box, He is actually so powerful that He can use those things for, ultimately, greater ends in a mysterious way. We never can anticipate it; we can confess it as an article of faith, but we can’t necessarily calculate in our own limited understanding…

Nehemia: Well, when you do, it’s dangerous. You end up like Job’s three companions, saying, “Well, if bad things happen to you, you must be a bad person.”

Pip: That’s right.

Nehemia: And actually, it’s part of God’s grand plan that Job couldn’t understand. And God’s answer to him at the end is, “You can’t even understand your natural universe, how could you understand how an infinite being operates?”

Pip: Right.

Nehemia: And for Jews, then, there’s the Book of Esther, or the Scroll of Esther, we call it, is essentially playing out that theme in the Joseph story on sort of a grand scale over many years where, God’s so obvious in the story but He’s not even mentioned. Meaning, the word God literally doesn’t appear…

Pip: Right.

Nehemia: …and you don’t realize that until someone points it out, because He’s so obviously interacting with history that He’s causing all these things to happen. That’s…

Pip: The invisible hand is almost visible… in the destruction of…

Nehemia: Well, and then the word Esther is from the word seter, which is hidden. So, it’s very deliberate, right? It’s kind of, the medium is the message. We don’t have to go into that. How does that play out in the New Testament? Talk to us about that.

Pip: Well, I wanted to back up, just to affirm a point of connection. So, I’m getting a little bit more into the weeds of my own tradition, Reformed Christianity, Reformed Scholastic Christianity, in the 1700s. They would distinguish between general providence, special providence, and most special providence.

Nehemia: Oh, okay. What are those? I’m not familiar with…

Pip: But this idea that you’ve got general providence; God’s in control of the sun, the moon, birds, whatever, everything. Special providence; God has a concern for His people as a whole and the movement of the moral agency of humans and angels. And then, most special providence is His concern for His people. Both His people as the whole…

Nehemia: Individually, you mean. Oh, both.

Pip: …and individually. This is, I think, saying the same thing that you were saying. They just kind of arrange it in this sort of way of…

Nehemia: I see.

Pip: …really, it’s a way of categorizing scriptural texts so that you don’t end up in the dangerous position of inferring too much from this event…

Nehemia: Okay.

Pip: …to be about a particular person or something like that. Yeah.

Nehemia: Well, so, let me ask you this. And here’s the complicated question, right? I’m trying to think how to phrase this. Does the New Testament teach, I’ll call it special providence? Meaning, is that something taught in the New Testament? And obviously you’re going to say yes, because it’s part of your denomination. But now as a scholar, who… meaning, like, pretend you’re not… I don’t even know if there’s a way to do this. Right? In other words, outside of your religious tradition, do you believe the New Testament literature actually teaches this idea of special providence? Meaning, that God’s interacting individually with individuals. Or intervening…

Pip: Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the paradigmatic case would be Jesus. In some ways, it’s a complicated case because Jesus is special and unique. And so, you might want to say, well, okay, we can look at the life of Jesus. We can see the way that there’s this personal one-on-one, even, interaction between God and Jesus. Yes. And then we look at, you know, a character like Paul. And there’s obviously, in the Book of Acts and in Paul’s letters, there’s personal one-on-one interaction.

But people might say, “Well, those are special people.” Right? You’ve got Jesus the Savior; you’ve got Paul the Apostle. Where do I see, you know, the sort of personal interaction with me in particular? And I think that’s where, actually, from the Christian perspective, we look at, not just Jesus in relation to his heavenly Father, but if Jesus is God (this is the proposition of Christianity) then his relationship to other people, the way that he interacts to people when they approach him, is supposed to be an image of the way that the heavenly Father reacts to anybody who approaches him.

Nehemia: Okay.

Pip: The way that we see Jesus personally interacting with, say, the woman at the well in John 4, or Peter in Matthew 16, or… it matters; your relationship with this person matters. The way that Jesus teaches his disciples to pray in Matthew 6, the Our Father. It’s very…

Nehemia: How does that express that, the Our Father? Explain that.

Pip: Say again?

Nehemia: How does the Our Father express the idea of this individual specific providence?

Pip: Right. So, you know, first of all, you’re praying to our Father. So, there’s a personal connection, even in the title Father. But one of the prayers is, “Give us this day our daily bread.”

Nehemia: Hmm.

Pip: There’s a sense in which you’re acknowledging in the prayer that day by day… it’s the manna in the wilderness principle.

Nehemia: Mm-hmm.

Pip: Day by day, the Lord nourishes me through all kinds of providential means. Providential meaning under His control. All kinds of means. So, it could be, you know, literal bread, it could be other things. But this idea that each day I am supposed to be reliant upon my heavenly Father to take care of me. And you see it elsewhere in the Sermon on the Mount, that same chunk of scripture in Matthew’s gospel, where Jesus will say things like, you know, “Don’t you know that you’re, you know… the sparrows…”

Nehemia: The thing about the birds, yeah, that’s what I was thinking.

Pip: You know, Solomon wasn’t dressed as beautifully as one of these flowers. God takes care of these flowers. How much more so does it have your daily needs taken care of? That kind of thing. It’s all throughout Jesus’ teaching and the way Jesus interacts with people. And he’s always encouraging people to see, not just the way you interact with me, but the way you interact with our Heavenly Father. It’s the same kind of relationship that you’re going to be having.

Nehemia: So, okay. So, that’s the background to what providence is. How does that play out into… I mean, you had a really interesting idea here, if I understood it correctly, which is that, when you look in Christian history and different Christians have interpreted Matthew 23 in different ways, that this isn’t just random happenstance that, you know, Augustine had bad pizza. But there is a providential aspect that should be taken into account, which is really interesting… Explain that better than I did.

Pip: Well, no, I think you’re… yeah, you’re helping a lot in keeping it simple that scholars who would look at the history of interpretation is probably the simplest way. They look at different interpretations in history. Some scholars would look at that history of interpretation and say, “Okay, so, we’ve got all kinds of diversity. We’ve got all kinds of change. Sometimes we can even trace, like, lines of development where, you know, one person is emphasizing something an earlier person said, or disagreeing with it, or something like that.” And there’s a tendency among scholars to say that that’s human… all too human, right? It’s just humans playing with the text and trying to figure out what it means. And you can’t get the meaning out of the text from seeing the way all these people try to treat it.

Nehemia: Hmm.

Pip: More extremely, some scholars will say, “Well, look at all these bad interpretations. That means the text must be bad.” Right?

Nehemia: Oh, wow.

Pip: You know a tree by its fruits, or something like that. They’d apply that to…

Nehemia: Do Christians say that? Or are you talking about secular scholars?

Pip: People who would profess Christianity. So, one scholar or…

Nehemia: Fair enough.

Pip: Yeah.

Nehemia: Okay. People who self-identify as Christians in modern lingo.

Pip: People who are very critical in their approach to the scriptures, not on the same page as I am, they would look at the bad interpretations and say, “Maybe this is because the text is bad.” This is a callback to the previous part of the conversation, where, you know…

Nehemia: The last episode.

Pip: …there’s one scholar saying, “Don’t read Matthew 23. Don’t preach on it, move beyond it, because it has this potential for bad application.”

Nehemia: Okay.

Pip: And what I’m saying is, I think we can look at the history of interpretation, and we can really acknowledge bad application. We can say, this text was used for horrible ends. This was misunderstood here. This was… you know. We can see the good, the bad, and the ugly in history without saying the text is at fault in the same way that we can look at the good, bad, and the ugly in the events of history without saying God is at fault, without saying God is evil.

So, I commit a sin. It’s under the providence of God in history, and yet it would be wrong for me to say, “Well, God is the one who caused me to sin and therefore God is to blame.” I’m doing a similar move with the scriptures. The scriptures are, “God breathed, God ordained.” People have used them sinfully. I don’t want to then say the scriptures are to blame for that sinful use of the scripture.

Nehemia: Mm-hmm.

Pip: So, it’s just an analogy between God’s control of all the events of history, seeing God’s control of the text and its use in history, the good, the bad, the ugly. And that is to say that God will use His word the way He wants. And sometimes we see this idea that… in Romans chapter 1, for example, that God will allow people to go unto themselves, right? He will let them go into their sin, and that’s a sign of judgment, that He lets people loose. He doesn’t challenge them anymore. I think He does that with His word among people who have rejected Him. They’re going to misuse His words; they’re going to twist the scripture.

Nehemia: So, is bad interpretation a sign that you’ve rejected God? Meaning, could there be someone who genuinely, innocently, embraces God, obviously, from your understanding, who gets things wrong? Is that possible as well?

Pip: Yes, yes. So, yeah, I’m taking the extreme cases, maybe, here…

Nehemia: Okay.

Pip: …but yeah. As we were saying before, you can’t always infer from the events of providence things about a person.

Nehemia: Let me…

Pip: Like, you can’t always…

Nehemia: …let me throw out an example. Sorry, finish what you’re saying. I apologize.

Pip: So, you can’t always infer… somebody has a bad interpretation of this passage, and you’re like, “No, that’s not really good.” You can’t necessarily judge the state of their soul before God based on the bad interpretation.

Nehemia: Mm-hmm.

Pip: That’s not exactly what we would say in line with the doctrine of providence. You can’t just say that. But what I am saying is, when you do see bad fruit, so to speak, in history, what you’re not going to connect it to is the scriptures. What you are going to connect it to is the fact that God can use His word in any way that He chooses, both to bless and to curse. And so, it’s supposed to encourage us to have a sense of fear and trembling, or what I call, “humbled sensitivity” to the way that this text, in my hands, could be misused. So, you’re gaining that sensitivity to the fact that, if I’m going to use this text, I need to make sure that it’s in line with what I call “the love command”.

Nehemia: Hmm.

Pip: You know, the two commands that Jesus says are the great command; “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength”, right, from the Shema, and “love your neighbor as yourself.” You know, being able to coordinate my use of this text with a hermeneutical principle like that, which, you know, we see in Irenaeus.

Nehemia: Tell us what a hermeneutical principle is, for the audience.

Pip: A principle for guiding interpretation…

Nehemia: Okay.

Pip: …guiding the way I view the text. We see this very early on. Irenaeus, Origen, these ancient scholars of the scriptures are saying that you need to make sure that love determines the way you use a text. We all do that imperfectly, but I think being able to see the good, the bad, and the ugly throughout history should help us to reorient ourselves. So that, if I know Matthew 23 has been used for anti-Jewish, anti-Semitic, polemic, say by German Christians in the early 20th century, I need to be very aware that in my hands, this text… I could repeat history, repeat the same mistakes. Or I could be sensitive to that and make sure that I am not doing that, even as I seek to fully understand the text. So, I’m not discarding the text. I’m not repudiating the text. Instead, I’m holding the text in light of what I’ve learned about the good, the bad, and the ugly, and saying, “Here’s a different way to understand it that’s different from Ernst Hankin,” you know…

Nehemia: So, let’s assume our audience doesn’t know, because I’m not sure that I do. How was Matthew 23 used in a… let’s call it anti-Jewish context, right? I prefer to call it anti-Semitic, but let’s just be neutral, an anti-Jewish context. Because I actually, like I said, I skimmed your dissertation for the parts that I was interested in. Do you talk about that in the dissertation?

Pip: Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: So, give us some examples of that and how providential history plays into that.

Pip: Yeah. So, I’ll start even before… so, probably in the late 1900s, you’ve got a scholar named…

Nehemia: You mean 1800s?

Pip: Sorry?

Nehemia: Do you mean 1800s, or 1900s?

Pip: Yes, sorry, late 1800s, starting with a scholar named Julius Wellhausen, who’s well-known…

Nehemia: Okay, I know him very well. We studied him in depth at Hebrew University in biblical studies.

Pip: Well, I wonder if this will register with you then. So, in his discussions of Judaism and the Jewish scriptures, he ends up hypothesizing, you know, as he’s developing the documentary hypothesis, that the prophets actually have the more authentic, older Judaism. And then later on, the law is written, right, that the Torah is actually written later and kind of pieced together afterwards. And so, this sort of law-driven Judaism interrupts the prophetic revelation of the sort of legitimate and thriving and vibrant Judaism. And then what Jesus does, in Wellhausen’s mind, is, he gets rid of the legal Rabbinical stuff and gets us back to the prophets.

Nehemia: And not just Rabbinical, the Five Books of Moses, what we call the Torah.

Pip: Exactly, exactly right.

Nehemia: In other words, Deuteronomy, with the exception of… Deuteronomy with, you know, some exceptions like 6:4 and 6:5, that he does like, he sees as sort of a perversion of the original faith of Israel.

Pip: That’s right.

Nehemia: And so, Jesus is essentially restoring what the author of Deuteronomy and the author of, particularly, Leviticus…

Pip: That’s right, yeah.

Nehemia: …outside of the Holiness Code, which we won’t go into.

Pip: Okay, so Wellhausen has this pattern of true prophetic religion messed up by Torah and law-obsessed Jews, he would say, and then restored by Jesus. That is inherently anti-Judaistic and it fits right in line with all of the anti-Judaistic thinking of Germany at the end of the 1800s. He’s just channeling this idea that the Jews messed it all up into Old Testament criticism. And people don’t know that Wellhausen also wrote commentaries on the New Testament. And when he gets to the New Testament and he’s talking about Matthew 23, all he has to say are source critical things. He doesn’t want it to be in the mouth of Jesus. Why?

Nehemia: Source critical is another way of saying, “Whatever I don’t think Jesus or God said, somebody else said that.”

Pip: “Somebody else said it. I can piece it out.” And Wellhausen, when he gets to this passage, he basically says, “Well, this is late and different, and Jesus couldn’t have said it because it’s commending the scribes and the Pharisees,” whom Wellhausen associates with this Torah that messed everything up. Right? So, Wellhausen can’t really handle Matthew 23. He ignores it, and a generation later, two generations later, you get these German, mostly Protestant scholars in this sort of anti-Jewish, even anti-Semitic mold, who over and over again, repeatedly, will remove Matthew 23 from the mouth of Jesus, especially 23:2. They’ll keep some of the woes and stuff; they like that stuff.

Nehemia: So, “The scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat. Whatsoever they bid you observe, that observe and do.” They’re saying Jesus didn’t say that; somebody else wrote that.

Pip: In their mind, there’s no way he could have said something so positive about the scribes and Pharisees. And you see this in… there’s a key text called Die Botschaft Gottes. It’s a reworked New Testament that the German Christian Church was going to republish in place of the Bible.

Nehemia: So, that’s like the message of God in German. Guys, we just looked it up. Okay. I just looked it up.

Pip: Yeah.

Nehemia: Because I took two years of German, but my German’s horrible. Go ahead.

Pip: Yeah. And the editors of that book were part of an institute for the elimination of Jewish thought in German Church life. Okay. So, this is what…

Nehemia: Wait, that was actually a thing?

Pip: Yes, yes.

Nehemia: Was that before 1931 or after 1931?

Pip: I don’t remember.

Nehemia: Meaning, was it before the rise of the Nazi regime, or…

Pip: I think it starts, it gets kickstarted, after the rise of the Nazi regime. But it’s right in line with all this scholarship and attitude in German life at the time. And not just German, I mean, it’s more widespread than that. So, the full name is the Institute for the Study and Elimination of Jewish Influence in the German Christian Church Life.

Nehemia: That’s amazing.

Pip: Okay. It’s all in German. Okay, so, this is a real institute. They published this reworked New Testament, and in that reworked New Testament, of course, they’ve taken out all of the apparently Jewish things that are associated with Jesus and rearranged the life of Jesus, and things like that. I mean, this is Marcion…

Nehemia: I was going to say this is Marcion. Tell us what Marcionism is. I’ve talked about it. Let’s assume some of my audience…

Pip: I’ll come back to Marcion. I’ll come back to Marcion. But so, what is missing, what is completely missing, would be the Chair of Moses saying, right?

Nehemia: Wow.

Pip: And then you get these other scholars. I mean, I’ve got a handful of scholars who actually talk about it, and of course, what they talk about is, there’s this Jewish Christian layer of tradition that Matthew has unwittingly incorporated, or he’s using it against rabbis in a later context, but it’s definitely, definitely, definitely, in all of them, not connected to Jesus, the historical Jesus. Okay.

Nehemia: So, “whatever you don’t like, just say some other person wrote that. It wasn’t Jesus. Whatever you do like, that was Jesus.” And what they’re essentially doing, I’ll just give you my perspective; they’re recreating the text according to their own desires and images. This is one of my criticisms of Bible criticism. Let’s say higher criticism. Lower criticism, which is what I do, textual criticism… Okay, there’s a manuscript; you could say it’s an important one or not an important one. You could say it’s a valid reading or not, but it’s a fact.

Pip: Yeah, you’ve got to deal with the words.

Nehemia: You have to decide; is this a corruption of the text? But it is a text.

Pip: Yeah.

Nehemia: And then here’s another manuscript that preserves the correct text, right?

Pip: Right.

Nehemia: But in higher criticism, what, or at least what you’re describing is maybe an extreme abuse of higher criticism. You decide this is, you know, source A and that source B, and then theologically you say, source A, that’s Jesus. Source B is, I’ll just use my terminology, some bozo who came along and put words in Jesus’s mouth.

Pip: Right.

Nehemia: Who happened to be named Matthew. Or wasn’t named Matthew because that was added later, right? Right. So, okay. So, that’s my criticism of higher criticism, or historical literary criticism we called it at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. But yeah.

Pip: Sure. Yeah, so, you get this… I mean, it’s just widespread, and this idea that this text can’t be said by Jesus because it sounds too positive towards the Judaism of his day. Right? “Listen to the scribes and Pharisees. Do whatever they tell you to do.” All whatsoever is the way you could translate that Greek. All whatsoever they might tell you to do, do it and keep it.

And so, there is a sense of real… how do I put it? In this strand of thinking, the anti-Jewish, anti-Semitic influence in the mind of these critics is just dissecting and divorcing the text from its narrative context. They can’t allow it to stand there. I mean, this is along the lines of the same people who say that Jesus is not Jewish at all, he’s actually, get this, Aryan, because he’s from Galilee, which was Aryan. Again, total rewriting of history. They don’t care about it.

Nehemia: Well, I mean, there were the Iturians there. So, here it goes back to whether or not you believe the text, right? I’m coming at it as a Jew, right? And I say… here’s my approach: as the text has come down to us, which might be different in different manuscripts, but as it survived in its final form, what is it saying? And it’s clearly saying that he came from a Galilean family, but they were from Bethlehem, right? So, what do they do with… they just say that whole thing’s made up. That there was a census and they went back. What are they saying?

Pip: Yeah. I have to go look at, you know, Debot Shavgatas and the other texts to see. I don’t recall exactly what they do with the birth narratives, but my suspicion is, and this is true of German higher criticism to the present, they say that the stuff in Matthew 1 and 2 is all legendary material. The stuff in Luke 1 and 2 is all legendary. And when they say legendary, they mean…

Nehemia: Untrue, it didn’t happen.

Pip: …they’re later editions that don’t have a historical basis to them…

Nehemia: Yeah.

Pip: …they’re just inventions from Christians to make Jesus sound Jewish, or something like that. So, it’s a real self-imposed blindness, I’d say, in the way that you deal with the text, or in this case, don’t deal with the text. So, coming back to the Chair of Moses saying, like, knowing that it can be used, abused, in some cases ignored for anti-Jewish, anti-Semitic purposes… You know, once I learned that and I start to read it, it is a moral imperative for me, as a Christian, to read it in a way that does not play into and feed into those misuses.

Nehemia: Okay.

Pip: Because I would accept the love commandment as something that should guide the whole of life, including the way I read the scriptures…

Nehemia: Mm-hmm.

Pip: … then I need to be reading this in a way that produces loving fruit. And I think, back to our previous part of the discussion, I mean, the way that I’m reading it is in a way that is self-consciously trying to situate Jesus in a plausible Jewish, early Judaism environment within the Roman Empire at the time. And it’s not playing into any of the claims about this being a later addition from some anti-Rabbinic source or something like that. Instead, we have Jesus commanding his disciples to listen to what are, effectively, governing authorities as they witness to him, which means being willing to take punishment if the governing authorities don’t agree with them. It means being willing to go along with something that they’d rather not do. Just like he says elsewhere in Matthew 10, they’re going to drag you in front of courts, they’re going to beat you in synagogues, they’re going to do all this… “and that’s the way they treated me,” and you move on. You continue to be faithful, but you don’t resist. You don’t retaliate. You don’t try to overthrow the government or something like that.

Nehemia: Well, so, wait a minute. And maybe we’re going back into what it meant in the 1st century, which we did last time…

Pip: Right, yes, we are.

Nehemia: Which is okay, which is fine. Wherever the conversation leads, I think, is important. Meaning, in the 1st century, in the time when Jesus is preaching this… and you said this is in the Temple, in Matthew 23, is there in your view… it’s a modern term: separation between church and state? Right? But there definitely was the Roman government, and then there was the Temple and Rabbinical authorities, which were probably two different things…

Pip: Yeah.

Nehemia: …which had some overlap. So, was he saying, “obey the government?” Or was he saying, “obey the religious authorities?” Or is it the same thing?

Pip: Yeah. I think there’s so much overlap in this period. So, there are hints where, say, Herod and Pilate sort of are hesitant to decide things according to Jewish law. Right? In the Book of Acts, too, there’s a sense of like, “I don’t know if I should touch that because that doesn’t pertain exactly to my, like, Roman imperial authority. And maybe I should let the Jews decide that on their own.” So, there are questions about… but I wouldn’t actually divide them along the lines of religion and state, or church and state, or anything like that.

Nehemia: Okay.

Pip: I think it’s actually more along the lines of Roman law and “other law”. And the Romans were pretty permissive about regional governments having their own customs and regulations, and even worship and things like that. So, the Romans were, in a sophisticated way, a little bit hands-off with some of that stuff. So, I think the dispute is not religious versus secular, or church versus state, but more Roman versus not Roman.

Nehemia: And is Jesus saying that you should obey the… In other words, let’s apply it to the 21st century.

Pip: Yeah. Well…

Nehemia: Or maybe we’re jumping too far.

Pip: That’s the question. How applicable is this after you get somebody like Theodore Beza, Thomas Hobbes, and others, who really try to coordinate… I mean, after Machiavelli, right? You’ve got the church and state. Which one’s in charge? Do they interact? Can they tell each other what to do? All those questions are live for us, and in the United States context, you know, it’s still actually a live question. As much as we do have a separation, there is a live question. Like, how much can the church say? What happens if you get a Christian in power? You know, how does that work out? How does that fall out?

I think what we’re seeing Jesus saying is, I think he’s treating the scribes and the Pharisees in this passage as what we would think of as civil authorities, but I don’t think he would distinguish… I think he would say religious matters are also under their jurisdiction.

Nehemia: He would agree with that or he wouldn’t, I’m not sure…

Pip: I think he would say that yeah, that there’s no… it’s not like there’s civil authorities and there’s civil law and religious authorities and there’s religious law, it’s that there’s authorities, and different places, like Roman Palestine at the time, would have different ways of deciding which laws go to which court, or which laws go to which governor, or which level, and so…

Nehemia: It didn’t…

Pip: A question about whether somebody’s a king or not, that gets punted up to Pontius Rilate, right?

Nehemia: Okay.

Pip: That’s why the king thing, the king of the Judeans, matters, on the cross. Because if there’s no comparable claim, then Pontius Pilate doesn’t have a Roman law…

Nehemia: He could care less, whereas the British say he couldn’t care less…

Pip: He couldn’t care less, that’s right.

Nehemia: … about whether you say you are a rabbi, but if you say you’re Messiah, which means king, “Well, we have a king and he’s in Rome.” Well, not a king, but a ruler, right?

Pip: Right.

Nehemia: So, is that what you’re saying?

Pip: Yeah. And so, Pilate is sort of, well, he’s kind of unconvinced. He goes along with it anyway, but if that rationale weren’t there, the sort of insurrectionist way of viewing Jesus’s ministry, if that weren’t there, then Pilate would say, “This is a matter for you, and according to Roman law, you can’t put anyone to death. So, you’re going to have to figure it out.”

Nehemia: There’s actually one exception.

Pip: Well, yes.

Nehemia: Which is mentioned by Josephus.

Pip: Okay.

Nehemia: And we found archaeological confirmation in the Balustrade Inscription. I don’t know if you want to talk about that.

Pip: No, you tell me about it.

Nehemia: So, Josephus records one of the emperors, I want to say it was Titus, but I may be getting this wrong, or whoever it was before that… or maybe it’s one of the governors, and he’s talking about how, “You Jews are so ungrateful! We gave you permission to execute uncircumcised men who go past like a certain point in the Temple, which normally, under Roman rule, you have no right to execute anybody! And we made a special exemption for you, and you’re still rebelling against us! Like, what more can we do? We’ve just got to put down… like, enough is enough!”

And then we have something called the Balustrade Inscription, which is currently in Istanbul, from the time of the Ottoman Empire. They stole it. They found it in Israel. And it says something to the effect, in Greek, of, “Any uncircumcised to enter will be put to death.” Well, the Jews didn’t have that authority. This was the one exception, which was, if you entered into the Temple uncircumcised, you could be executed. And it probably wasn’t an execution; it’s probably like a mob attack type thing…

Pip: Stoning, yeah.

Nehemia: But the point is the Romans are like, “We’re not going to get involved in that because we conceded that ridiculous thing.” Like, to them, that’s ridiculous; circumcision, right? It’s actually, you know, effeminizing in the Roman view. But they’re like, “Okay, you’re this exotic religion and, you know, and we’re just going to give into that as long as you pay your taxes and bring your sacrifice; not to the emperor, we’re going to concede on that, but in the name of the emperor.”

And when the Jews stopped bringing the sacrifice in the name of the emperor, meaning like to bless the emperor, that was insurrection. He’s like, “No, that’s too far. You’re in open rebellion against us.” Right? “We tried to concede to everything we can, but that we can’t let go.” So, the one exception where they were allowed to execute people was if an uncircumcised male went beyond this thing called the balustrade, which was the inner part of the Temple in Jerusalem.

Pip: Yeah, that’s really helpful. I hadn’t really known that. And it makes a lot of sense of some of the things in Acts, too. I mean, that would be an exception that proves the rule that there’s sort of a layering of law. It’s not quite like state and federal law the way we would think in the United States.

Nehemia: Right.

Pip: But there’s a sense in which Romans have given themselves a certain jurisdiction, and they give whatever conquered peoples or incorporated peoples a certain jurisdiction to handle in their own ways. And they try not to be over-determinative, and allow… So, they would allow the Sanhedrin to have a sort of exercise of influence, as long as when stuff gets out of hand, you know, insurrection or something like that, it gets punted up to the governor, or whoever it may be.

Nehemia: Hmm.

Pip: So, I think what’s going on here is not a distinction between religious and civil authorities, which is often the way that this whole thing is read, and that’s very post-Machiavellian. Instead…

Nehemia: Tell us how it’s post-Machiavellian. Assume people don’t know who Machiavelli is.

Pip: So, Machiavelli is reacting to, among other things, corrupt papacies, corrupt popes in European history, and he’s sort of theorizing about the authority of the prince. And he’s a little sneaky. He’s a little hard to read. He never quite says exactly what he thinks because he doesn’t want to die. But he’s sort of trying to navigate this idea that there would be civil authority that is not beholden to the papacy. Which is a real break with European history from about the year 1000 on, where, in order to be a monarch in Europe, you have to be blessed or crowned or something by the pope. Right?

Nehemia: Mm-hmm.

Pip: This is the period of history where that’s starting to break, in Machiavelli’s political rationale, and it gets worked out through the Early Modern period, the European Reformations period, and then through somebody like Thomas Hobbes saying that there’s actually no such thing as spiritual authority at all. It’s all civil authority. There can’t be a transnational pope, because then it would just be one nation. Either the king is in charge or not. You know, it’s kind of the absolutist way that Thomas Hobbes would put it.

And in that period, there’s a lot of variation and swinging back and forth, but there’s a clear separation of spheres, or circles, where the church has this domain and the state has this domain. And some people are proposing the church is on top, some people are proposing the state’s on top. Later on, you know, the U.S. Constitution would be an effect of people trying to figure out how they can peacefully coexist and have their own separate spheres. That conditions the way we think about these texts.

In the 21st century, we have a separation of church and state in our mind. However we would configure that, whether one’s on top of the other or whatever, we have these categories that did not exist. So, the breaking of what we might call Christendom, with the sort of transnational church in the West over all these governments, you end up with the separation of church and state ideas configured differently by different people. And we, when we read this text, we bring that separation of church and state to the text. Where in the ancient world, we don’t see a clear separation between religion and politics.

Nehemia: So, it’s interesting. I’ve had a conversation with Muslims, and I’ve heard them talk about this in other contexts, where, you know, in Islamic… and here I’m outside my wheelhouse, but my understanding is, if you become an apostate in Islam, and you deny the core principles of Islam, you’re to be executed. And I’m like, “That’s very extreme, isn’t it?” And their position is, “Oh, well, no, that’s because the government and the religion were the same thing, and you were a traitor, and you execute traitors.” That’s their explanation.

And if I look at Jews, let’s say from the time Jews lost sovereignty, whenever that was, you could argue about that, there was this idea of dina de’malkhuta dina – the law of the kingdom is the law. Meaning, we follow the law of the government as long as it doesn’t violate Jewish law.

Pip: Right.

Nehemia: And there’s this extreme statement in the Talmud that says, “Well, there’s three things you do get martyred for.” And those are, if they… famously, it says, if they tell you to kill somebody, right? So, murder, sexual immorality, and idolatry. So, if the government says, “go and worship that idol”, then you say, “Okay, execute me.” But if the government says, “pay that tax”, you pay the tax, and you’re bound to by the rabbis, right?

Pip: Sounds familiar, yeah.

Nehemia: And then, there’s an exception where, if they’re getting you to do something to prove that you no longer are following the Torah, or something that makes you distinctively Jewish is really what they’re saying, not necessarily the Torah, then they say, “Even if it’s the color of your shoelaces, you accept martyrdom.” Jews had a distinctively colored shoelace, and they say, “We want you to go and prove to the whole community you’re no longer a Jew. Put on the purple shoelaces instead of the green ones.” Then you accept martyrdom. Right?

So, in other words, other than that, except that particular case, where it’s kind of an outside profession of your identity, it’s just idolatry, sexual immorality, and murder that you’re required to reject the law of the government. Everything else, just do what they say. And morally, you should do what they say, meaning, even if you’re not going to get caught, you are required to follow the law. That’s the historical Jewish position, being a minority under the rule of non-Jews, right? Romans, or Babylonians, or Zoroastrians, it didn’t matter, right?

So, in the Jewish mind, even in the ancient world, there kind of is a distinction between the secular government… or, we can’t call it secular; between the malkhuta, the kingdom, the government, and Jewish law. So, what you’re saying is that it’s a modern construct.

Pip: I’m saying…

Nehemia: To me, I kind of feel like they must have had some kind of concept like that even in the time of Jesus.

Pip: Yeah, no, no. Yeah, I don’t want to be misunderstood there. I’m saying that the distinction between religious authorities and civil authorities, we don’t see that distinctly. The distinction between human authorities and God, we see. I mean, we see that…

Nehemia: Okay.

Pip: … in Hebrew and Aramaic scriptures through the New Testament. You know, should we obey God or man? Right? That question, the three interacting with Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel, right?

Nehemia: Right.

Pip: That distinction is there. So, I’m not saying there’s not a distinction between the divine and the human, or something like that.

Nehemia: Okay.

Pip: But this clear separation… like, somebody who has the sword in the ancient world, they have the power of punishing wrongdoers. The laws that are on the books could be what we would think of as religious laws, as well as what we would think of as civil laws, and they don’t distinguish between them. So, this would go to the example in Islam, the law on the book says you can’t badmouth the prophet. If you badmouth the prophet, you die. That’s the law on the civil magistrate’s books. Even though in our mind we’re thinking, “Well, that’s religious.” And they’re thinking, “Well, sure. It’s also about the good of the community, public law and order, this nation…”

Nehemia: That’s a good point.

Pip: “… which is under God.” Right?

Nehemia: Okay.

Pip: So, Brent Nongri, and a few others that I mentioned in the dissertation, talk about when that distinction between, like, civil and religious authorities really becomes operative in the way that most people think, you get some ancient kind of precedence. It’s not to say that people were incapable of thinking this way, but for the most part, the way ancient empires, states, what we call nations… some people don’t even like to use that word there, but these ancient peoples were arranged, they didn’t firmly distinguish between those two categories the way that we would.

And so, I think that in the case of the Chair of Moses, Jesus is saying that anything that’s under the jurisdiction of the Chair of Moses, you have to abide by that ruling. And he doesn’t spell it out, but I think that could be anything from the handwashing issue with the tradition of the elders, to bearing witness to Jesus that he’s the Messiah, or something like that.

Nehemia: You mean not bearing witness? Is that what you mean?

Pip: Well, let’s say one of his disciples says he’s the Messiah and gets in trouble for it, and gets kind of prosecuted in the synagogue, and they punt it up to the Chair of Moses. And the people who are in this appeals court, they rule against him and say, “No, you’re out of the community. You’re no longer part of your synagogue. You’re no longer…”

Nehemia: So, I’m trying to understand. So, I’m like… it’s hypothetical here, right? It’s the day after the crucifixion, and Peter wants to go, you know, have a sandwich. Does he wash his hands or doesn’t he? Or it’s, Shabbat, right? It’s literally the day after the crucifixion, based on the standard Christian understanding, it’s on Friday. It’s Saturday morning, and does Peter say, “Oh, I’m not supposed to, you know, violate the Jewish understandings of Shabbat. I can’t pluck grain today.” Right? Or is Peter saying, “No, that was nailed to the cross”? What is Peter’s take on this? And you don’t know, right? But what would you think, if you were Peter, on the day after the crucifixion?

Pip: Peter is a particularly complicated example because he denies Jesus and isn’t restored until after the resurrection.

Nehemia: Okay, so let’s take the example of one of the other disciples.

Pip: Right. So, well, I’m not exactly sure how to take that particular example, because Jesus does have a teaching prior to his death about eating on the Sabbath.

Nehemia: So, let’s take a different example.

Pip: Yeah, okay.

Nehemia: So, one of the non-Jews comes, who’s a follower of Jesus… I’m assuming there are some, the Ethiopian guy, and he says…

That’s later, yeah, so, there we go. So…

Pip: They’re all Jews, as far as we know, they’re all…

Nehemia: …but there’s one that we, as far as we know, there’s one we don’t know named Tom…

Pip: Okay, Tom.

Nehemia: …and he’s a Sadducee, and so, he says there’s no reason not to eat meat and milk together, because that’s a law of the rabbis, and he hands Peter a cheeseburger. Does Peter eat it? Or does he say, “No, I’m not allowed to do that, because the people in the Seat of Moses said I’m not allowed to eat meat and milk together,” right?

Pip: Um…

Nehemia: It’s obviously very hypothetical, right?

Pip: Yeah. I think what’s tripping me up is the day after the crucifixion.

Nehemia: Okay, let’s make it day 41 after the crucifixion. It’s after Acts 2.

Pip: After Acts 2.

Nehemia: Or no, not day 41, day 51. I’m thinking of Lent, sorry!

Pip: No, that’s fine. Yeah, so…

Nehemia: So, it’s after Acts. It’s a year after that Shavuot, that Pentecost. Now what?

Pip: Okay, that helps me, okay. So…

Nehemia: But it’s before Acts 10, because that’s different.

Pip: Okay. So, before Acts 10, Peter would say…

Nehemia: We’re in Acts 9.

Pip: Yeah. Peter would not eat something that he thought was a violation of the food laws before Acts 10. As far as I can tell, in my diagnosis, my understanding of Peter’s psychology, he would say, “This isn’t given for me to eat, and…”

Nehemia: So, let’s not deal with the food laws, because that has obviously some… like, we talked about that in the previous part.

Pip: Yeah.

Nehemia: So, let’s take something that’s not a food law. I’m trying to think what that would be. So, he’s given a garment by an Ethiopian convert which has a mix of wool and linen, and wool is in the one direction. The linen is interwoven; it’s in the same garment, clearly a violation nobody would dispute of Leviticus and Deuteronomy.

Pip: Yeah.

Nehemia: Does Peter say, “No, I’m not allowed to wear that,” or does he say, “No, that was nailed to the cross and it’s done away with”?

Pip: No, I think Peter would still say, “I’m not allowed to wear that.”

Nehemia: Even after Acts 10.

Pip: I think probably… so, going back to that principle that we talked about from Paul’s letter to the Romans and elsewhere, this idea that people who were raised within the ceremonial system… I mean, we see the disciples are still going to the Temple in Acts. Paul is still undergoing vow regulations with people in the Temple in the latter part of the Book of Acts, long after Acts 10. So, I think there’s a sense in which people who identified as both Jewish and followers of Jesus were continuing to keep the regulations that they knew, but they were also willing to not keep them when it came to ministering to Gentiles.

Nehemia: Okay.

Pip: So, after Acts 10, there’s a sense that Paul will say, “Among Jews, I’m a Jew. Among Greeks, I’m a Greek. I become all things to all people.” I think there’s a sense in which Paul, especially, maybe, has a freedom of conscience to say, “I can do these things and maintain ritual purity when I’m around people for whom that’s still important.”

Nehemia: Mm-hmm.

Pip: “I can also let go of it…”

Nehemia: Okay.

Pip: “…and not worry about it, because neither this nor that is determinative…”

Nehemia: And that’s not a violation of Matthew 23:2 and 3, when you say, I’m going to eat the ham sandwich, so…

Pip: That’s right. That’s right. Now I see where your questions come in. That’s because the Chair of Moses, the way I’m thinking about it, at the end of the dissertation, it’s not a legislative chair, where they pass laws. It’s a judicial chair where they rule on violations of law. So, the Chair of Moses has nothing to say to you until somebody accuses you of something. You get taken to court, whatever that might look like in the local community, and then the local community says, “You’ve got to go to Jerusalem, because this one’s too hard for us to determine.” And then…

Nehemia: Okay. So, you’re saying it’s that individual ruling, not the precedent that that individual ruling establishes. Is that what you’re saying?

Pip: Yeah. And as a court, they might care about the precedent, like previous rulings would, you know, inform the way they interpret whatever’s going on, but it’s not a law that’s promulgated throughout the land. Instead it’s, Peter got accused of eating a ham sandwich, got taken to court, brought to the Chair of Moses, and the Chair of Moses said, “You ate a ham sandwich, therefore you’re out of the community.” Or “you’re not allowed to be a member of the synagogue,” or “you have to do a Temple sacrifice to show that you’re willing to be restored,” or something like that. I don’t know what they would say. But the ruling, and the requirement that comes from that, Peter is supposed to follow it.

Nehemia: So, what’s the 21st century application of this? You know, let’s say if I was a Christian living in America and I really take the words of Jesus seriously… And look, we could have conflicting jurisdictions, right? I have my county and my city; am I required to follow, based on that verse, right? And maybe you’ll say, no, that’s a different text, right? Like you said last time.

Pip: Yeah.

Nehemia: Am I required to follow American law? And of course, give unto Caesar, that’s a different thing. But based on Matthew 23:2 to 3 alone, would that bind me to obey American law? Or let’s say I’m a member of a certain church that says… and I’ll give an example in a minute, but I want to hear your perspective on that.

Pip: Yeah. Yeah. I’ll say two things. So, the first is, I think there are, as you hinted, other texts that would require me to be a good citizen, like Romans 13 and 1 Peter 2. You know, be submitted to the governing authorities. I think this text is actually more about being willing to both bear witness to Jesus and suffer the consequences of bearing witness to Jesus as what we call martyrs. Martyrs aren’t always people who die. Anybody who bears witness and suffers for it, whether they die or are just punished…

Nehemia: And martyr literally means to bear witness in Greek.

Pip: That’s right. So, the martyrs, martyrdom, in these texts, is the idea of bearing witness, even if you survive, right? So, Peter gets out of prison; he’s still a martyr. Whereas James dies; he’s also a martyr. Okay. Martyr is a broader idea. Later on, the term gets associated particularly with those who die. But I’d say that what Jesus is saying, similar to what he says in Matthew chapter 10, is this idea that you are to acknowledge Jesus before men, and he will acknowledge you before the Father. If you deny him before men, he will deny you before the Father. You’re to acknowledge Jesus before men, even if it means that you get dragged into court for it. And when you are brought to the Chair of Moses, and they say you’re not allowed to come into the community anymore because you keep bearing witness to Jesus, you have to acknowledge that. You can’t fight them. You can’t bring down curses upon them. You can’t start an insurrection against them.

Nehemia: What if they command you to deny Jesus?

Pip: Well, right. It is your duty to acknowledge Jesus before men, even if you suffer for it.

Nehemia: Okay.

Pip: So, whatever they can do to you… I mean, maybe they can’t put you to death, but maybe they can construe you as somebody who’s against Caesar, as they do to Paul in the Book of Acts, right? They construe Paul’s violation as anti-Roman, not only against the Temple, but also, he’s preaching another king, right? So, they get Paul kind of in trouble with the Roman authorities that way. Paul goes with it, right? His whole modus operandi, his whole way of treating the situation is, “Sure, I’ll give my testimony before the Roman governors. Sure, I’ll go to Caesar, even if it means I’m in house arrest for the rest of my life.” Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: So, the way you interpret it, we had talked, I think it was in the previous episode or at some point in this, because guys, we’re all sitting the same day and having this long conversation, that’s why I’m wearing the same shirt, which is, you know, that’s fine. So, you had talked about how some… and you read a quote, how some Christian scholars or scholars of Christianity say this is one of the most difficult texts in Matthew 23, 2 through 3. So, this is your way of resolving it? Is that really… In other words, you’re saying it’s not difficult, because it has sort of a narrow definition, or maybe a very broad definition, but it’s not the definition where they were saying it was contradicting all these other things. Is that a fair assessment?

Pip: Yeah. I don’t want to say it’s an easy text. I wouldn’t say that, but I would say that I think you…

Nehemia: You’ve resolved it.

Pip: You can reasonably coordinate it with other things that Jesus says in the gospel according to Matthew, without supposing that he suddenly switched gears on the Pharisees, or something like that. Because when he’s talking about hand-washing or the teaching of the Sadducees and the Pharisees earlier on, he’s not talking about this legal ruling. He’s not talking about…

Nehemia: Okay.

Pip: … bearing the punishment for your crimes of bearing witness to Jesus. And so, there’s a sense in which you can make it fit right within its own narrative context without needing to put it in the mouth of a later Matthew or Jewish Christian tradition that’s not Jesus or something like that. Instead, you can see this reasonably coming out of the mouth of Jesus if the Chair of Moses is a metonym, a way of talking about this institution for kind of a legal court that makes rulings on community issues that can’t be resolved in the local synagogue.

Nehemia: Okay. And I want to shift gears and ask how this was interpreted in Christian history, which is a very broad question…

Pip: Yeah.

Nehemia: …but give us a few examples. And what I’m particularly interested in is people who, and correct me if I’m wrong here, or we’ll edit it out if I’m wrong, or maybe not; was this used, this verse, by different authorities, by different institutions, to say, “Hey, you got to obey us because Jesus said, ‘Obey the people in the Chair of Moses.’”? And the thing that comes to mind is… I don’t remember. It was the first Vatican Council or the second, I think it was the first Vatican Council that says, “When the Pope speaks ex-cathedra, that is binding upon all.” I think they would probably say Christians, but I would say Catholics, and that’s from the chair, right? And that’s like an institution now on Catholicism. Not everything the Pope says is binding, but when he speaks from the chair… and you could say that’s the chair of Peter, but there is clearly a connection to that, just the word cathedra, that they’re also saying, hey, I sit in the Seat of Moses. Jesus said, obey those in the Seat of Moses; obey us. So, how has that been used, and from your perspective, abused in Christian history?

Pip: Yeah, sure. Yeah. So, anyone who’s interested in this, I mean, chapters 2 through 5, actually, all kind of revolve around this, but chapter 5 is the one that gets into the kind of European Reformation’s period, where some of this stuff really comes to a head. But much earlier… So, talking early Christian, you know, Origen, Irenaeus, Tertullian, these people who are writing in the late 2nd century up through the 3rd century, I mean, there’s a lot of trying to work with the Chair of Moses and say, what does this mean? What is this talking about? And so, they will often try to interpret the Chair of Moses in relation to, as Tertullian puts it, the chair of Christ and the apostles, or, you know, the chair of the church, right?

And so, you get the Chair of Moses on the one hand, in these early Christian interpreters, they’re going to find an analogous thing called the chair of Christ or the chair of the church or the chair of the apostles. And they’re going to… Sometimes in Origen, it’s much more complicated, where, like, the Chair of Moses endures, and the chair of the church and chair of Christ are… they’re kind of parallel and coexisting. Whereas in Tertullian, it seems more like a replacement idea, where the Chair of Moses gets kind of swallowed up into the chair of the church. And there’s this idea that this Chair of Moses is about the teaching authority in the Old Testament church, you know, the church before Acts 2, in their way of thinking, that gets sort of somehow appropriated into a New Testament or a New Covenant teaching authority, which is vested in Christ and the apostles, and then later on the bishops. Even totally to the side of that, there’s already a tradition in Greco-Roman law where you have a cathedra where a governor will sit. So, a throne of some kind. Also, we have documents of professors sitting in the professor’s chair, even in Roman antiquity. So, we still have chaired appointments.

Nehemia: We call it… to this day a professorship is called a chair.

Pip: That’s right. So…

Nehemia: And there’s a very important Israeli journal called Kathedra, which is literally referencing that professorship chair.

Pip: Right. So, that idea of a chair being associated with teaching authority is totally before and separate from the Chair of Moses saying. I won’t say the Chair of Moses saying doesn’t appeal to that, but I’m saying that that was already…

Nehemia: That’s the context of the saying, to some extent, isn’t it?

Pip: That’s right. So, they’re thinking, “Okay, well, this is about teaching authority. Then maybe we can analogize from the Chair of Moses saying to these other chairs, all the other chairs you can think of.” And, you know, eventually gets to be the bishop’s chair in every Roman basilica, which at first was a law court, and eventually, after Constantine, it becomes a church court, which also administers the affairs of the empire. Very complicated.

On down the line, you get the chair of Peter. Now, actually, in my dissertation, I propose this. I give little hints of thoughts where you might pursue this. I think this is another good dissertation topic to connect the chair of Peter to the Chair of Moses, because in Constantine’s rhetoric, Emperor Constantine of Rome, and Eusebius, who writes The Life of Constantine, you get clear connections between the Roman emperor and Moses. Moses as a king.

Nehemia: Okay.

Pip: He’s construed as the ideal king, which, again, that’s its own dissertation. But you get this idea that the Roman imperial authority becomes Moses-like. It sits on this chair of judgment. The chair of Peter, you know, becomes where the Pope is, in Rome. All of this gets analogized from the Chair of Moses saying onto the chair of Peter in Rome. And then, it’s not until the Reformation period where you get people very clearly saying, “We speak with this authority from the chair. You need to obey. Just like Jesus said in Matthew 23:2, you need to obey the people who sit on the Chair of Moses. Our chair is even better than the Chair of Moses, therefore, you need to obey what we say.”

So, a notorious case of this would be Cardinal Sattoletto, who was a cardinal… among the places he was a bishop was Geneva, where John Calvin ends up becoming a great influence; some would say a notorious influence if you’re on the Roman Catholic side. And Sattoletto writes this letter to the Genevans saying, “Don’t fall in with these Protestants and Calvinists. Don’t fall in with them. You’re supposed to adhere to the authority of the bishop, even if the bishops are morally corrupt, we’ll grant that, we’ll grant Luther and Calvin that point. Still, you need to obey what they say,” quoting Matthew.

Nehemia: So, Matthew 23 becomes very important, because, in other words, Luther’s argument is, “These guys are hypocrites. Why would we listen to them?”

Pip: And they said…

Nehemia: And he’s like, “Yeah, they’re hypocrites, but you’ve got to listen to them because they have this chair of authority.” Wow! Okay.

Pip: And of course, Calvin writes a contrary letter. This is documented in a little book. It’s, I think, it’s got Calvin and Sattoletto in the title, you know, letters back and forth to the Church of Geneva. And Calvin says, “So you’re calling yourself scribes and Pharisees. Interesting! Well, let me tell you about the Pharisees.” And he ends up quoting a bunch of other things from Matthew that are negative about the Pharisees and avoiding their teaching.

So, you get this sort of interesting use of it where the, you know, what would become Roman Catholic authorities… that’s not a really appropriate term until after the Council of Trent, but the Catholic or Roman Catholic authorities saying, “We sit in this chair. You have to listen.” And the Protestants saying, “If you sit in that chair, there’s all kinds of other things that are wrong with you.” And then they would go on to reason about… you know…

Nehemia: Were there any Protestants who used Matthew 23 as their claim to authority?

Pip: That’s a good question. Not that I know of, but, you know, I’m unfamiliar with some of the more Episcopal traditions like later Lutheranism and the Episcopal Church, you know, the Church of England. I don’t know if they appeal to it at all, but I know for the most part, the early reformers and second-generation Protestant reformers were all comparing the people on the Chair of Moses to, you know, monks and Jesuits and people they didn’t like. They were putting them in the Chair of Moses and saying, you know, “This saying of Jesus is no longer in force,” in one way or another. Because they were doing that…

Nehemia: Wait, that’s really important. Hold on a second.

Pip: Yeah.

Nehemia: So, the Protestants like Calvin, who were saying that, “Yeah, you guys do sit in the Seat of Moses, but we’re no longer required to obey the people in the Seat of Moses.” Is that what they were saying?

Pip: Yeah. It’s different for different people, but yeah. So, there’s this line where it’s sort of saying, you know, “It would be inappropriate for us to just flatly read this as a command for the present day, because of the distinctions that we now make between…” I mean, Beza brings in the civil magistrate who has…

Nehemia: Oh, okay.

Pip: … a requirement to coerce heretics. Okay. This is like a totally different way of thinking about things that we would have. And so, they’re sort of saying that the Chair of Moses as a teaching institution in that time is not maintained in the same way. And Catholics who would appeal to it are, A, misunderstanding the text, and, if they’re calling themselves scribes and Pharisees, well… we have other words for them to say why we are not going to adhere to what they’re saying and so on.

So, it’s very convoluted and complicated, because on the one hand, everyone wants to read it in this metonym for teaching authority. On the other hand, people are going to say, “Well, you know, it’s no longer enforced because of X, Y and Z changes that happen in history and salvation history and so on.”

Nehemia: Mm-hmm. So, there’s an interesting example, and maybe we’re going now into modern times too much, but in China you have something called the Three Self Patriotic Church. And this is what I’ve been told by Chinese Christians who aren’t part of that church, right? So, take it with a grain of salt. I don’t know enough about this.

But what I’m told, by the people who are not part of this church, is that in that church, you’re required to make your first loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party or the government. I’m not sure how it’s worded, and only then to God and the church. And this is why they oppose it, they tell me, because no, my first loyalty has to be God, then to the church, and then to the government. And look, China has a really painful history of the Taiping Rebellion, which we won’t get into, but where tens of millions of people died over what today would probably be called a Christian cult. It was the guy who believed he was the brother of Jesus, and effectively overthrew… who were they, the Ching dynasty? In that area… Or maybe it’s the Ming. I think it’s the Ming… I don’t know, I’m not an expert in Chinese history. Whoever it was.

And it was a war that lasted for decades. And so, they’re very sensitive to that kind of thing. And so, if you were counseling a Chinese Christian… it’s totally hypothetical, you can pass, if you want, on the question. But if you decide to answer, if you’re counseling a Chinese Christian, and he says, “I don’t want to be part of the Three Patriotic Church. Should I, based on Matthew 23? Or should I just pray by myself at my house, maybe with my friends? That’s called a house church. What should I do?”

Pip: Yeah.

Nehemia: Pip, Reverend Pip? What would your advice be?

Pip: Yeah. So, I’m actually a little bit familiar with this. I recently studied, with a group of students, the writings of Wang Yi, who’s a Presbyterian minister who was jailed in 2018 in the new regulations, and he has a lot of writing on church-state relations that have been collected and translated into English now. He deals a lot with Matthew, the gospel…

Nehemia: So, I asked the right person.

Pip: Yeah. And, you know, Wang Yi is really insightful. And he’s coming in a similar tradition to my own, some different interpretations of Matthew 23, I think, sprinkled in there, but I think he would agree about the idea of a martyrdom focus, where you stay true to Jesus. Everything within your power, you try to be a good citizen. Christianity is not opposed, in principle, to any particular government or form of government even, but you always have to be ready to suffer for saying something. If the government tries to regulate your speech, or even more than that, your belief and thought, if the government tries to bind your conscience with regard to the things of God, you have to go with the things of God and be willing to suffer under the government. This is why he’s in prison right now, because he would flatly say things like, you know, “Jesus Christ is King of Kings and Lord of Lords. He has all authority in heaven and earth, even above the Chinese Communist Party.” He would say things like that, and so, they jailed him for it, and as far as we know, he’s still in prison.

And I think he’s right in line with this idea that, if we’d get a general principle from the Chair of Moses saying, it’s about the willingness to cooperate with the governing authorities, even when they’re wrong. Even when they have tried to bind your conscience, you are going to cooperate with them. Even if that means suffering the punishment for bearing witness to Jesus.

So, Wang Yi, or, I guess, the editors, title his book, Faithful Disobedience. Wang Yi makes a distinction; it’s not civil disobedience. He’s not engaging in civil disobedience, which would just be sort of like, you know, shocking the system in order to change it. He’s not appealing to the Chinese constitution, though he actually could, because there is a religious freedom clause in the Chinese constitution. He says, I’m not appealing to that. Instead, what I’m appealing to is the word of God and the scriptures, and all I’m saying is, “This is the thing I have to obey above and beyond whatever you’re telling me to say. And because this is my foundation, I’m willing to suffer and know that Jesus is Lord of heaven and earth, and there’s nothing you can do to me that he can’t restore. And you have no authority to tell him what to do.”

So, he would look at texts like the Great Commission, Matthew 28:18 through 20, where Jesus starts out by saying, after the resurrection, “All authority in heaven and earth has been given to me, and therefore, go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.” And then, this is the clause people forget: “And teaching them to obey all that I have commanded you.”

Nehemia: Hmm.

Pip: “Lo, I’m with you always to the end of the world.” Okay. “And to the end of the age.” And that teaching them to obey all I’ve commanded you, Wang Yi would look at that and say… I think many of these house church Christians would look at that and say, “There are lots of things that Jesus doesn’t talk about.” Form of government would be one of them, right? We can be in a communist society. We can be in a republic. We can be in a democracy. We can be in an absolute monarchy. That’s neither here nor there. But we do know what he did positively teach us to do, and we’re going to do those things. And when we get dragged before courts and governors and whatever else, we’re going to continue to say, “The reason I’m doing this is that Jesus is risen from the dead.” Something like that. And they’re going to bear witness to Jesus and they’re going to suffer for it.

So, I think the house church movement… and again, not all of them are the same, and not all of them would have the same degree of conviction, but by and large, I think many of the Chinese Christians in the house church movement would say, “We are willing to go to jail for saying that Jesus is not the subject of the Communist Party, that Jesus is actually Lord over China, as over America, as over everywhere else.”

And, I think, my understanding of the Chair of Moses saying fits right in with that sort of attitude towards the civil government where, on the one hand, you try to be a good citizen; on the other hand, you don’t capitulate in your faith. And when a human court judges you negatively, let’s say for matters of faith and conscience, you endure. You endure suffering.

Nehemia: But based on that, if… Wang Yi was his name?

Pip: Wang Yi, yeah. W-A-N-G and then Yi is his given name.

Nehemia: Oh, Wang Yi, I don’t know how it’s pronounced. Anyway… So, if he had an opportunity to escape from prison based on Matthew 23:2 through 3, he should not escape? I’m asking.

Pip: Yeah, I think so. I think he would say that there’s a… I mean, the scriptural precedent for Christians in Acts, when Paul is jailed in Philippi; he’s put in prison, kind of illegally, even though he’s a Roman citizen. He’s put in prison, and there’s this earthquake, and, you know, it’s a miraculous deliverance from prison. And the prison guard is worried that all the prisoners have escaped, and Paul says, “Actually, I’m still right here. I’m not going to run away.” Right?

Nehemia: By the way, in modern German law, I understand, escaping from prison isn’t illegal. And if you escape and get caught, then there’s no punishment because it’s a natural human instinct to want to escape.

Pip: Okay, cool.

Nehemia: And it’s their responsibility to keep you. But most governments consider it a crime to escape from prison.

Pip: Yeah. And I think that in that case, Paul is suffering for what he has been proclaiming about the gospel. And he’s saying, you know, “It wouldn’t be fitting for me to try to run away from this,” because in Paul’s mind, this is a way of following Jesus. As Jesus would say, you know, in the Gospels, you know, “Take up your cross daily and follow me.” I think there’s a sense in which there’s an expectation for Christians of persecution. That won’t always be physical or dramatic persecution by the government or something like that. It could be social ostracization or something like that, but I think there’s a pretty dominant theme in the New Testament that people are not going to like what you say, and you have to be convinced in your mind that it’s worth suffering for what you believe.

So, the Chair of Moses saying fits in with… I guess maybe I’m just trying to emphasize this idea that it doesn’t run aground at that idea. On the other hand, if you think it’s about teaching authority, and if you think of it as sort of a legislative chair where they’re promulgating laws, then it becomes much harder to coordinate with, well, how, you know, Jesus says, “Don’t do this hand-washing thing,” you know, “you’re not beholden to that. Beware the teaching of the Sadducees and the Pharisees.” Well, if it’s a teaching chair, then those texts don’t go together very well!

Nehemia: Something doesn’t fit. Right.

Pip: This is the problem that everyone has with it. But if it’s a judicial chair, well, actually then, there’s no conflict, and it fits actually very nicely in with Matthew 10, where they would expect to have rulings that are hard to follow based on their peculiarity.

Nehemia: I’m curious. So, you have this particular explanation of it, which you lay out in your dissertation, and this isn’t to… has anybody said that before? Or is this your… we say in Hebrew, a chidush, that you came up with something new? Which is usually considered a good thing, right? Is this your chi… No, 100% it is, right? We could call it, like, a novel insight. Is this your novel insight that just nobody noticed before? Or is there a long precedent of exegesis, of interpretation, that you can lean on? And I don’t mean that in a negative way, just to be clear.

Pip: Yeah. Well, I think maybe one of the novel insights along the way that I’ve really appropriated and changed, but would be from Hugo Grotius, who’s an early modern political theorist, but he also writes annotations on the New Testament that are extremely influential in his day. I think maybe the last ones were published posthumously. And he was sort of on the… you know, he’s an idiosyncratic theologian, we might put it that way. But his annotations are very insightful. Currently, they’re only in Latin but hopefully, someday, they’ll be more available.

And one of the things he really brings out is this idea that the context for this is legal. And what you have here is the fact that the law of Moses actually requires authoritative interpreters. He would call them, like, legal experts; lawyers, judges, things like that. And he’d say any body of laws… so, this is his jurisprudence coming in; any body of laws requires interpreters of laws. Doesn’t matter if they’re human or divine, he would just say that there’s no body of laws that could cover absolutely every case, right? They’re all… if you’ve got a statute, then you need case law to fill out, when does this apply? When does this not apply? How far do you go? What is the punishment? All these different questions that get raised in a court of law, and he says, “What Jesus is doing here is, he’s acknowledging that truth, that the law of Moses, as it’s written, doesn’t cover every case. In fact, it needs a tradition of legal authorities to carry it out.”

One of the illustrations of that, I don’t think he brings it up, but one way that I understand what he’s talking about would be like the daughters of Zelophehad, which is recorded in scripture, right? You’ve got these inheritance laws that are already established, and then the daughters of Zelophehad are saying, “Well, there’s no male heir, our father’s inheritance is going to be lost. What do we do?” And Moses makes a ruling, right? He says, “Given the logic of what’s already been revealed, here’s what’s going to happen; it’ll be held in trust when you have male heirs, then it’ll pass on.” And I think what he’s doing is, he’s showing the people of God; yeah, there are going to be cases that come up that are not easy to figure out, but you can use the logic of the law in order to make God-honoring decisions about what to do. And I would say loving decisions, you know. Loving-God and loving-neighbor kind of decisions. So, the Book of Ruth would be another example, right?

Nehemia: How so?

Pip: Moabites are not allowed to enter the assembly of Israel, to the 10th generation, according to Deuteronomy. This is definitely in the period of the judges, right? On the other hand, you’re supposed to love your family, your brothers, and you’ve got this kind of mixed situation where an inheritance is going to get lost. And you know, there’s all this kind of complication about the fields that belong to Naomi, and all the other kind of goings on with the death of these Israelites in a foreign land.

So, which law is more important? The Leverett marriage laws and the redemption of family and poverty laws, which get kind of fused together in an interesting way in Boaz’s rhetoric, or the law about Moabites. Boaz decides it’s the law about loving the brother and making sure the inheritance is maintained. And that actually is more important, and so, he does this sort of calculus; which one am I going to obey? I’m going to do the one that has to do with loving my brother. And it ends up being including the incorporation of a Moabite woman into the genealogy of David, no less. And as Matthew points out, the genealogy that he would trace to Jesus.

So, there’s a sense of, you know, the question of, what do you do in these weird cases where you’re going to have a levirate marriage situation? Where, you know, you’re doing the duty of a brother-in-law, sort of, except he’s kind of a cousin. You’re going to do this duty, but it’s with a Moabite wife, and you’re not supposed to marry Moabite! How do you reconcile…

Nehemia: So, what’s missing for me, and here, this is going to take us beyond the scope of our discussion, because what you probably don’t know is, I’m a Karaite Jew, if you know what that is.

Pip: I looked it up.

Nehemia: Okay, so, it comes down to Deuteronomy 17:8, like 12 or 13, is the key passage which in Jewish sources is that: who has that authority? Is that authority in the hands of human court? Which is the idea in Baba Metziah 59b, where a voice calls out from heaven and says the certain rabbi is right and everybody else is wrong, and the rabbis respond, “No, God’s given it over to us because the Torah is not in heaven.” That’s the Rabbinical, and I would say Pharisee position.

And then there is a Karaite position, which… you don’t need to know what that is, but the bottom line is it says, “No, that always belonged to prophets only.” And so, in Numbers 27…

Pip: Yeah.

Nehemia: … when Moses… and there’s four or five examples, depending on how you count them, where they don’t know what to do. It’s Numbers 9, the second Passover, and Leviticus 24, the man who curses God, and the daughters of Zelophehad, and the man who collects sticks. All five of those. All four, because five goes back to the daughter of Zelophehad. In those cases, Moses goes and he asks God. He doesn’t make it up on his own. And so, the Karaite position would be that that only belongs to a prophet, and God makes the decision, not a human court. The human court is just the conduit. But let’s not get into that…

Pip: No, no, I think…

Nehemia: …because that gets us into the weeds.

Pip: Well, I think that’s a valuable perspective on… I mean, when you get to something like the Book of Ruth and, you know, if you read it as…

Nehemia: Well, so, what’s missing in Ruth is that he doesn’t go and ask any court.

Pip: That’s right. Well, he does gather the elders of his town…

Nehemia: And he tells them what he’s doing, he doesn’t ask them.

Pip: That’s right. And so, I think there is maybe a question that… I don’t know how the Karaite tradition would resolve this idea that, you know, when you’re in a tough spot and you’re not sure… Esther would be another book where it’s like she’s clearly not keeping the food laws when she’s in the harem, because they don’t know she’s a Jew until quite late in the story. So, there’s a sense in which; how do you navigate what’s more important in the law?

Or another example, I think this is more in Grotius’ mind; how do you know exactly how to perform the sacrifice if it’s not written in Leviticus? Well, there has to be a way of, a kind of precedence… there has to be a longstanding tradition alongside the scripture in order to know how to do the scripture. I think that’s all Grotius is getting at. I don’t think he would say it’s equally authoritative or anything like that…

Nehemia: Mm-hmm.

Pip: … but he would say that you actually don’t know how to do some of the things in Torah without a tradition or culture around that.

Nehemia: The classic Pharisee-Rabbinical argument. Well, I mean, I would even call this Pharisee, because there’s a story… I feel like I’m going too far off the wheel here.

Pip: That’s okay. I’m interested.

Nehemia: So, there’s a story where a Gentile comes to Shammai and says, “I want to convert.” And this is important historically. You might say, well, this is much later, but I think it authentically goes back to things that were going on in the 1st century BC, the time of Hillel and Shammai, even though it’s written down much later.

So, the story is the Gentile goes to Shammai, and he says, “I want to become a Jew. Teach me the written Torah but not the oral Torah.” And Shammai was famously very hot-headed, and he was a builder. So, he took his builder staff and started beating the guy and chasing him away. And then the guy comes to Hillel, and Hillel says, “Repeat after me, Aleph, Bet, Gimel.” He says, “Aleph, Bet, Gimel.” He says, “Come back tomorrow for the next lesson.” He says, “Gimel, Bet, Aleph.” And the potential convert says, “I don’t understand. Yesterday you told me it was Aleph, Bet, Gimel.” And Hillel says to him, “If you rely on me to even know what the letters of the Aleph Bet are, you have to rely on me on what the words mean as well.”

And what’s important to me about this is, we have a time period; Hillel and Shammai, let’s call it 30 BCE, give or take, and they have this concept of a written Torah and an oral Torah. And they use that terminology, at least the way it’s recorded. Tora she’be’al pe, Tora she’bekhtav. So, this is an idea that you could say, well, Pharisees are different than rabbis. No, but that fundamental concept was… and Josephus confirms this, right? There is this concept that they have of an oral body of information that goes beyond just what is revealed in the written scriptures.

And so, to me, what’s so interesting about Matthew 23 is, if Jesus is saying that you have to accept the authority of the Pharisees because they sit in the Seat of Moses, and this is the way it was presented to me by these Messianic Jews, and I’m like, “You seem right, based on what I understand of the Greek. But you’re offering a different interpretation. It’s fine.” Then Jesus is acknowledging that oral body of authority and the people who claim that oral body. He’s putting his finger on the scale of who’s right, and the Pharisees are right. They do sit in the Seat of Moses, and you have to obey them, even if they don’t even follow their own rules. Now, you’re taking a little bit differently, which…

Pip: Yeah, I’m saying, if you want to find the oral Torah in the Gospels, it’s probably the tradition of the elders, which Jesus puts his…

Nehemia: Which he’s opposed to in Matthew 15 and Mark 7.

Pip: That’s right.

Nehemia: Which is the problem.

Pip: That’s the problem. If you read the Chair of Moses as being about oral Torah, that’s not right.

Nehemia: Okay.

Pip: So, I think what Grotius has helped me see is that it’s not oral Torah in the sense of the tradition of the elders. It’s an institution of legal decision-making that produces rulings. And the other person who’s really helpful for me that I’d think of as maybe making it so that this isn’t a totally new proposition would be Ernst Lohmeyer, who is in the chapter on the German Christians. He would be on the other side, who’s resisting anti-Judaism. So, he ends up getting killed by the Stasi, you know, after the…

Nehemia: That’s the East German secret police. Am I right about that?

Pip: That’s right.

Nehemia: Oh, wow.

Pip: So, he’s a Christian commentator. We would think of him as a higher critic, but he’s definitely anti-Nazi in his lifetime, and then anti-Stasi.

Nehemia: I want this to be very clear. Not everyone in higher criticism…

Pip: That’s right.

Nehemia: …is an anti-Semite.

Pip: Right.

Nehemia: They’re just trying to find the truth as they understand it.

Pip: Chapter 6. So, yeah, this is my chapter 6. But Ernst Lohmeyer really does a good job, I think, of bringing out some of this idea that I saw in Grotius earlier, and that I’ve ended up landing on; that whatever’s going on, Jesus is in fact positively commending these people in this institution. And what he’s commending is their speech as they sit on that chair. Not everything they say all the time, because some of the things the Pharisees say, you know, Jesus will say, “don’t do that”, or “you don’t need to do that”.

Nehemia: “You’re not bound by that.”

Pip: Beware of them.

Nehemia: Mm-hmm.

Pip: He’s saying, “All whatsoever they say to you is all whatsoever they say to you as judges, in this legal institution.” So, as a judge sitting there, it doesn’t matter what his character is, it doesn’t matter if he’s evil, it doesn’t matter if he’s whatever, if that judge says to you, “This is the sentence in your case,” you have to roll with it. There’s no higher court of appeal. And I think what Jesus is saying, you know, the same Jesus in Matthew 28 says, “All authority in heaven on earth has been given to me,” he’s saying, “Don’t come even running to the heavenly court and say you want an appeal, because I didn’t do that,” right?

Nehemia: Mm-hmm.

Pip: “I could have called down legions of angels to rescue me, but I didn’t. Instead, I suffered for the sake of my people, and you’re going to follow me in that.”

Nehemia: Wow.

Pip: So, there’s no higher court than the court of Moses…

Nehemia: Okay.

Pip: …or the Chair of Moses. “Go with it, and you will be following me.” I think that’s the…

Nehemia: Wow. Dr. Mohr, this has been an amazing conversation. I want to end this with asking you to pray again, but then I want to do a bonus round. And I’ll try not to take more than 10 minutes, if you’re willing to do it, just on the bonus round.

Pip: Sure.

Nehemia: All right. So, thank you guys. If you’re still watching and listening after all this, I think it was worth it. Would you end in a prayer, please?

Pip: Yes, yes. Our Father in heaven, we thank You for the way that You have strengthened us through this interview, that You’ve given us the opportunity to learn from each other. I pray for Your help in going forward as we read Your word, as we look to You to find truth, as we ask for help in interpreting. Would You meet us? Would You guide us? Would You build us up in love for one another, for our neighbors, and ultimately greater love for You? We ask that You would lead us in the truth. I pray for Your guidance in Nehemia’s ministry, that You would continue to help him to engage, and that You would help his audience to continue to grow as they understand Your revealed word. We thank You for all these things. Amen.

Nehemia: Amen.

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