Christians
have an interesting relationship with their heroes. There are many great men of
history that many Christians look up to, but which they are also not slow to
criticize when discussing them honestly. A good example of this is John Wesley
who is seen as an incredible church leader, but with a disastrous home life.
John Calvin is often criticized for his overly strict application of Old
Testament law to life in Geneva. Menno Simons is lauded for his stalwart effort
to refine the Anabaptist churches of Holland and Germany, but he is also
critiqued by going way too far with banning and shunning. Whatever the Church history great
you bring up, there will be some Christian with a genuine and not slanderous
critique, who makes a valid point. We serve the perfect Lord Jesus Christ and know that no
other man is the perfect Lord Jesus Christ.
This
critiquing of our heroes is a thoroughly biblical act. David the man after
God’s own heart, who made Israel greater than it had ever been was not beyond
criticism. Nathan, or whichever prophet which it was that wrote down David's history, went into great detail about his faults. Moses discusses his own
faults in the Books of Moses. Judges is brutally honest about Israel’s best men
of the time. As are many other books. And the New Testament does not shy away
from critiquing the Apostles, or many other church leaders in the gospels, Acts
and in the letters. There is a strong Christian tradition to do so.
But some
people really struggle when you have a take that they do not like on a
particular Bible character or hero. I recently wrote a series of articles on whether or not Esther was a heroine in which I examined whether or not
the traditional view is the correct one. Something I found in my research is that wrestling
with Esther in this way is almost as ancient as the book itself. Please read
the whole series before you make up your mind. But by the
time we get to Jesus’ day we see that the Jewish nation has gone seriously off
track because of the Judaizing error, and this causes all sorts of issues for Jesus, his Apostles and early
Christianity. This trajectory began somewhere and I believe a legitimate case
can be made for the seeds of this Judaizing error tracing back to the
post-exilic period.
A good
example of this is what happened in the days of Ezra. Now, I am not going to make
the case in this article that Ezra had gone as far off track as some other bible
characters, not at all. I simply see in him as another example of the flawed but
well intentioned leaders of Israel. But we do see indications of this Judaizing
error taking root in his time. What I mean by Judaizing error is an incorrect
understanding of the relationship between Jewish ethnicity and being part of
the people of God. In Paul’s day this took on one form, we see there that false
teachers were trying to pressure Christian converts to become full fledged Jews
and submit to the law as well as Christ. But it existed prior to this in the
form of a highly exclusive and antagonistic attitude among Jews towards people of other nations.
Look what
happens in Ezra 4 as the Jewish returned exiles are seeking to build the temple of God,
“1
Now when the adversaries of Judah and Benjamin heard that the returned exiles
were building a temple to the Lord, the God of Israel, 2 they approached
Zerubbabel and the heads of fathers' houses and said to them, “Let us build
with you, for we worship your God as you do, and we have been sacrificing to
him ever since the days of Esarhaddon king of Assyria who brought us here.” 3
But Zerubbabel, Jeshua, and the rest of the heads of fathers' houses in Israel
said to them, “You have nothing to do with us in building a house to our God;
but we alone will build to the Lord, the God of Israel, as King Cyrus the king
of Persia has commanded us.”
4
Then the people of the land discouraged the people of Judah and made them
afraid to build 5 and bribed counselors against them to frustrate their
purpose, all the days of Cyrus king of Persia, even until the reign of Darius
king of Persia.
6
And in the reign of Ahasuerus, in the beginning of his reign, they wrote an
accusation against the inhabitants of Judah and Jerusalem” (Ezra 4:1-6).
Here were the
people of Judah seeking to re-establish themselves when the God-fearing
inhabitants of the land came up to them and offered to help. These inhabitants
were the descendants of foreign peoples who were resettled in the land of
Israel by Osnapper,
“8
Rehum the commander and Shimshai the scribe wrote a letter against Jerusalem to
Artaxerxes the king as follows: 9 Rehum the commander, Shimshai the scribe, and
the rest of their associates, the judges, the governors, the officials, the
Persians, the men of Erech, the Babylonians, the men of Susa, that is, the
Elamites, 10 and the rest of the nations whom the great and noble Osnappar
deported and settled in the cities of Samaria and in the rest of the province
Beyond the River” (Ezra 4:8-10).
The fact that
these people were settled in the land of Samaria and other areas in this
region, indicates that these are the ancestors of the Samaritans, who are a
mixed people still in existence in Jesus day, and famously so. Here we see the
beginning of the fracture between this mixed people, the Samaritans, and the people of Judah,
who saw themselves as having a unique claim to the land and covenant because of their genealogy.
Even though
this passage begins by referring to these people as the “adversaries of Judah
and Benjamin” this is best read as a retrospective perspective. These people
came to the people of Judah in good faith and were flat out rejected and later became enemies. We see
here the beginnings of an overly ethnocentric approach to the religion of Moses
that is not biblical. We don’t want to overstate our case though, this probably
came about through good intentions. The men of Judah were seeking to recorrect the
errors that led them into exile, but they over-corrected. We know they over-corrected because they were actually commanded to allow the inclusion of
Gentiles into their fledging nation.
We read in
Ezekiel 47 that God says this to the exiles,
“21
So you shall divide this land among you according to the tribes of Israel. 22
You shall allot it as an inheritance for yourselves and for the sojourners who
reside among you and have had children among you. They shall be to you as
native-born children of Israel. With you they shall be allotted an inheritance
among the tribes of Israel. 23 In whatever tribe the sojourner resides, there
you shall assign him his inheritance, declares the Lord God” (Ez. 47:21-23).
Ezekiel was a
contemporary of Jeremiah, though he came in to his ministry towards the end of
Jeremiah’s time. We know this because both Jeremiah and Ezekiel lived to see
the destruction of Jerusalem. Both prophesied and saw it happen, but Ezekiel’s
ministry seems to go much further into the time of exile than Jeremiah’s.
Ezekiel can be seen as a book that is dedicated to helping the people of Israel
understand what is happening to them with their losing wars, it should be seen
as a vindication of Jeremiah’s message, and many other prophets as well, and it
is designed to help them understand both how to live in exile, but also what to
do when they return from exile. And when they return from exile they were
supposed to include the God-fearing foreigners in their midst among the
accounting of the people.
This was not
a new policy for Israel either. We read in Exodus 12 that this is exactly what
happened when the people came out of Egypt, they included many Gentiles in
their people, “37 And the people of Israel journeyed from Rameses to Succoth,
about six hundred thousand men on foot, besides women and children. 38 A mixed
multitude also went up with them, and very much livestock, both flocks and
herds” (Ex. 12:37-38). From its very inception Israel included people from the
nations. Abram was from Ur of the Chaldees, Babylon. Joseph had an Egyptian
wife and her children are blessed greatly in Israel. There is Rahab, Ruth, Obed
Edom and many more. It was always God’s policy that Israel was meant to be a vehicle of blessing
for the nations, not simply a state for one ethnic group.
Hence, I
think it is legitimate to say that Ezra over-corrected and excluded the
Gentiles from inclusion when he should not have. And I am not the only one who
asserts this, one commentator notes,
“THE
fourth chapter of the Book of Ezra introduces the vexed question of the limits
of comprehension in religion by affording a concrete illustration of it in a
very acute form. Communities, like individual organisms, can only live by means
of a certain adjustment to their environment, in the settlement of which there
necessarily arises a serious struggle to determine what shall be absorbed and
what rejected, how far it is desirable to admit alien bodies and to what extent
it is necessary to exclude them. The difficulty thus occasioned appeared in the
company of returned exiles soon after they had begun to rebuild the temple at
Jerusalem. It was the seed of many troubles. The anxieties and disappointments
which overshadowed the subsequent history of nearly all of them sprang from
this one source. Here we are brought to a very distinguishing characteristic of
the Persian period. The idea of Jewish exclusiveness which has been so singular
a feature in the whole course of Judaism right down to our own day was now in
its birth-throes. Like a young Hercules, it had to fight for its life in its
very cradle. It first appeared in the anxious compilation of genealogical
registers and the careful sifting of the qualifications of the pilgrims before
they left Babylon. In the events which followed the settlement at Jerusalem it
came forward with determined insistence on its rights, in opposition to a very
tempting offer which would have been fatal to its very existence…
…
In view of these considerations
we cannot but read the account of the absolute rejection of the offer by
Zerubbabel, Jeshua, and the rest of the twelve leaders with a sense of painful
disappointment. The less pleasing side of religious intensity here presents
itself. Zeal seems to be passing into fanaticism. A selfish element mars the
picture of whole-hearted devotion which was so delightfully portrayed in the
history of the returned exiles up to this time. The leaders are cautious enough
to couch their answer in terms that seem to hint at their inability to comply
with the friendly request of their neighbours, however much they may wish to do
so, because of the limitation imposed upon them in the edict of Cyrus which
confined the command to build the temple at Jerusalem to the Jews. But it is
evident that the secret of the refusal is in the mind and will of the Jews
themselves. They absolutely decline any co-operation with the colonists. There
is a sting in the carefully chosen language with which they define their work;
they call it building a house "unto our God." Thus they not only
accept the polite phrase "Your God" employed by the colonists in
addressing them; but by markedly accentuating its limitation they disallow any
right of the colonists to claim the same divinity.”[1]
Did you see
that? The Expositors Bible Commentary says that this became a source of many of
the troubles of the new fledging Israel. These people, who became the
Samaritans, did become an issue for the Jewish people in the post-exile period.
But the conflict began with this rejection. What Ezra should have done was seek
to determine the faith of these people, make sure they were following the law,
and then he should have followed what Ezekiel said they were to do. But instead
the Judean leadership took an ethnocentric approach to their faith which exacerbated conflict over time.
I don’t want
to sound too critical of Ezra though, because good leaders make mistakes. And he
was in a high pressure situation, so the stakes were high. He obviously cared
about his people and their protection and also their purity before God. But
this trajectory grew throughout the centuries and became one of the core
sources of many of Israel’s woes right up until the destruction of the temple,
and perhaps beyond.
This is what
the Judaizer error does. It makes an incorrect application of who God’s people
are, based more on ethnicity than on faith, and it bears destructive fruit.
It is also
clear that Jesus critiqued the Jews attitudes towards the
Samaritans as well. In fact he has the definitive critique. He uses the example
of a hypothetical “Good Samaritan” to challenge the Jews of his day about the
proper way of loving our neighbour (Luke 10:25-37). And he deliberately places
himself in a situation to both minister to and through a Samaritan woman in
John 4. What I mean by ministering through her is that she goes and tells many
Samaritans about this amazing man she encountered and then brings them back to him to receive salvation. And of
course he tells the Apostles in the Lukan Great Commision in Acts that the gospel is to be proclaimed in Samaria as a priority, after extending their ministry outside of Judah, “8 But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon
you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria,
and to the end of the earth” (Acts 1:8). Jesus was not anti-Samaritan like his people were.
I think it is
entirely valid to see this New Testament commentary on the place of the
Samaritans as a critique not just on how Jews viewed Samaritans in Jesus’ day,
but on how this conflict between these two people claiming descent from Abraham
and faith in the same God began. Jesus was critiquing the Judaizing error before
Paul even understood the gospel. But the Old Testament was critiquing it even
earlier, because it is the living word of God which Jesus fulfills and shows us
how to understand and apply properly.
An incorrect
ethnocentric application of the gospel or faith in God is destructive. It led
to a centuries long conflict between the Jewish people and the Samaritans, and
it is today leading to a now century or so long conflict between the Jewish
people and Palestinians. In fact, some of the similarities are actually
remarkable between these two situations.
As Christians
we need to resist any genetically based claims to the promises of God. This
Judaizer error is persistent and comes about in many forms. But consistently
the Bible rejects it and shows the damage that it causes. That Jesus made a
point of affirming the Samaritans, a people the Jewish nation almost
universally looked down upon, should give us a powerful insight into how God
sees this error and why we should reject it.
[1]
Expositors Bible Commentary.
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