Book: Beresford Job's Biblical Church - 2

This time, chapter 1 (which corresponds to his first free mp3 lecture here).

Some traditions of corporate religious life are ordained by God, and some are not. Of course, non-ordained, "man-made" traditions are often perfectly harmless, and they don't interfere with obedience to God's mandates. But other times, they are not so harmless.

Job points out that Paul makes a point of praising congregations for "maintaining" and "holding to" (not just the teachings, but also) the traditions he passed on to them. (1 Cor 11:2, 2 Thess 2:15, 3:6) And Jesus scolds people for forsaking God's orders for the sake of "your tradition" or "the tradition of men." (Mt 15:3,6)

In Jesus' day, there was "the tradition of the elders" (aka the oral law, the pharisaic law, or the laws of the fence or hedge). (Job cites this as the source of some of his information on this.) These were extra laws, devised and refined by generations of religious teachers, meant to prevent people of breaking any of the actual laws of Moses. Thus the 613 Mosaic laws were "fenced in by" something like 1500 extra ones.

The legalistic mindset in some of the examples Job cites are hilarious! God's law said: Don't work on the sabbath. (Hence, you should not harvest on the sabbath, for harvesting is work.) The fence-law makers, to protect this from violation, added that one may not walk through a field on the sabbath. Why? Well, you might separate a grain from the stalk, which would reaping on the sabbath. Or your foot-action might separate grain from chaff, which would be threshing on the sabbath. And the breeze of your garment as you pass might blow the chaff off the (one) grain, which would be winnowing on the sabbath. And if a bird comes to eat the newly emancipated grain, you have then been guilty of storing food (putting it aside to be eaten) on the sabbath. (23-4)

While first thought of as man made, extra helps, surprisingly, later generations thought of them as divinely inspired, and so just as binding as the Mosaic Law. The Pharisees taught that Moses was given a written and an oral law - two laws - the latter corresponding to the many fence laws. (25-6)

But what if there's a conflict between the two laws? By Jesus' time, it had been decided that the oral law - the teachings of the rabbis - should have precedence. So while in theory there were two equal laws, in practice, the oral law prevailed. Thus,

"Man-made established practice had ousted God-ordained established practice under the guise of obedience to God's will." (27)

Seems sort of obviously wrong, when it's other people, doesn't it?

Next: How did Jesus react to all of this?