The Messiah in Jewish Thought [11] – Who Is a Heretic?

We are in the final lesson on the Messiah in Jewish thought, studying sections of the Babylonian Talmud between pages 95 and 105. While I've been trying to go through it page by page, I obviously cannot touch every sentence and every idea, since I am concentrating on the messianic theme. In the last lesson we discussed R. Judah, son of R. Simeon, on those who bring suffering upon themselves for the sake of the study of Torah and, as a result, gain a blessing. This brought us to the principle R. Meir raised — measure against measure: that God measures us as we measure others, and that life and relationships run on this principle. "One hand washes the other," "what you give is what you get," "what goes around comes around" — these are modern expressions of the principle R. Meir raised. Yeshua taught it very explicitly in the Sermon on the Mount, as we discussed.

Is the Reward an Exact Measure?

I want to give a finishing touch on R. Judah's statement , and then move to other sections on pages 100b and 101a — a bit of a shotgun approach, skipping the parts that don't bear on the messianic idea. So we are on p. 100a, toward the bottom.

This is an important question, relevant also to the New Testament study we discussed earlier: is the principle of measure against measure an exact one? If you give ten thousand here, will you get ten thousand in heaven? Yeshua said to lay up treasures in heaven, where rust and moth and thieves cannot corrupt or steal them. So R. Judah's question is legitimate: "I'm willing to invest in heaven — but how does it work? If I give ten thousand here, do I get ten thousand back? If I give a loaf of bread, do I get a loaf in return? Is this an exact mathematical formula?" And as part of his question he adds:

This is part of a verse we read earlier, Isaiah chapter 40 verse 12 — "he meted out heaven with the span." God has a measure, a standard, a way of measuring; so the question is, when we speak of measure against measure, what is God's measure? Is it cause and effect, equal payment — something that can be quantified?

Concerning the manna, it says "He opened the doors of heaven"; concerning the flood, "the windows of heaven." A door is greater than a window — so, by this wordplay, God's measure of reward is greater than his measure of punishment. Therefore the rabbis conclude that God's measure of reward exceeds his measure of punishment.

So the rabbis retort that the punishment, too, is great.

That is, in both cases they are given an abnormal receptiveness — the wicked, to receive punishment; the righteous, to receive reward.

How "Measure for Measure" Is Misused

I want to elaborate, because this concept of "measure for measure" has been misused, especially in the modern West by people raising money for religious causes. Some churches and TV evangelists have treated it as if giving to their ministry were like putting a coin in a slot machine: you put in the coin, and God gives you a hundredfold — based on Luke 6, the "measure for measure" passage. They promise, "Give me ten dollars and God will give you a hundred; give me a hundred and you'll get a thousand." They misuse the principle to raise funds.

But the discussion here is really about the proportion of "measure for measure." R. Judah's idea is that it is equal — what you give is what you get, what you sow is what you reap. This is a good biblical principle, in both the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament. In 2 Corinthians chapter 9 verse 6, Paul uses it: "He which soweth sparingly shall reap also sparingly; and he which soweth bountifully shall reap also bountifully."

However, it does not work mechanically. There are other considerations. It is not a simple equation, because much goes into the giving. One factor is whether a person gives cheerfully, from his own desire, because there is a real need — and not in order to get a reward. Pirkei Avot, the Ethics of the Fathers, one of the tractates of the Mishnah, says clearly: do not give in order to get a reward; give for the glory of God. If you give for the glory of God, you will receive a reward from God with eternal consequences; but if you give for other reasons, you will get your reward from those reasons, and lose the main reward that God, the rewarder of all, can give.

This is important. When you give, give from a pure heart, out of love and real need — not out of a desire to manipulate God into giving you more, which happens quite often. You cannot manipulate God, because God looks into the heart. So when you give, when you do good deeds, when you keep the commandments, all of it must be done from the heart. Do not be like some of the Pharisees, who gave to be seen by men. Yeshua teaches in the Sermon on the Mount that when you give, give in secret, so that your right hand does not know what your left is doing. You must give as if you were giving to Yeshua himself — for in the judgment scene of Matthew chapter 25 verse 45, when people ask, "When did we see you hungry, or thirsty, or a stranger, or naked, and ministered to you?", he answers, "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me."

So the principle of measure against measure has many aspects: the sincerity of the heart; the publicity a person receives for his giving (if he gives to be seen by men, he has his reward from men, and none from God); the circumstances under which he gives; and what he gives from. We learn the last from the parable of the widow at the Temple: the widow who gave two pennies gave more, in God's eyes, than the rich who gave from their surplus. So "measure against measure" is not a mathematical measure of how much you gave against what you will receive, but of how much you gave against what you could and ought to have given, and in what state of heart you gave. It is not a bank formula where you know you'll get 9% interest on your deposit; it has to do with the whole picture of your relationship with God. It is even more complicated than I am making it here.

Who Is an Apikoros?

I will continue with the following passage, which returns to the Mishnah. Here we have what is called a petichta, an opening statement, with a quotation from the Mishnah. What is it about? It is about who will have eternal life and who will lose their portion in the world to come. Among those who lose their portion are the heretics — the apikoros in Hebrew. So we come to the question: who is an apikoros?

What uncanonical books does he mean? "The books of the Sadducees," this Tanna taught. Now this is strange, because by the time of R. Akiba there were no more Sadducees functioning as a group. Rashi explains that "the books of the Sadducees" means the books of those who blaspheme or deny the living God. The Soncino commentary, drawing on various Jewish sources, says: "This probably refers to the works of the Judeo-Christians, i.e. the New Testament. There were no Sadducees after the destruction of the Temple, so 'Sadducees' is probably a censor's emendation." Herford, in his book Christianity in Talmud and Midrash (p. 333), emends the reading here not to "Sadducees" but to "Minim," meaning the believers in Yeshua.

So here a Tanna says that whoever reads the sectarian books — the New Testament — loses his portion in the world to come. R. Akiba, by the way, makes a similar statement elsewhere in the Talmud: that anyone who reads the Evangelion (Gospel) — which he pronounces Aven Gilayon, "sinful pages" — loses his portion in the world to come.

What is bothering Abaye? Why should the book of Ben Sira not be read? This opens an interesting discussion of the rabbis' relationship to the apocryphal writings. In the first century BC and first century AD, the apocryphal books were very popular reading among Jews — literature, some of which were written in Greek in the diaspora, considered the bestsellers of the day. So when, after the destruction of the Temple, there came a reaction against the Hellenization of the Jewish community, these books were forbidden as too liberal or too Hellenistic. R. Akiba, a convert to Judaism from the pagan world, took a radical line: whoever reads these books has lost the world to come. Abaye, later in Babylon, asks, "Why?" — and a person wouldn't ask "why" unless he had been reading them. "We have been reading these as part of our corpus of Jewish literature; why are they forbidden?" And he suggests it might be because of the line in Ben Sira about not skinning the fish but roasting it whole — perhaps understood by the rabbis as an injunction against wasting food, since stripping the skin can tear off part of the flesh. But the rabbis reply that the Torah says the same thing:

This is a difficult verse from Deuteronomy: "You shall not destroy the trees thereof," where the reason given is ki ha-adam etz ha-sadeh, "for man is the tree of the field" — so you should not destroy the trees of the field, just as you should not destroy men.

I will conclude this part by noting that here, already in the Talmud, we see the enmity, the beginning of the rift, that started in the days of R. Akiba between the writings of the early Church and the rest of the Jewish community: the heretic, the apikoros, is anyone who reads the writings of the believers, the sectarians. That is how the nineteenth-century commentators, including Herford (a Christian), interpreted it. The rift came because the Messianic Jews did not join R. Akiba in the Bar Kochba rebellion, and R. Akiba developed a harsh attitude toward them for rejecting his false messiah, Bar Kochba.

The Torah as a Harp

The Talmud then discusses the value of sons over daughters, which we will skip, and moves to another passage on who is an apikoros, on page 101a:

Who is the heretic? One who reads the Song of Songs secularly, as a common song, or recites a verse frivolously at a banquet, making light of Scripture — that is heresy, taking the Scriptures lightly.

This is an interesting discussion, because the rabbis of R. Akiba's generation, at Yavne (Jamnia), themselves debated whether the Song of Songs should be in the Bible at all. Many thought it should not, because it was secular love poetry. There was a fight to keep it in the Scriptures, and R. Akiba was one of those who fought for it. It is said that he went up to the roof of his house and stayed there until he had explained every verse of the Song of Songs, and when he came down he declared it holier than any other book in the Bible. By this, according to the Jewish sources, R. Akiba was able to keep the Song of Songs in the canon. What he did was to allegorize it: instead of a man and a woman and the love between them, he made the man God and the woman Israel — the Song of Songs as the story of God's relationship with Israel. (Allegorizing was a skill from Akiba's pagan past; he was astute in it, like the Greeks of his day.) All these discussions were theoretical, but through them the rabbis tried to explain to themselves why these books belong in the canon. So R. Akiba was instrumental in keeping the Song of Songs in it.

Now the rabbis after R. Akiba, the Amoraim, discuss what it means to say that using Scripture secularly makes one a heretic. They bring a striking parable in which the Torah stands before God as a person — anthropomorphized, like a human being — and laments: "Sovereign of the Universe! Thy children have made me a harp upon which they frivolously play" — they use me as entertainment at their parties. God replies, "My daughter, when they are eating and drinking, what should they do?" (The Greek banquet, on which our Passover Seder is modeled, had a set format: courses, then questions and answers, witty riddles, an entertainment of wisdom. We see this already in the Philistine period — at the feast Delilah made, Samson set the Philistines a riddle to answer. Poetry and riddling were the Greco-Roman thing to do at dinner; it was before there was television.) So God asks the Torah, "What would you have my children occupy themselves with when they eat and drink?" And the Torah answers: "If they have Scriptural knowledge, let them occupy themselves with the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings" — the Tanakh: Torah, Nevi'im, Ketuvim — "and if they are students of the Mishnah, with Mishnah, halachot, and haggadot; and if of the Talmud, with the laws of Passover, Pentecost, and Tabernacles."

This allegory of God and the Torah in conversation was certainly written after the Mishnah, probably in the late Amoraic period. Then they bring R. Simeon b. Hanina's statement: that whenever you can bring a word of Scripture in its right place and context, in an honorable setting, you have done good to the world — "as it is written, a word spoken in season, how good is it." So again we see the discussion of who is the heretic: the one who reads the New Testament, and the one who misuses and misquotes the word of God in the wrong places and contexts.

Healing, Spittle, and the Name of God

The Talmud continues on the same question of who is an apikoros:

("Expectorates," in plain English, means spits.) Who is a heretic? One who whispers over a wound for healing and at the same time spits — uttering the Name of God while spitting, using the spittle as a means of healing. The Soncino footnote is interesting: in uttering such a charm one generally spat, the charm itself usually being a biblical verse containing the Name of God; some scholars hold that the expectoration was the essential part of the charm.

This becomes more interesting when we consider the healing of the blind man in John chapter 9. The disciples ask Yeshua who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind; and Yeshua answers, "Neither… but that the works of God should be made manifest in him." Then:

At first glance, comparing this to R. Johanan's statement, it sounds like exactly what Yeshua did — he spat and applied mud. But note: he did not whisper any incantation over the man, did not utter a verse with the spittle; he simply spat, made clay, and sent him to wash. The discussion that follows makes it more interesting still:

The story is that R. Isaac b. Joseph somehow got caught in a cedar tree and consulted the demons — it happened on the Sabbath — and the cedar split and released him. So there are two opinions: an older one, that you may not use demons in healing at all; and another, that you may, on the strength of this story, since a miracle occurred. The whole discussion arises from the permission the rabbis gave to oil and massage an invalid on the Sabbath, provided it is not done in the ordinary weekday way. R. Johanan's suggestion in the end is that you put the oil on while massaging — not oil first and then massage, but together — and that makes it permissible. So one may massage and heal with oil on the Sabbath, and comfort the sick.

Of course, these rabbis were not the rabbis of Yeshua's day; they lived a couple of centuries later or more. In any case, what Yeshua did was perfectly permissible. Why? He did not use the Name of God; he made no incantation; he simply put mud and spittle on the man's eyes and told him to go and wash in the pool of Siloam. There was no incantation, so one cannot accuse Yeshua of using charms for healing — of pronouncing the Name of God and spitting and applying things to the eye — as these rabbis were discussing.

Closing the Series

And here our journey through the messianic section of Sanhedrin comes to rest. Across these lessons we have watched the rabbis wrestle with the same great questions the New Testament wrestles with — when the Messiah will come and how, what his name will be, why the world was made, how the righteous suffer and are rewarded, and what redemption finally costs. They argued, they disagreed, they reached for the same Scriptures, and again and again their words come startlingly close to the Gospel — even the passages written to oppose it. The Talmud speaks directly of Yeshua too — of healing done in his name, and the rabbis who both feared and could not deny it — and that material is gathered in our study Yeshua in the Talmud. What we have seen throughout is a single, deeply Jewish conversation about the hope of Israel: a hope that, we are convinced, has a name.