COMMENTARY: Casting stones at Pharisees

c. 1996 Religion News Service (Rabbi Rudin is the national interreligious affairs director of the American Jewish Committee.) (UNDATED) Ellen F. Cooke, the former national treasurer of the Episcopal Church, was recently sentenced in federal court to five years in prison for embezzling $1.5 million in church funds and evading $300,000 in income taxes. Cooke’s […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

(Rabbi Rudin is the national interreligious affairs director of the American Jewish Committee.)

(UNDATED) Ellen F. Cooke, the former national treasurer of the Episcopal Church, was recently sentenced in federal court to five years in prison for embezzling $1.5 million in church funds and evading $300,000 in income taxes.


Cooke’s crimes put the spotlight on Presiding Bishop Edmond Browning, who had hired Cooke and then protected her from criticism when her major-league stealing was first revealed. Browning’s actions caused many Episcopalians to call for his resignation.

Perhaps hoping to silence critics, Browning and six other top Episcopal officials wrote a letter July 3 to U.S. District Court Judge Maryanne Trump Barry, urging appropriate punishment for Cooke, who spent the stolen money on jewelry, limousines, real estate and private-school tuition for her children at a time when the church was forced to cut back on its charities and downsize its staff.

And though the church leaders’ outrage is understandable, their letter to the judge contained a very strange phrase that evoked nearly 2,000 years of anti-Jewish prejudice. The letter also revealed the enduring power of defamatory speech, especially when it is cloaked in the language of religion and morality.

The Episcopal leaders labeled Cooke’s actions”heinous,”and accused her of using the stolen money”to support a lavish Pharisean lifestyle … the antithesis of the most basic teachings and tenets of our faith”.

It was, to say the least, a poor choice of words.

Pharisees, whose history reaches back more than 2,200 years, are believed to be successors of faithful Jews known as Hasidim, who believed in strict interpretation of the law of God _ particularly the laws of tithing and ritual purity _ at a time when Greek culture was threatening the Jewish way of life.

Pharisees revered the Bible, but believed Scripture must be interpreted in conformity with the standard of the rabbis in every generation and must harmonize with advanced ideas. The Pharisees’ main function was teaching and preaching the word of God to all the Jewish people, not just to the priestly class.

But to many Christians, whose only familiarity with the term”Pharisee”is the negative description found in the New Testament,”Pharisee”has come to mean a hypocrite, a fraudulent person filled with self-righteous claims of moral virtue. And tragically, the term has been used for centuries as a collective indictment of both Jews and Judaism, often with bloody results.

Why early Christians felt so negatively about the Pharisees is a mystery to me _ especially since so many Pharisaic doctrines became incorporated into Christian thought. But these are the issues on which interreligious dialogue rests.


In my conversations with two of the signers of the letter to Judge Barry, the church leaders were quick to apologize for the use of”Pharisean,”and said they never intended any malice towards Jews. While I accept their apology, the entire incident leads me to wonder why church leaders still feel the need, conscious or unconscious, to employ such a harsh and vitriolic word. Surely, they could have chosen a host of other expressions to describe Cooke’s extravagant and disgraceful lifestyle.

The use of”Pharisean”is especially offensive because Christian and Jewish scholars have disproved the ancient calumny surrounding this term, which in Hebrew means those who separate themselves from the impurities of the world.

In 1985, the Vatican issued an important teaching document,”Notes On the Correct Way to Present Jews and Judaism,”which devoted much attention to the misuse of the word”Pharisee.” This document should be required reading for all Christians who continue to perpetuate the negative use of the term.”An exclusively negative picture of the Pharisees is likely to be inaccurate and unjust,”the Vatican authors wrote, adding that Jesus'”relations with the Pharisees were not always or wholly polemical.” The document cited many New Testament passages in which Pharisees are depicted sharing a meal with Jesus; in which Pharisees are praised; and in which Pharisees warn Jesus of the risks of traveling about the countryside preaching.

The Vatican guidelines also emphasized that in the Book of Acts, Paul, whose father was a Pharisee,”always considered his membership of the Pharisees as a title of honor.”One of Paul’s teachers was the great Pharisee scholar, Gamaliel of Jerusalem. “Paul also, like Jesus himself, used methods of reading and interpreting Scripture and of teaching his disciples which were common to the Pharisees of their time,”the Vatican authors noted.

Some scholars believe that Jesus, like Paul, was, in fact, a Pharisee. With that in mind, the Vatican guidelines explained Jesus’ criticism of the group as found in the New Testament: He was, they said,”closer to them (the Pharisees) than to other contemporary Jewish groups.””Jesus,”the Vatican authors noted,”shares with the majority of Palestinian Jews of that time, some pharisaic doctrines: The resurrection of the body, forms of piety, like alms-giving, prayer, fasting, and the liturgical practice of addressing God as Father, and the priority of the commandment to love God and our neighbor.” This is not exactly the stuff of hypocrites.

It’s too bad Ellen Cooke didn’t follow the”Pharisean”doctrine of alms-giving, instead of alms-stealing.

And it’s too bad that the Episcopalian leaders didn’t draw upon the rich religious traditions of the authentic Pharisees before they cast stones at them.


MJP END RUDIN

Donate to Support Independent Journalism!

Donate Now!