The sixteenth passage of the Sefer Yeshua is based on Luke18:9-14, which is the sole source of this pericope. It could have come from the Q-gospel, but that would mean that the author of Matthew chose not to use it for some reason. The Jesus Seminar assigned it the colour pink, which means that the scholars felt, with some reservations, that Yeshua probably said something like this (the only colour higher was red, which meant that they concluded it would undoubtedly have been a saying of Yeshua).
16. 1There were some who believed themselves to be virtuous in the sight of God, yet despised others. 2So Yeshua told them this parable, saying, ‘Two men went up into the Temple to pray, one a Torah scholar and the other a tax collector. 3The Torah scholar stood and prayed like this in his heart and said, “O God, I thank you that I’m not like other people – thieving, unjust, adulterous, or even like this tax collector. 4I fast twice a week, and I give tithes of everything I get.”
5But the tax collector stood at a distance, and wouldn’t even lift his eyes to heaven, but beat his chest, saying, “O God, have mercy on me, a sinner!” 6I tell you, this man rather than the other, went home acquitted before God.’
Preliminary examination
Usually, I would need to contrast a passage’s use in the gospels with how it is given a context in the Sefer Yeshua. However, in this instance, the parable is introduced with a context which is appropriate to the intent of the parable.
Luke opens the passage with, ‘He also told this parable to those who believed themselves to be righteous, while regarding others with contempt.’ This is its most appropriate interpretation and usage.
However, until modern times, over the centuries the Church came to use it as a contrast between Judaism and Christianity – that we Jews put our faith in our ability to make ourselves right with God solely through following Torah by rote, while Christians are justified before God through faith in ‘Christ’ (this was how the passage was interpreted by my own Religious Studies teachers at school in the 1970s). Luke’s specification that the arrogant man was a Pharisee compounds this problem.
I suspect that the decision to make the arrogant man a Pharisee was Luke’s deliberate choice; it is possible that the original saying merely stated that this man was a scribe (that is, a Torah scholar). Describing him only as a Torah-scholar, and not a Pharisee, shifts the emphasis away from a contrast between Judaism and Christianity, and back to someone whose knowledge of his religion gives him a false sense of self-righteousness.
The important point in this parable is the contrast between the religious person, who is arrogant and condescending towards others, and the one who realises his own faults before God – that is the intended focus of the parable.
This passage opens a selection of Yeshua’s sayings in the Sefer Yeshua (SY 16-19) which were all intended to make arrogant, self-possessed religious people examine themselves more closely. Religious haughtiness is itself a sin – when a prideful person shows no humility before God. There are plenty of such people in modern times among all religions, and such people give religion and God a bad name.
The First Protagonist: the Pharisee / Torah scholar
In Luke, the main characters in the parable are a Pharisee and a tax-collector. In the gospels, the Pharisees represent the wicked and persistent enemies of ‘Christ’. Write ‘Pharisee’, and you instantly have the evil antagonist for your story, the bogeyman. ‘Pharisee’ represents the bad Jewish person who persecutes the son of God, and plots for his death.
The historical reality was likely nothing like that at all. The Pharisees would not have plotted for his death; with regard to dealing with messianic claimants, who were quite common in those days, the Pharisees generally took a ‘wait and see’ attitude. They may have questioned people to elicit information upon which to base their opinions of this or that claimant, but in general, they would not have plotted to kill such a messianic claimant.
In my personal opinion, if you read about Pharisees plotting to kill Jesus, it is highly probable that instead, the story originally involved Zealots plotting to kill Yeshua. The Zealots are conspicuously absent from the gospels, and the gospel-writers, probably not wanting to include any anti-Roman characters or plot-points in their story, clumsily replaced all the Zealots with Pharisees.
I therefore do not think that the original parable would have said ‘Pharisee’. The parable merely needs a self-righteous religious character who is full of himself, and so I think that the original parable just had ‘scribe’, which was a Torah scholar.
In that time, most Jewish sects had their own scribes – they were not exclusive to the Pharisees. Scribes were not merely people who wrote Torah scrolls and letters; they were people who were consulted for their learned opinions on matters of Torah. Each sect would have their own take on matters which were not clear in Torah. During James’s time as leader of our community, we would have had scribes of our own (one of our own scribes would have written the original Q-gospel, for example). So reclassifying him as a Torah-scholar doesn’t demonise any particular Jewish sect.
This particular scribe – this Torah-scholar – is an exceptionally arrogant one who seems to know everything and is assured of his own righteousness. He does everything his religion requires him to do. However, as with all fundamentalists, they look only at the external practice of religion, and completely ignore what God requires of the heart. They think themselves honourable, as if God only exists to congratulate them. They don’t really need God; God is only there to give an automatic stamp of approval to whatever they do.
The religious person who is ungracious towards others, should not automatically expect God to be gracious towards them. Their very arrogance cuts them off from God; they despise those who do not equal them in righteousness. They cut themselves off from the love of God with the coldness of their heart, and so, being thus disconnected from the love of God, they are unable to genuinely love anyone else.
The Second Protagonist: The Tax-Collector
The Torah-scholar’s prayer describes what he thought of tax-collectors in general – that they were ‘thieving, unjust, adulterous’. This may be an apt description of Jewish society’s general opinion towards tax-collectors. If he actually knew the tax-collector personally, it may even have been a criticism of the individual tax-collector himself.
The tax-collectors mentioned in the gospels were not just anyone who collected taxes; these were people who collected extra taxes on goods taken between cities, which were being levied by the Roman authorities.
The system of taxation was very complicated in Roman times. There were individuals who were sub-contracted by the Romans to collect taxes on their behalf. These were not just people who happened to get a job as a tax-collector; these were people who had placed bids to the Roman occupying government for permission to ‘farm’ taxes; they were Jews who willingly put themselves forward to oppress their own people on behalf of an occupying power.
The bidders would have paid this bid up front, so as well as collecting the taxes they were being hired to collect, tax-collectors also had to recoup the cost of the winning bid they had paid to the Romans, by adding hefty surcharges on top of the taxes. Most people in the Roman Empire considered these people despicable, and that there was no such thing as an honest and fair tax-collector (see the lengthy article on tax-collectors in the Commentary on Luke by Darrell Bock, pages 310-312).
During that time period, tax-collectors were some of the most hated puppets of the Roman Occupation. They collected extra and burdensome taxes on behalf of their Roman overlords, and were generally viewed as collaborators. If Yeshua had been a Zealot, as some scholars maintain, then the Jesus of the gospels would be someone who went round killing tax-collectors. Instead, the real Yeshua did something completely unexpected – with his message of repentance, rather than with the dagger, he sought to bring them back into society and to God. Mt 10:3 even mentions that one of Yeshua’s apostles, Matthew, was formerly a tax-collector.
The tax-collector in the parable has either heard Yeshua’s teaching, or the teaching of some other religious teacher who has touched the tax-collector’s conscience. Some tax-collectors might even have been made to think that they were being shunned by God; after all, they were working against their own people – God’s people – and some religious teachers may have been condemning them all out of hand. The people around them considered them utterly repugnant, and gave them no way back to God.
The gospels seem to associate tax-collectors with gluttons and drunkards (eg Mt 11:19), and in the same breath as a group, Yeshua mentions them with prostitutes (Mt 21:31-32) or with sinners in general (Mt 9:10-11). It may be that their collaboration with the Romans made them such hated social pariahs, condemned by most religious people, that they might have lost all hope in life, and so out of despair, they might have sought solace in alcohol and loose women.
Yeshua’s message of forgiveness reached out to them, and showed them a way back to God through repentance. In so doing, he showed them a way to be accepted back into their own people.
The stance of the two men is also to be noted. They are both in the Temple; the Pharisee is standing confidently, one supposes, by himself – he is proud and self-assured. The tax-collector on the other hand stands a way off, feeling unworthy to come any closer to the presence of God; he doesn’t even raise his eyes heavenward, which would have been the usual practice when praying in the Temple. These contrasting stances are similar to the circumstances of the person who is invited to a banquet, and in their pride they take the seat next to the host, only to be humiliated and told that he should take a lower seat. The humble person who takes the lower seat on entering is complimented by being invited to go higher.
The Torah-scholar’s prayer
We often concentrate on the words condemning the tax-collector, but the closing words of his prayer are just as telling. Torah requires fasting once a year, at Yom ha-Kippurim, but this man fasts twice a week. Torah only requires tithes of what you produce or of the money you earn, but he even gives tithes of everything he acquires and buys as well. In this way, he is trying to show God that he is ultra-righteous, because he performs overly more ritual than is required. Even in saying this, he is blind to what God truly requires of him in Torah.
In the words that the Torah-scholar prays in his heart, we must assume that this person at least knows of the tax-collector and recognises him as he passes by him, otherwise he wouldn’t be able to show any kind of condescension towards him for being a tax-collector – how would he know he was a tax-collector, unless he knew him?
We can also assume that the two men are ostensibly in the Temple to ask forgiveness of their sins, or they have reached a point in the Temple-service where they are supposed to examine themselves and ask God for forgiveness. However, the Torah-scholar does nothing of the sort. Rather than ask for forgiveness, he assumes he is already perfectly sinless, and so out of his boundless self-pride, thanks God for his righteousness. Instead of being thankful for God’s deeds in his life, he is conceitedly thankful for his own uprightness.
The Book of Proverbs has a lot to say about the spiritual attitude to pride and humility. Here is a selection:
‘A proud heart and haughty eyes – the lamp of the wicked – are sin itself.’ (Prov 21:4)
‘When pride comes, then comes disgrace, but wisdom is with the humble.’ (Prov 11:2)
‘It is better to be of a lowly spirit among the poor, than to divide the spoils with the proud.’ (Prov 16:19)
What compounds the sin of the arrogant religious person is their belief that they are perfectly in the right, and everyone else is wrong (cf Job 35:12, Ps 10:4, 59:12); in the Israelite faith, pride was almost synonymous with wickedness (Job 40:12). In the end, the prideful will be condemned by God (Ps 94:2), because pride and arrogance as a way of life is something that God frowns upon (Prov 8:13).
As you can see, the ethics of the original Yahwist Israelite faith considered prideful, arrogant religious people to be far from God. Such people ensure that they do all the easy things (the customs and practices of their religion), but strain to fulfil the more demanding requirements of their faith, which are having compassion for others, trying to understand the difficulties of others, and helping the vulnerable in society, rather than looking down on those whom their religion disapproves of.
Yeshua’s ethics
It is very obvious that Yeshua had a very clear system of ethics, which did not favour the self-righteous and pompous religious person. These values came from the days of the Israelite faith – they were not new inventions of ‘Christ’. For someone who supposedly couldn’t read, Yeshua showed a remarkable knowledge of these values!
Throughout the Hebrew Bible, and especially in the writings of the Prophets, it is clear that external observance is utterly pointless without a change to one’s heart – that is, to one’s outlook, mindset and approach to others. So how did Yeshua learn of all this, if he couldn’t read? How could he teach all this, if all he knew were the ways of the majority around him?
The first thing to point out, is that he was a prophet, so his teachings came from God. The second thing is that, rather than listening to the opinions of the majority and following them, he must have been mentored and influenced by wise religious teachers, such as Yochanan the Immerser (John the Baptist), and also, possibly his brother / cousin James.
According to ancient tradition (Eusebius quoting the Jewish-Christian Hegesippus), James was a Nazirite who was brought up in and around the Temple. He would have received a reasonably good education, and so probably spoke good Hebrew and Greek as well as his native Aramaic. He most likely learned treasured insights from his own teachers, the priests, who would still have held onto the original Yahwist beliefs and values, passed on through the centuries. And through James’s education, it is possible that Yeshua could have learned some valuable things too; it is not a foregone conclusion that Yeshua would only have believed and taught exactly what everyone else believed.
The prayer of the Tax-Collector
In contrast to the condescending prayer of the Torah-scholar, the tax-collector’s prayer shows humility, and suggests a willingness to do better – possibly to make something more of his life than thievery and adultery, and being disloyal to his country by collaborating with their occupiers.
As for the sins specifically associated with tax-collecting, we can refer to the confession of Zacchaeus in Lk 19:8. This tax-collector might also have been fleecing the poor, or defrauding tax-payers. It was generally thought that tax-collectors were corrupt, and regularly took more in tax than they were supposed to.
The man beats his chest, a sign of shame and humility, which was also a common Middle-Eastern way of unreservedly expressing guilt in front of a judge, and asking for mercy and clemency. This is the same mercy that the tax-collector asks of God; he knows what he deserves for what he has done with his life, and what he has been doing to his fellow Jews, and is ready to turn his life around. He therefore asks God to show mercy in his sentence. He is so humble that he doesn’t deny any of his sins (we never learn what they are, we can only presume); he is ready to accept whatever sentence God hands down to him – only asking that God show him mercy.
The reversal of expectations
One common oratory style that Yeshua employed, was to emphasise the reverse of what people expected. For example, in the parable of the Good Samaritan, it is the Samaritan, and not the priest or Levite, who shows kindness to the unconscious victim of robbers. Samaritans were generally mistrusted by Jews, and vice versa, and so the parable is meant to be a reversal of people’s expectations – if you substitute ‘Samaritan’ with the name of a religious group you don’t have a high opinion of, and the priest and Levite with one of your own people you idolise, then you get the true impact of the parable. So, for example, if you are a Protestant who hates Catholics, replace ‘Samaritan’ with ‘Catholic’, and the Levite with a Protestant pastor, and the parable will have the original shock-value that Yeshua intended to give his listeners back then.
Similarly in this parable, you would expect the religious person to be the exemplar of righteousness, and so be forgiven by God, and you would expect a traitor to his people, someone who took solace in loose living, to be condemned by God. Instead, as per Yeshua’s style, it is the sinner who is forgiven, while the religious person stands condemned.
Who is fit for the Kingdom? Our expectation is that the religious person is to be rewarded with the Kingdom of God because of his meticulous observance of tithing and fasting, and that the thieving sinner will not enter God’s Kingdom. However, the religious person has missed the point; external observances are not that important to God.
If a person today thinks that going to church every Sunday, and reading the Bible every day, will set them in a right relationship with God, then they are no better than the Torah-scholar (or the Pharisee in Luke’s gospel). Waving a bible around in your hand doesn’t prove how righteous you are; it only proves how much you love your religiousness to be seen by others, to get their approval. Such a bible is merely useless paper, if the one waving it doesn’t act on its contents, and become a kinder and more compassionate person. You show your righteousness in the quality of how you treat those around you.
The equivalent Jewish meaning of ‘to be justified’
There is a prayer recorded in the Qumran literature which says, “My own righteousness comes from God… and by the fountain of God’s righteousness my sins will be expiated; from the fountain of God’s righteousness comes my acquittal / justification” (1QS 11:2, 3, 5). Many scholars claim that the idea of justification came from Paul, but it existed in Judaism too – only with a different meaning.
Like a lot of Jewish terms, words do not have the same meaning for Jews that they have for Christians. Words like salvation, redemption and atonement mean one thing to Christians, but they mean something totally different to Jews.
Salvation to a Christian means, ‘having one’s sins permanently cancelled by the death of Christ, so that you are guaranteed to go to heaven’, whereas in Judaism it means, ‘to be rescued by God from an impossible situation, such as physical, psychological or spiritual danger’.
Similarly. ‘atonement’ to a Christian means, ‘having the penalty for one’s sins paid with Christ’s blood, so that you don’t go to hell,’ but in biblical Yahwism it means, ‘to have the blemish and injury of one’s sins completely removed, by being cleansed and purified by the fire of God’s Glory, so that one’s soul is healed and made whole again’ (see Lev 16:30 – “For on this day expiation shall be made for you, to cleanse you; from all your sins you shall be clean before YHVH”). ‘Atonement’ has become so loaded in popular culture with its Paullist Christian meaning, that in Jewish circles, the word ‘expiation’ is preferred.
We have a similar situation with the term, ‘to be justified by God’. To Christians, it means, ‘the act by which God moves a person from the state of sin to the state of grace.’ This comes from Paul’s use of the term (eg Rom 3:20, 24).
Jewish people nowadays would not use this term at all. This is because the imagery being alluded to is that of being cleared or acquitted in a trial – that is, to have all your sins completely wiped clean, as if you had never sinned.
In biblical Hebrew, a different idiom is used. When it says, ‘the wicked person shall die’ (eg Ezek 3:18), it doesn’t mean that a sinful person is put to death, it means ‘the wicked person will be condemned and found guilty of their sin’. Similarly, when the Bible says, ‘the righteous person shall live’ (eg Ezek 3:21), it means, ‘the righteous person will be found innocent and be acquitted of all charges’.
In Yahwist theology, the act of repentance brings forgiveness of one’s sins, and by then coming before the Glory of God in prayer, one’s soul is cleansed and restored by the fire of God’s Glory (God’s Divine Radiance). This is the original Yahwist understanding of ‘being acquitted before God’ – to have one’s soul restored to its original clean state by God, as if one had never sinned.
The fitting and proper reaction to God wiping clean our slate, should be the same as that of someone who has had an enormous debt paid off by a kind benefactor, a debt they otherwise could never have hoped to pay off in their lifetime. In contrast, an arrogant religious person reacts to God cleansing them of their sin, in the same way as such a person might react to a poor and lowly person who had just polished their shoes at a railway station.
In the parable, we expect the religious person to be acquitted, and the sinful person to be condemned, but that’s not what happens. The religious person has not repented of the sin of prideful arrogance – a sin he commits in the very prayer he prays! In contrast, the tax-collector’s willingness to take whatever sentence God may hand down to him, if only God be merciful, means that he has made his prayer of repentance, and God has forgiven him – the sorrow he shows for his past has saved him from the penalty he would otherwise have merited.
Concluding thoughts
Only when one is ready and willing to see this parable as contrasting the arrogant, self-righteous religious person, with someone who humbly recognises their faults and resolves to do better – only then can we realise what this parable is about.
There are some religious people who see God’s approval as an automatic right, simply because of the religion they belong to, or because of the religion they don’t belong to. Prayers such as, “I thank you Hashem, that I was not born a Gentile”, or, “I praise Allah that I am a Muslim, not one of those kafirs”, or, “I praise Jesus that I am a Christian, not one of these heathens who are all going to hell” are all prayers of the same pitiful level as the prayer of the prideful person in the parable.
In the modern world, there are too many religious people who look down on those they don’t approve of, considering themselves to be perfect and everyone else in the wrong. If you try your best to change yourself for the better, and strive to live God’s good ideals in your life, then the imperfection of your religious ritual doesn’t matter. YHVH our compassionate God knows that we are not perfect, and understands that we are trying. Even if we don’t always succeed, it is the direction that one’s inner heart faces that matters. The prideful person has a word ever ready to condemn, and the truly righteous person has a word ever ready to encourage.
There are some religious people who effectively are only part-time religious people. That is, they will go to church on Sunday, evangelise, witness for God when required, but when it comes to the other days of the week and being kind, understanding, honest or fair, it doesn’t matter to them, because they think that is not what will get them into heaven. They will argue to protect life, but then they will support the killing of workers in abortion clinics. To them, God only rules over their physical religious life, but they themselves rule over their own heart, and their heart can hate and condemn whomever they want – they can see no problem with that.
Such fundamentalists gloss over the parts of the bible which require them to show compassion towards the sick and the poor, the foreigner and the vulnerable; they ignore those parts of Yeshua’s sayings which preach supposedly ‘liberal values’. They are unwilling to understand what someone else has suffered in life; they are blind to the damage that their unbending, fundamentalist outlook has on others – how it damages them psychologically.
Is there any wonder that so many people are turning away from religion? Religious fundamentalism turns you into a sociopath, who loves to see the suffering of people they don’t agree with. True religion is not a belief-system, but rather, “love mercy, do justice, and walk humbly with your God.”