Taking up the Yoke

I took the Sabbath off. I should stop saying "tomorrow" to conclude my posts!

First off, I must say that I have not read Rob Bell's book Velvet Elvis, where he proposes ideas regarding Jesus as rabbi and the interpretation of the meaning and interpretation of his "rabbinical yoke." Viewing Jesus as a Jew, and more specifically as a rabbi, does cast some of his teachings and words in a dramatically different light. I came across some of these ideas when I listened to a sermon by one of my pastors in New Zealand on the subject, unknown to me using Rob Bell as his source.

Basically, it goes something like this:
1) When Jesus says "I am the way, the truth, and the life" he is saying that he is Torah.
2) When Jesus tells his disciples "For my yoke fits perfectly, and the burden I give you is light, (Matt 11:30)" he is referring to his "rabbinical yoke" or his interpretation of Torah.
3) Jesus was fully trained as a rabbi – in the rabbi tradition, a rabbi cannot teach until he reached the age of 30 – this is why Jesus waited until he was 30 to begin his ministry.
4) Jesus' disciples were more than likely young boys who flunked out of rabbi school – this is why they were fishermen, etc. – they had no hope of having a rabbi ask them to take his rabbinical yoke upon them, and so jumped at the chance when Jesus asked them, and left everything behind (because it was an honor to study under a rabbi and take his yoke).
5) The intent of taking up the rabbi's yoke was to learn from him and to become like him, eventually taking on students themselves and passing on the rabbinical yoke.

All of this really repaints the whole story of Jesus and his disciples. It solidifies the idea that Jesus was completely counter-cultural – the last will become first, and the first last – turning everything on its head in choosing a bunch of uneducated boys to be his students – entrusting his legacy as a rabbi to people not good enough for the religious establishment.

Hearing this, the Gospels seemed to crystallize in my mind – it all seemed to make sense now, in reading the story with the Jewish rabbinical tradition in mind. Here are some quotes out of Velvet Elvis (from another blog) by Rob Bell:

Now the ancient rabbis understood that the Bible is open-ended and has to be interpreted. And they understood that their role in the community was to study and mediate and discuss and pray and then make those decisions. Rabbis are like interpreters, helping people understand what God is saying to them through the text and what it means to live out the text...

Different rabbis had different sets of rules, which were really different lists of what they forbade and what they permitted. A rabbi's set of rules and lists, which was really that rabbi's interpretation of how to live the Torah, was called that rabbi's yoke. When you followed a certain rabbi, you were following him because you believed that rabbi's set of interpretations were the closest to what God intended through the Scriptures. And when you followed that rabbi, you were taking up that rabbi's yoke.

One rabbi even said his yoke was easy.

The intent then of a rabbi having a yoke wasn't just to interpret the words correctly; it was to live them out. In the jewish context, action was always the goal. It still is.

Rabbis would spend hours discussing with their students what it meant to live out a certain text. If a student made a suggestion about what a certain text meant and the rabbi thought that the student had totally missed the point, the rabbi would say, "You have abolished the Torah," which meant that in the rabbi's opinion, the student wasn't anywhere near what God wanted. But if the
student got it right, if the rabbi thought the student had grasped God's intention in the text, the rabbi would say, "You have fulfilled the Torah."

Notice what Jesus says in one of his first messages: "I have not come to abolish [the Torah] but to fulfill [it]. He was essentially saying, "I didn't come to do away with the words of God; I came to show people what it looks like when the Torah is lived out perfectly, right down to the smallest
punctuation marks."

"I'm here to put flesh and blood on the words."

Most rabbis taught the yoke of a well respected rabbi who had come before them. So if you visited a synogogue and the local rabbi (Torah teacher) was going to teach, you might hear that this rabbi teaches in the name of Rabbi So-and-So. If you were familiar with the yoke of Rabbi So-and-So, then you would know what to expect from this rabbi.

Every once in a while, a rabbi would come along who was teaching a new yoke, a new way of interpreting the Torah. This was rare and extraordinary.

Rob Bell is big on interpretation, which I have been stressing here lately. On the conflict between Science and Religion that I discussed previously, Gerald Schroeder agrees when he writes:

So where does the problem lie? In that acknowledged experts in science may assume that although scientific research requires diligent intellectual effort, biblical wisdom can be attained through a simple reading of the Bible.

Rob Bell is saying the same thing: basically, to fully understand scripture, we need to know the context in which it was written – historic, cultural, scriptural etc. – as well as how it was written, to be taken literally, allegorically, metaphorically or even poetically. I agree with this sentiment wholeheartedly. The problem with this sentiment is that it does result in scripture conflicting with itself, which calls into question the authority of scripture as the infallible Word of God, and thus the Fall of the House of Cards.

The critics of Rob Bell see where the reality of the importance of interpretation leads – a Bible of mush that means different things to all kinds of different people. Here from a critical review of Velvet Elvis by Greg Gilbert (Director of theological research for the president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and an elder at Third Avenue Baptist Church in Louisville, KY - it is a thoughtful discussion, so do go read the whole thing):

But I am convinced that when Bell brings all these things together, the result is something far more revolutionary than what appears on the surface. In fact, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Bell actually ends up throwing the entire Christian gospel up for grabs. God is made so mysterious, doctrine is deemed so questionable, and biblical interpretations are so relativized that in the end, Bell leaves us wondering if anything can be known for sure, or if any understanding of the Christian faith and gospel is any better than any other.

I seem to be circling my point and not really making it, don't I? Well, Rob Bell's interesting interpretation of Jesus' rabbinical yoke, after some searching on the internet, while definitely ringing true with me as a Deist and many others in the Christian Emergent Church, appears to be historically inaccurate. From New Testament scholar Ben Witherington's blog:

Rob, since he wants to stress the Jewishness of Jesus and his followers, needs to have a better understanding of early Judaism in a number of ways. In the first place, Jesus was no rabbi. So far as we can tell, there is no archaeological evidence at all for bet Talmud or bet Midrash in Jesus’ day in Galilee. There were some schools in Jerusalem but they were far from Galilee. After 70 A.D. of course some schools were established in Galilee because Jerusalem was no longer capable of supporting such things. This became totally impossible in Jerusalem after the Bar Kokhba revolt in the early second century when the Romans turned Jerusalem into a pagan city with a temple to Jupiter/Zeus and renamed the city Aelia Capitolina. In fact, you will notice that Jesus has no encounters with ‘rabbis’. Scribes yes, Pharisees yes, Sadducees yes, priests yes, synagogue Presidents like Jairus yes--- but no rabbis. This is because there were no ordained rabbis hanging around synagogues in Jesus’ day. It is a huge mistake to read the Talmuds and the Mishnah as if they were describing the world that Jesus lived in, when in fact they mostly described Judaism after the two Jewish wars when Judaism had been whittled down mostly to Pharisaism and had become a much more Torah-centric religion. Jesus was not a rabbi, nor did he have close encounters of the first kind with ordained rabbis. There were none in his day.

So, the interpretation of the rabbinical yoke rings true with me, yet it is not correct. I did not read this interpretation in Rob Bell's book, but heard it in a sermon, preached as if it was historically accurate. Rob Bell's book has been out for only two years now, yet its interpretations are spreading like wildfire in the Christian Emergent Church and across the internet (it took me some amount of time to track down good information on this subject, and not just a regurgitation of Rob Bell). I'll repeat: TWO YEARS.

The Gospel according to Matthew was written between 80-85 A.D. – at least 50 YEARS after Jesus was crucified! It should be noted as well, that according to Ben Witherington above that "After 70 A.D. of course some schools were established in Galilee…" Interesting. When the gospel was written that contained the words of Jesus referring to his "yoke," the rabbinical schools and tradition did perhaps exist outside Jerusalem.

A larger point to be made is this – how had the story of Jesus (if he did exist) change and morph over those 35 to 70 years that passed between his crucifixion and the writing of the Gospels? How many facts were twisted into legends? How many traditions were just created out of thin air? Moreover, Paul's Epistle to the Galatians is the first book of the New Testament to be written (49 A.D) – he had no Gospels to refer when writing this letter - and there are no quotations of Jesus to be found in the letter either.

The historical, cultural, and scriptural context of these books that so many people base their entire belief system and world-view upon do need to be understood to interpret the meaning of the scriptures effectively. And I say again – Reason is the foundation to understanding Jesus' words themselves!

When I was getting ready to ask my wife to marry me, I thought that the tradition of buying a diamond ring was a long-standing tradition. It rang true with me – a diamond is the strongest mineral substance; I learned that in high school geology – made sense that you'd propose with a gift that would last forever. Later I find out that DeBeers created the tradition via a massive television campaign in the 1950s. Forty-some years later and I'm thinking it has always been that way.

Same thing goes for Washington chopping down the cherry tree and Betsy Ross making the first American Flag – they never happened. They were made up, and passed on, becoming "fact" in a short span of time to be taught 200 years later in every classroom in the country.

And I'm asked to believe a story written down 35 to 70 years after it happened (65 to 100 years if you count the Christmas story), and voted as the official story 300+ years after it happened?! And this belief is a requirement to avoid Hell and enter Heaven?

The evidence of God is everywhere – we don't need some supposed holy scriptures to see Him. Simply put, in my mind, we only need to contemplate one number. More to come!