New Testament Judaism and Its Genesis

Abstract

With Malachi, the last of the minor prophets, the voice of inspiration and prophecy was hushed in Israel. The view that Daniel historically closes the Old Testament canon, and that we have alarge number of Maccabean Psalms, are at best hypotheses, either not proved and daily becoming more and more disproved (as in the case of Daniel), or not capable of being proved in the nature of the case, as is the state of affairs in reference to the Psalms claimed for the Maccabean period. In itself the position that this or that portion of the Old Testament books is later than Malachi is neither objectionable nor dangerous; but the simple truth is that the existence of such later portions has never been proved by those upon whom the onus probandi rests. The accepted chronology claims the year 433 B. C. as the date for the composition of Malachi; but it would seem that he wrote a little later. The centuries between this date and the appearance of John the Baptist, in whom the spirit of inspiration was again active, were very eventful for Israel, both externally and internally. The four centuries of silence witnessed a process and a development in the history of Israel's faith and religious convictions scarcely, if at all, equaled by any other period of the same length in the earlier records of the nation. That such is the case is evident from a mere comparison of Israel's faith, as we find it reflected in the New Testament, with the positive teachings of the Old. We need not consult the literary links that connect the two Testaments, to see that during those four remarkable centuries agents and factors were at work which changed quite radically the religion of the people, and made the Judaism of the New Testament period not a correct expression of the teachings of the Old, but rather a contradiction of these teachings. Christ, and with him the whole New Testament, opposes what was considered orthodoxy in his days, not because he was opposed to the teachings of the Old Testament, of which his contemporaries, principally the Pharisees as the official exponents of this orthodoxy, claimed to be the correct interpreters, but because he saw in this recognized system a radical departure from the Old Testament basis. Christ and his work are the fulfillment of Moses and the prophets in the divinely intended manner; and just in so far as the teachers in Christ's day oppose him, they oppose also the Old Testament teachings, to which his life and words gave the truest interpretation. Just in what respect New Testament Judaism had actually departed from its true historical foundation in the Old Testament is evident from the Lord's teachings, and still more from the polemics directed against it by St. Paul and other writers of the New Testament. The sum of their charges is that the basis of the ground of hope, of righteousness before God, had been shifted from the true foundation to one that was false. The legalism, or the claim of a righteousness based upon an observance of the minutiae of the law of Moses, so characteristic of the New Testament Jews, is the alpha and the omega of their system. The law is their one and all; and upon obedience to it depends the sole hope of the Israelite.