Chapter 199 of 404

Differing Interpretations of the Sabbath

Jewish people held some views of the Sabbath universally, but many, including many Pharisees, recognized diverse interpretations of Sabbath practice. The Sabbath was central to Jewish practice throughout the ancient world.⁵⁰ It was part of Jewish life, not restricted merely to the most pious.⁵¹ The rest of the Roman world marked its calendar with market-days rather than a weekly religious day of rest,⁵² but they were widely aware of the Jewish Sabbath.⁵³

The seventh day was already important in the Genesis creation narrative, but it became still more so in later tradition,⁵⁴ which declared that angels kept the Sabbath and that this day was holier than any other holy day.⁵⁵ (Some later rabbis even said, in notoriously hyperbolic language, that the Sabbath outweighed all other commandments of the Torah.)⁵⁶ A well-educated first-century Jew like Josephus could assume that Moses commanded Jewish people to assemble to learn the law together each Sabbath⁵⁷ (the law actually commanded no such thing). Josephus also claims that Jewish laws required, and even the laxer Jews of Tiberias observed, retiring to one’s home for a dinner when the Sabbath began around 6 p.m.⁵⁸ Later teachers meticulously detailed a protective “fence” around the Sabbath law.⁵⁹

Most Jewish people allowed some exceptions, especially for saving a life (including defensive warfare).⁶⁰ But any activity that could be done before the Sabbath was prohibited on the Sabbath.⁶¹ Although matters of life and death remained exceptions and common people were probably less particular, most Pharisees probably opposed minor medical cures on the Sabbath, generating conflict with Jesus’ healing activities.⁶²

It is doubtful that Jesus himself rejected the Sabbath, though he clearly interpreted and applied it quite differently from many of his contemporaries. Even in the Fourth Gospel, Jesus defends his Sabbath practice with a good halakic argument (Jn 7:22-23).⁶³ As Vermes notes, “If, as is often claimed, the evangelists aimed at inculcating . . . Christian doctrine such as the annulment of the Sabbath legislation . . . they did a pitiful job which falls far short of proving their alleged thesis.”⁶⁴ One may suspect that wishful thinking of later Gentile Christianity generated some of the later antinomian or partly antinomian traditions of interpretation.⁶⁵

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