A Hyperbolic Pharisee
A Hyperbolic Pharisee
In our earliest sources, Jesus critiques the Pharisees with the sort of wit that characterized the environment of Jewish scribal polemic. For example, in an undoubtedly original saying122 in “Q” Jesus denounces a hyperbolic Pharisee who tithes meticulously on mint and other debated substances while neglecting the principles of God’s law such as justice and love (Matt 23:23//Lk 11:42). As we have noted, Pharisees were known to be careful about tithing (cf. also Lk 18:12). Consequently they sought to determine which substances counted as foodstuffs, hence were covered under the Old Testament agrarian tithe.123 Later rabbis agreed to tithe on dill124 and cummin125 but eventually excluded mint.126 First-century Shammaites doubted that black cummin need be tithed, in contrast to Hillelites.127
In their eagerness to avoid violating any portion of the law, the ultrastrict Pharisees Jesus addresses here (perhaps a hyperbolic, reductio ad absurdum construct) tithe even the most disputable of substances. Believing that they were showing their faithfulness to God’s law by examining its every detail, they would not have thought of themselves as neglecting the law’s broader principles. Jesus, however, insisted that their commendable attention to the former had neglected the latter.128 Pharisees would have understood Jesus’ insistence on some matters of the law being weightier than others.129
Consistent with such “Q” material, even material found only in Matthew (who has reasons in his own milieu to highlight Jesus’ conflict with Pharisees) sounds as Jesus should have sounded in his original setting. Immediately after denouncing Pharisaic preference for tithing over mercy, Jesus illustrates their inconsistency in Matt 23:24 with a characteristically witty illustration, again portraying a superscrupulous Pharisee more attentive than Pharisaic legal rulings required.
In this saying, Jesus complains that they “strain out a gnat yet swallow a camel!” Again, he probably portrays a hyperbolic, superscrupulous Pharisee. If a fly fell into one’s drink, an observant Jew might hope to strain it out before it died, lest it contaminate the drink (cf. Lev 11:34). But Pharisaic legal experts decided that any organism smaller than a lentil (such as a gnat) was exempt.130 Passionate for purity, this Pharisee goes beyond the apparent letter of the law.131
Nevertheless, these hyperbolic Pharisees were so inconsistent, Jesus said, that they concerned themselves with purity issues as trifling as a gnat while ignoring a much larger purity issue in swallowing a camel whole. Biblical law explicitly deemed camels unclean for eating (Lev 11:4). Gnats appear in ancient illustrations as the prototypically smallest of creatures132 and notably inconspicuous;133 by contrast, camels were the largest animal in Palestine.134 In addition to such features of Palestinian Jewish background, the saying probably reflects an Aramaic original. Jesus’ contrast involves a pun that works in his Aramaic speech, but not in our Greek translation: “You . . . strain out a gnat but swallow a camel!” In Aramaic the words gamla (“camel”) and kamla or kalma (“gnat,” “mosquito,” “louse”) sound almost the same.135