GAMALIEL AND THE SCHOOL OF TÜBINGEN

I SHALL not often turn aside to meet what seem to me to be baseless objections; but as the name of Gamaliel will always be associated with that of St. Paul, it may be worth while to do so for a moment in this instance. It seems, then, to me that this accusation of St. Luke is founded on a mass of errors.1 Gamaliel, like St. Paul, was a Pharisee, the son of Pharisees, and it was doubtless his nobleness and candour of disposition which impressed the Apostle with the better elements of Pharisaism. The fiery zeal of a youthful Tarsian may have led him for a time to adopt the more violent tone of the school of Shammai, and yet might have been very far from obliterating the effects of previous teaching. But, in point of fact, even a Hillel and a Gamaliel, in spite of their general mildness, would have described themselves without hesitation as “exceedingly zealous for the traditions of the fathers.” Their concessions to expediency were either concessions in their conduct to the heathen, or concessions to necessity and the general interest.2 The difference between the two Pharisaic schools was not nearly so wide as that between the two great Jewish sects. The Pharisees were beyond all question allied to the Zealots in political sympathies, while the Sadducees had natural affinities with the Herodians. In what we know of Gamaliel, we trace a spirit, a tone, a point of view, which eminently resembles that of his far greater pupil. His decision that soldiers in war time, and all people engaged in works of mercy, duty, or necessity, might be exempted from the more stringent Sabbatical traditions; his concession of rights of gleaning to the poorer brethren;3 his direction that the “Peace be with you” should be addressed even to pagans on their feast days4—are all exactly analogous to the known sentiments of the Apostle; while the just, humane, and liberal regulations which he laid down to prevent the unfairness of husbands towards divorced wives, and of disobedient children towards their mothers, are identical in spirit to those which St. Paul applies to similar subjects. The story that he bathed in a bath at Ptolemais which was adorned with a statue of Aphrodite, and answered the reproaches of a min with the remark that the statue had evidently been made for the bath, and not the bath for the statue, belongs not to him but to his grandson, with whom he is perpetually confused.5 To the latter is also due the wise and kindly rule of burying the dead in simple white linen, instead of in costly robes. Yet so close was the unity of doctrine which bound together the successive hereditary presidents of the school of Hillel, that we may look on any anecdote of the younger Gamaliel as fairly illustrative of the views of the elder; and the argument of Gamaliel II., that, if he were to be excluded from the enjoyment of every place which had been defiled by the rights of idolatry, he would not be able to find any place to live in at all, reminds ns of more than one passage in St. Paul’s argument about meats offered to idols. We may therefore regard it as a significant fact that, in spite of these liberal principles, Gamaliel of Jabne sanctioned the use of the “curse against heretics,”6 which is given twelfth in order in the ShemoneEzre.7 It is probable that his grandfather, who was equally liberal in many of his sentiments, would yet have been perfectly willing to authorise a similar prayer. His sense of expediency was so little identical with any indifference to pure Mosaism, that when he died it was said that the purity and righteousness of Pharisaism was removed, and the glory of the Law ceased.8 Neither then, in St. Paul’s original zeal for the oral and written Law, nor in the liberality of his subsequent views and decisions about Mosaic observances, do we find any reason whatever to doubt the statement of his relation to Gamaliel, but on the contrary we find it confirmed by many minute and, at first sight, counter indications. And as far as the speech of Gamaliel is concerned, it seems probable that his toleration would have had decided limits. As it is by no means clear that he did not afterwards sanction the attempt to suppress the Christians, so it is by no means improbable that up to this time even Saul of Tarsus, had he been present at the debate, might have coincided with the half–tolerant, but also half–contemptuous, views of his great teacher. Although the Pharisees, in their deadly opposition to the Sadducees, were always ready to look with satisfaction on that one part of Christianity which rested on the belief in the Resurrection, the events of the next few months greatly altered the general relations of the Church, not only towards them, but also towards the entire body of the Jewish people, of whom, up to this time, a great multitude had welcomed its early manifestations with astonishment and joy.