Moses' seat

Anonymous said:

“Maybe there was no creed in OT times, but wasn't there some sort of magisterium, like the RC Church has. In the NT, Jesus talks about a ‘seat of Moses’ that all Jews had to obey. That sounds a lot like the ‘chair of Peter.’"

i) Before addressing your question, let’s be clear on the context. Perry Robinson and Ben Joseph have been contending over at Pontifications that we need an infallible church to promulgate irreformable dogma, and we need irreformable dogma in order for us to have divine teaching. Sola Scriptura is insufficient.

Jason and I have countered that this aprioristic argument is a historical fantasy, for it’s demonstrable, from the record of God’s concrete dealings with the covenant community in times past, that God did not employ this instrumentality to direct and indoctrinate his people.

So the point of my documentation is to illustrate the fact that the kind of creedal tradition and tradition of systematic theology we take for granted in Christianity is in standing contrast to the history of Judaism.

You have credal fragments scattered throughout the Bible. Yet Judaism never promulgated anything along the lines of a Summa Theologica or Catechism of the Catholic Church, Formula of Concord, Westminster Confession, Trent, or Vatican II.

This systematic, encyclopedic bent reflects a very Western, Aristotelian bias. The urge to catalogue and classify, synthesize and systematize. This impulse lays the foundation for modern science.

There’s nothing wrong with creeds and summas. I myself am a product of Western Civilization, and happily so. Systematic theology is a fine discipline. Creeds are useful pedagogical and disciplinary tools.

But it is quite provincial of Ben and Perry to codify a culture-bound phenomenon, and worse when they impose that on the church in defiance of divine precedent.

Just compare the Talmud to the Summa Theologica. One reason for the lack of formal order and technical rigor is undoubtedly the fact that Judaism was a living faith, deeply embedded in culture—something a Jew would pick up by osmosis.

ii) As to Mt 23:2, the problem with your interpretation is that it runs into conflict with the immediate and broader context. For, just a few verses down, Jesus will identify these teachers as blind guides (v16ff.; cf. 15:14).

It would be rather odd of Jesus to say that we are duty-bound to follow blind-guides. And is that your view of the Roman Magisterium? That the Pope and his bishops are blind guides?

That’s the problem when you prooftext, plucking a verse out of context without reading the whole flow of the argument.

What is more, Jesus, throughout the Gospel of Matthew, very publicly challenges the teaching of the religious establishment (cf. 5:21-48; 9:10-14; 12:1-2,10-14; 15:1-20; 16:12; 19:3-9).

iii) So what are we to make of 23:2-3? A couple of things:

a) The Mosaic Law was just that—a law code. This mean that Jewish teachers often served in a judicial capacity (cf. Exod 18:13; Deut 17:10). And in that capacity they wielded legal clout.

In a court of law, you do have to obey the judge even when he gets it wrong. He enjoys de facto authority even if his ruling lacks de jure merit.

b) In addition, it’s easy for a modern reader to forget that the ancient audience consisted of listeners rather than readers.

Most folks, even if they were literate, did not possess private copies of the Scriptures. They were therefore dependent for their knowledge of the text of Scripture on scribes and Pharisees who studied the sacred text and committed it to memory.

However unreliable they might be about what Moses meant, they were reliable about what Moses said.

That’s why Jews went to the synagogue—to hear the Scriptures read aloud as well as expounded.

iv) Finally, you have built no exegetical bridge from Moses' seat to "Peter's chair."