The more I learn about the origins of rabbinic authority, the more cautious I become with how much of the truth non-messianic rabbis hold. The tension comes from a political struggle in the first and second centuries, especially following the fall of Jerusalem. Without the temple of the Lord to serve as the centerpiece of Judaic life, several groups battled for the hearts and minds of the Jewish people and it was the descendants of the Pharisaic movement who won the power struggle and formed modern rabbinic Judaism.
The disturbing part about this struggle is how grounded in earthly lust for power this battle became. The rabbis, who actually had no Torah basis for exerting control over Israeli religion and life, backed a big transfer tank up to the Torah and filled it up to overflowing, in an attempt to establish a basis for their authority.
They did this by means of taking their oral traditions and asserting them as not only equal in authority to the Torah, but greater, since they claimed that their oral traditions, which came to be known as the Oral Law, could contradict Torah, but that Torah could not overpower Oral Law in such a struggle. What was their basis for such a claim? Their own claims.
It’s kind of ridiculous, once you understand it. But then, the Christian church is no better; in fact, the Catholic religion basically has established nearly the same thing. According to the Vatican, Catholic tradition is co-equal in authority to Scripture itself.
When will mankind ever learn to worship the things of G-d and only the things of G-d? To respect His Word more than their own?
Tags: Catholic church, Oral Law, Torah, transfer tank