Main news for 22 November 2015

There was evidently a substantial difference between the leaders of the Pharisaic religious brotherhood and those whom one might conditionally call the "common people," particularly in the perception of certain people and events. Of course, when speaking of the "common people," one must still keep in mind that they were not entirely simple. An illiterate Jew in Gospel times was a great rarity, just as was a Jew who did not read and even study the Torah and the Prophets, what today we would call Holy Scripture.

At every synagogue there was necessarily a religious school where all local boys, and sometimes girls as well, were taught not only literacy but also elementary work with the sacred books, including a special practice of prayerful or meditative reading. The culture of working with the sacred books was widespread enough in Jewish society, and among the teachers of the Torah, whom the Gospel usually calls "scribes," the majority were occupied precisely with teaching such work to children and adults, often free of charge or for a very modest payment.

But on the other hand, in the Jewish world there were also academies where the Torah and other sacred books were studied in the greatest detail. This was a special world of experts, educated theologians, and refined commentators of sacred texts, who sometimes embarked on such subtleties and reached such depths that simple readers of the Torah sometimes did not even suspect them. Unfortunately, this somewhat closed little world of academic theologians, as often happens in such cases, was marked by a considerable share of learned snobbery, which made them look at the mentioned simple readers as ignorant of the Torah.

And this same learned snobbery made them treat, if not with contempt, then at least with suspicion, those whom one might call popular spiritual authorities, among whom, incidentally, John the Baptist belonged. Of course, such restraint was often justified: mass religious consciousness is not very discriminating in its choice of religious leaders. But a priori distrust sometimes prevented both academic scribes and educated leaders of religious brotherhoods from recognizing true people of God, as happened in the case of John the Baptist.

And then the leaders of the Pharisaic movement had only to maneuver between their own distrust and even a certain spiritual fastidiousness on one side, and popular sympathies on the other: an open expression of their position could have ended badly for them. Yet such maneuvering in no way promotes either spiritual wholeness or full spiritual life, and the Savior's question should have made His interlocutors think about this simple truth, which for them was not obvious.