Main news for 7 August 2020

Between the leaders of the Pharisaic religious brotherhood and those who could conventionally be called "the simple people," there was a substantial difference, including in the perception of certain people and events. Of course, when speaking of "the simple people," one must still take into account that they were not entirely simple. An illiterate Jew in Gospel times was a great rarity, as was a Jew who did not read or even study the Torah and the Prophets, what today we would call Holy Scripture.

Every synagogue necessarily had 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 spread quite widely 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 fee.

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

And this same learned snobbery forced them to treat, if not with contempt then at least with suspicion, those who could be called popular spiritual authorities, among whom, incidentally, John the Baptist belonged. Of course, such reserve was often justified: mass religious consciousness is not very discriminating in its choice of religious leaders. But prior distrust sometimes prevented both academic scribes and educated leaders of religious brotherhoods from recognizing genuine people of God, as happened in the case of John the Baptist.

Then the leaders of the Pharisaic movement had only to maneuver between their own distrust and even a certain spiritual squeamishness on the one hand, and popular sympathies on the other, for an open expression of their position could end 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 that was not obvious to them.