This is the transcript of Restitutio episode 677: Two Powers in Heaven 4: Mishnah and Tosefta

This transcript was auto-generated and only approximates the contents of this episode.

Audio file
677 Two Powers part 4.mp3

Transcript

[00:00] Number four, what does the Mishnah say about two powers? Well, we've been on a series on the two powers heresy. We haven't honestly learned much about two powers yet, but hopefully you've learned a lot about Jewish apocalyptic literature and Jewish Platonic theology. Now these two things, Jewish apocalyptic literature and Platonic theology are completely different strands within Judaism and arguably both kind of a minority perspective. Whereas today we're coming towards the center, the great section of Judaism that would be considered mainstream, at least by looking back from today.

[00:43] And we're looking at the Mishnah and the Tosefta. What is the Mishnah or oral Torah? What is the Tosefta? When were they written? What do they have to tell us about the two powers idea? Today, we're going to encounter the Minim for the first time. Who are the Minim? Get answers to these questions in today's Restitutio Podcast. Welcome to Restitutio, a podcast seeking to recover authentic Christianity and live it out today. I'm your host, Sean Finnegan. And before going on to talk about the Mishnah and the Tosefta, I wonder if you can do me a favor.

[01:27] Can you subscribe to this channel? If you do, it would help us out a lot. So go ahead and hit that subscribe button if you don't mind. Also, if you want to know more about me and about Restitutio, you can find out more at our website, restitutio.org. It has lots of episodes for this podcast. I think we're almost near 700 now. And also some full length classes that may interest you. So take a look at that. And now on to the show. The Mishnah is a practical guide to the Torah written by the Tannaim. Do you remember who the Tannaim are? They're the Jewish teachers and rabbis of the first and second centuries AD.

[02:11] And I have a table here for you that goes through six generations of the Tannaim. And we see in the first generation, the years are from 10 AD to 80. So these are people that lived at the same time as Jesus Christ. And we see there Shammai and Hillel and Rabban Gamaliel the elder. In the second generation from 80 to 120, we get Gamaliel the second. In the third generation from 120 to 140, getting to the early second century and mid second century, we get Rabbi Akiva. In the fourth generation from 140 to 165, we get Rabbi Meir and some others.

[02:52] In the fifth generation from 165 to 200, we get a very important individual named Judah ha-Nasi. And he's so significant because he's the compiler of the Mishnah. We also get Nathan ha-Bavli, Nathan of Babylon. And then in the final generation of the Tannaim, we get from the years 200 to 220. So the early third century, we get the disciples and contemporaries of Judah ha-Nasi. So that's a little crash course on the Tannaim, simply put their rabbis of the first and second centuries. And the Mishnah is a collection of a lot of their rulings, a lot of their decisions of these Jewish sages.

[03:37] It's often called the oral Torah. And Orthodox Jews today believe that these oral laws were actually given to Moses at the same time as the written Torah. Although I don't see a good reason to believe that, it is a very common belief today. Regardless though, these are various legal rulings on agriculture, Sabbath, festivals, marriage, and family law, civil and criminal law, sacrifices, temple rituals, and purity laws. The idea is to explain how Jews should keep the Torah. So let me give you an example. This is a fun example. The Torah says not to work on the Sabbath.

[04:17] Everybody knows that, right? It's in the 10 commandments. The fourth commandment. And what counts as work? That's the question you have to ask yourself. Well, in Mishnah, Shabbat 7.2, we get 39 categories of what qualifies as work. Here they are. One who sows, one who plows, one who reaps, one who gathers, threshes, winnows, selects, grinds, sifts, kneads, bakes, shears wool, whitens it, combs the fleece. One who dyes it, spins wool, stretches the threads, constructs two meshes, et cetera, et cetera. You can see that there is a lot to the Mishnah, a great deal of detail here, telling the people specifically what is work, what is not work, so that they can keep it accurately.

[05:08] Another one, just example from the Mishnah is on the day of Yom Kippur, or as we often translate it, the day of atonement, it says to afflict yourselves. Well, then the question comes up, well, what do you mean by afflict myself?

[05:27] Should I whip myself with a piece of leather? Should I sit in a cold plunge bath for an hour? I'd be like, what does that even mean? Well, the Mishnah fills in how to afflict yourself. Mishnah Yoma 8.1 explains, well, on the day of atonement, no eating, no drinking, no bathing, no anointing with oil, no wearing leather shoes, and no sex. And then it gives a couple of exceptions. It talks about a king and a wife who is married within the first 30 days of their marriage, and it says, well, in that case, it's all right if they wash their faces on the day of atonement.

[06:06] Or it has one other little exception, which I kind of love. It's a woman who, after childbirth, is suffering, and she's just gone through such an ordeal, and her feet are in pain, and so she's allowed to wear shoes if she would like to, instead of going about barefoot, even on the day of atonement. So that's the little flavor of the Mishnah. Lots of different discussions in there. A lot of times it'll quote somebody. Sometimes it'll just give the opinion of, I guess, Judaism or the Tannaim in general, and that is probably coming from the pen of Judah, as I mentioned earlier.

[06:46] So, and he, again, he finished it around the year 200. So we're talking about early third century Judaism in its final form, but there are citations of individuals who lived in the second century and even in the first century, and we had to weigh those very carefully and analyze them very carefully because a lot of times those layers do go back centuries earlier. So, like I said, compiled by Judah ha-Nasi, thus it's a third century collection, but it contains rulings from the first and second centuries. I think you get it. Now, let's say you wanted to buy the Mishnah yourself.

[07:22] You can get it. This is the version by Jacob Neusner from 1991.

[07:31] Actually, I think it was originally done in the 80s and then republished in the 90s. You can get that version, or you can get a newer three-volume version called the Oxford Annotated Mishnah, which came out in 2023. These are both print versions that you will have to pay for. Another possibility is you can get it from sefaria.org. Sefariaa is a fabulous Jewish resource. They've got a translation there by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, and that is extracted from the Noé edition of the Koren Talmud Bavli. So the Talmud Bavli, the Babylonian Talmud, is a massive collection of forty-two volumes.

[08:14] We're gonna talk about that later, but within that, they have extracted out the Mishnah, and that's what you find on sefaria.org. It's the heart of the Babylonian Talmud. Our interest today is in the two power subject. And as it turns out, there's only one text that we need to look at within the Mishnah about the two power subject, and it comes from Sanhedrin 4.5, and this is what it says. Therefore, man was created alone to teach you that whoever destroys a single Israelite soul is deemed by scripture as if he had destroyed a whole world. And whoever saves a single Israelite soul is deemed by scripture as if he had saved a whole world.

[08:59] And it was also for the sake of peace among people so that someone should not say to his fellow, my father is greater than your father. And it was also on account of the minim, so that the minim should not say there are many domains in heaven and to portray the grandeur of the Holy One, blessed be he. So in summary, we read the reasons why God created Adam alone instead of creating him and Eve at the same time or creating him and a number of other humans at the same time. And one of those reasons is so that the minim should not say there are many domains in heaven.

[09:40] So this is the juicy part of the Mishnah that we really wanna do some focus on and focus attention and analysis on today. And I guess the concern is that if creation began with say five humans instead of just one, someone might think there were five creators. Here we see a statement about the minim. You know, it's not at all clear like who the minim are in this text, but presumably they would be people who believed in more than one creator or would possibly believe in more than one creator if Adam wasn't the only one created. You see how the logic works.

[10:19] Now, when it comes to this word minim, it's actually the plural of the Hebrew word min, at least that's the going theory. There is some debate about this, but that's the word for kind. And so in Genesis 1.12, we read about kinds of plants and in 1.21 kinds of water creatures and in 1.24 kinds of land animals. The minim are the kinds of people that have wrong beliefs. So a traditional translation for minim is just heretics. There are scholarly reasons why some translations don't prefer that, but a lot of them will just translate minim as heretics.

[11:02] I guess in the Neusner version, he just wanted to leave it as minim to avoid that whole debate. And I want to read to you a quote by Martin Goodman. And this is what he says in his book, Judaism in the Roman world. He says, the very fact that the minim have been identified in different passages with Jewish Christians, Gnostics, Hellenistic Jews, Sadducees, and others constitutes evidence that the rabbis who compiled these rabbinic documents use the term in a vague way. Now, I think this is actually really significant for us to get ahold of. The word minim is used for lots of different situations, lots of different kinds of people who are in different situations and who believe things that the mainstream here thinks is wrong.

[11:51] And we need to preserve the vagueness of the word and recognize that not every time minim are mentioned, does it refer to Jewish Christians, which is kind of like the standard that a lot of people want to hold it to, but that doesn't really hold up if you look very carefully. So who are the minim in this verse? Well, I would say the likeliest candidate would be just worshipers of the Greek or Roman pantheon. That's the majority of the world at the time. This would be written in the third century. Who's in charge in the third century? Well, it's the Roman Empire.

[12:25] What do the Romans believe? How do they live? Well, they kind of adopted the Greek gods and had different names for them. And they had temples to all these gods all over the place. Like you couldn't go into any city. Well, I won't say any, but almost every city in the Roman Empire is gonna have multiple temples to these gods plus temples to local gods as well. So this is their world. This is what they would be surrounded in. So I think that would be kind of an obvious candidate for who the minim are in this particular text. We know that the minim in question are those who believe in many authorities in heaven.

[13:03] This could also refer to the Gnostics who had lots of intermediaries that they called aeons. It could refer to a group of Jews holding to Philo's ideology of not only just God in heaven, the supreme one, but you also have the Logos, Sophia and the powers, which we talked about in a previous episode. The fact is he doesn't say who the minim are here. All we know is that God created Adam alone so that the minim wouldn't say there were multiple authorities in heaven. That's all we have to go on here. So there's really nothing about two powers in the Mishnah.

[13:44] Like this is the only text that is even close. And you might ask, well, Sean, why are you so confident? Like how do you know for sure? Well, grammar, that's why I'm so confident. And I wanna show you this. I wanna break this down for you so you can see it. Even if you don't read Hebrew, I think you can follow the reasoning here in a way that will make it clear. So as I mentioned, Mishnah Sanhedrin 4.5 from the Neusner translation said, so that the minim should not say there are many domains in heaven. The Sefaria translation that they have available uses the word authorities instead of domains.

[14:24] Not a real significant difference there. Well, the Hebrew is right here on the screen. If you can't read the Hebrew, don't worry about it. I'm gonna give you a literal translation. A literal translation is, and that not, that's that first word right there, she-lo, and that not would be, that's the second word, yomru, minim, saying, so that's the first line. And that not would be the minim saying, right? So that's, I have no complaint about the translation of Neusner here so that the minim should not say, right? I think it's beautiful. And then the next phrase, what should they not say?

[15:01] Many authorities in heaven. And they don't even use the word there are because in Hebrew you don't use the verb to be a lot of times because it's just sort of applied and it's just unnecessary. Here's what they're saying, many authorities in heaven. Now, this word, reshuyot, is the word translated as domains or authorities or powers. This is a plural word in the Hebrew, reshuyot. It's a plural. If a Hebrew author wants to talk about two of something, you can use the dual form. You have the singular, the dual, and the plural. And so if there are two powers, especially if they're like co-equal, you would expect the dual form here, not the plural form.

[15:49] Plural, it can mean two, but I think it more naturally means more than two in this kind of situation. Plus, that other word, let me pull it back up for you, that other word there, harbei. This is the word that means much or many. Okay, so when's the last time you heard anybody refer to two as many? That doesn't make any sense. So if it's something that can't be counted like a liquid, it'll say much. We'll translate the word as much. But if it's something that can be counted like authorities, then we in English will translate it as many. And so it's very unlikely that the Mishnah is referring here in Sanhedrin 4-5 to two powers.

[16:37] Extremely unlikely. This is not a two powers text. Even so this does show that Jews in the 200s were worried about false beliefs, okay? Even if they're not worried about the two powers, they are worried about false beliefs. They're concerned about those who misread scripture. They didn't want their students believing there were many authorities. They wanted them to believe there was just one God. So I think there was a concern, but it wasn't a concern over two powers, at least not in this passage, okay? And that's really the only passage in the Mishnah that relates to this.

[17:12] The next literature to consider for us is the Tosefta. The Tosefta is not at all as popular or as significant as the Mishnah, but it's very similar. It follows the same kind of outline of content and it's considered to be a supplement to the Mishnah, likely dated to a time shortly after the Mishnah. So say 220 to 250 AD. So middle of the third century. And again, we've just got one text to consider. Here it is. Sanhedrin 8-7 from the Tosefta says, man was created last in the order of creation. And why was man created last? So that the minim should not be able to say, there was a partner with him in his work.

[17:59] Pretty fast, pretty simple, pretty similar kind of statement to what we read in the Mishnah. Here, the concern is about the order of creation, not the number of creators, but the order in creation. If God created Adam earlier, then someone might think Adam participated with God in creation. I guess that's the concern here.

[18:25] That's why God made man last. So who are the minim? Who are we talking about here? Who are the heretics? This quote from Adiel Schremer, I think is very helpful to figure that out. This is what he says. Similarly, Mishnah, Sanhedrin 4-5, that's the previous text we had read, which claims that man was created alone. So the minim would not maintain that there are many powers in heaven, cannot be interpreted as speaking of minim who hold a binitarian concept. Rather, it has to be understood, as has been noted long ago by Arthur Marmorstein, as referring to some sort of Gnostics.

[19:09] The reference to minim in Tosefta, Sanhedrin 8-7, can be interpreted in a similar manner. According to the Tosefta, man was created at the end so that the minim would not be able to maintain that he joined him in the creation. As the speculations concerning the divine nature of Adam were widespread among the Gnostics of the first centuries, nothing forces us to abandon the possibility of identifying the minim here as Gnostics. Now, it is true that some Gnostics taught that Adam participated in creation. So we can read about this in a Gnostic text found at Nag Hammadi called On the Origin of the World.

[19:54] We read, when Adam of light wished to enter his light, which is the eighth heaven, he could not do so because of the poverty mingled with his light. So he created a great aeon for himself. And in that eternal realm, he created six more realms and their worlds, which are six in number and seven times better than the heavens of chaos and their worlds. So here we see a celestial Adam who is able to create things. And this is all part of the whole Gnostic universe, which if that's new to you, probably the best thing you could do is watch my video on the Gnostics, introducing them.

[20:38] If you wanna learn more about them, I don't know if it's the best, but I think it's pretty good. If you wanna learn more about the Gnostics, you can search YouTube for Sean Finnegan Gnostics, that's Gnostics with a G. You'll find the video there and you'll be able to understand the sort of system that the Gnostics are working from. It's really kind of similar to Philo in a lot of ways because the Gnostics are incorporating Platonism and the Old Testament together. And some even are also incorporating the New Testament, but they're saying different things than most Christians would say, which is why Christianity fought so hard against the Gnostics in the second and third centuries.

[21:19] But coming back here, what I'm saying to you is that the Tosefta quote here, the Minim in question are not Jews who believe that there are two powers in heaven that are equal and working together. That's just not what's in view. What's in view is probably Gnostics, although we can't say for sure. And we need to recognize that the word Minim, like I started with, is vague. And therefore we don't wanna over-define it. And we certainly don't wanna just throw out speculations and then build an entire doctrine on top of those speculations. And we can see from these two quotes how thin the material is for two powers in the Mishnah and the Tosefta.

[22:05] But we also see that in the third century there was certainly concern over Minim or outsiders, if you wanna call them that, or heretics that we're talking about multiple powers in heaven and talking about Adam being involved in creation. But there's no mention of actually two powers. There's nothing about binitarianism here. So let's take a moment to summarize where we've gotten so far. So far, we've looked at first Enoch. We've looked at Philo. We've looked at the Mishnah and the Tosefta. And we have yet to find any evidence at all of two powers.

[22:43] I know you're getting frustrated with me. I promise next time, we are going to find clear two powers information. We're gonna look at the Midrashim, and which is the plural of Midrash, so the various Midrashes, or I guess you maybe loosely translate them commentaries. These will give us clear evidence of two powers. And so I just encourage you to stick with me. If you found this episode helpful, please like and subscribe. Also, please share this episode with others. And if you'd like to support this ministry financially, you can do so by coming over to restitutio.org and setting up a monthly recurring donation.

[23:27] Thanks so much to those of you who are already doing that. It makes such a big difference. Well, that's it for today. I'll catch you next time. And remember, the truth has nothing to fear.