Succession Planning

“Now then, our God, the great, the mighty, and the awesome God, who keeps His covenant and faithfulness, do not let all the hardship seem insignificant before You,
which has happened to us, our kings, our leaders, our priests, our prophets, our fathers, and to all Your people, from the days of the kings of Assyria to this day.”  Nehemiah 9:32  NASB

Our leaders – In the end, religion boils down to power and authority.  I am not saying that spiritual experiences or personal relationships with the divine are nothing more than power and authority.  That is certainly not the case.  But religion is a different matter.  A religion is a system, an institution, with rules and regulations, doctrines and demands, ascribed to congregants by some authorized body.  Whether it is the Pope, the diocese, the synod, or the Sanhedrin, religion depends on a power structure that dictates what one must believe to be included among the faithful.  No renegades are allowed.

How did this come about?  How were tribal beliefs and individual experiences converted into institutional religions?  Before we can answer this question, we need to know something about the history of religious authority, and particularly about the history of Christian and Jewish religious authority.  For a long time, Christian scholars have claimed that Jewish religious orthodoxy was the model adopted by the Church, that is, Jewish authority came first and the Church copied the Jews.  Le Boulluec’s comment summarizes this view:

“It is very likely that the effort of reconstituting and unifying Judaism accomplished by rabbinical orthodoxy was imitated by the Church, stimulated by the competitive desire to supplant once more the elder brother, a desire that the renewed vitality (of the elder brother) could not help but reinforce.”

But Daniel Boyarin sees the development quite differently:

“On the contrary, I would suggest that the heresiological techniques promulgated in the rabbinic texts are as likely to be a product of contact with Christianity as the opposite (perhaps even more so).  In both nascent rabbinism and nascent Christianity the notion of apostolic succession is a development out of the Hellenistic idea of a diadoche, a succession list, or recognized teachers beginning with the founding ‘father’ of the school.  In both, however, this notion became transformed into a doctrine of succession of actual officeholders with the only claim to the truth of the tradition and the power to enforce that claim.”[1]

Review the typical understanding of the “Great Assembly”  (CLICK HERE).

You will immediately see that rabbinic Judaism does precisely what Boyarin suggests, that is, it reads the history of the text as an endorsement of its own authority.  Its claim is basically circular.  “We, who are the  authority, tell you that our reading of history shows that we are the authority because we say so.”  This is no different than the claim of the Church.  “We are God’s representatives on earth because we say that we are, and if you don’t believe us you will go to Hell.”

Boyarin’s study shows that this claim, by either Rabbinic Judaism or the Christian Church, draws its power from a Hellenistic idea, the idea that the succession of authorized teachers have the exclusive truth about religion.  As Boyarin notes, truth becomes the property of the proper house of study and is passed down from generation to generation by those who have been properly trained.  We might say that following the influence of Hellenism, both Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity became systems of authorized beliefs and doctrines instead of ways of living in community.

Boyarin writes:

“The rabbinic version of a diadoche cannot be stated before the promulgation of the Mishna at the beginning of the third century, thus well after Justin.  If anything, the necessity for Judaism to constitute itself as an orthodoxy for the first time in its history came from the challenge of the younger brother.  More plausibly in my view, both were equally participants in larger discursive or epistemic developments within their cultural and political context.”[2]

You can choose to follow Judah ha-Nasi or Justin but the pattern is the same.  You submit to authority in order to belong, and it is the human desire to belong that really motivates religious affiliation.  What motivates those in authority is even simpler: power.

Topical Index: religion, Hellenism, succession, authority, power, Nehemiah 9:32

[1] Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: the Partition of Judeo-Christianity (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), p. 75.

[2] Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: the Partition of Judeo-Christianity (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), p. 76.