[Originally posted in 2012. This brief discussion is from A History of the Jews by Christian historian Paul Johnson; he discusses the difference in dogmatic theology where Christianity had problems formulating while it was relatively absent from rabbinical Judaism. This book as been featured as MUST READ and MUST OWN, downloadable as ebook from amazon.com; reformatted for posting.]
Equally important, however, was another characteristic of Judaism: the relative absence of dogmatic theology.
Almost from the beginning, Christianity found itself in grave difficulties over dogma, because of its origins.
It believed in one God, but its monotheism was qualified by the divinity of Christ. To solve this problem it evolved the dogma of the two natures of Christ, and the dogma of the Trinity — three persons in one God. These devices in turn created more problems, and from the second century onwards produced innumerable heresies, which convulsed and divided Christianity through the Dark Ages.
The New Testament, with its enigmatic pronouncements by Jesus, and its Pauline obscurities–especially in the Epistle to the Romans — became a minefield. Thus the institution of the Petrine Church, with its axiom of central authority, led to endless controversy and a final breach between Rome and Byzantium in the 11th century. The precise meaning of the eucharist split the Roman trunk still further in the 16th.
The production of dogmatic theology — that is, what the church should teach about God, the sacraments and itself –became the main preoccupation of the professional Christian intelligentsia, and remains so to this day, so that at the end of the 20th century Anglican bishops are still arguing among themselves about he Virgin birth.
The Jews escaped this calvary.
Their view of God is very simple and clear. Some Jewish scholars argue that there is, in fact, a lot of dogma in Judaism. That is true in the sense that there are many negative prohibitions –chiefly against idolatry. But the Jews usually avoided the positive dogmas which the vanity of theologians tends to create and which are the source of so much trouble. They never adopted, for instance, the idea of Original Sin. Of all the ancient peoples, the Jews were perhaps the least interested in death, and this saved them from a host of problems. It is true that belief in resurrection and the afterlife was the main distinguishing mark of Pharisaism and thus a fundament of rabbinic Judaism. Indeed the first definite statement of dogma in the whole of Judaism, in the Mishnah, deals with this: ‘All Israel share in the world to come except the one who says resurrection has no origin in the Law.’ But the Jews had a way of concentrating on life and pushing death–and its dogmas–into the background. Predestination, single and double, purgatory, indulgences, prayers for the dad and the intercession of the saints — these vexatious sources of Christian discord caused Jews little or no trouble.
It is significant, indeed that whereas the Christians started to produce credal formulations very early in the history of the church, the earliest Jewish creed, listing 10 articles of faith, was formulated by Saadiah Gaon (882-942), by which time the Jewish religion was more than 2,500 years old. Not until much later did Maimonides’ 13 articles become a definitive statement of faith, and there is no evidence it was ever actually discussed and endorsed by any authoritative body. The original 13-point formulation, given in Maimonides’ commentary on the 10th Chapter of the Mishnah, on the Tractate Sanhedrin, lists the following articles of faith:
- the existence of a perfect Being, the author of all creation;
- God’s unity
- his incorporeality
- his pre-existence
- worship without intermediary
- belief in the truth of prophecy
- the uniqueness of Moses
- the Torah in its entirety is divinely given
- the Torah is unchangeable
- God is omniscient
- He punishes and rewards in the afterlife
- the coming of the Messiah
- the resurrection
This credo, reformulated as the Ani Ma’amin (‘I believe’), is printed in the Jewish prayer-book. It has given rise to little controversy. Indeed, credal formulation has not been an important preoccupation of Jewish scholars. Judaism is not about doctrine — that is taken for granted — as behavior; the code matters more than the creed.
The lasting achievement, then, of the sages was to transform the Torah into a universal, timeless, comprehensive and coherent guide to every aspect of human conduct. Next to monotheism itself, the Torah became the essence of Jewish faith.