Article February 24, 1917 Issue

Rabbinical Error Rebuked

JULIA WARNER MICHAEL

On page 30 of Science and Health Mrs. Eddy writes that "Christ Jesus came to rebuke rabbinical error." This statement opens a profoundly interesting view of Jesus' mission, for the Jewish rabbis were priests, lawyers, and doctors whose jurisdiction through ritualistic worship covered every phase of Jewish life. Because the people unquestioningly obeyed their instructions as the word of God, any error in these teachings had a far reaching effect, and unfortunately bore the semblance of truth. The mistake of these masters was the promulgation of the false doctrine of materialistic theology. They preached a God and man compounded of spirit and matter, good and evil, and the necessity of laws whereby to govern an evil state of existence. From this followed their petitions, sacrifices, atonements, pardons, and all the complicated systems of entrance into sin, disease, and death, and emergence therefrom either here or hereafter.

The very zeal of priests and people for centuries to obey these laws had brought no surcease from evil, but had established the belief in it more firmly in human consciousness, thus removing mortals farther and farther from the true understanding of God as Love and of man as His image and likeness. Hence arose the necessity for the deliverance of men from such self-made bondage, and this evidently could be accomplished only through the denial of these teachings as God's word. This was the work, with the attendant proof of physical healing, that Jesus the Christ undertook.

When only twelve years old Jesus began to question the rabbis' doctrines, and distinctly affirmed that in so doing he was about his Father's business. From this time on the gospels give accounts of his open denunciations of rabbinical error. He completely disproved, in the healing of leprosy, the ceremonial laws outlined in the fourteenth chapter of Leviticus, by instantly healing ten cases of it. He discountenanced the rabbis' way of dealing with sin, by healing and saving the adulterous woman instead of consenting to her being stoned to death, and he rebuked their false interpretation of charity by restoring sight to blind Bartimaeus rather than by giving him alms. He denied the rabbis' teaching that divine wisdom and progress were evidenced through death, by recalling Lazarus from the grave. His whole ministry was a successful refutation of enthroned materialism.

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