When the student of Christian Science, hitherto not overly familiar with the Bible, grasps the fact that the healing truth which comes to this age through our Leader's book, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," was manifested to the first century through Jesus, he begins to ponder over the life and works and words of the one who demonstrated this Science of being for all time, and wonders at the fewness of the utterances of Christ Jesus which we possess. We are assured that he gave the seeking and receptive thought of his day all it could assimilate, and he must have been sought of many for the words of help and wisdom which fell from his lips. Jesus was accorded the title of rabbi, or master of the law, and in the thought of the Jews this meant that he was qualified to teach and expound the law and the Scriptures. The rabbis all had followers, or students, and each of the popular and supposedly more learned of them had a student body that numbered hundreds. While Jesus directly chose the first of his students, the twelve who were his closest and ablest followers, he must have had a great number of others who listened carefully to his every word and cherished what was said, to pass it on to others as was the custom.
The Jews made three arbitrary divisions of their Scriptures: the written law, consisting of the five books of Moses; the prophets, the books containing the prophetic writings; and the hagiographa, or sacred writings, comprising all the other books of what we now call the Old Testament. Copies of the complete canonical books were not at all common, but there is every reason to believe that Joseph's household possessed one, or at any rate that Jesus had constant access to one. In making new copies of the Jewish Scriptures every care was taken to secure accuracy, and translators of the various original copies of the ancient versions of the Old Testament now available find comparatively few discrepancies; nothing like the number to be found in the versions of the New Testament. It is probable, too, that two or three of the twelve apostles also had complete copies of the Scriptures. As at this time the cost of such a book was considerable and almost out of the question for the poorer class, from which Joseph and the twelve came, it can be seen what must have been the earnestness back of the sacrifice which enabled these households to procure this well-nigh priceless treasure.
To the orthodox, the temple Jew, the written law was the main thing; all else hinged upon it. Properly the sacrifices and ritualism it enjoined could only be carried on in Jerusalem, and so here it was that the rabbis held their schools and daily taught the oral law in explanation and amplification of the written. From the time the law had been given to Moses questions had arisen as to interpretation. The Sanhedrin and rabbis held that the law having been given to the Jewish nation in its completeness in written form, no other law was to be written; no interpretations, no customs, no explanations, no traditions, must be in writing—all must be oral, carried in the memory and so passed on and down. In the intervening centuries, however, so many accepted interpretations had been given, had received the Sanhedric and rabbinic endorsements, and then become incorporated in the traditional law, that in the first century the oral law was many times greater in volume than the written. It was said by the contemporaries of one great rabbi that so great was his power of interpretation that he could take of every stroke of every letter of every word in any one of the written laws and make a new law from each. Another rabbi, called "The Splendor of Wisdom," told an inquirer as to the extent of his knowledge, that he had been taught of the wise ones so much of the traditional law, that if all the sky were parchment, every reed a pen, all the water ink, and all the inhabitants of the world writers, these would not suffice to record all he knew of the law. So it may be seen how the Jewish student of the Scriptures was trained to carry in his memory what he was taught by the rabbi he looked to as a teacher; for it was forbidden to write it down.
