Philo's lead found no imitators. It was not for many centuries that
two causes led the Synagogue to formulate a creed. And even then it
was not the Synagogue as a body that acted, nor was it a creed that
resulted. The first cause was the rise of sects within the Synagogue. Of
these sects the most important was that of the Karaites or Scripturalists.
Rejecting tradition, the Karaites expounded their beliefs both as a
justification of themselves against the Traditionalists and possibly as
a remedy against their own tendency to divide within their own order
into smaller sects. In the middle of the twelfth century the Karaite
Judah Hadassi of Constantinople arranged the whole Pentateuch under
the headings of the Decalogue, much as Philo had done long before.
And so he formulates ten dogmas of Judaism. These are--(i) Creation
(as opposed to the Aristotelian doctrine of the eternity of the world);
(ii) the existence of God; (iii) God is one and incorporeal; (iv) Moses
and the other canonical prophets were called by God; (v) the Law is the
Word of God, it is complete, and the Oral Tradition was unnecessary;
(vi) the Law must be read by the Jew in the original Hebrew; (vii) the
Temple of Jerusalem was the place chosen by God for His manifestation;
(viii) the Resurrection of the dead; (ix) the Coming of Messiah, son of
David; (x) Final Judgment and Retribution.
Within the main body of the Synagogue we have to wait for the same
moment for a formulation of Articles of Faith. Maimonides (1135-1204)
was a younger contemporary of Hadassi; he it was that drew up the one
and only set of principles which have ever enjoyed wide authority in
Judaism. Before Maimonides there had been some inclination towards
a creed, but he is the first to put one into set terms. Maimonides
was much influenced by Aristotelianism, and this gave him an impulse
towards a logical statement of the tenets of Judaism. On the other side,
he was deeply concerned by the criticism of Judaism from the side of
Mohammedan theologians. The latter contended, in particular, that the
biblical anthropomorphisms were destructive of a belief in the pure
spirituality of God. Hence Maimonides devoted much of his great treatise,
_Guide for the Perplexed_, to a philosophical allegorisation of the
human terms applied to God in the Hebrew Bible. In his Commentary on the
_Mishnah_ (Sanhedrin, Introduction to Chelek), Maimonides declares
'The roots of our law and its fundamental principles are thirteen.' These
are--(i) Belief in the existence of God, the Creator; (ii) belief in
the unity of God; (iii) belief in the incorporeality of God; (iv) belief
in the priority and eternity of God; (v) belief that to God and to God
alone worship must be offered; (vi) belief in prophecy; (vii) belief that
Moses was the greatest of all prophets; (viii) belief that the Law was
revealed from heaven; (ix) belief that the Law will never be abrogated,
and that no other Law will ever come from God; (x) belief that God knows
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