The Key That Was Taken

Jesus, the Kabbalah of Entering, and the Orchard of Pardes

Luke records a sentence that many readers pass over on the way to something else. Jesus is at table in a Pharisee's house (Luke 11:37), speaking to the nomikoi, the lawyers whose trade was the interpretation of Torah, and the King James Version gives his words this way: "Woe unto you, lawyers! for ye have taken away the key of knowledge: ye entered not in yourselves, and them that were entering in ye hindered" (Luke 11:52). The verse usually gets filed as a rebuke, one more entry in the long ledger of Jesus quarrelling with religious authorities, and the reader moves on to the next pericope without much thought.

The accusation, though, is oddly concrete. He charges the lawyers with removing an object, a key, and with failing to perform an action, entering, and the Greek presses the second charge by using the same verb, eiserchomai, twice inside one clause, once for what the lawyers refused to do and once for what the people behind them were already doing at the moment they were stopped. Matthew's form of the saying (23:13) speaks of shutting up the kingdom of heaven against men rather than taking away a key, and no one can say with confidence which evangelist preserves the older wording, although the Gospel of Thomas, as we will see in a moment, sides with Luke on the key. Once the verb is placed beside what entering meant in the wider currents of Jewish esoteric speculation, the saying changes shape in the hand.

The Key and What It Was For

The key was already a working idiom in Jewish talk about Torah, and Jesus had no need to invent it. The Babylonian Talmud preserves a saying of Rabbah bar Rav Huna comparing a man who has Torah without the fear of heaven to a treasurer handed the keys to the inner chambers but not the keys to the outer ones, and then asking, with the dry humor of the academy, how such a man is supposed to get in (b. Shabbat 31a–b). The saying is later than Jesus by a couple of centuries, so it cannot serve as his source. What it does show is how naturally rabbinic teachers pictured learning as a house with doors and a ring of keys, in which mastery belonged to the one who could open, and the keeper of the keys resembled a steward or a guide more than a bookish collector of opinions.

Jesus uses the idiom at its full weight. The lawyers, on his account, held an office whose entire purpose was opening, and they had pocketed the key, planted themselves in the doorway, and turned back everyone in the queue. The Gospel of Thomas gives the saying in a form strikingly close to Luke's, with the Pharisees and the scribes taking the keys of knowledge and hiding them, neither going in themselves nor letting in those who wish to go in (Gos. Thom. 39). Whether Thomas depends on Luke or draws on an independent stream of the sayings tradition is one of the long-running disputes in the study of that gospel, and this one logion cannot settle it. Two early witnesses nonetheless agree on the key and on the verb, and for the present argument that agreement carries more weight than the question of who copied whom.

The Dead Sea Scrolls level a cognate accusation from outside the Jerusalem establishment. In one of the Thanksgiving Hymns the speaker complains that teachers of deceit have withheld the drink of knowledge from the thirsty and given them vinegar for their thirst (1QHa XII, 11). The image there is water rather than a lock, which is a small difference and also a large one, since a key can be slipped into a pocket while a fountain can only be stopped up, and the two metaphors imagine two different kinds of thief. The Qumran community believed the Temple leadership had sealed off access to right interpretation, and it organized its common life around a rival claim to hold what had been withheld. Jesus and the sectarians drew from the same well of complaint, which tells us that the charge in Luke 11:52 belonged to a recognizable category of offense in first-century Jewish speech rather than to a private grievance improvised over one awkward dinner.

Pardes: What Happens When You Actually Enter

The tradition turns strange at this point, and the strangeness repays slow reading. The Babylonian Talmud (b. Hagigah 14b), with a parallel in the Tosefta (t. Hagigah 2:3), reports that four sages entered pardes, a Persian loanword for a walled garden or orchard that came to stand for the inner domain of divine mystery. The four were Ben Azzai, Ben Zoma, Elisha ben Abuyah, remembered afterward only as Acher, "the Other," and Rabbi Akiva.

Of the four, Ben Azzai looked and died. Ben Zoma looked and came away harmed, a word the later sources take to mean that his reason gave out, and Acher "cut the shoots," a gardener's euphemism for apostasy that pictures a man tearing up the orchard he had been admitted to walk in. Only Akiva went in peace and came out in peace, the single member of the party to return whole.

The story is usually read as a warning against mystical study, and a warning is what it is. Its more interesting work, for this essay at least, lies in how it treats the inner domain of divine knowledge as a place a person goes into, with consequences proportioned to the preparation and the method of the one going in. A garden has an inside and an outside, and the Talmud is far more interested in what the inside did to the four men than in how they found the gate.

The classical Kabbalah of the Middle Ages gave this spatial instinct a full cosmology. The ten sefirot, the emanations through which the hidden God becomes manifest, form a tree of linked levels, and the older Sefer Yetzirah had already opened with thirty-two wondrous paths of wisdom, the ten sefirot together with the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, by which the world was made (Sefer Yetzirah 1:1). Later Kabbalists reimagined those paths as routes the soul travels, each level a domain to be entered and understood before the next one opens to it.

A caution belongs here, and I will repeat it later because the whole argument depends on it. The Zohar surfaced in thirteenth-century Castile, Isaac Luria taught in sixteenth-century Safed, and the date of Sefer Yetzirah is itself disputed across several centuries of late antiquity, so none of this machinery can be read back into the first century as doctrine Jesus knew. The verb, however, is older than the system that later grew around it, and the verb is what the Pardes story and Luke 11:52 hold in common.

The Fifty Gates and the One Moses Could Not Open

The architecture of entry carries a numerical theology of its own. In b. Rosh Hashanah 21b, Rav and Shmuel are both credited with the teaching that fifty gates of understanding were created in the world and all were given to Moses except one, and the Talmud finds its proof in Psalm 8, "For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels" (8:5 in English Bibles, 8:6 in the Hebrew). The Hebrew word behind "angels" is elohim, and the rabbis read the verse as saying that Moses fell short of the divine by a single degree. Forty-nine gates, the entire human range of understanding, he passed through, and the fiftieth stayed shut.

The claim startles once you remember who Moses is in the Hebrew Bible. He received the Torah at Sinai, the LORD spoke to him "face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend" (Exod 33:11), and Deuteronomy closes by saying that no prophet like him has arisen since in Israel (Deut 34:10). The rabbis still left him one gate short. The Talmud itself offers no account of the missing gate, and the explanations arrive later, when Kabbalistic writers assigned the fifty gates to Binah, Understanding, the third of the upper sefirot, so that the last gate became the threshold of the highest understanding a created mind could approach.

A homiletic tradition, which I have not been able to trace to one early source and so offer only as a later reading, found the gate hidden in the name of the mountain where Moses died. Nebo, spelled nun-bet-vav, can be read as nun bo, "fifty is in it," as though Moses crossed the last gate only in dying, on the summit from which he was shown the land he would not enter (Deut 34:1–5). Even here the verb of entering waits for him, since the command that sends Moses up Nebo closes with lo tavo, "thou shalt not go thither unto the land" (Deut 32:52), from bo, the ordinary Hebrew verb for coming in, so that the one place the greatest prophet was refused is described in the language of entering.

Fifty also runs through the biblical calendar with an insistence hard to dismiss as accident. Leviticus has Israel count seven full weeks from the offering of the sheaf and keep the feast on the fiftieth day (Lev 23:15–16), and rabbinic tradition identified that feast, Shavuot, as the day the Torah was given (b. Pesachim 68b). The Jubilee falls in the fiftieth year, after seven sevens of years, when liberty is proclaimed throughout the land (Lev 25:8–10). Later interpreters read these as one grammar, forty-nine marking the outer limit of human effort and fifty marking what opens once that effort is spent and something answers from beyond it. That reading is theirs and the Torah never states it, though the numbers they were reading are in the Torah as written.

The Narrow Gate, the Many Rooms, and the Shut Door

The evidence needs careful handling at this point. The classical Kabbalah took shape more than a thousand years after Jesus, and attributing a Kabbalistic system to him would be an anachronism the sources will not bear. The argument here is narrower and easier to defend: the vocabulary of entering, of graded domains, of keys and gates and restricted passage, belonged to a current of Jewish speculation already alive in the first century. The Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice from Qumran (4Q400–407) describe a heavenly sanctuary of successive chambers and gates, written before Jesus was born, and Paul's own account of paradise, discussed below, comes from within a generation of him. The Mishnah, compiled around 200, still restricts teaching about the divine Chariot to a sage who understands of his own knowledge (m. Hagigah 2:1), which reads like the residue of an older nervousness. Jesus draws on that current with fluency.

In Matthew the instruction comes as a command: "Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it" (Matt 7:13–14). The verb is eiserchomai again, the one Luke uses for what the lawyers refused to do. Gates, roads, a crowd on the broad way and a handful on the narrow one: the picture is spatial before it becomes moral, and centuries of preaching have flattened it into a general appeal to virtue, which loses the detail that the small gate must first be found.

John 14:2 moves further inside. "In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you." The Greek monai, from menō, to remain, means dwelling places, and the English "mansions" comes down through the Latin mansiones, which in the Roman world could also mean the posting stations along an imperial road where a traveler stopped for the night before going on. That double sense, a room in a house and a halt on a journey, suits the passage better than either meaning alone. The speaker presents himself as the one who has already been inside and goes ahead to prepare the place, promising in the next verse to come back for the others (John 14:3), which, set beside Pardes, casts him in the part Akiva plays in the Talmud, the traveler who goes in and returns intact. That comparison is mine and not John's, and the Fourth Gospel shows no awareness of the Pardes story.

The sharpest instruction about how the entering is done comes in the Sermon on the Mount, and it has been in plain sight for two thousand years: "But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret" (Matt 6:6). The Greek reads eiselthe eis to tameion sou, and a tameion was the storeroom at the back of a house, usually the one room without a window, the place a family kept its grain and its few valuables. The Father met there is one who is en tō kryptō, in the hidden place. The wording also echoes Isaiah 26:20, which the Septuagint renders with the same verb, the same word for chamber, and the same shutting of the door, and it recalls Elisha, who "went in therefore, and shut the door upon them twain, and prayed unto the LORD" (2 Kgs 4:33).

The surrounding verses sharpen the point. The hypocrites pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners so that they may be seen (Matt 6:5), performing the outside of the practice at the public gate and going no further, which is the lawyers' failure in Luke 11:52 transposed into the key of private devotion. Jesus tells his hearers to do the thing the lawyers would not do, and the instruction is almost architectural: go in, close the door, and pray where no one is watching. The storeroom with the shut door is the individual practitioner's version of the narrow gate, and nobody can pass through it while performing for an audience.

Paul Caught Up to the Third Heaven

Paul writes some two decades after Jesus, and in 2 Corinthians he describes an experience that belongs in this company rather than in the margins of apostolic biography. He speaks of himself in the third person, a distancing that tells us how hard the thing was to narrate: "I knew a man in Christ above fourteen years ago, (whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth;) such an one caught up to the third heaven" (2 Cor 12:2). Two verses later the same man "was caught up into paradise, and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter" (12:4). The letter is usually dated to the mid-50s, which puts the experience around 41 or 42, several years after the Damascus encounter, though the arithmetic rests on a letter date that is itself an estimate and the window should be held loosely.

The third heaven had an address in the cosmology of the period. Second Enoch places paradise in the third heaven (2 En. 8), as does the Apocalypse of Moses (37:5), while the Babylonian Talmud later names seven heavens one by one (b. Hagigah 12b); the dating of 2 Enoch is badly contested, anywhere from the first century to the early Middle Ages, so it illustrates Paul's map more safely than it explains it. Paul's verb is harpazō, to seize or snatch, the word Acts uses when the Spirit carries Philip off (Acts 8:39) and the word Paul himself uses for the living who will be caught up to meet the Lord in the air (1 Thess 4:17). The passive voice matters, because Paul presents himself as the one taken rather than the one climbing, which is a different mode of entry from the Pardes story, where four sages walk in on their own initiative and pay for it on their own account.

The connection to Pardes is no modern invention of mine. Gershom Scholem argued in 1960 that Paul's paradise and the rabbinic orchard belong to one tradition of heavenly ascent, and C. R. A. Morray-Jones later developed the case at length, reading 2 Corinthians 12 against the Pardes story and the early Merkabah materials. Scholars still dispute how much of the later rabbinic shape can be pushed back into Paul's decade.

What Paul refuses to say matters as much as what he says. The phrase arrēta rhēmata, unspeakable words, borrows the vocabulary of the Greek mysteries, where arrētos named the rites an initiate was forbidden to disclose, and so Paul, a Pharisee by training, reaches for a pagan initiate's word to describe a Jewish ascent, which is the sort of crossing that happened constantly in Corinth and that the tidy histories of either religion tend to leave out. The later Hekhalot texts, whose dates run across late antiquity and are themselves disputed, warn repeatedly about revealing the contents of the heavenly palaces to the unprepared, and they station gatekeepers at each palace who demand the right seals before anyone may pass. The tradition understood that some gates opened inward and that what waited behind them could break a man, as it broke Ben Zoma, and Paul's silence is the behavior of someone who knew the rules of the place he had been taken to.

Muhammad and the Seven Gated Heavens

Some six centuries after Paul, the same grammar of guarded entry appears in a different religious world, and the parallels are close enough to instruct even though no line of literary dependence has to be drawn for them to do so. The Qur'an speaks briefly of a night journey from the sacred mosque to the farthest mosque (Q 17:1) and of a vision at the lote-tree of the boundary, sidrat al-muntahā, near which is the garden of refuge (Q 53:13–18). The full account of the Isrā' and Mi'rāj, the Night Journey and the Ascension, comes in the hadith collections, among them Sahih al-Bukhari 3887, in the book on the merits of the Ansar. Islamic tradition places the event in Mecca before the emigration to Medina, commonly around 621, not long after what the sources call the Year of Sorrow, when Muhammad lost both his wife Khadijah and his uncle and protector Abu Talib.

In Bukhari's account Gabriel escorts Muhammad through seven heavens, and at every gate the same exchange takes place. Gabriel asks for the gate to be opened; a voice asks who is there; Gabriel names himself; the voice asks who is with him; Gabriel answers that it is Muhammad; the voice asks whether he has been sent for; Gabriel says that he has, and only then does the gate open. The repetition is the point of the scene. Arrival at a gate earns nothing by itself, and the question asked at every threshold is whether the traveler has been summoned and whether someone who knows the way will vouch for him, which is the Hekhalot gatekeeper's question in Arabic dress.

At each heaven Muhammad meets a prophet: Adam in the first, John and Jesus in the second, Joseph in the third, Idris, whom many commentators identify with Enoch, in the fourth, Aaron in the fifth, Moses in the sixth, and Abraham in the seventh. When Muhammad passes him, Moses weeps, and when asked why, he says that a young man has been sent after him whose followers will enter paradise in greater numbers than his own. The verb of entering returns in Arabic, from the one figure our sources have already left standing at the edge of a land he could see and not go into.

At the lote-tree Muhammad receives the command of fifty daily prayers, and on his way down it is Moses who stops him and sends him back, drawing on long experience of what his own people could bear, until the number has been bargained down to five. The figure fifty turns up once more, which I note without building anything on it, since the hadith gives no sign of knowing the rabbinic gates and the coincidence could be nothing more than a round number. Later tellings add that Gabriel halted at the lote-tree and that Muhammad went on alone past the boundary no created being had crossed; Bukhari 3887 itself does not make that claim, and it belongs to the elaboration of the story rather than to its earliest written form.

The architecture of the Mi'rāj is a locked-door cosmology: seven heavens, a gatekeeper at each, a guide who knows the way, a traveler who has been called, and an encounter at the innermost point that ordinary language cannot carry. Muhammad comes back with an obligation, five prayers a day, and with the memory of the tree that marks the outer edge of the knowable.

The Crime of the Doorkeepers

When these passages are read side by side, they describe the encounter with divine knowledge in Jewish, Christian and Islamic sources as a journey through guarded and graded spaces, one that calls for a key, a guide, a summons, and a readiness to go where the unprepared do not come back intact. Moses climbs to the forty-ninth gate, and a later reading has the fiftieth open to him only in death. Four sages enter the orchard and three are undone in three different ways. Paul is seized, carried to the third heaven, and returns with words he will not repeat, while Muhammad passes seven guarded gates with Gabriel beside him and comes down carrying an obligation. These traditions span six centuries and three communities, and I am not claiming that any one of them borrowed from another; the shared feature is a picture of knowledge as a building with doors.

Jesus belongs inside that picture. For him the knowledge of God is something a person goes into rather than something skimmed off the surface of a text, there are keys to the entrance and people charged with holding them, and the passage carries real danger for anyone who attempts it badly. The tragedy he names in Luke 11:52 is that the very men whose social function was to hold the key and open the door had become the door's surest obstacle, using the authority given them for opening as an instrument for keeping others out.

A wry footnote waits in Matthew, the gospel that has Jesus condemn the scribes for shutting the kingdom of heaven against men (23:13). Seven chapters earlier the same evangelist has him hand Peter "the keys of the kingdom of heaven" (16:19), and the history of the church that claimed those keys is, among other things, a long experiment in whether a doorkeeper can be prevented from becoming a jailer. Western literature never stopped worrying at the problem. Dante sets an angel at the gate of Purgatory holding two keys, one gold and one silver, which he says he received from Peter, and the angel warns the poet that whoever looks back must return outside (Purgatorio IX). The Ophite diagram described by Origen supplies the soul with formulas to recite to each archon on its way up, as though heaven were a series of checkpoints staffed by officials who must be answered correctly (Contra Celsum 6.31).

Those later images inherited the anxiety Jesus voiced at a Pharisee's table, where the charge went beyond the lawyers' ignorance and named something worse, that they knew where the door was, held the key in their hands, and spent their authority making certain that no one behind them would get through. The verse has been read for centuries as one more argument with Pharisees, and all that time the word enter has been there in the middle of it, like a key someone left in the lock and walked away from.

Notes and References

Scriptural quotations follow the Authorized King James Version. Greek New Testament wording follows Nestle-Aland, Novum Testamentum Graece, 28th ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2012), and the Septuagint follows Rahlfs-Hanhart, Septuaginta, rev. ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2006). Talmudic references use the standard tractate and folio. Psalm 8 is cited by English verse (8:5), with the Hebrew numbering (8:6) noted in the text.

Passages cited: Exod 33:11; Lev 23:15–16; Lev 25:8–10; Deut 32:52; Deut 34:1–10; 2 Kgs 4:33; Ps 8:5; Isa 26:20; Matt 6:5–6; Matt 7:13–14; Matt 16:19; Matt 23:13; Luke 11:37–52; John 14:2–3; Acts 8:39; 2 Cor 12:2–4; 1 Thess 4:17; Qur'an 17:1; 53:13–18.

Al-Bukhari, Muhammad ibn Isma'il. Sahih al-Bukhari. Translated by Muhammad Muhsin Khan. 9 vols. Riyadh: Darussalam, 1997. Hadith 3887 (Book of the Merits of the Ansar).

The Babylonian Talmud. Edited by Isidore Epstein. London: Soncino Press, 1935–1952. Tractates cited: Shabbat 31a–b; Pesachim 68b; Rosh Hashanah 21b; Hagigah 12b, 14b.

Charlesworth, James H., ed. The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. 2 vols. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1983–1985. Vol. 1: 2 Enoch 8 (trans. F. I. Andersen); vol. 2: Apocalypse of Moses 37:5, in "Life of Adam and Eve" (trans. M. D. Johnson).

Danby, Herbert, trans. The Mishnah. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933. Hagigah 2:1.

Dante Alighieri. Purgatorio, Canto IX.

García Martínez, Florentino, and Eibert J. C. Tigchelaar, eds. The Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition. 2 vols. Leiden: Brill, 1997–1998. 1QHa XII, 11 (Thanksgiving Hymns); 4Q400–407 (Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice).

Kaplan, Aryeh, trans. Sefer Yetzirah: The Book of Creation. Rev. ed. York Beach, ME: Weiser, 1997. 1:1.

Lambdin, Thomas O., trans. "The Gospel of Thomas." In The Nag Hammadi Library in English, edited by James M. Robinson, rev. ed. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1990. Saying 39.

Morray-Jones, C. R. A. "Paradise Revisited (2 Cor 12:1–12): The Jewish Mystical Background of Paul's Apostolate." Harvard Theological Review 86 (1993): 177–217 and 265–292.

Origen. Contra Celsum. Translated by Henry Chadwick. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953. 6.31.

Scholem, Gershom. Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and Talmudic Tradition. New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1960.

Tosefta. Hagigah 2:3.