I have started reading a very interesting book by a 17th-century Dutch Reformed scholar and professor of ancient history, Campegius “Kempe” Vitringa, Sr. (1659-1722), titled “Ancient Roots for Reformed Polity: De Synagoga Vetere and the Ecclesiology of the Early Church – An Annotated Compendium.” It is a modern (2020) English translation and abridgment of his original 1,100-page Latin dissertation on the development of ancient Jewish synagogues before Christ, and how they informed the development of early Christian congregations. Vitringa’s thesis is that Divine Providence prepared the synagogal structure in anticipation of the beginning of the New Testament church.

Toward the beginning of the book, in discussing the earliest development of the synagogue, and the customs and canons regulating how and where synagogue-buildings should be built in pre-Christian Judaism, Vitringa makes the following startling admission:

“Synagogues were sometimes built near the sepulchers of devout persons; sometimes they were built round sepulchers of devout persons; so as to enclose them within their walls. Synagogues thus circumstanced, were esteemed more sacred. There was a notion among the Jews, that the souls of the deceased hovered round the tombs in which their bodies were deposited, and that by their intercession, suppliants, who frequented their tombs, obtained the more easily their requests from God; and though some Jews strongly disclaim this notion, and assert, that they frequent these tombs to learn a lesson of humility, and to be put in mind of death, (the common lot of all); still there is little doubt, but that the general opinion was in favor of the intercession of departed spirits.” (p. 28, Kindle edition; emphasis mine)

Speaking as he is about the development of the synagogal system before Christ and the advent of the New Covenant, this is remarkable as far as common Protestant views of the invocation of saints and the veneration of holy people’s tombs and relics, and the origins and development of these practices, are concerned.

The original Reformers’ standard argument, popular to this day, is that the invocation of saints and related practices (e.g. the veneration given to martyrs’ tombs) are of a later pagan, Hellenizing and Roman influence, and they have nothing to do with the pure Jewish font of earliest Christianity.

Thus Melanchthon in his Apology of the Augsburg Confession says (emphasis mine): “For when they [i.e. Catholics defending invocation of saints] cite the example of the Church, it is evident that this is a new custom in the Church.” Similarly, Calvin, in his 1543 letter to the Imperial Diet at Spires on “The Necessity of Reforming the Church,” calls the invocation of saints “profane heathen delusions” and says that the Jews “do not . . . seek intercession from the dead . . . how extravagant, then, and infatuated, to abandon the form of prayer which the Lord has recommended, and without any injunction, and with no example, to introduce into prayer the intercession of saints?” (emphasis mine).

It is also a standard line in more recent Protestant systematic theology to identify the source of this “corruption” with a kind of Hellenizing influence from Greco-Roman paganism during the development of the post-New Testament church, as when the great Reformed Princeton systematic theologian Charles Hodge states that “[t]he polytheism of the Church of Rome is in many respects analogous to that of heathen Rome.”

If Prof. Vitringa’s research is correct, however — and note again that, as a Reformed Calvinist, he had no agenda of trying to attest a strong saintly-intercessory tradition in pre-Christian Judaism! — then whatever its theological and rational merits or demerits, the pious practice of directly seeking the intercession of the holy departed in order to “boost” the efficacy of one’s prayer to the one true God, is directly intertwined with pre-Christian Judaism and the development of the ancient synagogue, and not a “foreign corruption” wrought by the extension of the church of God to the gentiles under the New Covenant. Nor was this an eccentric opinion of a few Jews, but “the general opinion” among them!

Back to Vitringa: “Some [Jewish] writers have even gone so far as to explain, how the prayer of the suppliant on earth reaches the departed spirit; and it is expressly stated in the Gemara [a part of the Talmudic Rabbinical commentary], that the reason why the Lord hid the body of Moses was, ‘lest the Israelites in exile should come to his tomb, and pray, saying, O Moses, our master, intercede for us, we beseech thee.‘”

Of course there remain many reasonable arguments to be had about the propriety of the invocation of saints, its relationship to Scripture as the written Word of God, whether and to what extent abuses in pious customs can creep in and how they are to be curtailed. The Rabbinical commentary quoted above, for instance, makes it sound like God was trying to prevent Israelites from invoking Moses in prayer.

It is also noteworthy that, at least as far as the liturgical tradition of the Western/Latin Catholic Church is concerned, saints are as a rule not directly invoked and addressed in prayer in the liturgy, but are rather (even on their feasts and memorials) mentioned, and their intercession and merits referenced and called upon, in prayer addressed directly to God.

Just as it seems was the case from Vitringa’s description in pre-Christian Jewish synagogues, the direct invocation of saints was more a matter of pious folk custom than formal liturgical prayer, it remains to a large extent the same in apostolic Christian churches of today. (There are exceptions, of course, like the use of the Litany of the Saints, which does directly invoke saints in prayer, at certain liturgical occasions.)

However, Vitringa’s frank admission should at least help put to rest the specious notion, common in “pop apologetics” and in the collective consciousness from Reformation times to our day, that “all that saint stuff” in the older apostolic churches — that is, the Roman Catholic, Eastern, and Oriental Orthodox communions — is some later pagan creep that has nothing to do with “pure” Jewish tradition, or pre-New Testament Israel. History seems to tell a very different and far more nuanced story, and Kempe Vitringa should be commended for his honest and scholarly assessment of the evidence without a confessional agenda.