"What the rabbis were doing in their painstaking way was trying to see how the will of God could be discovered in every detail of life. It was because they believed that the love of God was so wide that they appear so narrow - the divine interest descends even to pots and pans, just as Jesus believed the very hairs of our head are numbered. The fact that the rabbis minded - and mind - about meat, wineskins, square holes and round holes, should not allow Gentiles in their loftiness to suppose that devout Jews were or are little better than the inhabitants of Swift's Lilliput debating whether to eat boiled eggs from the Big or the Little End. These debates are not the core of the rabbi's religious faith. They are the consequence that grows out from the fundamental faith, which is found in the Torah and in the Prophets, the belief that the Universal Creator and Lawgiver had revealed himself to mankind, and called mankind to himself to worship Him and serve Him. To judge Judaism by these obscure passages in the Mishnah would be like judging Christianity by the petty rules pinned to a convent notice-board about when the novices should do the laundry. The universalist faith of the 104th Psalm where God is seen animating, informing, enlivening and enriching all forms of terrestrial life, birds, trees, seas, land, men and mountains, underlies the apparently bizarre belief that He is fascinated with the details of domestic trivia. There are many ways in which the later teaching of Paul diverges from that of the Pharisees; so much so, that - as we have stated - some scholars would altogether dispute his claim to have been taught by the Pharisees. But it would be a travesty of the Pharisaic and rabbinic teaching to suppose that Paul abandoned it - still more that he abandoned Judaism, which he never did! - on the grounds that it was too 'petty' and that he wished to set out on his own. His cavalier attitude to the details of Pharisaic teaching did not derive from a 'modern' notion that such things do not matter; and of his surviving writings, a substantial part is in fact devoted to questions such as eating, drinking, haircuts, head-covering and sexual intercourse - humdrum or private matters for the rest of the human race, but very much up the street of the rabbis."

-a.n. wilson.