How can I find the different ancestral laws in John's Gospel? I searched for ancestry NEAR John and ancestral laws NEAR John.
To the best of my knowledge, ancestral laws is not a common term in the academic study of scripture. Are you referring to the Mitzvot, oral Torah law, or cultural tradition? In no case are you likely to find the information you are looking for accurately prepackaged for you.
If you mean Mitzvot, although there is a standard number, the actual laws vary by Jewish groups. A later, very common list is available in Logos as Commandments of the Law. To find those of oral Torah or tradition, I would analyze John in terms of laws - followed, broken, or assumed background - and subtract out the known mitzvot. The remainder then need research to classify into those that latter Jewish literature assign to oral Torah or those that are cultural in the sense of having no rabbinic written origin.
I do find the term used in relationship to the Essenes:
[quote]Philo describes the Essenes a few times in his literary oeuvre; the most important of these descriptions are to be found in Apologia Pro Iudaies and Quod Omnis Probus Liber Sit. The former is a reference to Hypothetica, the title given by Philo to his work. It is preserved as an extract in Praeparatio Evangelica 8.5, 11, and Eusebius was responsible for describing the contents as “the apology for the Jews” (8.10, 19). The latter, “for every good man is free,” is the second part of a larger work that discusses the relationship between ethics and civil freedom in a way that is reminiscent of Stoic ideals. This too is preserved as a fragment in the same work by Eusebius (book 8, chapter 12). The authenticity of this latter excerpt has previously been questioned but is now generally accepted as genuine.
It is in Probus 75–91 that Philo hints at the kind of writings that were considered authoritative. He describes how the the Essaioi (variant of Essenes), who numbered some four thousand in Palestinian Syria, were models of ethical living. Their virtue is indicated by their name, which Philo acknowledges is not Greek and thinks it means “holiness,” and exemplified by the way they live. The Essenes flee from the cities and towns and instead live in villages, in order to avoid the ungodliness of the town dwellers. The rationale for the avoidance is the corrupting influence of intermingling with the ungodly, which Philo compares to the spread of disease: “As noxious air breeds epidemics there, so does the social life afflict the soul with incurable ills” (76).
Timothy H. Lim, The Formation of the Jewish Canon, ed. John J. Collins, The Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2013), 148–149.
It is used against tyrants:
[quote]The author of 2 Maccabees uses the persuasive power of the term “ancestral laws” to depict Antiochus as an arch tyrant, one who fights against God. The success of the Maccabean uprising in response to his decision is celebrated in the Feast of Hanukkah. However, the decision seems not to have been one of much concern to the king.
Robert Doran, “Antiochus IV Epiphanes,” in The Eerdmans Dictionary of Early Judaism, ed. John J. Collins and Daniel C. Harlow (Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2010), 339.
[quote]Erich Gruen has said that ancestral law, like freedom, was a slogan that carried great emotional appeal and that opposing parties would both assert that they were the champions of the ancestral laws. By using this emotion-laden phrase, the author strives to engage his audience and move them to maintain and follow ancestral traditions. Recognition of this motif also clarifies why the author expounds so much on the building of a gymnasium in Jerusalem. The gymnasium was the symbol of Greek education par excellence. The author warns his audience against full acceptance of Hellenistic culture and stresses instead the need for the traditional educational goals of a Judean community.
Robert Doran, 2 Maccabees: A Critical Commentary, ed. Harold W. Attridge, Hermeneia—A Critical and Historical Commentary on the Bible (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2012), 13.
as, perhaps, a background for the "traditions of man" debates
[quote]What were these ancestral laws? Most scholars are quick to identify the ancestral laws with the Torah of Moses. While Tcherikover agrees with this identification, he helps to complicate it, asking whether only written Torah or also oral traditions would have been intended. He points out, for example, that nothing in the Mosaic Torah (i.e., the Pentateuch) assigns to a high priest the governing position he holds at this time in Jerusalem, nor can the Mosaic Torah alone account for all of the cultic and administrative practices that Antiochus III intends to confirm in this document. Tcherikover asserts, “There is no doubt that the concept of ‘ancestral laws,’ where it concerns the Jews, is much broader than the law of Moses, and includes, not only the elements of Jewish religion, but the maintenance of political institutions, the form of the regime, the methods of social organization, and the like.”
Tcherikover is certainly right, but it will be necessary for us to complicate this picture still further, to consider not only the place of Mosaic Torah in relation to oral traditions intended to interpret or supplement this law, but also other written and oral traditions backed by competing claims to ancestral (and divine) authority. That is, the generic authorization of self-governance according to “ancestral laws” masks the possibility that the scope and content of these laws were not universally agreed upon by Jews in this period. The literary evidence suggests that not all Jews would have agreed on the content and limits of authoritative tradition. In light of this fact, we must also consider that there may have been disagreement as to (1) whether written Mosaic Torah was agreed to be the primary source for ancestral laws; (2) whether other written or oral traditions might have held equal or greater status as a source of ancestral laws; and (3) whether current social, political, and religious norms or practices were perceived to be in accordance with ancestral laws, whatever these were understood to be.It will help to view the ancestral laws as part of a tradition that is not a “fixed tablet” but rather constantly in the process of being articulated and performed. For this reason, while the idea of “ancestral laws” and their concomitant authority for the community may be fairly fixed in this period, their contents—and their meaning—may be more fluid. This makes the ancestral laws an important site of contest as well as an important resource for the ongoing negotiation, construction, and articulation of Jewish identity, practice, and belief in the midst of the colonial situation. Bhabha writes of the repeated invention of tradition in this way:
The social articulation of difference, from the minority perspective, is a complex, on-going negotiation that seeks to authorize cultural hybridities that emerge in moments of historical transformation. The “right” to signify from the periphery of authorized power and privilege does not depend on the persistence of tradition; it is resourced by the power of tradition to be reinscribed through the conditions of contingency and contradictoriness that attend upon the lives of those who are “in the minority.” The recognition that tradition bestows is a partial form of identification. In restaging the past it introduces other, incommensurable cultural temporalities into the invention of tradition. This process estranges any immediate access to an originary identity or a “received tradition.”
Bhabha calls our attention to the fact that tradition—in this case “ancestral law,” though we will soon turn our attention to other traditions—is not simply inherited or received, but is actively produced in an ongoing process of negotiation that both uses and invents the past as a resource for constructing identity and meaning in the present. The active production of tradition is an imaginative and creative process. In a similar vein, Stephen Weitzman has emphasized the vital role of imagination and creativity in what he calls the “cultural persistence” of Judaism in the Second Temple period, especially in the face of threats from imperial powers.132
Anathea E. Portier-Young, Apocalypse against Empire: Theologies of Resistance in Early Judaism (Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2011), 73–75.
or the laws of other tribal groups:
[quote]
THE Rechabites had lived a nomad life, dwelling in tents, not practising agriculture, abstaining from intoxicants. They were therein obeying the command of their ancestor, Jonadab. They had been driven by the Babylonian invasion to take refuge in Jerusalem, and, no doubt, were a nine days’ wonder there, with their strange ways. Jeremiah seized on their loyalty to their dead ancestor’s command as an object-lesson, by which he put a still sharper edge on his rebukes. The Rechabites gave their ancestral law an obedience which shamed Judah’s disobedience to Jehovah. God asks from us only what we are willing to give to one another, and God is often refused what men have but to ask and it is given. The virtues which we exercise to each other rebuke us, because we so often refuse to exercise them towards God.
Alexander MacLaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture: Isaiah 49–66, Jeremiah (Bellingham, WA: Logos Bible Software, 2009), 351.
etc.
