(The Badlands, SD)
What springs to mind when you hear the word Pharisee? Uh-huh, I thought so.
Because the Pharisees get so much negative publicity in the New Testament, we tend to think of them as the bad guys – Jesus' arch-foes and a bunch of legalistic nitpickers. Actually, the truth is pretty close to the opposite of this.
I had always known in a general way that this was true, but an excellent 15-part series from 2023 that I just watched, Searching for the Historical Jesus, brought it into focus: The Great Courses.
The Sadducees were the aristocrats and elite and closer to being the bad guys. (They didn't believe in an afterlife, so they were "Sad, you see." :)) They cut deals with the governing authorities and refused to go beyond the Torah (Written Law) in their thinking.
In contrast, the Pharisees were more the party of the common people, laymen and scribes. (Scribes could include everything from mere secretaries to lawyers.) The Jewish Virtual Library describes them as "blue collar Jews." Pharisees, Sadducees & Essenes.
Far from being nitpicking legalistic nigglers, the Pharisees were far more broad-minded than the Sadducees. Their thinking went beyond the Torah to include oral tradition (the Oral Law) and later the Mishnah. They believed in an afterlife in which God would punish the wicked and reward the righteous, a Messiah who would usher in an era of world peace, assembly in synagogues and individual prayer - pretty much what Jesus believed. (Many scholars believe Jesus was likely a Pharisee. He certainly wasn't a Sadducee.)
Unlike the Sadducees, the Pharisees loved to wrestle with issues. As summarized in the Encyclopedia Brittanica:
[T]he Pharisees admitted the principle of evolution in the Law: humans must use their reason in interpreting the Torah and applying it to contemporary problems. Rather than blindly follow the letter of the Law even if it conflicted with reason or conscience, the Pharisees harmonized the teachings of the Torah with their own ideas or found their own ideas suggested or implied in it. They interpreted the Law according to its spirit. When in the course of time a law had been outgrown or superseded by changing conditions, they gave it a new and more-acceptable meaning, seeking scriptural support for their actions through a ramified system of hermeneutics.
Pharisee | Definition, History, & Legacy
Pharisee, member of a Jewish religious party that flourished in Palestine during the latter part of the Second Temple period. The Pharisees’ insistence on the binding force of oral tradition still remains a basic tenet of Jewish theological thought. Learn about the history of the Pharisees and...
www.britannica.com
This isn't to say the Pharisees were fans of Jesus, but they were hardly the legalistic, letter-of-the-Law hypocrites the term "Pharisee" has come to mean today. (The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines a pharisaical individual as one who is "hypocritical, censorious and self-righteous.")
Certainly, as with religious leaders today, some of them were precisely what the Gospels describe Jesus as attacking them for being: Full of themselves, in love with power and wealth, hypocritical in what they demanded of others versus what they demanded of themselves. But this was not the Pharisee party as a whole any more than a handful of bad apples define some modern Christian denomination.
Some leading scholars suggest that the New Testament passages most hostile to the Pharisees were written after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 A.D., when the Sadducees and Essenes had disappeared and the Pharisees had become the dominant form of Judaism in competition with Christianity. It is the Pharisees who are the ancestors of modern Rabbinic Judaism. (The Searching for the Historical Jesus series also makes the point that any conspiracy to destroy Jesus involving the Pharisees and Sadducees working together is historically implausible because the two parties pretty much despised each other.)
I'm no historian or expert on the Pharisees. The point is simply that the mental image most of us have of them is quite inaccurate. Understanding who they really were is an example of how basic historical knowledge can shed light on biblical passages that might otherwise be misleading
So the next time someone calls you a Pharisee, smile and say, "Why, thank you!"
