Pharisees

• 1. Introduction

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  The Pharisees were a Jewish movement of the Second Temple era, and the historian Josephus put their numbers at around 6,000. That is a small figure. By his account, their hold on ordinary people was so strong that anything they said against a king or high priest was believed.

  The movement itself no longer exists. Its name, though, lives on in two very different places. Mainstream forms of Judaism still trace their roots back to the Pharisees. Meanwhile, in everyday English, a lowercase version of the word names a hypocrite.

  How did a few thousand teachers and their followers become the foundation of a religious tradition? Who were the rivals they argued with, and what did they actually believe? And why do many Jews today hear an insult in a word borrowed from their ancestors' name?

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• 2. A Name Meaning Set Apart

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  The word Pharisee travelled from Ancient Greek, Pharisaios, back to the Aramaic Pərīšā, which means set apart or separated. Scholars disagree about what the Pharisees were separated from. The answer may be Gentiles, who were sources of ritual impurity, or Jews judged to be irreligious. A political reading is also possible, in which the name marks separatists who broke away from the Sadducee elite. Yitzhak Isaac Halevi saw the Sadducees and Pharisees as political parties more than religious sects.

  Thomas Walter Manson and Louis Finkelstein offered a stranger idea. They suggested the name came from an Aramaic word meaning Persian, or Persianizer. Shaye J. D. Cohen dismisses this. In his words, "Practically all scholars now agree that the name "Pharisee" derives from the Hebrew and Aramaic parush or persushi."

  The earliest historical mentions of the group appear in the four gospels and the Acts of the Apostles. Those books describe both their careful devotion to their reading of the Torah and their views about the last things. Josephus, a Jewish-Roman historian, later sorted first-century Jews into four schools of thought. Besides the Pharisees he listed the Essenes, the Sadducees and the Zealots.

  The Essenes were generally apolitical, and may have begun as dissident priests who refused to accept their high priests as legitimate. The Sadducees were the main antagonists of the Pharisees. Josephus is himself a puzzle, because many historians believe he was a Pharisee. That makes his praise of the movement hard to take at face value.

  Judah ha-Nasi edited the Mishnah around 200 AD, collecting Pharisaic interpretations into one authoritative text. Even so, none of the rabbinic sources contains an identifiable eyewitness account of the Pharisees. They have to be pieced together from rivals, admirers and heirs. The first rival worth meeting is the priestly party that claimed Zadok as its ancestor.

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• 3. Priests and Sages

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  In 597 BC, Nebuchadnezzar II began deporting Jews from the Kingdom of Judah to Babylon. After Jerusalem fell and the Temple was destroyed in 587 BC, the exile stretched to about 70 years. Houses of assembly, the synagogues, became the main places of prayer. A house of study, the beit midrash, served alongside them.

  In 539 BC the Persians conquered Babylon, and in 537 BC Cyrus the Great let the Jews return to Judea and rebuild the Temple. He did not allow a Judean monarchy. That left the priests as the dominant authority. Around this time the Sadducee party emerged as the party of priests and their allied elites.

  The Second Temple was finished in 515 BC, but it had been built under a foreign power. Questions about its legitimacy lingered. Various sects arose, each claiming to speak for Judaism alone, and they typically avoided social contact with one another, especially marriage.

  Daily religious life did not depend on the Temple alone. Most Jews could not attend its services regularly, so they gathered in synagogues for morning, afternoon and evening prayers. On Mondays, Thursdays and Shabbat, a portion of the Torah was read aloud. Priests controlled the Temple rituals, while scribes and sages, later called rabbis, dominated the study of the Torah. They kept an oral tradition that they believed went back to Mount Sinai.

  When Alexander the Great conquered Persia in 332 BC, a rift opened between priests and sages. In 167 BC the Seleucid king Antiochus IV entered the Temple and stripped it of money and ceremonial objects. He then ordered Jews to give up their own laws and customs. The Maccabean Revolt followed, and Jerusalem was liberated in 165 BC.

  The Sadducees and Pharisees fought on several fronts. One was cultural, with the Sadducees favoring Hellenization and the Pharisees resisting it. Another was legal and religious, pitting the Temple and its rites against the wider body of Mosaic law. A third was about the Torah itself. The Sadducees accepted only the Written Torah, and they rejected the Prophets, the Writings, the Oral Torah and the resurrection of the dead.

  The phrase "an eye in place of an eye" shows how far apart the two readings sat. For the Pharisees, the offender paid the value of the eye. The Sadducees took the words more literally, so the offender's own eye would be removed.

  Josephus places the Sadducees among the ruling classes. They were aristocratic monarchists, while the Pharisees were eclectic, popular and more democratic. One Pharisaic saying captures the mood: "A learned mamzer takes precedence over an ignorant High Priest." A mamzer, by the Pharisaic definition, is an outcast child born of a forbidden relationship. Adultery and incest are examples. The word is often, but wrongly, translated as illegitimate.

  The Pharisees grew largely out of those scribes and sages. Josephus first mentions them in connection with Jonathan Apphus, the man who succeeded Judas Maccabeus.

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• 4. Crown and Conquest

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  A Pharisee named Eleazar once insulted the Hasmonean ruler John Hyrcanus at the ruler's own table. He urged Hyrcanus to give up the office of High Priest. The reason was a rumor, probably untrue, that Hyrcanus had been conceived while his mother was a prisoner of war. Hyrcanus responded by distancing himself from the Pharisees. They had already opposed the Hasmonean wars of expansion and the forced conversion of the Idumeans.

  The Hasmoneans were hailed as heroes for resisting the Seleucids. Still, they lacked descent from the Davidic dynasty of the First Temple era, which weakened their claim to rule.

  After Hyrcanus died, his younger son Alexander Jannaeus made himself king and openly sided with the Sadducees by adopting their rites in the Temple. The result was a riot in the Temple, then a brief civil war, then a bloody repression of the Pharisees. On his deathbed, though, Jannaeus advised his widow, Salome Alexandra, to seek peace with them. Her brother was Shimon ben Shetach, a leading Pharisee.

  Under Salome, according to Josephus, Pharisaic political influence grew tremendously, especially in the Sanhedrin, the Jewish Council, which they came to dominate. Historians warn that Josephus may overstate the case. He reports elsewhere that the Pharisees did not rise to power until her reign, and his own Pharisaic leanings may have colored the story.

  After Salome died, her sons Hyrcanus II and Aristobulus II fought a civil war. The Pharisees generally supported Hyrcanus II. The war ended when the Roman general Pompey captured Jerusalem in 63 BC. According to Josephus, the Pharisees appeared before Pompey to ask that the old priesthood be restored and Hasmonean royalty abolished. They also opened Jerusalem's gates to the Romans. To them, Pompey's defilement of the Temple was divine punishment for Sadducean misrule.

  Pompey ended the monarchy and named Hyrcanus II high priest and ethnarch, a lesser title than king. Six years later Hyrcanus lost his remaining political authority. The proconsul of Syria took ultimate jurisdiction and ruled through Antipater, an Idumaean associate of Hyrcanus, and later through Antipater's sons Phasael and Herod. In 40 BC, Antigonus, the son of Aristobulus, overthrew Hyrcanus and named himself king and high priest. Herod fled to Rome.

  There Herod won the backing of Mark Antony and Octavian, and the Roman Senate recognized him as king. Josephus says Sadducean opposition pushed Herod to treat the Pharisees kindly. Herod nevertheless remained unpopular as a perceived Roman puppet. His treatment of his own family and the last Hasmoneans hurt him further, despite his restoration and expansion of the Temple. The Pharisees eventually turned against him and, in 4 BC, fell victim to his bloodthirstiness. The family of Boethus, whom Herod raised to the high priesthood, revived the Sadducean spirit, and the Pharisees again had them as opponents.

  While the Second Temple stood, Jews were required to travel to Jerusalem three times a year for Pesach, Shavuot and Sukkot. The Pharisees, like the Sadducees, stayed politically quiet and studied, taught and worshiped in their own way. In that period they shared and elevated the Essene idea that holiness could exist outside the Temple.

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• 5. After the Fire

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  In 73 AD the last Zealots died at Masada, and revolutionary Judaism lost whatever credibility it had left. The Sadducees, whose teachings were tied to the Temple, vanished when it was destroyed in 70 AD. The Essenes disappeared too. Perhaps their teachings had drifted too far from the concerns of the age, or perhaps the Romans sacked them at Qumran. Of the major sects, only the Pharisees were left.

  A midrash in Avot D'Rabbi Nathan tells of Rabbi Joshua weeping over the ruins. He cried out that the place which atoned for the sins of all Israel lay in ruins. Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai answered him: "Be not grieved, my son. There is another way of gaining ritual atonement, even though the Temple is destroyed. We must now gain ritual atonement through deeds of loving-kindness."

  That answer became a program. Rome governed Judea through a procurator at Caesarea and a Jewish patriarch, and it levied the Fiscus Judaicus. Yohanan ben Zakkai, a leading Pharisee, became the first patriarch, and he reestablished the Sanhedrin at Yavneh under Pharisee control. The rabbis told Jews to give charity in place of tithes to priests. They also urged everyone to study in local synagogues, because the Torah is "the inheritance of the congregation of Jacob."

  In 132 AD, Emperor Hadrian threatened to rebuild Jerusalem as a pagan city dedicated to Jupiter. Some leading sages of the Sanhedrin backed a rebellion led by Simon Bar Kosiba, later known as Bar Kokhba. His independent state was short-lived, and the Romans conquered it in 135 AD. Jews were barred from Jerusalem except on Tisha B'Av. Rome renamed the province Syria Palaestina and the city Aelia Capitolina.

  The historian Shaye Cohen notes that three generations after the Temple fell, most Jews expected no rebuilding in their lifetimes. Four questions followed. How could atonement be achieved without the Temple? How could the disastrous revolt be explained? How should Jews live in a Romanized world? How could present practice stay joined to the past? The Pharisaic idea that ordinary people could meet the sacred through everyday law gave an answer to all four. Those answers became Rabbinic Judaism.

  The rabbis avoided the word Pharisee, perhaps because outsiders used it and because it was openly sectarian. They added the birkat haMinim to the Amidah, a prayer understood as a rejection of sectarians. Disputes did not end. They moved inside Rabbinic Judaism, where scholarly debate became a value in its own right.

  The first rabbinic age belonged to the Tannaim, whose name comes from an Aramaic word for repeating, because they passed down the Oral Torah. During their era the rabbis finalized the canon of the Tanakh. The Amoraim, or speakers, came next. They debated at academies in Tiberias, Caesarea and Sepphoris in Judea, and at Nehardea, Pumpeditha and Sura in Babylonia. Their work produced the Talmudim, compiled around 400 AD in Judea and around 500 AD in Babylon.

  How powerful were the rabbis in those years? Jacob Neusner argued that they were a minority seeking authority without much government support. In his view the Talmud shows the world as the rabbis dreamed it should be. Salo Baron saw a general willingness among the people to follow rabbinic rule, backed by flogging, heavy fines and a wide system of excommunication.

  Baron points to a few striking details. R' Ashi took the title rabbana, once held by the exilarch. He appeared with two other rabbis as a delegation at the gate of King Yazdegard's court. The sage Rav was a personal friend of the Parthian king Artabenus IV, and Shmuel was close to King Shapur I of Persia.

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• 6. Core Convictions

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  A gentile once challenged the sage Shammai to teach him the wisdom of the whole Torah while he stood on one foot. Shammai drove him away. The man went to Hillel, who gently scolded him. Hillel said: "That which is hateful to you do not do to another; that is the entire Torah, and the rest is its interpretation. Go study." Both sages lived in the latter half of the 1st century BC. Pharisaic wisdom was gathered in one book of the Mishnah, Pirkei Avot, and this exchange perhaps best captures its attitude.

  The key rabbinic texts say surprisingly little about theology. No single tractate of the Mishnah or Talmud is devoted to it. Only one chapter of the Mishnah takes it up. It says three kinds of people will have no share in the world to come. They are those who deny the resurrection of the dead, those who deny the divinity of the Torah, and Epicureans. Epicureans deny divine supervision of human affairs.

  Sanhedrin 74a offers another list of core principles. Normally a Jew may break any law to save a life. That ruling, however, demands martyrdom rather than breaking the laws against idolatry, murder or adultery. Judah ha-Nasi pulled the other way. He told Jews to be meticulous in small duties as well as large ones, since no one knows which will bring a reward.

  Monotheism united the Pharisees with all Jews of the era. The Shema, built from Deuteronomy 6:4, shows this. It opens "Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God; the Lord is one." According to the Mishnah, it was recited in the Temple alongside the twice-daily Tamid offering. Jews of the diaspora said it in their houses of assembly. Tradition credits the men of the Great Assembly with requiring prayer three times a day, with the Shema in the morning and evening services.

  On human choice, Josephus drew a three-way contrast. The Sadducees held that people have total free will, and the Essenes held that a life is entirely predestined. The Pharisees held that people have free will while God foresees human destiny. Pirkei Avot 3:19 agrees, quoting Rabbi Akiva: "All is foreseen, but freedom of choice is given."

  On the afterlife, the sources disagree. The Sadducees are generally held to have rejected any existence after death. The New Testament says the Pharisees believed in the resurrection of the dead. Josephus describes it differently, claiming that only the soul is immortal. Good souls "pass into other bodies," he says, while "the souls of the wicked will suffer eternal punishment" beneath the earth.

  Combining Josephus and the New Testament, the theologian David Bentley Hart reads the Pharisees as expecting the righteous to be resurrected in ethereal bodies. These would resemble angels, spirits or the stars. He claims that the Apostle Paul and the first Christians understood resurrection the same way.

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• 7. Argument as Worship

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  The book of Exodus promises Israel "a kingdom of priests and a holy nation," and the Pharisees took that promise seriously. Jacob Neusner holds that they read it broadly and literally. If every Israelite was meant to be priestly, then ordinary Jews should keep purity rules in daily life, not only at the Temple. The kosher laws, perhaps first meant for priests, were extended to the whole people. So was the ban on cutting the flesh in mourning.

  This made the Pharisaic path more participatory. Rituals were not monopolized by an inherited priesthood, and leaders were chosen by scholarly achievement rather than birth.

  The standard picture says Pharisees accepted an Oral Torah alongside scripture. Anthony J. Saldarini argues that nothing explicit or implicit in the evidence supports this. He dates the Oral Torah to the 3rd century AD, with an unstated idea of it existing earlier. Rosemary Ruether sees the Pharisaic claim as a way of freeing Judaism from the grip of the Aaronite priesthood.

  The Talmudic sages held two things together. The oral law was revealed to Moses at Mount Sinai, and it was also the product of rabbinic debate. Taking part in that process meant taking part in God's continuing act of revelation. In Neusner's description, the rabbis believed Moses was a rabbi, God wears phylacteries, and the heavenly court studies Torah just as the earthly one does.

  The Pharisees were innovators as well as preservers. They enacted protective rules called gezeirot, such as the ban on taking a lulav on Shabbat lest one carry it in the public domain. Reading the Megillah on Purim and lighting the Menorah on Hanukkah are rabbinic innovations. So are the blessings before meals and the wording of the Amidah, all known as Takanot. They grounded this authority in Deuteronomy 17:10-11, which tells Israelites to act according to what the teachers instruct and not to turn right or left.

  Abraham Geiger added a twist. He argued that the Sadducees clung to an ancient Halacha, while the Pharisees were willing to develop it as the times required. Bernard Revel's study of Karaite Halacha rejects many of Geiger's proofs.

  Debate itself mattered as much as any single law. The rabbis believed the heavenly court argues over the same questions as the earthly one. So when one rabbi disagreed with another, neither felt he was rejecting God. Arguing honored God.

  The Mishnah and Talmud even mark generations of scholars by pairs of rival schools. In the first century the two major Pharisaic schools were those of Hillel and Shammai. Hillel died in 10 AD, and Shammai served as president of the Sanhedrin until he died in 30 AD. Their followers dominated scholarly debate for decades. The Talmud records the arguments of Shammai's school, but the teachings of Hillel's school became authoritative.

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• 8. The Gospel Portrait

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  Nicodemus the Pharisee, named in John 3:1, helped Joseph of Arimathea bury the body of Jesus at great personal risk. Gamaliel, a highly respected rabbi, was a Pharisee too, and he is remembered in Christianity as a defender of the apostles. Some Christian traditions say he secretly converted. The New Testament also records Pharisees in conflict with John the Baptist and with Jesus.

  Paul the Apostle declared himself a Pharisee, even after his belief in Jesus. Acts 15:5 shows other Pharisees becoming believers. Some of them argued that gentile converts must be circumcised and follow the Mosaic law. That dispute was addressed at the Apostolic Council in Jerusalem in 50 CE.

  The Synoptic Gospels, especially, portray Pharisaic leaders as fixated on man-made rules about purity. Jesus is shown criticizing ritual observance pursued for acclaim or at the expense of helping needy people, which he calls hypocrisy. He compares it to cleaning a drinking vessel on the outside only, leaving the inside unclean. The Gospel of John, the only one to mention Nicodemus, shows the sect as divided and willing to debate.

  Saint Paul and Martin Luther inferred that the Pharisees were more legalistic than other sects. Josephus does call them the strictest observers of the law. Yet Neusner points out that Pharisaism was one of many Judaisms of its day, set apart by how it interpreted the law.

  Because of these depictions, the English word "pharisee" came to mean a hypocritical, arrogant person. Such a person places the letter of the law above its spirit. Modern Jews generally find this usage insulting, and some consider it implicitly antisemitic.

  Scholars dispute the historical picture. Hyam Maccoby speculated that Jesus himself was a Pharisee and that his arguments with them signal inclusion. Disputation was the dominant mode of the Talmud, after all. Most scholars have rejected his view.

  The healing of a paralytic man shows the controversy. Jesus declared the man's sins forgiven, the Pharisees called it blasphemy, and Jesus then healed him. E. P. Sanders argues that rabbinic sources commonly link illness with sin and healing with forgiveness. In his view no surviving rabbinic source criticizes the practice. He adds that the claim Pharisees held "God alone" could forgive sins is rhetoric more than history. He also finds no rabbinic rule that Jesus' Sabbath healing of a withered hand would have broken, though the Mishnah is full of Sabbath restrictions.

  Chris Keith disagrees with Sanders. He accepts that Jesus really had such debates with the literate interpreters of the text. He grants, though, that the Gospels bear the marks of later struggles between Christians and Jews.

  Paula Frederiksen and Michael J. Cook believe the most hostile passages were written after the Temple's destruction in 70 AD. Only Christianity and Pharisaism survived it, and they competed for a short time until the Pharisees emerged as the dominant form of Judaism. When many Jews did not convert, Christians turned to Gentiles. Some scholars find evidence of continuous contact between Jewish-Christian and rabbinic movements from the mid to late 2nd century into the 4th century.

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