The Pharisees were saying to him, “Look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath?”
-Mark 2:24

You may have heard, wrongly, that the Pharisees were the rabbis and that they basically ran the show in Yeshua’s time.

You may have heard that the Pharisees . . .

• were all hypocrites
• made up 613 rules which were oppressive
• led the synagogues and governed the way Jews lived for God.

Great resources for those who want to read up on the Pharisees: E.P. Sanders, Judaism: Practice and Belief and Shaye Cohen, From the Maccabees to the Mishnah. I provide no documentation for the assertions I will make in this summary on the Pharisees. Feel free to ask questions in the comments.

There are several reasons why the Pharisees are misunderstood:

• Josephus, who was a Pharisee, exaggerated their power and influence
• The later rabbis (third through sixth centuries), whose origins were in the Pharisee movement, exaggerated their power and influence when writing about the first century
• The other parties (Sadducees, Essenes, Herodians) all ceased to exist after 70 CE
• Yeshua clashed with the Pharisees on some matters of Torah
• Un-careful reading of the Gospels leads people not to notice the Sadducees and chief priests were the primary instruments of his execution, while some Pharisees instigated against him.

Here are some important truths about the Pharisees:

• They tended to be middle class, some working as scribes and other in various occupations.
• They tended to be urban, not rural.
• Their numbers were never large.
• Their origin was as a political party in the days of the Maccabees.
• They had some popularity because they stood against Rome in some early clashes.
• They were a sort of fraternity with a common interest in reforming Israel by increasing zeal for the Torah.
• Their beliefs were the closest of all the parties to the views of Yeshua and the apostles.
• In the early days especially, and the later rabbis corrected this tendency, they emphasized ritual over love and justice and mercy.
• You should no more judge Judaism by the things Yeshua criticized about the Pharisees than you should judge any Christian group by the ideas or behavior of some.
• If Yeshua was commenting today, he’d have many sharp criticisms for various Christian sub-groups that might make the Pharisees look good by comparison.
• The synagogues were run by common Jews, elders in the various towns.
• The rabbis of later centuries, whose origins were from the Pharisees, did not become the recognized leaders of Judaism until the sixth century.
• Synagogues in Israel in Yeshua’s time were not places of power, but learning and piety, and they were not led by Pharisees.
• Most Jews did not follow the growing list of traditions the Pharisees were coming up with out of a desire to see Israel come closer to God.
• The 613 are biblical commandments, not man-made rules of the Pharisees.
• Yeshua had positive things to say about some Pharisees. Nicodemus seems to have become a disciple. Of one Pharisee Yeshua said, “You are not far from the kingdom.”
• Many Pharisees believed in Yeshua after the resurrection, and one of them was Paul.
• Paul continued to say, “I am a Pharisee,” the rest of his life and never repudiated this identity.
• The Pharisees who thought more like Shammai were probably more violent in their manner of dealing with threats to Israel’s renewal.
• The Pharisees who thought like the gentler, more tolerant Hillel outnumbered the Shammaite Pharisees.
• Paul the persecutor was probably in the more militant Shammaite wing.
• The Pharisees were a minority on the Sanhedrin and the Sadducees called the shots.
• The Temple did not run according to the wishes of the Pharisees; if it had, this would have been a vast improvement and would have made the Temple much more in keeping with what Yeshua believed.
• The Pharisees in Yeshua’s time lived in Judea and had not spread much into Galilee.
• Yeshua believed the Pharisees did not keep the Torah enough and said his disciples had to surpass them.
• A large part of Yeshua’s critique was that the Pharisees should have seen loving God and people as the highest priorities of Torah.
• Yeshua expected his disciples to outdo the Pharisees literally in loving God and people.

So why would Pharisees come up to Galilee to check Yeshua out? Why would they sometimes follow him around and find reasons to criticize his disciples?

They cared deeply about Israel getting right with God. They wanted to see Messiah come and had a notion of Messiah and victory over Rome that Yeshua came to teach against.

They saw Yeshua at first as a disciple of John the Baptizer. They came to evaluate him as they had first evaluated John. They were critical of his ideas which did not match their own about what Torah renewal would look like.

They were well-meaning people who were wrong about a few things. But they were more like Yeshua in beliefs than most other Jewish sub-groups. And some of the things they were wrong about no one else understood either. Even the disciples did not think Messiah would die, make atonement for Israel and the world, and rise again.

Questions? Doubt something I said has substantiation? Feel free to ask me in the comments. Or if you would like to share how misinformation about the Pharisees and about Judaism has bothered you, I’d love to hear from you.

Contributing to the faulty view of rabbinic dominance in early Jewish history is the Mishnah and Talmud and Midrashic literature. This, taken together, is called rabbinic literature. And in the rabbinic literature, the dominance of the rabbinic movement is greatly exaggerated.

Also contributing to this distorted view of early Jewish history is a sad reality: most of the Jews in the early centuries are invisible to us today. Literature from the Jewish communities of the Roman empire outside of rabbinic literature is scarce. The rabbis seem to have been the leaders of the Jewish world because their literature, almost exclusively, survives. But historians have enough evidence to know that the widespread Jewish communities of the early centuries were not so rabbinic in practice and that the rabbinic movement was a small one, growing slowly in importance and influence.

What sort of people set the standards for the synagogues of early Judaism? For the most part, they are invisible Jews. We only wish we could know more about synagogue life in those times.

The Pharisees simplify their standard of living, making no concession to luxury. They follow the guidance of that which their doctrine has selected and transmitted as good, attaching the chief importance to the observance of those commandments which it has seen fit to dictate to them. They show respect and deference to their elders, nor do they rashly presume to contradict their proposals.

Because of these views they are, as a matter of fact, extremely influential among the townsfolk; and all prayers and sacred rites of divine worship are performed according to their exposition. This is the great tribute that the inhabitants of the cities, by practicing the highest ideals both in their way of living and in their discourse, have paid to the excellence of the Pharisees.
–Antiquities 18:12-15, c. 90 CE.

Notes: References to “their doctrine” which was “transmitted” and their “deference to their elders” is Josephus’ way of describing the “traditions of the elders,” the rulings about how to keep the commandments of Torah that passed down from teachers to students and were memorized. The notion that the chief priests and Sadducees ran the Temple according to the rulings of the Pharisees is something many historians refute, especially Sanders.

For the present I wish merely to explain that the Pharisees had passed on to the people certain regulations handed down by former generations and not recorded in the laws of Moses, for which reason they are rejected by the Sadducean group, who that only those regulations should be considered valid which were written down (in scripture), and that those which were handed down by former generations need not be observed. And concerning these matters the two parties came to have controversies an serious differences, the Sadducees having the confidence of the wealthy alone but no following among the populace, while the Pharisees have the support of the masses.
–Antiquities 13:297-298.

See also Jewish War 2:162-163 about the Pharisees and their view of fate and free will. Josephus says they were considered the most accurate interpreters of the law.

Richard Horsley makes the case that too little attention has been given in historical Jesus research to the latest information and guesses about religious and political differences between Galilee and Judea. Suddenly statements such as in the fourth gospel about the “Passover of the Jews” begin to make more sense (Passover at the Temple run by the Judeans and based on Judean interpretations of the Torah and the obligations of Israel).

What follows is a summary of some main points from Horsley’s book (restated in my own words and greatly simplified) and a comparison with the four controversy stories between Yeshua and the Pharisees, scribes, and Sadducees of Judea in Matthew 22.

Some Major Issues of Religious and Political Difference Between Galilee and Judea

(1) The Judeans had an aristocracy and worked with Rome through aristocrats and diplomacy. Galilee was ruled directly by the Herodians under Roman power with no representatives of their own to stand between.

(2) Judeans ran the Temple and obligated all the Israelite regions, such as Galilee, to send tithes and taxes.

(3) Galileans did not support the Temple en masse. Evidence is fragmentary, but it suggests that few Galileans went. (This does not suggest a rejection of Torah, but perhaps a sense of protest against a corrupt Temple regime).

(4) The traditions of the elders lobbied for by the Pharisees and scribes were part of Judean control, as far the Galileans saw it, and were resisted. (Note: this is not an argument that Pharisees had controlling power or influence at the time, but their power and influence was substantial and was likely resented as coming from Judea). Pharisees have no power over Galilee.

(5) The Sadducees would have had even less love from the Galileans, being the corruptors of the Temple and collaborators with Rome. They have no power over Galilee.

Matthew 22 and the Four Controversies

THE POLL TAX – MT 22:15-22
-Pharisees and Herodians.
-Pharisees are Judean scribes who seek to conform Israel to their version of Torah customs. Herodians are Galileans who collaborate with Rome and rule Galilee with a heavy hand.
-The goal of the parties is to trap Yeshua, either hurting his popularity if he approves of the Roman tax or entangling him with Rome if he speaks publicly against it.
-Yeshua condemns his opponents (implicitly) by asking if one of them has a denarius, a coin which has an image of Caesar and the motto filius divius, son of god. This is supposedly the religious reason for objecting, yet one of his opponents has such a coin in his possession.
-Yeshua calls them hypocrites.
-Yeshua’s reasoning: one can obey the government and also God. The tax is of little consequence, but are his opponents rendering their total allegiance to God?

RESURRECTION/AFTERLIFE – MT 22:23-33
-Sadducees.
-The Sadducees were the aristocrats and chief priests who mediated between Rome and Judea and in so doing compromised for personal power and wealth.
-The Sadducees induced a clever argument from the levirate marriage laws of Torah to ridicule the idea of resurrection and afterlife.
-Yeshua’s reasoning: Torah is permeated with hints of resurrection and Yeshua claims knowledge of the afterlife which appears to come from his own authority.
-Possible Galilean twist: experience with the living God (prophetic) as a sign of truth versus the rationalist Sadducean (Hellenism and Torah mixed) approach.

THE GREATEST COMMANDMENT – MT 22:34-40
-Judean Pharisees test Yeshua, thinking perhaps his grasp of Torah will be poor since he is Galilean.
-Yeshua answers wisely and the conflict is abated (note: Mark’s version is even more positive).

THE MESSIAH – MT 22:41-46
-Yeshua challenges the Judean Pharisees and shows them unschooled in the Psalms and prophets (possibly a Galilean affinity for prophetic and poetic spirituality?).
-Yeshua raises a mystery in Psalm 110 which is about his own identity (Messiah is not David’s lesser but his greater, which reveals a lack of Pharisaic understanding of the depths of God’s prophetic plan).

Whether or not the Pharisee in the famous (and dangerous for its readers and hearers, since the parable tempts us to judge the Pharisee) Pharisee and Tax Collector parable (Luke 18:9-14) was supposed to be prototypical or not, Yeshua has more to say about Pharisees being lax in lawkeeping than rigid.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Yeshua says he comes to fill up the Torah (Matthew 5:17, “fulfill” is a misleading translation best done away with). He proceeds to give six examples in Matthew 5:21-47 of what the “filled up” Torah looks like. In each case, Yeshua’s interpretation and application of Torah is thoroughgoing, extending the meaning to the most selfless, humble, faithful, holistic interpretation possible. The Torah’s requirement is seen to penetrate to the level of motives. Hatred and insult are a kind of murder. Lust is a kind of sexual sin. Marriage requires total commitment and there is no license to lightly abandon marriage vows. Attempts to evade oaths or give them insincerely are not valid. Love must be for all, even enemies, and neighbor in the Torah does not mean only those we like or who are like us. Retribution is not sanctioned by any law of Torah.

Therefore, when Yeshua says in 5:20 that his disciples’ righteousness must exceed that of the Pharisees, he means it literally.

It is a common assumption that: (1) the Pharisees are highly devoted and rigidly perfect in lawkeeping, (2) that Yeshua could not literally mean for anyone to be a better lawkeeper than them, and thus, (3) that Yeshua means the way of faith is better than the way of lawkeeping.

But none of Yeshua’s examples in vss. 21-47 make such a point. Rather, they define the “filled up” interpretation of Torah (vs. 17) and require the disciples to follow this way rather than looking for evasions and loopholes.

See E.P. Sanders, Judaism: Practice and Belief. Trinity Press International, 1992.

In the Dead Sea Scrolls, in the Commentary on Nahum, the writer (probably an Essene, a much stricter sect that the Pharisees) refers to an incident in which a “furious young lion” (Jannaeus, the Hasmonean king of Israel from 103 to 76 BCE) killed the “seekers of smooth things.” The reference is to a dispute between the Pharisees and Jannaeus which led to a public crucifixion of some 800 of them.

“Seekers of smooth things” is a pun in Hebrew: dorshei hachalakot instead of a title the Pharisees perhaps used for themselves: dorshei hahalachot, seekers of the way to keep Torah.

Earliest references to Pharisees: Dead Sea Scrolls perhaps refer to Pharisees with terms like “seekers of smooth things.”

Earliest historical appearance of Pharisees: reign of Jonathan (161-143 BCE).

Earliest event specifically mentioned to involve them: They asked Hyrcanus to step down as high priest, leading him to abandon the Pharisee party and become a Sadducee (c. 135-104 BCE, Josephus Antiq. 13.288-298).

Earliest literature by a Pharisee: many scholars believe the Psalms of Solomon (c. 60 BCE) are written by Pharisees.

Reference: Sanders, E.P. Judaism: Practice and Belief. Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1992.