PHARISEES

1. INTRODUCTION
Pharisees, were members of a Jewish religious party social movement and a school of
thought  that flourished in Palestine during the latter part of the Second Temple Judaism
(515 BCE–70 CE). After the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, Pharisaic beliefs
became the foundational, liturgical, and ritualistic basis for Rabbinic Judaism. The
Pharisees’ insistence on the binding force of oral tradition (“the unwritten Torah”) remains a
basic tenet of Jewish theological thought.

The Pharisees were primarily not a political party but a society of scholars and pietists. They
enjoyed a large popular following, and in the New Testament they appear as spokesmen for
the majority of the population.

About 100 BCE a long struggle ensued as the Pharisees tried to democratize the
Jewish religion and remove it from the control of the Temple priests. The
Pharisees asserted that God could and should be worshipped even away from the Temple
and outside Jerusalem. To the Pharisees, worship consisted not in bloody sacrifices—the
practice of the Temple priests—but in prayer and in the study of God’s law. Hence, the
Pharisees fostered the synagogue as an institution of religious worship, outside and separate
from the Temple. The synagogue may thus be considered a Pharasaic institution, since the
Pharisees developed it, raised it to high eminence, and gave it a central place in Jewish
religious life.

2. POPULATION SIZE
Josephus (37 – c. 100 CE), believed by many historians to be a Pharisee, estimated the total
Pharisee population before the fall of the Second Temple to be around 6,000. Josephus
claimed that Pharisees received the full support and goodwill of the common people,
apparently in contrast to the more elite Sadducees, who were the upper class.

3. ETYMOLOGY
"Pharisee" is derived from Ancient Greek Pharisaios (Φαρισαῖος), from Aramaic Pərīšā,
meaning "set apart, separated". This may be a reference to their separation from
the gentiles, sources of ritual impurity, or from non-religious Jews. Alternatively, it may
have a particular political meaning as "separatists" due to their division from the Sadducee
elite.

4. SOURCES
The first historical mention of the Pharisees and their beliefs comes in the four gospels and
the Book of Acts, in which both their meticulous adherence to their interpretation of the
Torah as well as their eschatological views are described. A later historical mention of the
Pharisees comes from the Jewish-Roman historian Josephus (37–100 CE) in a description of
the "four schools of thought", or "four sects", into which he divided the Jews in the 1st
century CE.

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5. HISTORY
From 600 BCE – 160 BCE
The Pharisees (Hebrew: Perushim) emerged as a distinct group shortly after
the Maccabean revolt, about 165–160 BCE; they were, it is generally believed, spiritual
descendants of the Hasideans. The Pharisees emerged as a party of laymen in
contradistinction to the Sadducees—i.e., the party of the high priesthood that had
traditionally provided the sole leadership of the Jewish people.

The deportation and exile of an unknown number of Jews of the ancient Kingdom of

Judah to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar II, starting with the first deportation in 597 BCE and
continuing after the fall of Jerusalem and destruction of the Temple in 587 BCE, resulted in
dramatic changes to Jewish culture and religion. During the 70-year exile in Babylon, Jewish
houses of assembly (known in Greek as a synagogue) and houses of prayer
(Greek proseuchai) were the primary meeting places for prayer, and the house of study was
the counterpart for the synagogue.

In 539 BCE the Persians conquered Babylon, and in 537 BCE Cyrus the Great allowed Jews

to return to Judea and rebuild the Temple. He did not, however, allow the restoration of the
Judean monarchy, which left the Judean priests as the dominant authority. With the
absence of power of the monarchy, the authority of the Temple in civic life was amplified. It
was around this time that the Sadducee party emerged as the party of priests and allied
elites. However, the Second Temple, which was completed in 515 BCE, had been constructed
under the auspices of a foreign power, and there were lingering questions about its
legitimacy. This provided the condition for the development of various sects or "schools of
thought," each of which claimed exclusive authority to represent "Judaism," and which
typically shunned social intercourse, especially marriage, with members of other sects. In
the same period, the council of sages known as the Sanhedrin may have codified
and canonized the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), from which, following the return from Babylon,
the Torah was read publicly on market-days.

The Temple was no longer the only institution for Jewish religious life. After the building of
the Second Temple in the time of Ezra the Scribe, the houses of study and worship remained
important secondary institutions in Jewish life. Outside Judea, the synagogue was often
called a house of prayer. While most Jews could not regularly attend the Temple service,
they could meet at the synagogue for morning, afternoon and evening prayers. On Mondays,
Thursdays and Shabbats, a weekly Torah portion was read publicly in the synagogues,
following the tradition of public Torah readings instituted by Ezra.
The Hellenistic period of Jewish history began when Alexander the Great conquered Persia
in 332 BCE. The rift between the priests and the sages developed during this time, when
Jews faced new political and cultural struggles. After Alexander's death in 323 BCE, Judea
was ruled by the Egyptian-Hellenic Ptolemies until 198 BCE, when the Syrian-
Hellenic Seleucid Empire, under Antiochus III, seized control. Then, in 167 BCE, the
Seleucid king Antiochus IV invaded Judea, entered the Temple, and stripped it of money and
ceremonial objects. He imposed a program of forced Hellenization, requiring Jews to
abandon their own laws and customs, thus precipitating the Maccabean Revolt. Jerusalem
was liberated in 165 BCE and the Temple was restored. In 141 BCE an assembly of priests
and others affirmed Simon Maccabeus as high priest and leader, in effect establishing
the Hasmonean dynasty.

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6. EMERGENCE OF THE PHARISEES
After defeating the Seleucid forces, Judas Maccabaeus's nephew John Hyrcanus established
a new monarchy in the form of the priestly Hasmonean dynasty in 152 BCE, thus
establishing priests as political as well as religious authorities. Although the Hasmoneans
were considered heroes for resisting the Seleucids, their reign lacked the legitimacy
conferred by descent from the Davidic dynasty of the First Temple era.
The Pharisee ("separatist") party emerged largely out of the group of scribes and sages. Their
name comes from the Hebrew and Aramaic parush or parushi, which means "one who is
separated." It may refer to their separation from Gentiles, sources of ritual impurity or from
irreligious Jews. The Pharisees, among other Jewish sects, were active from the middle of
the second century BCE until the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE. Josephus first
mentions them in connection with Jonathan, the successor of Judas Maccabeus.
 One of the factors that distinguished the Pharisees from other groups prior to the
destruction of the Temple was their belief that all Jews had to observe the purity laws (which
applied to the Temple service) outside the Temple. The major difference, however, was the
continued adherence of the Pharisees to the laws and traditions of the Jewish people in the
face of assimilation. As Josephus noted, the Pharisees were considered the most expert and
accurate expositors of Jewish law.
Josephus indicates that the Pharisees received the backing and good-will of the common
people, apparently in contrast to the more elite Sadducees associated with the ruling classes.
In general, whereas the Sadducees were aristocratic monarchists, the Pharisees were
eclectic, popular, and more democratic. The Pharisaic position is exemplified by the
assertion that "A learned mamzer takes precedence over an ignorant High Priest."
(A mamzer, according to the Pharisaic definition, is an outcast child born of a forbidden
relationship, such as adultery or incest, in which marriage of the parents could not lawfully
occur.
Sadducees rejected the Pharisaic tenet of an Oral Torah, creating two Jewish understandings
of the Torah. An example of this differing approach is the interpretation of, "an eye in place
of an eye". The Pharisaic understanding was that the value of an eye was to be paid by the
perpetrator. In the Sadducees' view the words were given a more literal interpretation, in
which the offender's eye would be removed.
 The Roman period; Judaea (Roman province)
According to Josephus, the Pharisees appeared before Pompey asking him to interfere and
restore the old priesthood while abolishing the royalty of the Hasmoneans altogether.
Pharisees also opened Jerusalem's gates to the Romans, and actively supported them against
the Sadducean faction. When the Romans finally broke the entrance to the Jerusalem's
Temple, the Pharisees killed the priests who were officiating the Temple services on
Saturday. They regarded Pompey's defilement of the Temple in Jerusalem as a divine
punishment of Sadducean misrule.
While it stood, the Second Temple remained the center of Jewish ritual life. According to the
Torah, Jews were required to travel to Jerusalem and offer sacrifices at the Temple three
times a year: Pesach (Passover), Shavuot (the Feast of Weeks), and Sukkot (the Feast of
Tabernacles). The Pharisees, like the Sadducees, were politically quiescent, and studied,
taught, and worshiped in their own way. At this time serious theological differences emerged
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 between the Sadducees and Pharisees. The notion that the sacred could exist outside the
Temple, a view central to the Essenes, was shared and elevated by the Pharisees.

7. LEGACY
At first the values of the Pharisees developed through their sectarian debates with the
Sadducees; then they developed through internal, non-sectarian debates over the law as an
adaptation to life without the Temple, and life in exile, and eventually, to a more limited
degree, life in conflict with Christianity. These shifts mark the transformation of Pharisaic to
Rabbinic Judaism.

8. BELIEFS
No single tractate of the key Rabbinic texts, the Mishnah and the Talmud, is devoted to
theological issues; these texts are concerned primarily with interpretations of Jewish law,
and anecdotes about the sages and their values. Only one chapter of the Mishnah deals with
theological issues;
It asserts that three kinds of people will have no share in "the world to come:"
 Those who deny the resurrection of the dead,
 Those who deny the divinity of the Torah,
 Epicureans (who deny divine supervision of human affairs).
Another passage suggests a different set of core principles. It suggests that Jews must "be
meticulous in small religious duties as well as large ones, because you do not know what sort
of reward is coming for any of the religious duties," suggesting that all laws are of equal
importance).
Monotheism
One belief central to the Pharisees which was shared by all Jews of the time is monotheism.
This is evident in the practice of reciting the Shema, a prayer composed of select verses from
the Torah (Deuteronomy 6:4), at the Temple and in synagogues; the Shema begins with the
verses, "Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God; the Lord is one." According to the Mishna, these
passages were recited in the Temple along with the twice-daily Tamid offering; Jews in
the diaspora, who did not have access to the Temple, recited these passages in their houses
of assembly.
According to the Mishnah and Talmud, the men of the Great Assembly instituted the
requirement that Jews both in Judea and in the diaspora pray three times a day (morning,
afternoon and evening), and include in their prayers a recitation of these passages in the
morning ("Shacharit") and evening ("Ma'ariv") prayers.

Wisdom (Logic)
Pharisaic wisdom was compiled in one book of the Mishna, Pirkei Avot. The Pharisaic
attitude is perhaps best exemplified by a story about the sages Hillel the Elder and Shammai,
who both lived in the latter half of the 1st century BCE. A gentile once challenged Shammai
to teach him the wisdom of the Torah while he stood on one foot. Shammai drove him away.
The same gentile approached Hillel and asked of him the same thing. Hillel chastised him
gently by saying, "What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah;
the rest is the explanation – now go and study."

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 Free will and predestination
According to Josephus, whereas the Sadducees believed that people have total free will and
the Essenes believed that all of a person's life is predestined, the Pharisees believed that
people have free will but that God also has foreknowledge of human destiny. This also
accords with the statement in Pirkei Avot 3:19, "Rabbi Akiva said: All is foreseen, but
freedom of choice is given".

The afterlife
Unlike the Sadducees, who are generally held to have rejected any existence after death, the
sources vary on the beliefs of the Pharisees on the afterlife. According to the New Testament
the Pharisees believed in the resurrection of the dead, but it does not specify whether this
resurrection included the flesh or not

9. PRACTICES
A kingdom of priests
Fundamentally, the Pharisees continued a form of Judaism that extended beyond the
Temple, applying Jewish law to mundane activities in order to sanctify the every-day world.
This was a more participatory (or "democratic") form of Judaism, in which rituals were not
monopolized by an inherited priesthood but rather could be performed by all adult Jews
individually or collectively; whose leaders were not determined by birth but by scholarly
achievement. Pharisees believed in a broad and literal interpretation of Exodus (19:3–6),
"you shall be my own possession among all peoples; for all the earth is mine, and you shall
be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation."

The Oral Torah

The standard view is that the Pharisees differed from Sadducees in the sense that they
accepted the Oral Torah in addition to the Scripture. To Rosemary Ruether, the
Pharisaic proclamation of the Oral Torah was their way of freeing Judaism
from the clutches of Aaronite priesthood, represented by the Sadducees. The
Oral Torah was to remain oral but was later given a written form. It did not refer to the
Torah in a status as a commentary, rather had its own separate existence which allowed
Pharisaic innovations.
Yet, as Neusner has observed, Pharisaism was but one of many "Judaisms" in its day, and its
legal interpretation are what set it apart from the other sects of Judaism. The commitment
to relate religion to daily life through the law has led some (notably, Saint Paul and Martin
Luther) to infer that the Pharisees were more legalistic than other sects in the Second
Temple Era.
Innovators or preservers
The Pharisees were also innovators in that they enacted specific laws as they saw necessary
according to the needs of the time. The Pharisees preserved and transmitted Judaism
through the flexibility they gave to Jewish scriptural interpretation in the face of changing
historical circumstances.

Significance of debate and study of the law

Just as important as (if not more important than) any particular law was the value the rabbis
placed on legal study and debate. The sages of the Talmud believed that when they taught
the Oral Torah to their students, they were imitating Moses, who taught the law to the
children of Israel. Moreover, the rabbis believed that "the heavenly court studies Torah

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 precisely as does the earthly one, even arguing about the same questions."   Thus, in debating
and disagreeing over the meaning of the Torah or how best to put it into practice, no rabbi
felt that he (or his opponent) was rejecting God or threatening Judaism; on the contrary, it
was precisely through such arguments that the rabbis imitated and honored God. The efforts
they devoted to education also had a seminal importance in subsequent Jewish history. After
the destruction of the Second Temple and the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE, it was the
synagogue and the schools of the Pharisees that continued to function and to promote
Judaism in the long centuries following the Diaspora.

10. ORIGIN OF PHARISEES VS SADDUCEES FEUD

Conflicts between Pharisees and Sadducees took place in the context of much broader and
longstanding social and religious conflicts among Jews, made worse by the Roman conquest.
Conflicts among these two groups predominantly displayed themselves in the following
areas viz:
 The basic difference that led to the split between the Pharisees and the Sadducees lay
in their respective attitudes toward the Torah (the first five books of the Bible) and
the problem of finding in it answers to questions and bases for decisions
about contemporary legal and religious matters arising under circumstances far
different from those of the time of Moses.

In their response to this problem, the Sadducees, on the one hand, refused to accept
any precept as binding unless it was based directly on the Torah—i.e., the Written
Law. The Pharisees, on the other hand, believed that the Law that God gave to Moses
was twofold, consisting of the Written Law and the Oral Law—i.e., the teachings of
the prophets and the oral traditions of the Jewish people.

Whereas the priestly Sadducees taught that the written Torah was the only source
of revelation, the 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. It was because of this progressive tendency of the Pharisees that
their interpretation of the Torah continued to develop and has remained a living force
in Judaism.

 Another conflict was cultural, between those who favored Hellenization (the

Sadducees) and those who resisted it (the Pharisees).
 A third was juridico-religious, between those who emphasized the importance of
the Second Temple with its rites and services, and those who emphasized the
importance of other Mosaic Laws.

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  A fourth point of conflict, specifically religious, involved different interpretations of
the Torah and how to apply it to current Jewish life, with Sadducees recognizing only
the Written Torah (with Greek philosophy) and rejecting doctrines such as the Oral
Torah, the Prophets, the Writings, and the resurrection of the dead.

11. FROM PHARISEES TO RABBIS

Following the Jewish–Roman wars, revolutionaries like the Zealots had been crushed by the
Romans, and had little credibility (the last Zealots died at Masada in 73 CE). Similarly, the
Sadducees, whose teachings were closely connected to the Temple, disappeared with the
destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. The Essenes too disappeared, perhaps because
their teachings so diverged from the concerns of the times, perhaps because they were
sacked by the Romans at Qumran.

Post-Temple developments
According to historian Shaye Cohen, by the time three generations had passed after the
destruction of the Second Temple, most Jews concluded that the Temple would not be
rebuilt during their lives, nor in the foreseeable future. Jews were now confronted with
difficult and far-reaching questions:
 How to achieve atonement without the Temple?
 How to explain the disastrous outcome of the rebellion?
 How to live in the post-Temple, Romanized world?
 How to connect present and past traditions?
Regardless of the importance they gave to the Temple, the Pharisees' vision of Jewish law
as a means by which ordinary people could engage with the sacred in their daily lives
provided them with a position from which to respond to all four challenges in a way
meaningful to the vast majority of Jews. Their responses would constitute Rabbinic
Judaism.
After the destruction of the Second Temple, these sectarian divisions ended. The Rabbis
avoided the term "Pharisee," perhaps because it was a term more often used by non-
Pharisees, but also because the term was explicitly sectarian.
Thus, as the Pharisees argued that all Israel should act as priests, the Rabbis argued that
all Israel should act as rabbis: "The rabbis furthermore want to transform the entire
Jewish community into an academy where the whole Torah is studied and kept ....
redemption depends on the "rabbinization" of all Israel, that is, upon the attainment of
all Jewry of a full and complete embodiment of revelation or Torah, thus achieving a
perfect replica of heaven."

12. PHARISEES AND CHRISTIANITY

Pharisees have also been made notable by numerous references to them in the New
Testament. While the writers record hostilities between some of the Pharisees and Jesus,
there are also several references in the New Testament to Pharisees who believed in him,
including Nicodemus, who said it is known Jesus is a teacher sent from God, Joseph of
Arimathea, who was his disciple, and an unknown number of "those of the party of the
Pharisees who believed", among them the Apostle Paul — a student of Gamaliel,  who
warned the Sanhedrin that opposing the disciples of Jesus could prove to be tantamount to
opposing God — even after becoming an apostle of Jesus Christ.

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 The Pharisees were also found in the New Testament engaging in conflicts between
themselves and John the Baptist and with Jesus.
There are several references in the New Testament to Paul the Apostle being a Pharisee
before converting to Christianity, and other members of the Pharisee sect are known
from Acts 15:5 to have become Christian believers. It was some members of his group who
argued that gentile converts must be circumcised and obliged to follow the Mosaic law,
leading to a dispute within the early Church addressed at the Apostolic Council in
Jerusalem, in 50 CE.
The New Testament, particularly the Synoptic Gospels, presents especially the leadership of
the Pharisees as obsessed with man-made rules (especially concerning purity) whereas Jesus
is more concerned with God's love; the Pharisees scorn sinners whereas Jesus seeks them
out. (The Gospel of John, which is the only gospel where Nicodemus is mentioned,
particularly portrays the sect as divided and willing to debate.) Because of the New
Testament's frequent depictions of Pharisees as self-righteous rule-followers, the word
"pharisee" has come into semi-common usage in English to describe a hypocritical and
arrogant person who places the letter of the law above its spirit. Jews today typically find
this insulting and some consider the use of the word to be anti-Semitic.
Hyam Maccoby speculated that Jesus was himself a Pharisee and that his arguments with
Pharisees are sign of inclusion rather than fundamental conflict (disputation being the
dominant narrative mode employed in the Talmud as a search for truth, and not necessarily
a sign of opposition).
Examples of disputed passages include the story of Jesus declaring the sins of a paralytic
man forgiven and the Pharisees calling the action blasphemy. In the story, Jesus counters
the accusation that he does not have the power to forgive sins by pronouncing forgiveness of
sins and then healing the man. The account of the Paralytic Man and Jesus's performance of
miracles on the Sabbath are often interpreted as oppositional and at times antagonistic to
that of the Pharisees' teachings.
Paula Frederiksen and Michael J. Cook believe that those passages of the New Testament
that are seemingly most hostile to the Pharisees were written sometime after the destruction
of Herod's Temple in 70 CE. Only Christianity and Pharisaism survived the destruction of
the Temple, and the two competed for a short time until the Pharisees emerged as the
dominant form of Judaism. When many Jews did not convert, Christians sought new
converts from among the Gentiles.
Some scholars have found evidence of continuous interactions between Jewish-Christian
and rabbinic movements from the mid to late second century to the fourth century.

13. WOES OF THE PHARISEES (A CRITIQUE OF THE PHARISEES).

The Woes of the Pharisees is a list of criticisms
by Jesus against scribes and Pharisees recorded in Luke 11:37–54 and Matthew 23:1–
39. Mark 12:35–40 and Luke 20:45–47
Eight are listed in Matthew, and hence Matthew's version is known as the eight woes.
These are found in Matthew 23 verses 13–16, 23, 25, 27 and 29.
Only six are given in Luke, whose version is thus known as the six woes.

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The woes mostly criticise the Pharisees for hypocrisy and perjury. They illustrate the
differences between inner and outer moral states.
Context and background
The woes are mentioned twice in the narratives in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. In
Matthew they are mentioned after Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem, where he teaches
in the Temple, while in Luke they are mentioned after the Lord's prayer is given and
the disciples are first sent out over the land. Before introducing the woes themselves,
Matthew states that Jesus criticized them for taking the place of honor at banquets, for
wearing ostentatious clothing, for encouraging people to call them rabbi.
The woes are all woes of hypocrisy and illustrate the differences between inner and outer
moral states. Jesus portrays the Pharisees as impatient with outward, ritual observance of
minutiae which made them look acceptable and virtuous outwardly but left the inner person
unreformed.
The seven woes
1. They taught about God, but did not love God – they did not enter the kingdom of
heaven themselves, nor did they let others enter.
2. They preached God, but converted people to dead religion.
3. They taught that an oath sworn by the temple or altar was not binding, but that if
sworn by the gold ornamentation of the temple, or by a sacrificial gift on the altar,
it was binding. The gold and gifts, however, were not sacred in themselves as the
temple and altar were, but derived a measure of lesser sacredness by being connected
to the temple or altar. The teachers and Pharisees worshiped at the temple and
offered sacrifices at the altar because they knew that the temple and altar were
sacred. How then could they deny oath-binding value to what was truly sacred and
accord it to objects of trivial and derived sacredness?
4. They taught the law, but did not practice some of the most important parts of the law
– justice, mercy, faithfulness to God. They obeyed the minutiae of the law such as
tithing spices, but not the weightier matters of the law.
5. They presented an appearance of being 'clean' (self-restrained, not involved in carnal
matters), but they were dirty inside: they seethed with hidden worldly desires,
carnality. They were full of greed and self-indulgence.
6. They exhibited themselves as righteous on account of being scrupulous keepers of the
law but were, in fact, not righteous: their mask of righteousness hid a secret inner
world of ungodly thoughts and feelings. They were full of wickedness. They were like
whitewashed tombs, beautiful on the outside, but full of dead men's bones.
7. They professed a high regard for the dead prophets of old and claimed that they
would never have persecuted and murdered prophets when, in fact, they were cut
from the same cloth as the persecutors and murderers: they too had murderous
blood in their veins.

REFERENCES
Melissa Petruzzello, The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica

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Mordechai Judovits, Sages of the Talmud: The Lives, Sayings and Stories of 400
Rabbinic Masters Hardcover, 2009

Joseph Sievers and Amy-Jill Levine, The Pharisees Hardcover, 2021

Joseph Sievers and Amy-Jill Levine, The Pharisees, 2021

Jacob Neusner, Bruce Chilton, In Quest of the Historical Pharisees Baylor University

Press, 2007

Pharisees, From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharisees

Woes of the Pharisees, From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woes_of_the_Pharisees

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