Pharisees

The Pharisees were the most respected and popular religious teachers of Jesus' day — lay experts in the Torah who sought to live out the whole Law in daily life. They are the direct ancestors of rabbinic Judaism, and the group Jesus most often engaged, agreed with, and argued with.

For Inquirers

If you read the Gospels, you keep running into "the Pharisees" — usually in an argument with Jesus — and it is easy to come away thinking the word just means hypocrite. It did not. To the people of their own time, the Pharisees were the good guys: the most careful, most respected, most popular religious teachers around, ordinary laymen (not priests) who devoted their lives to studying God's Law and working out how to keep it faithfully in every corner of daily life — what to eat, how to keep the Sabbath, how to pray.

Two things are worth knowing before you meet them on the page. First, Jesus actually agreed with the Pharisees about a great deal: that the dead will rise, that angels are real, that the Scriptures are God's word. His sharp exchanges with them were more like a fierce quarrel within a family than an attack on outsiders — which is part of why they got so heated. The Apostle Paul was himself a Pharisee, and proud of it, even after becoming a Christian.

Second, the Pharisees are the ancestors of the Judaism that still exists today. After the Temple was destroyed in AD 70 and the priests lost their altar, it was the Pharisees' way — Torah study, the synagogue, the teacher (rabbi) — that survived and became rabbinic Judaism. So understanding them is really understanding a fork in the road: one path led to the rabbis, and the other, through a Pharisee named Paul and a Teacher they rejected, led to the Church.

Overview

• The Pharisees were a lay religious movement in Judea during the Second Temple period (roughly the last two centuries BC through the first century AD), devoted to the careful study and practice of the Torah — God's Law — in everyday life.
• They were known, even by those who disagreed with them, for their precision in the Law, and they treasured not only the written Scriptures but a body of inherited interpretation, the "tradition of the elders," for applying the Law to new situations.
• They believed in the resurrection of the dead, in angels and spirits, and in a coming judgment — beliefs the Sadducees rejected and that Christianity shares. They are the direct forerunners of rabbinic Judaism, and the group the Gospels show Jesus engaging more than any other.

Summary

The Pharisees were the most influential of the Jewish religious parties of the New Testament era, described by ancient sources as noted for their "precision in matters of Jewish law."[^jant] Unlike the priestly Sadducees, they were largely laymen, and their religious life centered not on the Temple altar but on the study and observance of the Torah — carried on in synagogues and houses of study rather than only in Jerusalem. Alongside the written Law they held to an oral "tradition of the elders" (Mark 7.3), a living body of interpretation that extended the Torah into the details of daily life; this instinct — that faithful human decisions and interpretation genuinely shape how the Law is kept — is what most distinguished them, and it made them, in effect, a proto-rabbinic movement.[^jant] They confessed the resurrection of the dead, angels, and spirits (Acts 23.8), and their leaders, such as Gamaliel (Acts 5.34), were revered teachers. The Apostle Paul was raised and trained a Pharisee (Philippians 3.5). After the destruction of the Temple in AD 70 ended the priestly religion of the Sadducees, the Pharisaic way survived and grew into rabbinic Judaism, the ancestor of Judaism as it is practiced today. Cross-link Sadducees, Essenes, The Torah, Mishnah, Bodily Resurrection, St. Paul.

Not the villains the word suggests

Because the Gospels so often show Jesus rebuking them, "Pharisee" has become an English byword for smug hypocrisy — and that is a genuine distortion of the historical group. In their own society the Pharisees were widely admired precisely for taking God seriously: they were the party of the devout layman, popular with ordinary people, respected for knowing the Law and living it. When the Gospel of Matthew has Jesus say, "The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses' seat" (Matthew 23.2) — that is, they hold real teaching authority — and tells the crowds to do what they teach, it is acknowledging their standing even in the midst of criticizing them. The sharpness of Jesus' words is better understood as an argument within a shared world than as the denunciation of a foreign enemy; He and the Pharisees stood close enough to clash. Reading them as cartoon villains obscures both the Gospels and the group itself.

Torah written and oral: a religion of study

What set the Pharisees apart was their relationship to the Torah. They were not content to read the Law as a fixed text and leave its silences alone; they cultivated an inherited, developing interpretation — the "tradition of the elders" (Mark 7.3-5) — for carrying God's commandments faithfully into circumstances the written Law did not directly address. It is over exactly this that Jesus and the Pharisees repeatedly spar: the washing of hands, the keeping of the Sabbath, what honors God and what merely honors a human rule. The underlying Pharisaic conviction was that God had given not only a written text but a community charged with interpreting it, and that faithful interpretation was itself part of obedience. This same instinct, refined over centuries, would be written down as the Mishnah and become the foundation of rabbinic Judaism. (An Orthodox Christian will notice the structural rhyme with the Church's own conviction that Scripture lives within a Tradition that reads it rightly — even as the two traditions read it toward very different ends.)

Born a Jew, or becoming one: choice over birth

Modern scholarship has illuminated the Pharisees by contrasting them with the priestly parties. A priest was born a priest, a son of Aaron; his status came by birth and nature. The Pharisees represented the opposite instinct: that what matters most is what a person freely takes up and does — that human decisions, study, and commitment endow things with their religious weight.[^jant] A teacher became a rabbi not by birth but by being recognized for his learning; a synagogue became holy because a community chose to build one. From this flowed several of the beliefs that distinguish the Pharisees from the Sadducees: an openness to the conversion of Gentiles, and — most importantly for the New Testament — a firm belief in the resurrection of the dead and in a soul that outlives the body. "For the Sadducees say that there is no resurrection, nor angel, nor spirit," Luke explains, "but the Pharisees confess all of these" (Acts 23.8). On these points the Pharisees stood far closer to the teaching of Christ and His Church than their priestly rivals did.

Jesus, Paul, and the Pharisees

The Pharisees are woven all through the New Testament, and rarely as simple opponents. Nicodemus, "a ruler of the Jews," comes to Jesus by night and later helps to bury Him. Gamaliel, "a teacher of the law, honored by all the people" (Acts 5.34), counsels the Sanhedrin to leave the apostles alone. And the greatest of the apostles was one of them: Paul calls himself, without embarrassment, "concerning the law, a Pharisee" (Philippians 3.5), and later, on trial, still cries, "I am a Pharisee, a son of Pharisees. Concerning the hope and resurrection of the dead I am being judged!" (Acts 23.6). The tragedy and drama of the Gospels is not that Jesus confronts a wholly alien sect, but that He presses hardest on the people who were, in so many ways, closest to Him — those who searched the Scriptures most earnestly and yet, in the main, did not recognize the One the Scriptures were about.

After the Temple: the road to the rabbis

The Pharisees' lasting significance is that theirs was the form of Judaism that survived. When the Romans destroyed the Temple in AD 70, the priestly Sadducees lost the altar that was the whole basis of their religion and effectively vanished from history. But a religion centered on Torah study, the synagogue, and the teacher needed no Temple to continue — and so it did. The Pharisaic movement became the rabbinic movement, its inherited interpretations were gathered into the Mishnah and the Talmud, and rabbinic Judaism, the direct heir of the Pharisees, became the mainstream of Jewish life down to the present day. Christianity, meanwhile, carried its own inheritance out of the same first-century world — through a Pharisee named Paul, and around the Messiah his former party had not received. Cross-link Sadducees, Essenes, Judaism, Mishnah, Maccabean Revolt.

Sources

[^jant]: The Jewish Annotated New Testament (eds. Amy-Jill Levine & Marc Zvi Brettler, Oxford Univ. Press), essay "Jewish Movements of the New Testament Period" — the Pharisees as a lay movement "noted for their precision in matters of Jewish law" and as a "proto-rabbinic" party defined by the priority of study, interpretation, and human decision over inherited priestly birth; their belief in resurrection; and their continuity into rabbinic Judaism after AD 70, (in-copyright scholarly reference; paraphrased, not reproduced).