Let’s Be Fair to the Pharisees

What is a Pharisee? A bad guy, right?

If our Sunday School lessons were correct, then a Pharisee must be a hypocrite, a self-righteous, ostentatious, inhumane villain that is too busy being religious to be nice. It would make them blind, ignorant fools with made-up authority that they used to invent new laws and throw out old ones.

If Jesus movies are any indication, Pharisees had long scraggly beards, beady eyes, long crooked noses, pointy hats, wrung their hands together and wore black all the time. We are often taught that it was the Pharisees that conspired together to put Christ to death.

If these ideas haven’t been stated explicitly, they have been implied. The Pharisees have been the villains and scapegoats in church sermons throughout the centuries. Not only that, it is commonly intimated that the Jews today are exactly like the old-time Pharisees. Were they really that bad?

We misunderstand the Pharisees for a number of reasons.

The Gospels only mention conflicts

Imagine if someone from another culture and time were to attempt to write your biography, and the only information they had to work with was your family photo album. They would determine that you were constantly on vacation and never went to work or school. That’s because people don’t usually take pictures unless something out of the ordinary is happening.

A similar phenomenon occurs in the Gospels. Out of the years of Yeshua’s life on earth, only a few select stories are related about him. All we have are the most interesting and exciting things to have happened in that period of time. Conflict is interesting and exciting, so naturally we are presented with a disproportionate amount of it.

If Yeshua was invited to spend the Sabbath in a Pharisee’s home, and he offered an insightful commentary on the Torah, and everyone had a nice time and went home smiling, they didn’t write it down. It just wouldn’t have been notable enough to the people who recorded the Gospels.

It is therefore easy for us to make the mistake of generalizing the events in the Gospels, and considering them all to be typical events, when they were in fact written down because they were atypical. This leads people falsely to believe that Yeshua and they Pharisees to be bitter enemies, when they had run-ins once in a while.

Confusing Pharisees with Sadducees

It is not uncommon for people to confuse the Pharisees with the Sadducees. This problem is readily visible in Jesus movies, where they are often lumped together into one evil big-bearded group.

But in reality, the Pharisees and Sadducees were polar opposites in many ways. For example, the Pharisees believed in the resurrection, angels and demons, and in a personal Messiah. The Sadducees did not believe in any of these things.

The Sadducees are known even in extra-biblical sources to have been corrupt sell-outs to Rome. Sadducees comprised much of the priesthood. Caiaphas was a Sadducee. It was the Sadducees, not the Pharisees, that condemned Yeshua in a kangaroo court. It was they who delivered Yeshua into the hands of the Romans.

The Pharisees may have had their problems, but it was the Sadducees that were the true villains in the Gospels, and it is a serious historical error to confuse these two very different groups.

Ignoring pro-Pharisee passages

The erroneous concept that Pharisees are all evil is so ingrained that people often completely ignore or dismiss passages that present Pharisees in a positive light.

For example, it was the Pharisees who attempted to save Yeshua’s life by warning him to flee when Herod sought to kill him (Luke 13:31). The Pharisees commonly invited him to eat in their homes, which was no small honor.

Yeshua was speaking to the Pharisees when he told the parables of the lost sheep and the prodigal son, after they criticized his outreach to sinners (Luke 15:2-3). In the parable of the lost sheep, the lost sheep represents prostitutes, tax collectors and similar type of sinners among the common folk. The clear implication is that the Pharisees are among the sheep that did not stray, whom he calls, “righteous persons who need no repentance,” (v. 7).

In the parable of the prodigal son, the older brother is jealous of the attention the younger receives when he repents. This older brother undoubtedly refers to the Pharisees. Notice what the father says about this older brother: “Son, you have always been with me, and all that is mine is yours,” (Luke 15:31).

A similar comparison is made in Yeshua’s statement, “It is not those who are healthy who need a physician, but those who are sick; I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners,” (Mark 2:16-17, cf. also Matthew 9:11-13). If those who are sick are the non-Pharisee “tax collectors and sinners,” then who are the healthy and the righteous to whom he refers?

John 9:16 indicates there were different opinions about him among the Pharisees, some rejecting him and some accepting him. We might also mention notable Pharisees among the believers, including Nicodemus, who admitted that Yeshua came from God (John 3:2), and stood up for him in front of other leaders (John 7:50-52). Gamaliel similarly stood up for the believers in the Council (Acts 5:34-39).

It appears that there were many believers among the Pharisees who retained their identity with the Pharisees after they became believers (Acts 15:5). This even included Paul (Acts 23:6, 26:5, Philippians 3:5).

Misunderstanding Jewish polemical style

Sometimes the conflicts that Yeshua had with the Pharisees and others are blown out of proportion because the Gospels do not give us a broad perspective on the political and religious climate. We sometimes come away with the perspective that Yeshua vs. the Jewish establishment was the only argument occurring at the time. But in reality, Yeshua was one voice among many who were arguing in heated and harsh terms. Consider this debate between a Sadducee and Pharisee recorded in the Gemara:

A sectarian said to Gebiha b. Pesisa, ‘Woe to you, ye wicked, who maintain that the dead will revive; if even the living die, shall the dead live!’ He replied, ‘Woe to you, ye wicked, who maintain that the dead will not revive: if what was not,[now] lives, - surely what has lived, will live again!’ ‘Thou hast called me wicked,’ said he, ‘If I stood up I could kick thee and strip thee of thy hump! ‘If thou couldst do that,’ he retorted, ‘thou wouldst be called a great doctor, and command large fees.’ (b. Sanhedrin 91a)

Testing a Messiah candidate is a good thing

We often find in the Gospels cases where Pharisees approach Yeshua in an effort to “test” or “trap” him. The Pharisees’ behavior is sometimes interpreted to mean that they were unfaithful, blinded to the truth and even conspiring together to do evil, a perspective that is influenced by historical anti-Semitism.

But is it really a bad thing that the Pharisees tried to test Yeshua? He was claiming to be the messiah! If someone made such a claim to you, would you want to test them, or would you blindly take their word for it? Testing someone who makes serious claims to be sent from God is the only right thing to do, especially if you are the spiritual leader of a community. The fact that the Pharisees tested Yeshua is evidence that they took him seriously, and were responsible leaders among the Jewish people. It is to their credit.

One who claims to be the messiah should expect to be challenged on that point, and should not be intimidated. And remarkably, we find that Yeshua passed their tests with flying colors, often leaving them with nothing left to say.

Our best friends are our worst enemies

Religious communities are unique in that the more similar two groups are, the more likely they are to fight, and the more heated the fighting will be.

A notorious fellow once came into a congregation that I attended, and he began to distribute literature to congregants criticizing the leadership, accusing them of false teaching. When he was taken aside by the elders, they asked him: “Who is closer to the truth, we or the people at the Lutheran church down the street?” “You are,” he admitted. “Then why don’t you go the Lutherans!?” they responded.

Even the relationship between the two early Pharisaic groups (the House of Hillel and the House of Shammai) became so strained at one point that it led to bloodshed.

We must see the arguments between Yeshua and the Pharisees as an in-house argument. He vociferously criticized them precisely because they were the good guys; they should have known better.

A Wicked Generation

None of this is meant to say that the Pharisees were without their problems. There were some Pharisees who were hypocritical. There were some that were arrogant or ostentatious. There were some who hated without cause, and some who managed to be inwardly corrupt while maintaining an outward appearance of godliness.

The Talmud itself catalogues the “plagues of the Pharisees” which bring destruction upon the world (see b. Sotah 22b), describing those with hypocrisy, false humility and self-righteous attitudes.

But the problem with the recipients of Yeshua’s criticism was not that they were Pharisees. In fact, had they actually carried out their own teachings, they could not have been accused of hypocrisy, as Yeshua said, “therefore all that they tell you, do and observe, but do not do according to their deeds; for they say things and do not do them,” (Matthew 23:3).

The generation prior to the destruction of the Temple was known for corruption. The Talmud (b. Yoma 9b) explains that even though people were stringent in their observance, the Temple was destroyed because of the sin of baseless hatred.

It was important to understand that the specific generation that saw Yeshua was uniquely corrupt. After the Temple was destroyed, Judaism went through many changes and improvements. Although the rabbis and sages that inherited the stewardship of the vineyard of Israel were the heirs of the first century Pharisees, the message of the Temple’s destruction was not lost on them. The primary goal of Orthodox Judaism since that time has been to promote true repentance and pure-hearted devotion to God. The Judaism that exists today cannot be characterized with the same faults that existed in the days of the Pharisees.

Everyone, whether they are Jewish or not, would do well to heed the warnings and admonishments that Yeshua spoke. However, Yeshua’s condemnation was primarily aimed at that particular generation. He repeatedly used the term “this generation” in his criticism. If we generalize his accusations to apply to all Jewish people everywhere throughout all time, then we twist his words and put anti-Semitism in his mouth, Heaven forbid. Ironically, we would then be committing the same sins of self-righteousness and baseless hatred that plagued that generation.

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