Who Were the Pharisees? (Part 1)
Your Bite-Sized Bible Dictionary
This is the first entry in what I’m calling (tentatively) the Bite-Sized Bible Dictionary. This is an attempt to provide a quick and critical overview of a topic related to the background of the New Testament. Today, we’re talking about the Pharisees.
Who were the Pharisees? Are they more like evil Sith Lords or Jesus’ rabbinic contemporaries? What did they believe? What kind of political influence and power did they have? Do all the Gospels present them the same? What was Jesus’ relationship to the Pharisees?
Pharisees are perhaps the most well-known Jewish sect in the first-century among others like the Sadducees, Essenes, and Zealots. In Second Temple Judaism, the separatist predecessors of the Pharisees, a sect known as the Hasidim (“pious ones”), became active in response to the political influence of Hellenism within the aristocracy of the Hasmonean dynasty circa 150 B.C.E. The Hasidim as a movement expanded and split into subgroups, for various reasons, into the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes. ‘Pharisee’ comes from an Aramaic word “פרשׁ (prsh), which means ‘to separate,’ ‘divide,’ or ‘distinguish.’”1 The sect is often presumed to have subsumed into and founded Rabbinic Judaism circa A.D. 135.
In scholarship, however, there are disagreements about certain aspects of the group, such as the meaning of their name given above, the extent of their political influence in Jewish society and government, and their origins more generally. This is why recent scholarship has taken an ad fontes (“back to the sources”) approach to the Pharisees.
What Sources Do We Have?
In the 1970s, an important shift in studying the Pharisees happened with the work of Jacob Neusner and Ellis Rivkin. They began to only look at and contextualize the independent sources that mentioned the name of the Pharisees. We don’t have extant texts from them, thus, for Neusener and Rivkin, reconstructing the “historical” Pharisees can only draw on three primary sources: Flavius Josephus, the New Testament, and later rabbinic literature. The intention behind this approach was to help scholars apply a conservative, historical methodology when examining Pharisiac aims and origins as a corrective to previous claims and theories about the Pharisees.
For example, the previous consensus of scholarship was generally held that the Pharisees had a dominating influence in Jewish society. But Neusner overturned this view by showing, for example, that before 70 A.D. synagogues were not institutions controlled by the Pharisees, nor was the later rabbinic movement specifically Pharisaic in origin. However, this isn’t universally accepted among scholars today.
The three primary sources understand the Pharisees differently, but they do support some agreement on the following: (1) they were not a priestly sect, by were lay experts of Torah, (2) had a mediating influence between common folk and aristocracy, (3) they advanced oral traditions(s) based on Torah, (4) they were strict about tithing and ritual purity, (5) they held specific theological beliefs about eschatological judgment, afterlife, and the spiritual realm.
Conclusion
Overall, our three sources don’t seem interested in revealing more about the Pharisees than is necessary for their purposes, so we must be prudent about interpreting their aims, motives, beliefs, behaviors, etc. given the data we have. We’ll look at the three sources and some recent considerations and theories about the Pharisees over the coming weeks in bite-sized sections. I hope you’ve enjoyed this post!
Bibliography:
Cohick, L. “Pharisees.” In Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels, Second Edition, edited by Joel B. Green, Jeannine K. Brown, and Nicholas Perrin. Downers Grove, IL; Nottingham, England: IVP Academic; IVP, 2013.
Johnson, Bradley T. “Pharisees.” In The Lexham Bible Dictionary, edited by John D. Barry, David Bomar, Derek R. Brown, Rachel Klippenstein, Douglas Mangum, Carrie Sinclair Wolcott, Lazarus Wentz, Elliot Ritzema, and Wendy Widder. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2016.
Mason, S. “Pharisees.” In Dictionary of New Testament Background, edited by Craig A. Evans, and Stanely E. Porter. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/fuller/detail.action?docID=2009908.
Bradley T. Johnson, “Pharisees,” in The Lexham Bible Dictionary, ed. John D. Barry et al. (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2016).