The ancient historian Flavius Josephus describes four rival philosophies among the Jews at the time of Jesus: Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, and a fourth group he traces to Judas the Galilean. We usually call that fourth group the Zealots.
The Pharisees are the ones everybody thinks they already know. The word has become an English insult meaning a self-righteous hypocrite, and that is a problem, because it means most of us arrive at the Gospels with the verdict already delivered. If you know in advance that the Pharisees are the bad guys, you will read right past what Jesus actually says to them and why.
Where the Name Comes From
The Hebrew is perushim, from the root parash, meaning to separate or to distinguish. Hence the usual gloss, separatist.
The name may have started as an outsider's nickname rather than a badge they chose. Among themselves they seem to have used haverim, associates or fellows. Also, the same root can carry the sense of specifying or interpreting precisely, which fits them just as well. These were the people who worked out what the law required in exact detail.
Separatist is not a slur here. They separated from ritual impurity and from casual, careless religion. They were serious people.
Pharisees at a Glance
- Their name is generally thought to derive from a Hebrew root meaning to separate.
- The Pharisees sprang from the Hasidim, the pious group who joined the Maccabean revolt looking for religious freedom (1 Maccabees 2:42; 7:13).
- They were the intellectual elite, not the aristocratic wealthy elite. Their authority came from learning, not from birth or office.
- Chief feature: they had a reputation for excelling in religious observance and for exact keeping of the law. They were religiously progressive, constantly refining the oral law, which they regarded as binding alongside the written law.
- They were a small but influential party. Josephus numbers them at roughly six thousand in Herod's time (Antiquities 17.2.4).
- They emphasized God's sovereign government of the universe and his overruling of human disobedience so that the divine will triumphs.
- They insisted on individual as well as communal adherence to the standards of the Mosaic law in every detail.
- They built an oral law, an interpretation of the written law that treated the tradition of the elders as authoritative for religious life alongside Scripture.
- They practiced great care in matters of ritual purity, food laws, sabbath laws and tithing.
- They affirmed the resurrection of the dead, an afterlife of rewards and punishments, and the existence of angels and spirits. On every one of these points the Sadducees disagreed.
- They were popular with ordinary people and therefore a political force to be reckoned with. This is the reverse of the Sadducees, who had power without popularity.
- They looked for a Messiah who would reinstate a righteous kingdom under God.
- The Pharisees were the forefathers of the rabbinic movement. When the temple fell in AD 70 and the Sadducees vanished with it, the Pharisees survived, because their religion was portable. It lived in the synagogue, the household and the text rather than in a building. Rabbinic Judaism descends from them.
Seven Kinds of Pharisee***
The Jewish Talmud (Sota 22b) acknowledges the existence of 7 kinds of Pharisees*:
- The "wait-a little" Pharisee always has an excuse for putting off a good deed.
- The "bruise" or "bleeding" Pharisee, in order to avoid looking at a women, shuts his eyes and stumbles against the wall so as to bruise himself and bleed.
- The "shoulder Pharisee wears, as it were, his good deeds ostentatiously upon his shoulders, where all can see them.
- The "hump backed" Pharisee walks about stooped over in mock humility.
- The "ever-reckoning" Pharisee is continually counting up his good deeds to balance them against his bad deeds.
- The "God-fearing" Pharisee stands in awe and dread of God.
- The "God-loving" Pharisee is a true son of Abraham and a genuine Pharisee.
*adapted from Jewish New Testament Commentary by David H. Stern 1992 p. 69-70.
***The Talmud was compiled centuries after the New Testament, so this is not a first-century source and it is not evidence for what Pharisees were like in Jesus' day. What it is, and this is the useful part, is a Jewish tradition criticizing its own. The rabbis who descended from the Pharisees saw the same failure modes Jesus named and had words for them. Notice too that two of the seven are commended. Even in this list, being a Pharisee is not automatically a condemnation.
Pharisees in the New Testament
They appear more than any other group, and the picture is more varied than the caricature allows.
Mark 7:1-13. The central dispute in a single scene. The Pharisees ask why Jesus' disciples eat with unwashed hands, meaning ritually unwashed, not dirty. Jesus answers that they leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men, and gives an example: a man declares his property Corban, dedicated to God, and thereby escapes the obligation to support his parents. The tradition has been used to get around the commandment. That is the argument. It is not about caring too much about obedience. It is about what happens when human interpretation acquires the authority of Scripture.
Matthew 23. The woes. Read verses 2 and 3 before the rest of it. Jesus tells the crowd to do what the Pharisees teach, because they sit in Moses' seat, but not to do what they do, because they do not practice what they preach. He is not dismissing their teaching wholesale. He is indicting the gap between what they say and how they live.
Luke 18:9-14. The Pharisee and the tax collector. The Pharisee's prayer is factually accurate. He really does fast and tithe, and he really is not an extortioner. That is what makes the parable land. Jesus is not attacking a man who lied. He is attacking a man who was right about his own record and thought that was the point.
Nicodemus (John 3:1-21; 7:50-51; 19:39). A Pharisee and a member of the council, who comes at night with real questions, later defends Jesus' right to a hearing, and finally helps bury him.
Gamaliel (Acts 5:34-39). A Pharisee who stops the Sanhedrin from killing the apostles, on the grounds that if this movement is from God they cannot overthrow it.
Paul (Acts 23:6; 26:5; Philippians 3:4-6). The most famous Pharisee in the New Testament. He never says he stopped being one in the matter of the resurrection, and in Philippians he lists his Pharisaic credentials at length before calling them loss for the sake of Christ. Notice what he does not say. He does not say the credentials were fake. He says they were not the point.
Acts 15:5. Some believers who belonged to the party of the Pharisees, in the church, arguing at the Jerusalem council. Converted Pharisees existed in numbers.
Luke 7:36; 11:37; 14:1. Jesus repeatedly accepts dinner invitations from Pharisees. You do not get invited to dinner by people who consider you an enemy, at least not that often.
Luke 13:31. Some Pharisees come to warn Jesus that Herod wants to kill him.
Why this matters
Suppose you decide you are going to take Scripture seriously. Not casually, seriously. You want to actually obey it, not just admire it. So you start asking practical questions. The command says do no work on the sabbath. Fine. Is carrying my keys work? Is walking to my neighbor's house work? How far is too far?
Somebody has to answer those questions or the command can't be kept. So you answer them. Then you write the answers down so the next generation doesn't have to start over. Then those answers get taught alongside the command, because they're how you keep the command. And within a generation or two, nobody can tell the difference anymore between what God said and what the careful people concluded God must have meant.
That is what you get when serious people try to be faithful in situations Scripture doesn't directly address. Every church tradition does some version of it, including yours and mine.
So when we call somebody a Pharisee, we usually mean he was uptight about rules. That misses it. The problem was not that they cared about obedience. Jesus cared about obedience. The problem was two-fold, and both parts are worth naming precisely.
- They gave human interpretation the authority of the word of God, and then used it to work around the word of God. That's Mark 7.
- They measured righteousness by what could be counted. Tithing herbs can be verified. Justice, mercy and faithfulness cannot be put on a spreadsheet, which is exactly why Jesus says in Matthew 23:23 that they've attended to the small measurable thing and neglected the weightier matters. Not instead of the small thing. In addition to it.
The uncomfortable application is not "don't be a Pharisee." Nobody wakes up planning to be one. The application is: which of my convictions are actually Scripture, and which are the careful conclusions of people I trust? Both may be right. They are not the same thing, and treating them as the same thing is precisely the move Jesus objected to.
Common Questions
What did the Pharisees believe? They held the written law and the oral tradition of the elders as authoritative, affirmed the resurrection and an afterlife, believed in angels and spirits, emphasized God's sovereignty, and pursued exact obedience in matters of purity, sabbath, food and tithing.
What is the difference between the Pharisees and the Sadducees? The Pharisees were a lay movement of scholars, popular with ordinary people, who accepted oral tradition and affirmed the resurrection. The Sadducees were the priestly and landowning aristocracy, who rejected oral tradition, denied the resurrection, and held political power through the temple.
Why did Jesus criticize the Pharisees? Not for taking obedience seriously. He criticized them for treating human tradition as equal to God's command, for using tradition to evade God's command, for measuring righteousness by what could be counted, and for the gap between what they taught and how they lived.
Were all Pharisees opposed to Jesus? No. Nicodemus, Gamaliel and Paul were Pharisees. Acts 15:5 mentions Christians who belonged to the party. Jesus ate in Pharisees' homes on several occasions, and some Pharisees warned him about Herod.
What happened to the Pharisees? They survived the destruction of the temple in AD 70, because their religion centered on the text and the synagogue rather than on the temple. Rabbinic Judaism descends from them.
References
Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 13.10.5-6, 17.2.4, 18.1.3 Josephus, The Jewish War 2.8.14 Babylonian Talmud, Sotah 22b
Baker’s Evangelical Dictionary: Pharisees
Bridgeway Bible Dictionary: Pharisees
Easton’s Bible Dictionary: Pharisees
Fausset Bible Dictionary: Pharisees
Holman Bible Dictionary: Jewish Parties in the New Testament
Hastings’ Dictionary of the Bible: Pharisees
Kitto’s Popular Cyclopedia of Biblical Literature: Pharisees
Morrish Bible Dictionary: Pharisees
International Standard Bible Encyclopedia: Pharisees
McClintock and Strong: Pharisee
The Nuttall Encyclopedia: Pharisees
The Jewish Encyclopedia: Pharisees
Alfred Edersheim: Chapter 15 Relation of the Pharisees to the Sadducees and Essenes, and to the Gospel of Christ
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