The Pharisees - were they all bad?

Vanellus

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In old fashioned WW2 movies there was often the cliche of the good German. A more recent example was Oskar Schindler in the Schindler's list.

The NT seems to treat the Pharisees in a similar manner (of course the situation was less extreme in terms of numbers of people killed)

So we have "good" or goodish Pharisees like Nicodemus and Gamaliel (a leader of the Pharisees)
Pharisees who warn Jesus about Herod wanting to kill him (was Herod bored after getting rid of John the Baptist) in Lk 13:31
(though it seems the Pharisees were just trying to get Jesus to leave their area)
Pharisees who plot to kill Jesus e.g. Mk 3:6

I've read about two schools of Pharisees - that of Hillel and Shammai, but I don't get the impression these differences in attitude to Jesus and the early church stem from that.

Is this just natural variation you get in any group or is there something else going on?
 

JackRT

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Over the centuries and going right back to the New Testament itself, the Pharisees have been viewed very negatively. In my opinion most of this negativity is quite undeserved.

At the time of Jesus the Pharisees were the most liberal and progressive aspect of Judaism. They were in several 'schools' or ‘bets’ --- the most progressive was Bet Hillel, which was in a minority position at the time of Jesus. The dominant group was the more conservative Bet Shammai. Towards the end of the first century following the destruction of the temple, Bet Hillel moved into the dominant role. Modern rabbinical Judaism traces its roots to the Pharisee movement.


Being a rabbi, Jesus was also a Pharisee and it seems most likely that Jesus was of Bet Hillel. To suggest that the scribes and Pharisees were in bed with the high priest and his little group is to betray a lack of understanding of Judaism at that time. The high priest, a Sadducee, was the most hated man in Judaism for the simple reason that he was regarded as a Roman 'quisling' --- he was after all personally appointed by the procurator himself and answered to him. The high priest did chair the Sanhedrin but did not control it. It was, in fact, controlled by the Pharisees who opposed the high priest at nearly every turn.

The Pharisees themselves became a major movement within Judaism in the centuries just prior to Jesus. They regarded their role as an effort to make the Law a possession of all the people not just the priesthood and the ruling elite. To this end they established synagogues in the cities, towns and villages. That is to say, they invented the 'community church' and most Christian churches today follow the same order of service established by the Pharisees --- several scripture readings interspersed with prayer and hymns and of course a sermon usually based on one of the readings. They also established schools attached to the synagogues to encourage literacy even amongst the common people. At the time of Jesus they as a group were certainly were not the hypocrites that the gospels portray them as. It is also very probably true that there were individual Pharisees who were over-zealous hypocrites.


In addition, they were able to successfully introduce legal measures to mitigate the harsher aspects of Torah law. This had the effect of virtually eliminating legal executions by stoning for offences like blasphemy, adultery, rebellious youths and the like. In those few executions that did take place, they ensured that the victim was rendered dead or unconscious by the first stone.


Scripture portrays a degree of hostility between the Pharisees and Jesus and his followers. It is doubtful that this was the actual case at the time of Jesus. I suspect that the majority of Pharisees would have been both curious about and friendly toward Jesus. In Acts 5:33-42 Luke portrays Peter and the apostles arrested and taken for trial before the Sanhedrin. Note that earlier in this same chapter it was the Sadducees not the Pharisees who were demanding that the apostles be imprisoned. It was Rabbi Gamaliel, a Pharisee, who successfully defended them before the Sanhedrin. Rabbi Gamaliel was a student of Rabbi Hillel mentioned earlier. Scripture even notes that Saul/Paul studied under Gamaliel.


About forty years following the execution of Jesus, the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and the temple and with it they also destroyed the high priesthood. In the years following, the leadership of Judaism did devolve upon the Pharisees and we see rabbinic Judaism becoming dominant. Like all peoples threatened with cultural extinction, Judaism turned inward --- they circled the wagons and became very suspicious of any threat both internal and external. This is a fundamentalist knee jerk reaction --- we see something similar going on in the Islamic world today and also in the Christian right in certain parts of the USA.


This was the climate in which the gospels were written. By this time it was becoming increasingly apparent that the early Christian church was losing the battle for the heart and soul of Judaism to the Pharisee rabbis and there was a good deal of bitterness on the part of both parties. This explains the animosity toward the Pharisees. Let us then temper our attitudes and ‘Pharisee rhetoric’ because we now realize, for the most part, that they have been portrayed quite unfairly in the gospels.


******


You might be interested to know that at the time of Jesus the Pharisees were divided into several schools or 'Bets'. The majority were in the very rigid and conservative Bet Shammai. The most important of the minority schools was Bet Hillel. They were actually quite liberal and progressive. Recall that Rabbi Gamaliel was a student of Rabbi Hillel and that Paul claimed to have been a student of Gamaliel. Gamaliel also successfully defended Peter and some of the apostles before the Sanhedrin. The teachings of Bet Hillel would have been very familiar to Jesus because he used some of them himself along with using the parable as an effective teaching tool. By the way, to be a Rabbi was automatically to be a Pharisee. At the time of Jesus they are estimated to have numbered only about 6000 out of the estimated total world population of 10 million Jews. I suspect that Rabbi Yeshua bar Miriam (Jesus) was of Bet Hillel. Perhaps the negative press received by the Pharisees in the bible is partly due to the fact the Bet Shammai was the dominant school. Incidentally Bet Hillel did move into the dominant role late in the 1st century and became what we know today as Rabbinic Judaism. Following the destruction of Jerusalem in AD70 the Pharisees replaced the high priesthood as the dominant authority in Judaism. It was at the same time becoming obvious that Christianity was losing the battle for the heart and soul of Judaism to the Pharisees. I suspect there was a certain amount of bitterness about this in the Christian community. Since this was happening at the very time the canonical gospels were being written, it should come as no surprise that our gospels reflect a certain amount of anti Pharisee and indeed anti Judaic bias.
 
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JackRT

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JackRT,

Thanks for your long response, but shouldn't you have said that it wasn't original but sourced from:
OrthodoxChristianity.net - Index

Actually That was not my source. My post is drawn from wide reading from quite a number of sources. I will certainly look into the site you provided. Thank you.
 
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ViaCrucis

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The Pharisees, as a group, weren't bad. Theologically Jesus was a Pharisee; and Pharisaism is effectively the form of Judaism which the New Testament seems to regard as the most valid (certainly moreso than Saduceeism). The problem is that we are looking back at the Gospels with different eyes; and the conflict between Jesus/the early Church and the Pharisees seems to suggest as if the Pharisees as a whole were some nefarious, evil group. There were bad Pharisees, just as there are bad eggs in every group. What the Pharisees were chiefly concerned about was the purity of Jewish religion, and so that meant many of them were going to respond less charitably with someone going around claiming to be the Messiah and the Son of God; and for early Christians they were going to be seen largely as heretics or apostates to Judaism.

What Jesus takes issue with is not Pharisaism, but with religious hypocrisy and the misuse of religion, and other such factors--things which are hardly a "Pharisee problem", it's a religion problem. It's why He tells His followers not to do those things, that His followers are to be selfless servants. The misuse of religion toward wielding it as power over others is exceptionally easy and quite tempting for anyone who does happen to be in a position of authority--and history is pretty replete with that. It's easy to hold firm to the ideals of one's religion when one is in the position of being persecuted or socially stigmatized; but holding firm to those ideals once one's religious group is the dominant one in society? Well--just pick up a history book and take a gander.

-CryptoLutheran
 
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Soyeong

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In old fashioned WW2 movies there was often the cliche of the good German. A more recent example was Oskar Schindler in the Schindler's list.

The NT seems to treat the Pharisees in a similar manner (of course the situation was less extreme in terms of numbers of people killed)

So we have "good" or goodish Pharisees like Nicodemus and Gamaliel (a leader of the Pharisees)
Pharisees who warn Jesus about Herod wanting to kill him (was Herod bored after getting rid of John the Baptist) in Lk 13:31
(though it seems the Pharisees were just trying to get Jesus to leave their area)
Pharisees who plot to kill Jesus e.g. Mk 3:6

I've read about two schools of Pharisees - that of Hillel and Shammai, but I don't get the impression these differences in attitude to Jesus and the early church stem from that.

Is this just natural variation you get in any group or is there something else going on?

Paul also identified as a Pharisee in the end of Acts, so there certainly were some good Pharisees. A major problem that Jesus had was with hypocrisy, which is not to say that the Pharisees were all hypocrites or that hypocrisy is only a problem with the Pharisees. It is interesting to compare some of the similarities between the teachings of Hillel and the teachings of Jesus. For example:

'One famous account in the Talmud (Shabbat 31a) tells about a gentile who wanted to convert to Judaism. This happened not infrequently, and this individual stated that he would accept Judaism only if a rabbi would teach him the entire Torah while he, the prospective convert, stood on one foot. First he went to Shammai, who, insulted by this ridiculous request, threw him out of the house. The man did not give up and went to Hillel. This gentle sage accepted the challenge, and said:

"What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation of this--go and study it!"'

I also recommend this lecture by an ex-Pharisee about what Phariseeism is and the historical background of what Jesus was dealing with.

 
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Bob Crowley

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To be honest, I sometimes wonder if Christ contemplated becoming a Pharisee himself in his younger years. You might remember when his parents discovered Him in the temple after looking for him for three days, the leaders of the temple worship were astonished at his insights at that age.

So He'd certainly have known some of them, and He'd have realised they had God's laws at heart, and occupied the seat of Moses. But I suspect that as He grew older, and got to know the system and the people a bit better, He would have become disillusioned with them. And so we find His later opposition to the Pharisees as a group, opposition so bitter it led to His crucifixion.

Yet it's noteworthy that when God wanted someone to take the message to the Gentiles, and write much of the New Testament, He chose a Pharisee, namely St. Paul (Saul at the time).

I suppose you could say that they suffered the usual fate of power groups after they've been in power for too long - they become corrupt. They started with a lot of respect from the Jewish people during and after the Maccabean revolt, but as time went by, the continued power (and subsequent wealth) went to their heads. Yet they took God seriously in the Jewish legal sense, so when God wanted to make it clear that Christ had fulfilled the Law, He used a Pharisee in the form of St. Paul, the writer of most of the NT Epistles.

The Origin of the Pharisees (Bible History Online)
 
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JackRT

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To be honest, I sometimes wonder if Christ contemplated becoming a Pharisee himself in his younger years. You might remember when his parents discovered Him in the temple after looking for him for three days, the leaders of the temple worship were astonished at his insights at that age.

So He'd certainly have known some of them, and He'd have realised they had God's laws at heart, and occupied the seat of Moses. But I suspect that as He grew older, and got to know the system and the people a bit better, He would have become disillusioned with them. And so we find His later opposition to the Pharisees as a group, opposition so bitter it led to His crucifixion.

Yet it's noteworthy that when God wanted someone to take the message to the Gentiles, and write much of the New Testament, He chose a Pharisee, namely St. Paul (Saul at the time).

I suppose you could say that they suffered the usual fate of power groups after they've been in power for too long - they become corrupt. They started with a lot of respect from the Jewish people during and after the Maccabean revolt, but as time went by, the continued power (and subsequent wealth) went to their heads. Yet they took God seriously in the Jewish legal sense, so when God wanted to make it clear that Christ had fulfilled the Law, He used a Pharisee in the form of St. Paul, the writer of most of the NT Epistles.

The Origin of the Pharisees (Bible History Online)

Without saying so outright, the Bible strongly suggests that Jesus himself was a Pharisee rabbi himself.
 
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Vanellus

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If you equate Pharisee to mean rabbi, then since Jesus was functionally a rabbi then be could be considered a Pharisee.

That doesn't mean thinking that Jesus' criticism of the hypocrisy of Pharisees didn't happen.

A related question. The gospels often refer to the "Jews" e.g. Jn7:14

Not until halfway through the festival did Jesus go up to the temple courts and begin to teach. 15The Jews there were amazed and asked, “How did this man get such learning without having been taught?”

It seems odd to describe people in the Temple area as "Jews". Jesus was a Jew, all his disciples were Jews. Jerusalem (esp the temple area) was occupied mostly by Jews. When did Jesus ever teach a large crowd of non Jews? There are other instances of this usage in the gospels. Why needlessly emphasise the Jewishness of the people when it's obvious they were Jews?
 
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Bob Crowley

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If you equate Pharisee to mean rabbi, then since Jesus was functionally a rabbi then be could be considered a Pharisee.

That doesn't mean thinking that Jesus' criticism of the hypocrisy of Pharisees didn't happen.

A related question. The gospels often refer to the "Jews" e.g. Jn7:14

Not until halfway through the festival did Jesus go up to the temple courts and begin to teach. 15The Jews there were amazed and asked, “How did this man get such learning without having been taught?”

It seems odd to describe people in the Temple area as "Jews". Jesus was a Jew, all his disciples were Jews. Jerusalem (esp the temple area) was occupied mostly by Jews. When did Jesus ever teach a large crowd of non Jews? There are other instances of this usage in the gospels. Why needlessly emphasise the Jewishness of the people when it's obvious they were Jews?

Because by the time the Gospels were written, the Church had spread well outside Israel. The audience the writers usually had in mind were Gentiles, hence they were written in Koine Greek, the lingua fraca of the time.
 
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