The Pharisees were saying to him, “Look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath?”
-Mark 2:24

You may have heard, wrongly, that the Pharisees were the rabbis and that they basically ran the show in Yeshua’s time.

You may have heard that the Pharisees . . .

• were all hypocrites
• made up 613 rules which were oppressive
• led the synagogues and governed the way Jews lived for God.

Great resources for those who want to read up on the Pharisees: E.P. Sanders, Judaism: Practice and Belief and Shaye Cohen, From the Maccabees to the Mishnah. I provide no documentation for the assertions I will make in this summary on the Pharisees. Feel free to ask questions in the comments.

There are several reasons why the Pharisees are misunderstood:

• Josephus, who was a Pharisee, exaggerated their power and influence
• The later rabbis (third through sixth centuries), whose origins were in the Pharisee movement, exaggerated their power and influence when writing about the first century
• The other parties (Sadducees, Essenes, Herodians) all ceased to exist after 70 CE
• Yeshua clashed with the Pharisees on some matters of Torah
• Un-careful reading of the Gospels leads people not to notice the Sadducees and chief priests were the primary instruments of his execution, while some Pharisees instigated against him.

Here are some important truths about the Pharisees:

• They tended to be middle class, some working as scribes and other in various occupations.
• They tended to be urban, not rural.
• Their numbers were never large.
• Their origin was as a political party in the days of the Maccabees.
• They had some popularity because they stood against Rome in some early clashes.
• They were a sort of fraternity with a common interest in reforming Israel by increasing zeal for the Torah.
• Their beliefs were the closest of all the parties to the views of Yeshua and the apostles.
• In the early days especially, and the later rabbis corrected this tendency, they emphasized ritual over love and justice and mercy.
• You should no more judge Judaism by the things Yeshua criticized about the Pharisees than you should judge any Christian group by the ideas or behavior of some.
• If Yeshua was commenting today, he’d have many sharp criticisms for various Christian sub-groups that might make the Pharisees look good by comparison.
• The synagogues were run by common Jews, elders in the various towns.
• The rabbis of later centuries, whose origins were from the Pharisees, did not become the recognized leaders of Judaism until the sixth century.
• Synagogues in Israel in Yeshua’s time were not places of power, but learning and piety, and they were not led by Pharisees.
• Most Jews did not follow the growing list of traditions the Pharisees were coming up with out of a desire to see Israel come closer to God.
• The 613 are biblical commandments, not man-made rules of the Pharisees.
• Yeshua had positive things to say about some Pharisees. Nicodemus seems to have become a disciple. Of one Pharisee Yeshua said, “You are not far from the kingdom.”
• Many Pharisees believed in Yeshua after the resurrection, and one of them was Paul.
• Paul continued to say, “I am a Pharisee,” the rest of his life and never repudiated this identity.
• The Pharisees who thought more like Shammai were probably more violent in their manner of dealing with threats to Israel’s renewal.
• The Pharisees who thought like the gentler, more tolerant Hillel outnumbered the Shammaite Pharisees.
• Paul the persecutor was probably in the more militant Shammaite wing.
• The Pharisees were a minority on the Sanhedrin and the Sadducees called the shots.
• The Temple did not run according to the wishes of the Pharisees; if it had, this would have been a vast improvement and would have made the Temple much more in keeping with what Yeshua believed.
• The Pharisees in Yeshua’s time lived in Judea and had not spread much into Galilee.
• Yeshua believed the Pharisees did not keep the Torah enough and said his disciples had to surpass them.
• A large part of Yeshua’s critique was that the Pharisees should have seen loving God and people as the highest priorities of Torah.
• Yeshua expected his disciples to outdo the Pharisees literally in loving God and people.

So why would Pharisees come up to Galilee to check Yeshua out? Why would they sometimes follow him around and find reasons to criticize his disciples?

They cared deeply about Israel getting right with God. They wanted to see Messiah come and had a notion of Messiah and victory over Rome that Yeshua came to teach against.

They saw Yeshua at first as a disciple of John the Baptizer. They came to evaluate him as they had first evaluated John. They were critical of his ideas which did not match their own about what Torah renewal would look like.

They were well-meaning people who were wrong about a few things. But they were more like Yeshua in beliefs than most other Jewish sub-groups. And some of the things they were wrong about no one else understood either. Even the disciples did not think Messiah would die, make atonement for Israel and the world, and rise again.

Questions? Doubt something I said has substantiation? Feel free to ask me in the comments. Or if you would like to share how misinformation about the Pharisees and about Judaism has bothered you, I’d love to hear from you.

Josephus, a Galilean general, captured by the Romans, who became a collaborator with the Romans though always a defender of the greatness of his people, explains in a famous passage in The Jewish War (also called Bellum Judaicum or BJ for short) what one of the root causes of the war was. It was a concept of a Jewish ruler who would actually rule the world:

But their chief inducement to go to war was a equivocal oracle also found in their sacred writings, announcing that at that time a man from their country would become the ruler of the world.
–Bellum Judaicum 6.312-313, G.A. Williamson translation, Penguin Books, 1959.

John J. Collins says of this passage:

Josephus . . . also claims that messianic expectation was a significant factor in the outbreak of the revolt against Rome . . . Josephus held that the oracle really referred to Vespasian, who was proclaimed emperor while still in Judea (The Messiah in Early Judaism and Christianity, pg. 19).

What oracle from the Hebrew Bible did Josephus likely mean? N.T. Wright thinks it was Daniel 2, in which Daniel explains a vision of four successive empires and then a fifth kingdom which breaks all others “in those days,” a kingdom which will never end (Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, pg. 304). In another passage (Antiquities 10.203-210), Josephus alters the vision of Daniel to hide the fact that it might refer to Rome being destroyed. He points out that iron is stronger than gold, silver, or bronze (a compliment to Rome) and says he will not bother to interpret the meaning of the stone that breaks all the kingdoms since that deals with the future and not the present.

So, to summarize some important points we learn from Josephus about the messianic concept:

(1) Daniel 2 suggested to many Jews that their time was the time when the world ruler from Israel would emerge (i.e., Messiah).

(2) The belief in this emerging Jewish king of the world (Messiah) was a large part of the motivation for the Jewish Revolt.

(3) How does this relate to the possibility of a strong “Messiah concept” in the lifetime of Yeshua? It shows that a generation after Yeshua, there was a strong messianic concept. This is evidence, though admittedly not proof, that similar concepts abounded in Yeshua’s time a generation earlier.