Biblical Pharisees and Jewish Halakhah
Good guys with bad press, says scholar Roland Deines
Were the Biblical Pharisees really as bad as the New Testament makes them seem? Professor Roland Deines thinks not. Photo courtesy Roland Deines.
And yet, Deines says, the Biblical Pharisees were popular in the first century; they were the people’s party. Why would the people follow a bunch of hypocrites?
As Roland Deines explains in a BAR column, the New Testament and Josephus include polemical texts against the Pharisees rather than objective descriptions. In fact, it was the Pharisees’ take on Jewish halakhah that made them so popular.
The strict (and extensive) purity laws of Jewish halakhah made it both costly and time-consuming to follow—putting the Biblical instructions out of reach for most common people. For example, if impurity touched the outside of a pottery vessel, it needed to be broken and the contents thrown away. Instead, the Pharisees interpreted these laws in a way that made purity accessible to more people. According to the Pharisaic interpretation, the inside of the aforementioned vessel remained pure and the contents could still be used.
Although this sort of legalistic interpretation may seem like nit-picking to some, the Pharisees made purity attainable for all of Israel, not just the elite.
For more of Roland Deines’s explanation about the popularity of the Biblical Pharisees and their take on Jewish halakhah, see Roland Deines, Biblical Views: “The Pharisees—Good Guys with Bad Press” in the July/August 2013 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review. This Bible History Daily post was originally published in August 2013.
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Related reading in Bible History Daily:
Ancient Jewish Theology and Law
Jonathan Klawans on the divergence of the Pharisees, Sadducees and Essenes
Schisms in Jewish History
Lawrence H. Schiffman’s four-part series on unity and disunity throughout Jewish history.
This Bible History Daily feature was originally published in 2013.
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Jesus’ dealings with the pharisees is some of the most anachronistic literature in all the NT.
It seems a lot of these purity laws and the red heifer were Gods way of protecting his people (the whole tribe) from sickness a disease because he loved them all. I don’t think God meant for people to be looked down upon for not being able to pay for the precautions and required methods to do things in a kosher way. It seems to me the pharisees were short sighted in determining the reason for the law and shrugged off the responsibility for the elite to help their fellow tribesmen to be able to afford to maintain the law. Their strength was in their numbers rich or poor.
We have that same problem today the power elite put their self above the little people that they make their wealth off of. They like to reap the harvest and not reseed the field. The 2 pyramids in that star of David cover both ways top to bottom and bottom to top, it’s not meant to be a one way thing the elite seem to forget that. YHWH people do his work. imho
They may have been popular with many, they certainly had powerful positions in the community, but so what? So do many hypocritical religious leaders today. Look at the popularity of some TV preachers. There is nothing in the NT to suggest that the Gospel writers were dishonest in their writings. The writings of the early Jewish leaders confirm their hatred of Jesus. There is also no secret about how the Pharisees persecuted the early Christians.
Now all of the sudden someone wants to white wash what they did. They did not make purity available to all Israel, then actually imposed heave burdens on the people that made obeyingf the law more difficult. They have a shameful history.
Always consider the source, their ties, alliances, consistent positions and financiers of their research. I think a contempory of the time-Josepus, and first hand witness accounts of what Yehoshua said and the non recantations of the tortured witnesses, has the highest of credibility v.s. the schooled opinions of 2,000 year after the fact researchers. Hard but true. Most of us know the archeological politics that are played back and forth. Everyone always has THEIR experts to claim what they want. The Pharisees are Perushim because they think they have more authority to create Law and that it supersedes Torah.
They supported the Maccabees in his self appointing of High Priest against the Sons of Zaddok/Essenes. The wicked priest killed the founder (Teacher of Righteousness) for speaking against the High Priest and Pharisees, Sound familiar?
Yeshua (Jesus) also indicated that the P’rushim (Pharisees) were righteous as well . . .
Notice the following in the text:
Matthew 5:20 (CJB)
20 For I tell you that
unless your righteousness
is far greater than that of the Torah-teachers and P’rushim,
you will certainly not enter the Kingdom of Heaven!
πλείων pleiōn – To a greater degree – greater in magnitude . . .
If we are going to take an exegetical approach, we have to come to the conclusion that they have a righteousness of some degree because that is exactly what is being said . . .
Contrast this with the following question:
If what they were teaching was wrong, would Yeshua instruct his talmidim to do what they say?
Matthew 23:1-7 (CJB)
1 Then Yeshua addressed the crowds and his talmidim:
2 “The Torah-teachers and the P’rushim,” he said, “sit in the seat of Moshe.
3 So whatever they tell you, take care to do it.
But don’t do what they do, because they talk but don’t act!
4 They tie heavy loads onto people’s shoulders but won’t lift a finger to help carry them.
5 Everything they do is done to be seen by others; for they make their t’fillin broad and their tzitziyot long,
6 they love the place of honor at banquets and the best seats in the synagogues,
7 and they love being greeted deferentially in the marketplaces and being called ‘Rabbi.’
However, they are also warned not to do what they do . . .
Obviously, their intent/inner motive is suspect here –
What is NOT suspect is that they sit in the seat of authority
They were considered the most accurate interpreters of the law
The question you have to ask is whether Yeshua would have the people and his talmidim obey them if what they were teaching was wrong . . . .
In layman’s terms – they followed the rules (where their degree of righteousness comes from)
but Adonai judges the heart . . .the inner motive
Isn’t that why he says, if you really believed Moshe you would believe in me because he wrote about me?
and yet some did – just look at acts 15
3 verses are all that are needed:
Acts 15:5 (CJB)
5 But some of those who had come to trust were from the party of the P’rushim; and they stood up and said, “It is necessary to circumcise them and direct them to observe the Torah of Moshe.”
Acts 15:12 (CJB)
12 Then the whole assembly kept still as they listened to Bar-Nabba and Sha’ul tell what signs and miracles God had done through them among the Gentiles.
* (this includes the P’rushim)
Acts 15:25 (CJB)
25 So we have decided unanimously to select men and send them to you with our dear friends Bar-Nabba and Sha’ul,
* (again this includes believing P’rushim in their midst)
P’rushim (Pharisees) that were believers?!? Oy Vey! (Oh the pain) 😛
My 2 cents anyways
You ask why would the people follow a bunch of hypocrites? Look around you, for Heaven’s sake!!! Human nature hasn’t changed much over the millennia, if I’m any kind of a student of history. Human beings are creatures of expediency and if their leadership found a way to reinterpret the law and navigate a more user-friendly version for the people, I doubt there was a hypocrisy flag thrown by the masses! My 2 cents.
My good Sir, would I be in err to say that they did not ‘make the laws of purity more accessible? ‘
How did the various takanot and maasim of the Pharisees make ritual purity ‘accessible ‘? Yeshua ‘s (Jesus ‘) first miracle is yo turn water set aside for ritual washing, a commandment never found in the law of God (Torah) but invented by the Prushim (Pharisees), turning this water into the finest wine in the land. And, my!, guess what they considered would make this purported water of puritication defiled? (well, as you will find in all his miracles, the answer is in the miracle 🙂 ) So what would make this purification water defiled?
Ans : If it had the slightest taste of wine. But boy, this had more than the slightest taste!, I mean ransack France but you won’tget a hold of this Sauvignon!
Healing the man born blind (at the Feast of Lights!!! enough said, prophecy declared) why did the Lord of Glory spit and mmake mud, send this 40 yr old blind man on a trek to the pool of Shiloam with all the mikvaot on the temple mount? Believe it or not, he broke at least 2 Rabbinic takanot in this one miracle!!!
1. Making mud on the Sabbath (Talmud, tractate Shabbat 108b)
2. Walking more than a Sabbath days journey!
Do we see a pattern here?
(Main reference tool for this comment : The Chronological Gospels : The Life and Seventy Week Ministry of the Messiah, by Michael Rood) just so you know I am not making these things up!
All of this stuff about ritual purity is actually beside the point. That applied, anyway, only to matters relating to Temple attendance. It was important to priests serving there. That is one chief reason why the Pharisees relieved the mass of the people from most of its obligations, both in Judea and in the Diaspora too, even if they sought to keep as many as were practically possible in their own more demanding observance.
Underlying these things, anyway, was a vision of the Jewish people as being a dedicated “Kingdom of Priests” (Exod. 19:6) serving a laity which was the whole of humanity, and the Temple itself was to be seen as “a house of prayer for all people” (Isa. 56:7). Succot, Tabernacles, in particular, was a festival in which there were offerings for all humanity, which is why Zechariyah 14:16ff. says in the Messianic Era all peoples will come to Jerusalem to celebrate Succot. There was a universalistic vision behind this which is ignored in most accounts.
What many of these comments depressingly indicate is that the anti-Judaism that stains too much of the New Testament and the Church Fathers remains alive and well amongst too many otherwise admirably devout Christians today: here we have the heartroot of antisemitism down through the ages, for over 2,000 years. The Pharisees, predecessors of the Rabbis who transmitted mainstream Judaism to later ages, were criticised by Josephus precisely because of their popularity and generally acknowledged authority amongst the people — since he himself was of Sadducean background and sympathies, even if he had toyed with joining the Pharisees in his youth. He had also toyed with joining the Essenes, he tells us; such frivolous adolescent experiments mean little aside from being possible indicators of instability. He was quite ready to go over to the Roman side, after all, betraying his people and joining their mass murderers, at the time of the war with Rome that brought about the destruction of Judea and the Temple itself. His problem with the Pharisees had nothing to do with ritual purity matters. It was because they were the admired and followed mainstream religious authorities of the Jews.
The hostility towards the Pharisees in the New Testament was for much the same reason. The leaders of early Christianity were in competition from the start with the mainstream authorities of Judaism to win the allegiance of the Jewish masses. They had a problem, though, since few joined them: traditional Jewish religion flourished, and its Pharisaic leaders were too admired for their kindliness, leniency, piety and learning. The great Rabbi/Pharisee Hillel famously exemplified those qualities, and he and his students led the major school amongst the Pharisees. (Indeed there is actually very little in Jesus’ incontrovertible teachings that deviated from Pharisaic teachings; he even insisted that all the Pharisaic teachings were authoritative, came from Sinai and must be followed down to the last detail: Matt.5:18-19; 23:2-3; Luke 11:42, 16:16-17; I Epistle of John 2:3-4, 5:2-3.) Such lives of loftiness and godliness also won the admiration of gentiles, many of whom converted to Judaism in those days, and of “God-fearers” that did not convert but attended synagogues throughout Judea and the Roman Empire.
The competition grew even fiercer as the Church became gentile and split with the Jerusalem sect under James, something that had gone very far already in the first generation. At that point the gentile Church was competing with the Jewish-led sect for the allegiance of interested gentile proselytes. After all, the Jamesian sect was Pharisaic in spirit and practice, too, as the Epistle of James shows (James 1:25 et passim). So does the Book of Acts as well: the momentous permission James and his Jerusalem council gave to Paul to proselytize amongst gentiles without requiring their conversion, Acts 15:13-21, expressed the Biblical, Pharisaic and later Rabbinic belief that non-Jews did not need to convert to Judaism to be saved — this idea, actualised by the Pharisees in their inclusion of “God-fearers” in synagogue services, they derived from the Noahite Covenant described in the Mosaic Torah and reflected in the Books of Job and Jonah. When the Sadducean High Priest with his Sadducean-dominated Sanhedrin persuaded the Romans to execute James, the most respected religious authorities amongst the people, evidently therefore Pharisees, rose in protest against that (as described in detail by Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, 20, 9, 1). Therefore it was no longer just a matter of competing with the Pharisees for religious authority amongst Jews. That could even be abandoned to the Jamesians (they were painted as actually worshipping Satan: John 8:31-47). But the sincerity, piety and learning of the leaders of mainstream Judaism which so impressed gentiles as well had to be painted as mere outward show and hypocrisy, “whitened sepulchres,” beautiful only on the outside, yes, granted, but secretly and really dead and ugly within. So they had Jesus say that those mainstream authorities were literally damned to Hell no matter how good they were or how firmly they dissociated themselves with past persecutions of prophets (Matt. 23:33), for simply as blood descendants of those alleged persecutors they had a evil hereditary racial taint shared by all born Jews (Matt. 23:29-31). It hardly needs saying that Jesus could not have actually said this, since he would have been damning himself and all his apostles and followers as well. Those passages in the Gospel of Matthew were clearly later gentile interpolations, like quite a few of the other anti-Pharisaic texts of the N.T. None of this relates to ritual purity issues, although that could be dragged in eventually, quite contrary to Jesus’s own statements affirming the validity of all the commandments, cited above. Paul’s view of such matters became normative for the gentile Church, instead, that the “Law” is a “dispensation of death,” enslaves, and is a curse from which Christ frees humanity (II Cor. 3:7ff., Gal. 3:10-13, 13-28, etc.).
For more on these matters generally, see Jules Isaac, The Teaching of Contempt: Christian Roots of Anti-Semitism (1964), the book that helped to motivate the revision of Catholic views under Pope John’s urgings in Vatican II; James Parkes, The Conflict of Church and the Synagogue: A Study in the Origins of Antisemitism (1961); and Rosemary Radford Ruether, Faith and Fraticide: The Theological Roots of Antisemitism (1974). In regard to the Pharisees specifically and what they lived by, practiced and believed, and later Rabbinic views and practices as well, it is still worthwhile to consult three groundbreaking works that helped significantly to revise Christian views back in the early 20th century, namely, Israel Abrahams, Studies in Pharisaism and the Gospels (1917-1924), George Foote Moore, Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era, 3 vols. (1927-1930); and Solomon Schechter, Aspects of Rabbinic Theology (1909). More recently, E.P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion (1976), has been a landmark work changing our understanding both of Paul and “the Law,” i.e., Rabbinic religion as such.
P.S.: Since we are all on a first-name basis in this blog, not every entry bearing the same first name is from the same person. So I would like to get “Ben” back in Dec. 2013 off the hook, so to speak, and wish to clarify that my views should not be attributed to him nor vice versa.