You learn something new every day
One of the reasons that my novel-writing is such slow going is that I am really meticulous when it comes to detail (that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it!). Case in point: today. In one fairly minor scene, my main character refers to another character disparagingly as a “Pharisee.” Being meticulous when it comes to detail (or trying to, at least), I wasn’t comfortable relying on my thirty-odd years of church and Sunday School memory, so I wiki’ed “Pharisees” just to make sure the criticism was apt. Well, lo and behold, it’s a little complicated:
…Because of the New Testament’s frequent depictions of Pharisees as self-righteous rule-followers, the word “pharisee” (and its derivatives: “pharisaical”, etc.) has changed in meaning and has come into semi-common usage in English to describe a hypocritical and arrogant person who places the letter of the law above its spirit. Jews today (who subscribe to Pharisaic Judaism) typically find this insulting if not anti-Semitic.[emphasis mine]
An important binary in the New Testament is the opposition between law and love. Accordingly, the New Testament presents the Pharisees as obsessed with man-made rules (especially concerning purity) whereas Jesus is more concerned with God’s love; the Pharisees scorn sinners whereas Jesus seeks them out.
Many non-Christians object that the four Gospels, which were canonized after Christianity had separated from Judaism[citation needed] (and after Pharisaism emerged as the dominant form of Judaism), are likely a very biased source concerning the conduct of the Pharisees. Some have argued that Jesus was himself a Pharisee and that his arguments with Pharisees is a sign of inclusion rather than fundamental conflict (disputation being the dominant narrative mode employed in the Talmud as a search for truth, and not necessarily a sign of opposition).
Jesus’ emphasis on loving one’s neighbor, for example, echoes the teaching of the school of Hillel (Jesus’ views of divorce, however, are closer to those of the school of Shammai, another Pharisee). Others have argued that the portrait of the Pharisees in the New Testament is an anachronistic caricature.
For example, when Jesus declares the sins of a paralytic man forgiven, the New Testament has the Pharisees criticizing Jesus’ blasphemy. But Jewish sources from the time commonly associate illness with sin and healing with forgiveness, and there is no actual Rabbinic source that questions or criticizes this practice. Thus, the proposition that Jesus’ healing was criticized by Pharisees is sharply at odds with the teachings of the Pharisees independently preserved. There may be no conflict in the Christian account and historical records if the reactions recorded in the New Testament are from a few individual Pharisees, uncharacteristic of mainstream thinking.
Similarly, according to the New Testament, Pharisees wanted to punish Jesus for healing a man’s withered hand on the Sabbath, but there is no Rabbinic rule found historically according to which Jesus had violated the Sabbath. Again, the objection may have been the misguided complaint of a few uninformed individuals, not representative of Pharisees in general.
Although the New Testament presents the Pharisees as obsessed with avoiding impurity, Rabbinic texts reveal that the Pharisees were concerned merely with offering means for removing impurities, so that a person could again participate in the community.
According to the New Testament the Pharisees objected to Jesus’s mission to outcast groups such as beggars and tax-collectors, but Rabbinic texts actually emphasize the availability of forgiveness to all. Indeed, much of Jesus’ teaching, for example the Sermon on the Mount, is consistent with that of the Pharisees.
Some scholars believe that those passages of the New Testament that are most hostile to the Pharisees were written sometime after the destruction of Herod’s Temple in 70 CE [4], at a time when it had become clear that most Jews did not consider Jesus to be the messiah, see also Rejection of Jesus. At this time Christians sought most new converts from among the gentiles, and needed to explain why converts should listen to them rather than the Jews, concerning the Hebrew Bible. They thus would have presented a story of Jesus that was more sympathetic to Romans than to Jews. It was only after 70 CE that Phariseeism emerged as the dominant form of Judaism…
Read the entire entry here.
