One of the more visible villains in the New Testament’s gospels is the figure of the Pharisee. Recalled in Christian memory as “heretical” and “legalistic,” the Pharisees battled Jesus the protagonist with venom, conspiring to bring about Jesus’ ultimate destruction (Matthew 12:14).
In the narratives, the Pharisees plot to destroy Jesus…
-
But the Pharisees went out and conspired against him, how to destroy him. Matthew 12:13-15
-
The Pharisees went out and immediately held counsel with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him. Mark 3:5-7
-
And the scribes and the Pharisees watched him, to see whether he would heal on the Sabbath, so that they might find a reason to accuse him. Luke 6:6-8
And Jesus responds, spewing the now iconic words:
- But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you shut the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. For you neither enter yourselves nor allow those who would enter to go in. Matthew 23:12-14
-
Woe to you Pharisees! For you love the best seat in the synagogues and greetings in the marketplaces. Luke 11:42-44
-
For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Matthew 5:19-21
Deducing from the gospels’ description, the Pharisees do not sound like the nicest guys, and that is precisely what the gospel writers want you to think. The gospel accounts of the Pharisees are used as rhetorical tools to validate the position of the early Christians. This isn’t a conspiracy theory in the making; rather, the writing of any narrative demands a villain, some force to whom the hero will battle and arise triumphant. The Pharisees, an ancient Judean sect concerned with oral law and piety, serve this villainous function.
The religious leaders of Jesus’ day, including the Pharisees, are cast in the gospels as the archetypes of power, injustice, and opposition to Christ as a means of validating the conversion of Jewish Christians. The debates between the Pharisees and Jesus carry the cosmic weight of eternity, forged in the New Testament’s text in a manner of portraying the early Christians as oppressed and the Jewish religious leaders as the oppressor. As rhetoricians know, there is no stronger position to have in a dispute than the position of the weak and helpless.
However some scholars have claimed that the teachings of Jesus actually most closely resemble the Pharisees. Both parties appear concerned with the reception of oral and written torah and the longevity of their Judean religion in a religiously diverse landscape. They debate the finer parts of biblical law with skill and alacrity, mirroring the oral law of the rabbinic authors, and as Daniel Boyarin describes, Jesus’ words are “not an exhortation, then, to abandon the Torah, but a call to deepen our genuine commitment both to practicing it and to incorporating its meanings” (The Jewish Gospels, 124).
Even further, the later rabbinic schools who communicated and wrote the great texts of Jewish Oral law— the Mishnah, Tosefta, and two Talmuds, might have emerged from this Pharisean sect. Thus, several scholars argue that Jesus’s dispute with the Pharisees was a sign of inclusion, two parties participating in an oral dialogue, rather than a clash of acrimony as depicted in the gospels. Graham N. Stanton explains, “Sociologists have often observed that the closer the relationship between groups, the more intense the conflict” (The Gospels and Jesus, 241). When Jesus conversed with the religious scholars of his day, he was participating in a similar stream of oral torah, sharing disputations as a means of reverence for the traditions.
And for precisely this reason, I would caution Christian circles from employing the term “Pharisee” as a rhetorical tool of denigration. Encapsulated in the term is the image of Judaism as the foe of Jesus, stereotypically obscuring the law and missing the truth of God’s salvation. This idea is a classic example of Anti-Judaism, historically used to breed antisemitism and violence against Jewish people. What one might think is a simple rhetorical jab carries the weight of historical misunderstanding and abuse. As Marilyn Salmon notes,
“Simply substituting ‘religious authorities’ for ‘the Jews’ does nothing to diminish the anti-Judaism. The stereotypes of Judaism remain: exclusivism, an establishment with rigid boundaries, misinterpretation of their own Scriptures and traditions, and hostility toward Jesus” (Preaching Without Contempt, 140).
As for the historical Pharisees, I would wager that some were heretical and some were not, just as the Early Christian community was diverse as well. In fact the very term “heretic” in Jesus’ day simply meant an interpretation of the Law that differed from one’s own. Neither group, apart from the gospel narratives, were inherently “evil” or “good.” We would do better to understand the purpose of these memories and read the gospels as an intra-Jewish debate, one side elevated in the text as superior, as one would expect. In this way, we can avoid essentializing the diversity of ancient Judean religion, perpetuating bad history in the least and at the worst extending anti-judaism.