Pharisees Part Two: Reception History

See the full Pharisees forum here:
https://www.ancientjewreview.com/read/2022/3/21/the-pharisees-an-sbl-2021-review-forum

My thanks to Professors AJ Levine, Joseph Sievers, and Kelly Coblentz Bautch for the invitation to participate in the panel discussion on the newly released volume, The Pharisees. As I have been asked to comment primarily on select chapters in part two, “Reception History,” along with chapter 11 in part one, it is important to state that I speak as a Roman Catholic systematic theologian working in the area of Jewish-Christian studies at a small Catholic college. My comments intend to address primarily those who have not yet read the book, to provide a brief taste of my assigned chapters, and to reflect on the significance of this work for Jewish-Christian relations, especially in terms of community engagement and education.

This volume will surely inspire many other programs that will continue the exploration into the book itself as well as its subject, the Pharisees. One can only hope that the book will find its way into the hands of teachers and preachers and eventually make its way into seminary curricula. Though there is no lack of examples proving the need for this work, I would like to offer one example as a way to underscore the urgency of the suggestions offered by the editors in part three, “Looking Toward the Future.” The passionate and careful scholarship captured in the volume and the insights of the panel matter little if we cannot translate the findings and make them effective in schools, parishes, and synagogues.

In footnote 11 of his chapter “A Textbook Case-The Pharisees in Catholic Religion Textbooks,” Philip Cunningham mentions a board game that I had planned to use in my remarks even prior to reading his chapter. According to Cunningham, the game dubbed “Pharisees: The Party Game” is an “extreme example of US evangelical Protestant perspectives” (389).  Professor Cunningham and I discovered this game in 2017 when we were attending a small study group. While discussing the direction of our next project and debating the types of educational materials needed in Jewish-Christian relations, someone in the group googled “The Pharisees” and the game was the first thing that came up.

Under the guise of both education and “just fun,” the Campbells, an enterprising young couple with a thriving Christian youth ministry created and was successfully marketing a game (fully funded in only four hours on Kickstarter) that actively promotes a vivid example of the Christian anti-Pharisee teaching (see https://stuffyoucanuse.org/3-ways-to-use-pharisees-the-party-game-in-youth-ministry/ ). In a video, the couple explains that the game puts you in a time when the “religious leaders of the day, the Pharisees, are not happy” about “the controversial new prophet” who has so many followers. In the game you are one of the followers and “each night the Pharisees sneak into your community in search of one of Jesus’s disciples to stone. As a disciple it’s your job to work with the rest of the disciples to find and excommunicate the Pharisees before they stone everyone. But be careful because you can never be sure who’s a real disciple and who’s a Pharisee” (see https://phariseesgame.com/ ). The couple states that, “the big-picture story of this game centers around the conflict that existed between Jesus and the Pharisees;” they further claim that the game can prompt questions about the Pharisees that “are a pretty phenomenal set-up for a conversation about the Gospel, and grace, and hypocrisy, and righteousness.”

Marketed as an education tool, the game presents us with many of the problems that authors in the volume carefully detail. It is absolutely culturally tone-deaf, as AJ Levine discusses in part three, to “how its language and symbols can offend people from other groups” (407). It demonstrates an inaccurate historical knowledge; presents the Pharisees as murderers; suggests the Pharisees are naturally duplicitous (they hide as “disciples”), thus accentuating the classic trope of Jews as liars and blends the presumably murderous Pharisees with all Jews, thus re-inscribing the deicide charge and the blood curse.

One minister who endorsed the game said it was “a legit way” to teach the Bible and such “legit” teaching apparently involves conversion of the Jews. When commenting on the excitement during the first games played, the couple enthusiastically writes: “Someone called the Pharisees a ‘brood of vipers.’ The Saul/Paul card transformed from a Pharisee into a disciple and the entire room rejoiced over his conversion.” The Pharisee card has “Woe to you Pharisee” on it and though admittedly the images on the playing cards are cartoon-like, I cannot help but think of Angela La Delfa’s chapter “The Pharisee in Art” (319–334) and how she carefully detailed the clothing and posture of Pharisees in art projecting a self-satisfied, superior attitude. The cartoon images deliver. As a teaching tool, the game could have serious consequences, yet the website unsurprisingly does not offer responsible background materials steeped in current scholarship. My study group sent a gentle letter to the Campbells with links to good resources and an offer to provide more resources for their ministry if they wanted. We never received a response.

 This game may be an extreme example but it indicates why I am so grateful for Professors Sievers’ and Levine’s book. I can use the results to help educate students, teachers, and preachers with much more clarity and nuance about the current state of scholarship on the Pharisees. The overt and offensive messages of “Pharisees: The Board Game” regularly seep into the Catholic sermons I hear, religious education in the parishes, and sometimes still subtly affect the writing of colleagues.

The following offers very cursory comments on my assigned chapters 11 and 18-23.

Yair Furstenberg’s Chapter 11, “The Shared Image of Pharisaic Law in The Gospels and Rabbinic Tradition” carefully documents narratives of legal controversy found in the gospels and the Mishnah in order to discover “key elements in Pharisaic legal policy” (202). Furstenberg’s analysis shatters any flat stereotype of the Pharisees as strict legalists. Rather, he complicates the situation by demonstrating that the Pharisees were in fact “attacked from two opposite directions: as ‘seekers of smooth things’ on the one hand and as imposing heavy burdens on the other” (203).

I found particularly interesting the idea that the Pharisees were charged with leniency, morally laxity, and “mediocre legal standards,” promoting compromises that undermined the Levitical system of holiness, and hypocrisy (216-19) all because they were trying to meet the needs of the people where they were. They created, according to Furstenberg, practical solutions to live a covenantal life in an imperfect and impure world. The chapter has prompted me to think more about two issues. First, Christianity has had its battles with the idea of a church of the pure from at least the Donatist era. And, as a Catholic, one hears often from the culture warriors about the need for a leaner, smaller, doctrinally pure church. Speaking only from my own denominational location, in a time when the Catholic church is bleeding membership in America and in Europe, I wonder if we might take a lesson from the Pharisees in trying to learn how to navigate practicing and upholding religious ideals in a decidedly imperfect and utterly human world. Do the Pharisees provide a lesson in hospitality and humility when arguing about the “true” practice of Catholicism? Second, how the Pharisees, the gospels, and the Mishnah deal with oral law/the tradition of the Elders again makes me wonder how Catholics might find affinities with the Pharisees when it comes to assessing the authority of scripture and the authority of tradition.

Randall Zachman’s “The Pharisees in the Theology of Martin Luther and John Calvin (chapter 18) draws us more deeply into questions of whether the Pharisees—and ultimately Roman Catholics/papists—abandon G-d’s law for human law. Zachman immediately explains that neither Luther nor Calvin use the Pharisees as fodder for their anti-Jewish polemics. Whatever negative portrayals of the Pharisees ensue, he demonstrates how both Luther and Calvin have to account for Jesus’s praise of the Pharisees in Matthew 23:1-3.

Zachman’s reading of Luther finds that “Luther regards the Pharisees as interpreting the law in an external way and paying no attention to their hearts” (305). Luther views the Pharisees as focused on their own merit while “compounding this affliction of conscience by teaching human traditions” (305-06). The Pharisee’s use of human tradition increases legalism and self-righteousness for Luther. As we saw earlier, Furstenberg’s legal analysis might cast doubt on Luther’s opinion. On the other hand, in order to account for Jesus’s positive statement of the Pharisees, Luther extolls the Pharisees for a type of piety that is actually to be emulated even if at times it can obscure the “devil within” (302, 309-10).

Calvin treats the Pharisees as a sect not a type. Zachman explains that Calvin calls out for criticism the Pharisees’ use of seeing hidden meanings in scripture and for interpreting scripture by “adding teachings that come to them from their fathers” (313). For Calvin this reinforced “their hypocrisy, pride, and ambition, and made them the most zealous and malicious of all the opponents of Jesus” (318). Calvin’s distinctive ecclesiology enabled him to make strong comparisons between the Pharisees and “the Roman Church of his own day” (311–12). As a Roman Catholic theologian, I need to balance Luther’s and Calvin’s understanding of the Pharisees against contemporary understandings such as those evinced in this volume and pay particular self-critical attention to what tradition and traditions might mean for the practice and piety of Catholicism today, especially in terms of dismantling anti-Jewish theology.

Adele Reinhartz begins her chapter “The Pharisees on Film” by noting that “while Pharisees as a group no longer exist, they are commonly seen by Jews and Christians as the forerunners, and in some sense stand-ins, for all Jews everywhere and at all times” (344). This important reality is recognized by other authors in the volume.

Along these lines, chapters 19, 20, and 21 take up the representation of the Pharisees in art, theater, and film respectively. Time does not allow a full discussion of each chapter here, but I will attempt some broad strokes. Angela La Delfa created an exhibit for the conference that gave rise to the book. She begins her chapter “The Pharisees in Art” by saying the “depiction of the Pharisees in Western figurative art is unexplored territory” (319). She clearly charts the development of the basic image of the Pharisee in art. She notes that in the earliest image of the Pharisee and the tax collector from the 6th century, the Pharisee is represented as the younger of the two figures. Later it becomes standard that the Pharisee is older, always more richly dressed, has a longer beard, has a hat (whose shapes develop over time), and has a proud, self-satisfied (or angry/aggressive) posture. La Delfa carefully demonstrates that the image of the Pharisee in art adapts as Christian attitudes adapt and is not always negative: “In most cases, theirs is not a highly negative depiction, which is distinct from their negative stereotypes in literature, teaching, and preaching” (334).

Christian Stuckl, the longtime director of the Oberammergau Passion Play, reviews his personal history with this production and provides a primer on the origins and development of the play. As just one example, when in the 1770s the monks of Ettal tried to make the play more historically accurate by removing the character of Lucifer and adding new characters such as the money changers, they ended up increasing the antisemitism because the money changers stirred the crowd against Jesus. What happens to the costuming over the years? The reader is helped to follow the importance of the costumes by having read the previous chapter on art. Stuckl also details the four main problems with the play identified by the AJC and the ADL in the 1970s (340). The criticisms were not received well by the townspeople but in 1980 Stuckl was able to begin to make significant changes. He is to be commended for meeting with both Christian and Jewish scholars and religious leaders, working to educate his community about antisemitism and anti-Judaism by educating them about the Jewishness of Jesus, taking the cast to begin rehearsals in Israel, and expanding membership in the cast to non-Catholics and now even non-Christians. That something as offensive to my Jewish brothers and sisters as the almost 400-year-old Oberammergau Passion Play can significantly adapt in response to recognizing the post-war changes in the relationship between Jews and Christians is a sign of hope and a signal that scholarship such as the work of this volume continues to be needed.

Adele Reinhartz’s “The Pharisees on Film” echoes La Delfa’s analysis that one cannot approach the representation of the Pharisees as an all or nothing zero sum game. While vile depictions of Pharisees, Jews, and Judaism in film certainly exist, probably more often than not, the films all need to be contextualized. Reinhartz writes, “the portrayal of the Pharisees depends as much on the historical contexts and personal views of the filmmakers as on the primary sources upon which they draw” (348). Reinhartz carefully reviews a variety of films, recounts how filmmakers consulted or did not consult religious leaders and scholars, and describes how films use the Pharisees not only as “stand-ins for all Jews everywhere and at all times” (344) but to stand as the object for whatever it is the filmmaker wants to analyze.

Susannah Heschel’s and Deborah Forger’s chapter “The Pharisees in Modern Scholarship,” even more than the other essays, defies easy summary. The chapter should be required reading for any Christian theologian because, as they write in the third paragraph of the essay, “How the Pharisees are understood is significant for understanding not only the emergence of Rabbinic Judaism and Christian origins but also the widespread cultural identifications of Pharisees as hypocrites” (361). What is the ongoing challenge of Abraham Geiger’s interpretations of Jesus to a Christian understanding of Jesus? How can Christian theologians protect against the reemergence of race theory as was practiced by figures such as Carl Schneider in 1934 to remove Jesus from Judaism and claim that “early Christianity was an anti-Jewish movement” (373)? How can Christian theologians reform theology that characterized the Pharisees and the movement in terms such as “rigid, petrified, degraded…wrathful, violent” and more (365)? I am grateful for the recounting of the changing trajectories and tone in post-war scholarship. There are no easy summaries and no easy answers to questions concerning the identity of the Pharisees or of Jesus; as the authors say, “as much as the 19th century was a quest for the historical Jesus, it was also a quest for the historical Pharisees” (382).

Finally, Philip Cunningham concludes part two with chapter 23 “A Textbook Case-the Pharisees in Catholic Religion Textbooks.” Confining himself to textbook studies in America with some input from Italian studies, Cunningham covers ground quite familiar to him as his first book was a textbook analysis. This chapter is a great synthesis for those who are not aware of the several studies of the representation of Jews and Judaism in Catholic textbooks since the mid-50s. Time allows for but a simply summary of Cunningham’s results. The representation of categories such as Jesus as a Jew, Jesus and Jews, Pharisees, and the Crucifixion fare far better after the Second Vatican council and the promulgation of Nostra Aetate. The tables in the chapter efficiently and illustratively demonstrate both the problems and the progress. A main issue for Catholic textbooks is that they have to pass the curricular standards published by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. These standards are tied to the Catholic catechism. Only so much progress can be made in the text books when distressingly the catechism itself scores far more poorly on all measured counts than the text books themselves. Cunningham concludes with three recommendations that transition well into the concluding reflections and suggestions of part 3.

By way of contemporary significance, much more could be said connecting the themes of the chapters I considered. For example, Pope Francis seeks to root out clericalism and careerism in the ranks of the clergy. Unfortunately, there are times when he infelicitously employs the Pharisees to make a point. Or very recently, during the summer of 2021 there was significant concern about his catechesis on Galatians. For now, I am very grateful to have this book of erudite and nuanced essays to bring to the level of community and congregation dialogue.