Who Needs the Pharisees? New Testament and Beyond

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Who needs the Pharisees? The immediate follow-up question to such a query would be, of course: Which Pharisees? – The historical Pharisees or the Pharisees of the Gospels? Paul? Or the Pharisees of the Late-Ancient Christian and rabbinic imagination? Or the multiple and variegated images of them evoked in modern Jewish and Christian settings, respectively, and in popular culture? The volume edited by Joseph Sievers and Amy-Jill Levine under review here, The Pharisees (Eerdmans, 2021), constitutes an unparalleled resource for addressing both of these questions. For in this book, the reader is invited into a complex and chronologically extended (discursive) landscape, stretching from the second century BCE to the present day. The shifting scenery is reconstructed using all sorts of source materials, from literary texts both ancient and modern to art and archaeology; all of it contributing to the diverse images of this elusive second-temple group that have developed over two millennia.

Entering these landscapes within which the Pharisees are variously resurrected, one cannot help but noticing how the shifting perceptions and receptions of them seem intertwined with certain needs of those who bring them to life. Indeed, the book itself, aiming at reconstructing both the historical group and understanding its various receptions, is responding to a need in our own time. As the editors say in their Preface (ix–xviii), the book not only wishes to advance academic study but also to correct harmful prejudice (x).

Placing the present volume in historical context highlights the book’s uniqueness in this regard. Here we have a book edited and authored by Jewish and Christian scholars unfettered by the rhetorical customs of their respective traditions, seeking together the truth behind the stereotypes. From the perspective of centuries of troubled Jewish and Christian history this is in and of itself a remarkable achievement that illustrates the constructive significance of the modern academic project for inter-religious encounters and dialogue. In the following, while I shall offer some more general comments on various parts of the book, I will focus my attention on a selection of chapters centering on the first century (primarily Paul and Matthew) and late-antique and medieval Christian and Jewish reception.

Paul and the Gospels

Looking first at the source material informing us of the historical Pharisees, it is somewhat ironic in light of what history was soon about to offer in terms of conflict between Christians and Jews that the only ancient texts we have access to that were written by a self-identified Pharisee are, as Paula Fredriksen points out in her excellent contribution, the letters of Paul, a follower of Jesus.[1]  As Fredriksen concludes, contrary to traditional belief Paul never left his Pharisaic identity behind when he became a follower of Jesus: “Paul had thought of himself as a flawless Pharisee. […] If on his own efforts he had achieved righteousness under the law faultlessly, then now that Christ lived in him, Paul could only be an even better Pharisee” (135).[2] In the only ancient texts written by a Pharisee, then, not only is the resurrected Christ put forward as the answer to the apocalyptic end-times that this Pharisee thought had just been inaugurated, but Pharisaic identity as such is foregrounded as something positive, a guarantee for excellence in all matters concerning law; something that makes Paul himself trustworthy as he proclaims his messiah to the nations.

Of course, not all Pharisaic Christ-followers agreed with Paul’s solution to the gentile problem as they worked to save the nations from coming doom. If we are to believe Acts 15:5, other Pharisees in the movement spoke in favor of proselyte circumcision when they considered what’s best for those non-Jews who aligned themselves with the message of hope proclaimed to them. Within the Jesus movement, then, we find that in-group Pharisees are portrayed differently, having opposing views on how best to embody the messianic. One might think that, if this is true of those Pharisees that were Christ-followers, Pharisees outside the movement would be characterized by the New Testament texts invariably as negatively stereotyped outsiders. This, however, is not the case and that is one of the key insights offered in this part of the volume.

Luke–Acts, with some differences between them, portray Pharisees as both good and bad (Hermut Löhr); John, who describes Pharisaic resistance to Jesus, still singles out Nicodemus as among those who are curiously interested in this possible messiah (Harold Attridge). In Mark, who was not given a chapter of his own, Pharisees are described sometimes as simply shocked by Jesus’s behavior, asking him questions, sometimes as wanting to test him and destroy him. Matthew stands out among the rest, however, as he has nothing good at all to say about them (Henry Pattarumadathil; Adela Collins).[3] Within the first-century Jesus movement, then, Pharisees could be described as stereotypically good (Paul) or axiomatically bad (Matthew), but also as reasoned and balanced in their approach to Jesus and his followers (John 3:1–21; 7:50–52; Acts 5:34–39).[4]

If we pretend, as the church has often done, that the New Testament presents a single, coherent, and consistent “narrative,” we would have to conclude, then, that the Pharisees emerge as somewhat round characters. In this regard, it is interesting to note that in the New Testament, the Pharisees is the only named group said to have produced Christ-followers.[5] It seems, however, as if Matthew’s portrait of them has dominated their reception in the later church, creating the Pharisees as the ultimate “Other,” an image of everything a good Christian shouldn’t be or do. Perhaps the influence of Matthew on Christian reception is why the editors decided to include two chapters dedicated to the first evangelist.[6]

While I must admit that I read Matthew rather differently from Pattarumadathil and Collins, these two chapters, one on Pharisees and Sadducees and the other on Matthew 23, have plenty to offer. For the sake of our discussion here, I will highlight just a couple of points where I think Matthew may be productively read in other ways.

Pattarumadathil argues that Matthew’s pairing of the Pharisees and the Sadducees may indicate a conflation of these groups in an attempt at describing a Jewish leadership, or even “the Jews” as opponents of Jesus, referring to the Ioudaioi of Matt 28:15, who are said to believe in false rumors about the resurrection as fake news. In my view, though, while I would agree that Matthew is careful to conjure up strong resistance to Jesus to enable the Messiah to make his rhetorical points, I believe the idea here is precisely not to conflate these groups as they unite against Jesus. None of these groups disappeared immediately after 70 CE, meaning that the impression left on the reader who had experience of them is one of an alliance between enemies joining forces against the messiah.

I would also argue that Matthew’s narrative is not about ultimately presenting “the Jews” as opponents to Jesus. Not only should the Ioudaioi of 28:15, in my view, be translated as “Judeans” in a geographical-political sense, emphasizing the tensions between Jerusalem and the Galilee which is a key component to Matthew’s story; contrary to Luke-Acts, Galilee is the place to be for the disciples as they begin to take on the nations, not Jerusalem. Matthew’s hoi ochloi (‘the crowds’), i.e., the majority of the Jewish people in any given place, are also mostly portrayed positively, and ultimately, as the story ends, as undecided in their attitude to Jesus. The Pharisees remain, it seems to me, a distinct but flat character throughout Matthew’s narrative.[7]

As I read Matthew, then, there is no shift in this Gospel in which Jesus-followers become a mixed group of Jews and non-Jews that will replace the Jewish people as God’s people, and this also problematizes Collins’s presentation of Mattheans as a new ethnos (148). There are no “Christians” in this text. In fact, there are no non-Jews at all among Jesus’s followers (cf. 10:5-6), and the group designated to replace the current Jewish leaders in the world to come are also Jewish, as Matthew 19 clarifies that this will be the future role of the twelve disciples.  

Most importantly, the Pharisees, to my mind, fill a different narrative need in this text. In Matthew’s infamous 23rd chapter, the critique of the Pharisees crescendoes into the outrageous accusation that they are guilty of shedding all innocent blood in world history, as well as polluting the temple through murder by the altar. Immediately after this chapter, Jesus predicts the destruction of the (now polluted) temple, which leaves the Jewish people without means of atonement. Thus, in order to save his people from their sins (1:21), Jesus will offer himself as a sacrifice (26:28). From here on, the Pharisees disappear from the story, and the chief priests take the lead as this sacrifice is prepared.[8] The Pharisees in Matthew, thus, are used to explain why Jesus had to die; I cannot see that they are in any way related to an assumed parting of the ways generating a “new people.”

In sum, the texts included in the NT seem to need the Pharisees to perform different rhetorical tasks: For Paul, his Pharisaic identity provided him with cred; John and Luke may sometimes have used the Pharisees they portrayed as curious and reasoned to attract potential Christ-followers; and Matthew needed them to explain the fall of the temple and, indeed, the entire Jesus event – why Jesus had to die (a sacrificial death).

Beyond the First Century

Leaving the first century behind, as we enter the second century any such needs of the Pharisees seem to have receded into the background, if not disappeared completely. As shown by Luca Angelelli in his very helpful, if rather brief statistical investigation of Greek literature using the TLG database, there is a very sharp decline in occurrences of the word pharisaios in the second century.[9] In the fourth century, however, things have again changed, and we find here the highest number of uses of the word. Indeed, it is now that we find the very first usage of Pharisaikos (281). Interestingly, as Angelelli points out, even across these centuries, the Pharisees in Christian tradition seems to have been “an affair of the few,” as he notes that most of the uses of the word surfaces in the writings of Origen (c. 184–c. 253), Chrysostom (c. 347–407), and Cyril of Alexandria (c. 376–444), that is, in the timespan between the third and the fifth centuries (279).

Intriguingly, as shown convincingly by Günter Stemberger and Shaye Cohen,[10] the emerging rabbinic form of Judaism that was to later become mainstream Judaism shared with the early (non-Jewish) Christians a lack of interest in the Pharisees. Indeed, the early rabbis did not seem to want to trace their origins back to this group. As Cohen concludes, the framers of the Mishnah and their sources “possessed only minimal Pharisaic self-consciousness, if they possessed it at all” (285).

Equally thought-provoking is the fact that later on, in the Babylonian Talmud, as shown by Stemberger (246–47), the rabbis seem to “discover” their Pharisaic roots.[11] Cohen, though, points to the Hebrew paraphrase of a Latin translation of Josephus, the tenth-century work Yossipon, for the earliest source to “identify explicitly the ‘Sages of Israel’ with the Pharisees” (288; cf. 290–91). Then, Cohen notes, it is not until “the great Jewish historians of the nineteenth century” that the Pharisees are attributed “centrality and importance in the history of Judaism” (287),[12] a period when also Christian scholars write extensively about this group. But this development was by no means a straightforward path to prominence within Jewish communities, as Abraham Skorka shows in his chapter on Medieval Jewish authors.[13] Focusing on Rashi (1040–1105), Nahmanides (1194–1270) and Maimonides (1135–1204), Skorka argues that perushim for these writers were not equated with the rabbis. Rather, the perushim refer to humble or modest people, behavioral ideals. We do not find in these texts any responses to New Testament polemics.

Taking a step back and correlating the chronology of these Christian and Jewish texts as it emerges from our chapters, how do we explain this Pharisaic rollercoaster? Why did these people need – and why did they not need – the Pharisees at these junctures in their respective communal histories? Why did the Pharisees matter to so few Jews and Christians in the second century? And in the periods when they are referred to, why these specific portraits and not others at these particular times?

The authors list various options to these “why?”-questions. In his informative discussion of Christian heresiology, Matthias Skeb highlights the fact that for the heresiologists, the Pharisees are important only for theological purposes, not for sociological: “their concern is more with the origins of heresies than they are with the Pharisees’ depiction in the New Testament, or with the relation of Pharisees to contemporary Jews” (257).[14] For example, for Hippolytus and Epiphanius, the Pharisees are part of causing the beginning of a destructive diversification following a period Jewish–Christian proto-unity (276). That is, the contemporary reality of discord affecting the church negatively is explained pointing the finger at the Other. By contrast, in the late-rabbinic and medieval-Jewish camp, the Pharisees are rather those who provide continuity and cohesion.

None of these needs seem to have been relevant for the New Testament authors in the first century. A more general impression would be that, apart from Paul, most Jews and Christians seem to have needed the Pharisees to highlight traits that make themselves “Other” in relation to one another; either explicitly so through polemical charges or theological origins theories, or implicitly by connecting them to virtues that were perceived to belong only within one’s own in-group.

History as Contemporary Discourse

Summing up – and answering our initial question, “Who needs the Pharisees?” – it seems that, on the whole, we today, both Jews and Christians, need them more than anyone has ever done before, but for very different reasons. And we need them in academic historical, non-polemical form.

Let me illustrate this with a brief anecdote, adding to Amy-Jill Levine’s discussion in the book’s penultimate chapter.[15] In the fall of 2021, I attended a church service in Oslo, Norway. I was late. As I opened the large doors, the sermon, which had already begun, proclaimed as I made my way to a pew at the very back that “the Pharisees” represented the kind of vain and arrogant attitude that Christians must shun. Instead, the tax collector of Luke 18:9–14, aware of his sin and humbly repentant, would show the faithful the way forward. Returning home, frustrated, I happened to pick up an issue of the British weekly magazine The Economist. I opened it at the United-State section and noted a political opinion piece defending the African American stand-up comedian Dave Chappelle against his critics. As the author’s counterattack crescendoed into its climax the choice of denigrating labels descended into the abyss of Christian classics: “And the leftist Pharisees who disagree…[etc.]”[16]

That was a lot on one Sunday. The episode shows that anti-Jewish prejudice is far from a Christianity-only problem. As Pope Francis says in his address, published as an appendix to the volume, “[a]mong Christians and in secular society, in different languages the word ‘Pharisee’ often means ‘a self-righteous and hypocritical person.’ For many Jews, however, the Pharisees are the founders of Rabbinic Judaism and hence their own spiritual forebears.”[17]

Can we disagree with the historical Pharisees? Of course. But only as long as we know who they were.[18] Indeed, we may even disagree with Jesus himself, as perceptively pointed out by Adela Collins (169). In fact, such disagreement is canonized as exemplary in Matthew’s story about the Canaanite woman (Matt 15:21–28). As in the case of this woman – who wins her debate against Jesus and thereby secures healing for her daughter – contradicting Jesus may, for the pious, result in freedom from the demons of prejudice. Such debates, however, require both knowledge and hermeneutical skills. In light of such needs, returning one last time to our initial question, ‘Who needs The Pharisees?’ – this time referring to the title of the book under review – my answer is simple: Everyone.

[1] Paula Fredriksen, “Paul, the Perfectly Righteous Pharisee,” 112–135, here 112–113.

[2] In this regard, the Book of Acts seems to have understood Paul rather well, as its author also describes Paul as a Pharisee in the present tense, and without any negative polemics attached to the identification (Acts 23:6; cf. 26:5–8). While Fredriksen’s chapter catches well Paul’s sense of certainty about his own ability to get things right, one might want to add that there are a few passages that may mitigate this image somewhat. Among the more quoted ones is 1 Corinthians 13, where Paul both comments on the (perishable) nature of knowledge (“as for knowledge, it will come to an end” v.8), as well as his and all human beings’ limitations in terms of what can be known (“For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known,” v.12).

[3] Based on its relevance for the discussions in the present volume, it is somewhat surprising that there is no interaction with the study by Mary Marshall, The Portrayals of the Pharisees in the Gospels and Acts (FRLANT 254; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015) in these chapters. (See, however, the contribution by Jens Schröter, “How Close were Jesus and the Pharisees?” [220-239], which discusses this volume to some degree.) On the whole, though, the footnotes of the volume give the reader ample opportunity to pursue further their special interests, whatever those may be.

[4] On Luke, Hermut Löhr, “Luke-Acts as a Source for the History of the Pharisees” (170–184); on John, Harold W. Attridge, “Pharisees in the Fourth Gospel and One Special Pharisee” (185–198).

[5] I do not include here groups or officials which are not bound together by ideological, theological, or halakhic views, such as the scribes (cf. Matt 13:52) and the priests (Acts 6:7). In addition to Paul and Acts 15:5, the Gospel of Matthew was probably produced by (former) Pharisees; see Anders Runesson, “Re-Thinking Early Jewish–Christian Relations: Matthean Community History as Pharisaic Intragroup Conflict.” JBL 127:1 (2008) 95-132; idem, Divine Wrath and Salvation in Matthew: The Narrative World of the First Gospel (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2016). See also Löhr’s conclusion, “Luke-Acts,” 184: “The common denominator [between Luke and Acts] seems to me that both books want to convey the image of closer contacts between the Jesus group and the Pharisees, closer than with any other Jewish group. I see no good reason to deny that this is historically plausible.” On Pharisees wanting to save Jesus’s life, see Luke 13:31.

[6] Henry Pattarumadathil, “Pharisees and Sadducees Together in Matthew” (136–147); Adela Yarbro Collins, “Polemic Against the Pharisees in Matthew 23” (148–169).

[7] Problematising also Amy-Jill Levine’s conclusion on Matthew in her contribution, “Preaching and Teaching the Pharisees” (403–427), here 404; for discussion, see Anders Runesson, Divine Wrath and Salvation in Matthew: The Narrative World of the First Gospel (Minneapolis. Fortress, 2016), 233–256.

[8] Cf. Catherine Sider Hamilton, The Death of Jesus in Matthew: Innocent Blood and the End of the Exile, SNTSMS 167 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Runesson, Divine Wrath.

[9] “A Statistical Approach to Pharisaios and Pharisaikos in the Greek Fathers” (278–282). The Greek word does not exist before the first century CE.

[10] Günter Stemberger, “The Pharisees and the Rabbis” (240–254); Shaye Cohen, “The Forgotten Pharisees” (283–291).

[11] Stemberger refers to b. Qidd. 66a and b. Nid. 33b.

[12] Cohen suggests that factors involved in this 19th-century rediscovery of the Pharisees as important to Jewish history, including their link to the rabbis, may involve the 10th-century Yossipon and the discovery of the Greco-Jewish literature in the 16th century (287–88).

[13] Abraham Skorka, “The Perushim in the Understanding of the Medieval Jewish Sages” (292–301).

[14] Matthias Skeb, “‘Pharisees’ in Early Christian Heresiology” (257–277).

[15] Levine, “Preaching and Teaching the Pharisees.”

[16] “Lexington: Chapeau to Dave Chappelle,” in The Economist, October 16th 2021, p. 37.

[17] “Address of His Holiness Pope Francis to the Pontifical Biblical Institute, May 9, 2019” (441–444), here 442.

[18] Cf. Skorka, “The Perushim,” 301, emphasizing the search for truth as a vital aspect also of interfaith dialogue.