Quit Picking on the Pharisees!

PEJORATIVE COMMENTS about racial and ethnic minorities, GLBTQI people, and the poor appropriately receive public censure. But say something negative about Pharisees, and the response is likely to be a hearty “amen.”

When anti-Pharisaic comments appear, especially from church pulpits or Christian magazines, few complain. And when correctives are suggested, the responses are usually something like, “Of course not all Pharisees were money-loving, sanctimonious hypocrites.” The comparison to other bigoted comments—“Of course not all Latinos are illegal; of course not all African Americans are lazy”—should tell us how insufficient the excuses are.

Just as we are heirs of centuries of racism, we are heirs of two millennia of negative stereotypes of Pharisees and, by extension, of Jews—for it is substantially from Pharisaic teaching that rabbinic Judaism springs. Whenever sermons and Bible studies proclaim that Jesus’ views concerning social justice are contrary to Jewish views grounded in Pharisaic teaching, they promote bad history and bad theology.

The pastors and priests who make such comments are not anti-Semites. Even Pope Francis, who is certainly no bigot, speaks of Pharisees as “Closed-minded men, men who are so attached to the laws, to the letter of the law, that they were always closing the doorway to hope, love, and salvation.” Rather, these interpreters are unaware of the history of the Pharisees and unaware as well of how these claims about Pharisees often bleed over into anti-Jewish invective.

In this interpretation, the Pharisees appear to epitomize everything antithetical to an ethos of justice and peace. For example, in a 2009 God’s Politics blog post, we read that the “Pharisees thought Jesus was making himself unclean by eating with sinners in the house of a tax collector (Matthew 9:9-13).” We read elsewhere that Pharisees found it offensive that he would dine with “sinners” and outcasts. Tax collectors were not outcast, and they did not represent ritual impurity. Tax collectors were those who violated community welfare: They took from the poor and they gave to Rome. They were not “cast out”; they walked out on their own two feet. And yet, they too are welcome in the center of Jewish practice, the Jerusalem Temple (see Luke 18:10-14).

In a 2014 article in Sojourners, we are told that the Pharisees were allied with the Zealots in the first revolt against Rome. Only when the revolution failed did the Pharisees follow, in many ways, “a path more like the one Jesus had taught, and they showed that it wasn’t too late for even Pharisees to change.” Some Pharisees joined the Zealot party; many others did not. If there were a complete overlap between the two, first-century Jewish historian Josephus would not have described the four Jewish philosophical groupings as Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, and Zealots.

We read that Pharisees are like “rich and successful people who lived in fancy houses and stepped over their destitute neighbors who slept in the gutters outside their gates! Proud people, who judged, insulted, excluded, avoided, and accused others!”

The article continues: “And who, according to Jesus, was going to heaven? The very people whom the Pharisees despised, deprived, avoided, excluded, and condemned! Heaven’s gates opened wide for the poor and destitute ... the sinners, the sick, and the homeless ... even the prostitutes and tax collectors! In other words, all the people the Pharisees were careful to avoid were exactly the ones who would someday be welcomed into heaven! Imagine how this overturning of traditional language of hell must have shocked everyone—multitudes and Pharisees alike.”

This final line makes the common connection between Pharisees and Jews, for it suggests that all Jews—the “multitudes” who hold to the “traditional language of hell,” “everyone”—think G-d loves only the wealthy. Anti-Jewish stereotype is full-blown.

I want to be clear. These authors mean well—and most Christians do. However, until we address the fundamental errors of such reconstructions, such bad history and theology will continue. Nor, by the way, are Jews immune to errors about Christianity. There’s work to be done on all sides. To end abuse, education is essential. This education for Christians should include knowledge of Jewish history.

WE HAVE MULTIPLE sources—the gospels, Paul’s letters, Josephus’ writings, the Dead Sea Scrolls, rabbinic literature—from which to reconstruct Pharisaic practice and piety. All the sources are tendentious.

The gospels charge the Pharisees with, among other things, being hypocrites, blind guides, fools, a brood of vipers (a particularly vicious charge: Baby vipers were thought to bite their way out of the mother), full of extortion, greed, and iniquity, and with killing and crucifying and being guilty of all the righteous blood shed since Abel. This hyperbole, typical of first-century polemic, is not objective reporting; it is instead comparable to its modern incarnation: political discourse. Nor is it surprising. The majority of Jews chose not to follow Jesus of Nazareth, but the “traditions of the elders” (see Mark 7:3, 5); the Pharisees, who promoted those traditions, thus represented a major rival to the nascent church.

Paul is proud of his Pharisaic connections (Philippians 3:5), but he says little about them. Josephus, in his works Jewish War and Antiquities, compares the Pharisees to the Stoic philosophical school. Although the Dead Sea Scrolls do not mention Pharisees by name, the comments about “seekers after smooth things” likely reflect their view of Pharisees: They made things too easy. The rabbis of the Mishnah and Talmud display interest in matters the other sources connect with Pharisees, such as tithing, purity, and Sabbath observance; we can with caution extrapolate some historical data from their comments.

Despite the difficulties in locating historical Pharisaic views, when we combine these sources, a consistent portrait emerges. Here’s what we know, in seven points, about these Jews whom churches traditionally see as representing everything Jesus came to correct, and whom synagogues traditionally see as representing the faithful transmission of our beautiful tradition.

1. Contrary to the dominant Christian view, the Pharisees were not generally wealthy. The only Pharisee from whom we have written records, Paul of Tarsus, is a leather worker. Josephus makes clear that he was no fan of the Pharisees, resenting their popular support that he thought should have been given to the priests. “The Pharisees simplify their standard of living, making no concession to luxury,” he writes in Antiquities. Ironically, in the gospels it is not the Pharisees who are wealthy, but tax collectors such as Zacchaeus and his buddies, Joseph of Arimathea, and the upscale family of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus.

Luke claims that Pharisees are “lovers of money” (16:14), but Luke is engaging in generalized insult. One could claim that all early Christians were lovers of money, given the frequent warnings against this sin in 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Hebrews 1, but that would be uncharitable.

4. Pharisees lived among the people, not apart from them. The term “Pharisee” likely derives from a Hebrew/Aramaic word meaning “separate,” although it could derive as well from a term meaning “to interpret.” If indicating “separation,” we need to determine: separate from what?

There is no indication that the Pharisees separated themselves from fellow Jews. In order to teach them and to set examples for them, they had to be with them. Hillel also wrote, “Be of the disciples of Aaron, loving peace, and pursuing peace, loving humanity, and bringing them near to the Torah” (Mishnah Pirkei Avot 1.12). Jesus himself notes the Pharisaic interest in bringing others into their movement (Matthew 23:15). Three times in Luke’s gospel, Pharisees invite Jesus to dine with them. These invitations suggest an open, rather than closed, group. That they debate with Jesus over how best to follow Torah also suggests engagement rather than aloofness.

The designation may derive from their separation from the Maccabees (see 1 Maccabees 7:12-13, if the Pharisees are connected to the Hasidaeans) or from the Sadducees, a group with whom the Pharisees are antithetically paired in the gospels and in Acts. The term “Pharisee” generally drops out of rabbinic sources, perhaps because the separation from the Sadducees became de facto when the temple, the locus of Sadducean authority, was destroyed in 70 C.E.

6. Recognizing that Israel was a “priestly kingdom and a holy nation” (Exodus 19:6), Pharisees were a democratizing group that expanded priestly roles from the temple to the home. For the Pharisees, such practices as Sabbath and holiday observance, ritual purity, and tithing were available to all—rich and poor, women and men. Their practices not only enabled Jews to sanctify their bodies and their homes, they were also the means by which Jews celebrated their distinct identity within the Roman imperial context.

After two millennia, surely the time has come to stop bearing false witness against Pharisees and their Jewish descendants. Christianity does not need to bear false witness against Judaism in order to proclaim its good news.