First, thanks to Peg Conway, Bob Blackburn, and others who voiced their concern about how I represented the Pharisees in my article on hell.
Many Christians take the gospels’ generally negative portrayal of the Pharisees as factual history. Others don’t think much about historical accuracy, choosing instead to interpret the Pharisees as characters in a story, a literary mirror reflecting our own religious dysfunction, helping us acknowledge the ways in which we ourselves are “self-righteous hypocrites” and “elitist, judgmental, and indifferent to the poor.” Either way, too few of us focus on the unintended consequences of the negative portrayal of the Pharisees in the gospels.
Jews, meanwhile, learn a radically different account of the Pharisees. They were the heroic leaders who rebuilt the Jewish people’s national and spiritual psyche after the Jewish revolution of 67 C.E. and its crushing reversal in 70 C.E. They laid the foundations of rabbinic Judaism that undergirds expressions of Judaism today.
This difference could perhaps be tolerated if it weren’t for the fact that many generations of Christians projected their negative characterization of the Pharisees onto Jews in general. In other words, the tragic reality of anti-Semitism through history is connected to the negative portrait of the Pharisees in the gospels. In the decades since the Holocaust, Christians have been slowly coming to terms with this grim fact.
As Peg Conway wrote, “A positive presentation of Jesus does not require negative stereotyping of the Pharisees or any other Jews.” But that leaves Christians today with the challenge of figuring out how to deal with the negative depiction of the Pharisees in the gospels.
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