Category:Pharisees (subject)

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The Pharisees were one of the religious parties of Second Temple Judaism.

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Overview

During the late Second Temple period, the Pharisees became the most popular opposition party against the leadership of the ruling party of the Sadducees. The Pharisees represented the interests of "middle-class" Jews, especially Levites.

Religiously, the Pharisees were a reform movement. They emphasized the centrality of the Torah and its moral commitments, more that the sacrificial system of the Temple. They strongly promoted the observance of purity laws outside the Temple. According to Josephus, they stressed human freedom, but recognized that such a freedom was somehow limited by the spread of evil. They believed in the end of time or in the coming of an eschatological Messiah (the Son of David). They considered normative not only the five books of Moses, but also the Prophets and the Tradition of the Fathers.

While competing with the Sadducees, the Pharisees did not attack directly their authority and the authority of the Temple and priesthood. They relied on the large consensus they had among the masses to promote their reforms. Especially under the Hasmoneans the Pharisees were subjected to persecution, but their strength proved to be greater of any attempt to suppress them.

The attitude of the Pharisees toward more radical groups of opponents (Essenes, Zealots, Early Christians, etc.) was somehow ambivalent. On one hand they strongly fought against their radical views; on the other, they often defended them against the Sadducees, never recognizing to the Sadducees the right to suppress their opponents.

The Pharisees were active in Judea but also in Galilee (see Josephus, Life 196-197; Ant 18:4,23).

The Pharisees had a role of leadership at the beginning of the Jewish War, when Ananus ben Ananus succeeded in creating a government of national unity with the Sadducees, the Pharisees and the Essenes. As the revolt progressed, however, the more moderate parties were marginalized and the Pharisees also lost enthusiasm in the cause. They took a midway position (neither with the rebels nor with the Romans) which on the long run allowed them to survive and prosper. It is generally maintained that the Pharisees were the most important and dynamic component in the coalition that after the Jewish War]] generated Rabbinic Judaism.

The Pharisees in ancient sources

See Pharisees (sources)

The Pharisees in early Christian sources

The Pharisees in Scholarship

The term "Pharisees" had been commonly deployed by Christians as an epithet against their Christian opponents long before the Pharisees became subject of scholarly inquiry.

In 1857 Abraham Geiger is credited for initiating the modern study of the Pharisees and Sadducees viewed not as "sects" but as representatives of two broad "tendencies" (Tendenzen) within Second Temple Judaism. Geiger argued that the Pharisees were the liberalizing, progressive movement that emerged after the Maccabean revolt; they were opposed to the conservative Sadducees, representing the ruling elite, the priests of the Jerusalem Temple. The Pharisees became increasingly dominant. By the second century CE, Rabbinic Judaism, built on Pharisaism, arose. In Judaism and Its History (1867), Geiger claimed that Jesus himself was "a Pharisee who walked in the way of Hillel"; his teaching was nothing new until it was re-elaborated by the ignorant Jews of Galilee who were inclined to apocalyptic phantasies.

The Pharisees in Fiction

In movies the Pharisees are consistently presented as enemies of Jesus and hypocrites.

In Intolerance; or the Triumph of Love against Intolerance, Jesus represents "Love" while the Pharisees ("Certain Hypocrites among the Pharisees") represents "Intolerance".

In the Gospel according to Matthew, the words against the Pharisees are addressed against the Romans. Nonetheless Parolini peretuted some anti-Jewish stereotypes.

In Jesus of Montreal there is deliberately no reference to the Pharisees.