Growing up in church, I learned that the Pharisees were legalistic, ritual-loving hypocrites who frustrated Jesus’s mission. I was warned to avoid such hypocrisy and empty religiosity in sermons and devotional literature. But as a literature professor reading the Gospels with my children, some of those characterizations became problematic….

“Why do your disciples eat with unwashed hands?” (Mark 7:5) Even as years of Christian reading had a ready answer to explain this was a “special ritual hand washing,” the mother in me couldn’t help but feel sympathy for the Pharisees’s question. How many times had my husband or I sent my children away from the table to WASH THEIR HANDS before eating. 

Or, even lacking a full understanding of the purity discussions taking place when Jesus and the Pharisees debate the cleanliness of the inside vs outside of the bowl (Matt 23:25-26), the mother in me wanted to tell both Jesus and the Pharisees to do a better job washing the dishes and clean BOTH THE INSIDE AND OUTSIDE before putting it away!

But it was reading a story about work on the Sabbath that started to make me think Christians might be reading the Pharisees all wrong. About a year into our family’s practice of Sabbath, we read the story of Jesus healing someone on the Sabbath. My children jumped straight into the debate, bouncing between Jesus and the Pharisees’s perspectives, finding merit in both. As I listened to my children, I realized that the debate wasn’t about if one should keep Sabbath but about how one should keep Sabbath. And, more importantly, it wasn’t clear if the Pharisees were actually opposed to Jesus healing the man. Might they have been using this “test” to determine how Jesus interpreted the Law, just as I might ask a question of a colleague to see how they interpreted a poem or other text?

So, who were the Pharisees and why does the Christian tradition treat them so harshly?

They were popular teachers known for their insightful readings of scripture, offering interpretations that were lenient and humane

The Pharisees, co-edited by Amy-Jill Levine and Joseph Sievers, offers a thorough look at both the Pharisees in their historical context and their later treatment in both Jewish and Christian traditions, overturning centuries of popular (mis)characterizations. In a nutshell, the essays in this volume characterize the Pharisees of history as a reforming force within Second Temple Judaism. They were popular teachers known for their insightful readings of scripture, offering interpretations that were lenient and humane (for example, rendering things like capital punishment nearly unenforceable). They worked to break down the barriers between the Temple and the populace, believing that holiness was not just for the elite but for everyone and for everyday life. Regarding the applications of ritual purity laws, they were known for their progressive interpretations that made it easier for people and objects to be restored to ritual purity and thus participate in the community (which turns out to be the context for the inside/outside the bowl controversy I mentioned above). The Pharisees emphasized the eternal soul, the afterlife, the resurrection of the dead, and the role of divine providence in human life. They were largely urban, loved by the people, sometimes used their popularity for political power-plays, and frequently at odds with the Priests and Sadducees. (As a side note, the Sadducees also come into clearer focus in some of the early essays, where they are characterized as the elite ruling class, who saw the Law of Moses as the only guide and were thus more conservative in how to apply laws and favored stricter punishments. They emphasized free will and did not believe in a soul or afterlife.)

Clearly, recovering a more historically grounded understanding of the Pharisees works against nearly 2000 years of Christian mischaracterizations of the Pharisees and by extension, Judaism more broadly. And that is a very good thing.

For starters, better (more historically grounded) characterizations of the Pharisees work against their negative mis-characterizations that have been extended to apply to Jews and Judaism throughout Christian history. Such false characterizations have helped support sustained systemic and individual violence (the Holocaust being only one relatively recent example of the many acts of mass destruction wrought by Christians against their Jewish neighbors, to say nothing of the ongoing smaller scale acts of violence against Jewish communities). Any work that challenges—and hopefully changes—such false characterizations is to be welcomed.

Secondly, better characterizations of the Pharisees create a context for better readings of the New Testament. Granted such characterizations also raise new questions, some exciting, some vexing. For example:

• A number of the essays cite a charge against the Pharisees, “The Pharisees claim that Holy Scripture renders the hands unclean, but Homer does not render the hands unclean.” How might the Pharisees’s approach to the secular and sacred be reflected in Paul’s discussion the Law in Romans 7: 7–12? Might his views reflect the Pharisees’s understanding that ritual impurity only becomes an issue when engaging the sacred, meaning the Law brings life but also, ironically, death?
• When the Pharisees (who were part of the Jesus-movement) insist on circumcision at the Jerusalem Council (Acts 15:5), could their insistence reflect a popular desire (among Jewish and non-Jewish Jesus followers) for Gentiles to be full members of the synagogue community? Paul’s ongoing struggle to keep non-Jewish Jesus followers distinct in their bodies (if not other practice) seems to suggest a popular desire among Gentiles to mark their bodies and their lives as belonging to the people of God. 
• If the Pharisees are keen to extend holiness to everyone and gracious in their application of the law, then perhaps their frustration with Jesus isn’t that Jesus does the wrong thing (healing on the Sabbath, letting the woman caught in adultery leave) but that Jesus is doing exactly what they would do? They do, after all, depart from such encounters without challenging Jesus’s answers or actions!
• While there is deep antipathy from Jesus toward the Pharisees in many passages, might this anger also take on new valences? Perhaps Jesus’s frustration is because he and the Pharisees are largely in agreement (except for where Jesus seems more akin to the much stricter Sadducees…or even the Essenes). The Pharisees’s refusal to collectively and concretely acknowledge the validity of Jesus’s teaching and interpretation begins to look much less like hardened hypocrisy and much more like indigenous leaders caught in the destructive web of colonial power, mixed with a healthy dose of skepticism toward any new religious teacher whose followers seem all too inclined toward hero-worship.

Granted, the re-readings such questions provoke will not suddenly transform the Pharisees into the  “good guys” in the Gospels (or Acts for that matter). But new readings might helpfully untangle some of Paul’s perplexing passages. More importantly, reconsidering our understanding of the Pharisees can help topple the vicious, one-dimensional, “legalistic bad guys” characterizations that permeate Christian history—and continue to misinform Christian readings— instead rendering the Pharisees complex and profoundly sympathetic characters. 

grace & peace,

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