Pharisees - Pharisees and Christianity

Pharisees and Christianity

See also: Early Christianity and Judaism, Paul of Tarsus and Judaism, and Christianity and Judaism

Outside of Jewish history and writings, the Pharisees have been made notable by references in the New Testament to conflicts between themselves and John the Baptist and with Jesus, and because Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea, both members of the sect, buried Jesus' body at great personal risk. Gamaliel, the highly respected rabbi and defender of the apostles, was also a Pharisee, and according to some Christian traditions secretly converted to Christianity (Nonetheless, there is no evidence of this in the New Testament.). There are also several references in the New Testament to Paul of Tarsus being a Pharisee. Christian traditions have been a cause of widespread awareness of (and, according to many Jews, misconception about or prejudice against) the Pharisees among the world's roughly two billion Christians.

An important binary in the New Testament is the opposition between law and love. Accordingly, the New Testament, particularly the Synoptic Gospels, presents especially the leadership of the Pharisees as obsessed with man-made rules (especially concerning purity) whereas Jesus is more concerned with God’s love; the Pharisees scorn sinners whereas Jesus seeks them out. (The Gospel of John, which is the only gospel where Nicodemus is mentioned, particularly portrays the sect as divided and willing to debate) Because of the New Testament's frequent depictions of Pharisees as self-righteous rule-followers (see also Woes of the Pharisees and Legalism (theology)), the word "pharisee" (and its derivatives: "pharisaical", etc.) has come into semi-common usage in English to describe a hypocritical and arrogant person who places the letter of the law above its spirit. Jews today who subscribe to Pharisaic Judaism typically find this insulting and some consider the use of the word to be anti-Semitic.

Some have speculated that Jesus was himself a Pharisee and that his arguments with Pharisees is a sign of inclusion rather than fundamental conflict (disputation being the dominant narrative mode employed in the Talmud as a search for truth, and not necessarily a sign of opposition). Jesus' emphasis on loving one's neighbor (see Great Commandment), for example, echoes the teaching of the school of Hillel. Jesus' views of divorce, however, are closer to those of the school of Shammai, another Pharisee.

Others have argued that the portrait of the Pharisees in the New Testament is an anachronistic caricature. Though a minority of scholars follow the Augustinian hypothesis, most scholars (including Christians and non-Christians) date the composition of the Christian gospels to between 70 and 100 CE, a time after Christianity had separated from Judaism (and after Pharisaism emerged as the dominant form of Judaism). Rather than an accurate account of Jesus' relationship to Pharisees and other Jewish leaders, this view holds that the Gospels instead reflect the competition and conflict between early Christians and Pharisees for leadership of the Jews, or reflects Christian attempts to distance themselves from Jews in order to present themselves in a more sympathetic (and benign) light to Romans and other Gentiles — thus making them a biased source concerning the conduct of the Pharisees.

Examples of disputed passages include the story of Jesus declaring the sins of a paralytic man forgiven and the Pharisees calling the action blasphemy. In the story, Jesus counters the accusation that he does not have the power to forgive sins and forgives them, and also heals the man. Christians interpret the Parable of the Paralytic Man as showing that the "man-made" teachings of the Pharisees had so "blinded their eyes" and "hardened their hearts", that they were persisting (unlike the crowds) in refusing to credit his authority. Hence, the New Testament describes Jesus as tackling what he saw as the Pharisees' non-scriptural judgmentalism concerning sin, disability and sickness.

Some historians, however, have noted that Jesus' actions are actually similar to and consistent with Jewish beliefs and practices of the time, as recorded by the Rabbis, that commonly associate illness with sin and healing with forgiveness. Jews (according to E.P. Sanders) reject the New Testament suggestion that the healing would have been critical of, or criticized by, the Pharisees as no surviving Rabbinic source questions or criticizes this practice.

Another argument along the same lines is that according to the New Testament, Pharisees wanted to punish Jesus for healing a man's withered hand on Sabbath. No Rabbinic rule has been found according to which Jesus would have violated Sabbath.

Although the New Testament presents the Pharisees as obsessed with avoiding impurity, Rabbinic texts argue that the Pharisees were concerned merely with offering means for removing impurities, so that a person could again participate in the community. According to the New Testament, many Pharisees objected to Jesus's mission to outcast groups such as beggars and tax-collectors, but Rabbinic texts actually emphasize the availability of forgiveness to all. Indeed, much of Jesus' teaching, for example the Sermon on the Mount, is consistent with that of the Pharisees and later Rabbinic thought.

Some scholars believe that those passages of the New Testament that are seemingly most hostile to the Pharisees were written sometime after the destruction of Herod's Temple in 70 CE. Only Christianity and Phariseeism survived the destruction of the Temple, and the two competed for a short time until the Pharisees emerged as the dominant form of Judaism. Once it had become clear that most Jews did not consider Jesus to be the messiah (see also Rejection of Jesus) Christians (among whom were Messianic Jews) sought a number of new converts from among the gentiles. Christians had to explain why converts should listen to them rather than the Non-Messianic Jews, concerning the Hebrew Bible, and also had to dissociate themselves with the rebellious Jews who so often rejected Roman authority and authority in general. They thus were perceived to have had presented a story of Jesus that was more sympathetic to Romans than to Jews.