Hypocrites or Heroes?: The Paradoxical Portrayal of the Pharisees in the New Testament

By Roger Amos and Pieter J. Lalleman

It is easy to dismiss the Pharisees as Jesus' implacable adversaries, the hypocrites with whom he frequently debated and who even plotted his downfall. That picture, however, ignores other gospel passages that show Jesus on friendly terms with them. This study explores every New Testament reference to the Pharisees, paying special attention to Jesus' encounters with them, and offers a feasible resolution of the seeming discrepancies. Unlike those proposed by some scholars, this solution preserves the integrity of the gospel texts and also explains other paradoxical aspects of Jesus' ministry.

This subject contains more than academic importance. Since much of the gospel record of the actions and teachings of Jesus falls within the context of his encounters with the Pharisees, some knowledge of these people with whom he so frequently engaged is an essential prerequisite to understanding Jesus himself. This study's historical reconstructions of the Pharisee movement origins, of its characteristics at the time of Jesus, and of Jesus' relationship with the Pharisees themselves, provide not only a clearer picture of the social and religious environment in which the Christian faith originated, but also fresh insight into Jesus.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Release date: Apr 22, 2015
• ISBN: 9781498220286

Roger Amos

In Roger's working career pastoring Baptist churches alternated with technical authoring. Retiring in 2008 Roger took the MA course (by Distance Learning) in Aspects of Biblical Interpretation from the London School of Theology. Personal research led to Hypocrites or Heroes? published in 2015. The pandemic prevented him from completing a PhD, his thesis becoming What Was Jesus Hoping to Achieve? He is an Associate Research Fellow of Spurgeon's College, London.

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Hypocrites or Heroes?

The Paradoxical Portrayal of the Pharisees in the New Testament

Roger Amos

Foreword by Pieter Lalleman

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HYPOCRITES OR HEROES?

The Paradoxical Portrayal of the Pharisees in the New Testament

Copyright © 2015 Roger Amos. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

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isbn 13: 978-1-4982-2027-9

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All scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright ©1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com The NIV and New International Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™

Table of Contents

Title Page

Foreword

Preface

Abbreviations

1. Introduction

2. The Pharisees in the New Testament

3. The Jews in John’s Gospel

4. The Pharisees in Josephus and the Rabbinical Literature

5. Historical Reconstruction 1—The Origin of the Pharisees

6. Historical Reconstruction 2—The Pharisees at the Time of Jesus

7. Historical Reconstruction 3—Jesus and the Pharisees

8. Hypocrites or Heroes—Explaining the Paradox

Appendix

Bibliography

Foreword

Many of us who grew up in Christian homes will be familiar with the Pharisees as bad people. In countless stories which we were told from children’s Bibles and other popular sources, they are the perennial adversaries of the Lord Jesus, always on hand to criticize him and to attack the good things he did for the people of Israel. In such stories there is normally not the faintest suggestion that some of the Pharisees might actually have had good intentions. Popular preachers are likely to misrepresent these contemporaries of Jesus in a similar way. Those of you who grew up outside the Christian tradition are not so likely to know these misleading stories but you will know the term Pharisee as a swearword.

In any case, the caricatures that are made of the Pharisees easily rub off on all Jewish people, first on Jesus’ other contemporaries and then on all Jews anywhere. And regrettably this is what has happened: popular misrepresentations of the Pharisees have contributed to—and then in turn resulted from—the latent or open anti-Semitism which has characterized large sections of Christianity and of the western civilization in general for most of its history.

Part of the problem is that discussions among Jewish people can be sharp; sharper than we may find acceptable. Hence the New Testament itself is harsh about the Pharisees. Both sides of the divide, the Lord Jesus as well as his adversaries, call a spade a spade. In doing this, they simply follow conventions which we already find in the Old Testament, where the prophet Amos addresses the rich women of Samaria as cows (Amos 4:1) and Isaiah suggests that his contemporaries are less intelligent than an ox and a donkey (Isa 1:3), to give only two of many examples. In the Dead Sea Scrolls, texts written by Jews in the era just before the coming of the Messiah, this sharp tone is also found. For example, several texts refer to their own people as children of light and to their opponents as children of darkness. In all these cases, the aim is to shock in order to gain attention and to call the addressees back to the fold. It is language Jews use among themselves.

We hear this same aggressive tone in many encounters of Jesus and the Pharisees. They are close to each other in their views and both have the best interest of the nation at heart—hence they speak with intensity. It is their very closeness that heightens the feelings and the tone. Hence they clash rather fiercely and mud flies through the air. British readers, who prefer to refer to total nonsense as interesting and have a friendly word for any lunatic, are likely to misunderstand this style and to be unnecessarily offended.

The present book by Roger Amos builds on contemporary scholarship about the Pharisees and takes it a step further. We can all be grateful to him for tackling the misunderstanding regarding the identity of the Pharisees effectively. I am glad to see that John’s Gospel is taken as seriously as the other three gospels as a source of historical information. In addition to his clear discussion of the relevant material, the author might have drawn some attention to Acts 6:7, which tells us that many priests accepted Jesus as the Messiah of Israel; it is very likely that among them were many who would have seen themselves as Pharisees. This text then shows us that the breach between Jesus and the Pharisees was never too wide to be crossed.

This book can be read in conjunction with books that are drawing attention to the political aspects of the ministry of Jesus and to the fact that in the struggle against the Roman occupation of their country the Pharisees were aptly nationalistic whereas the Sadducees were collaborators. Although one can disagree with aspects of the argument and with some of Amos’ conclusions, his rehabilitation of the Pharisees is appropriate and overdue. I fully agree with his words: Jesus and the Pharisees usually agree on the fundamentals of their faith. Once again, it is the very closeness of these opponents that explains why the ultimate disagreement over Jesus’ role and identity was so painful.

I sincerely hope that this book will help to eradicate the caricatures of the Pharisees and that it will contribute to a better mutual understanding of Jews and Christians, as well as of who the Lord Jesus is.

Dr Pieter Lalleman,Academic Dean and Tutor of New Testament,Spurgeon’s College, London

Preface

During the closing years of my pastoral ministry and the first years of my retirement I pursued the MA (by Distance Learning) course in Aspects of Biblical Interpretation from the London School of Theology. One of the concerns of my dissertation was a question which had engaged me for several years: precisely who were the sinners that the gospels mention in many places?

My research led to some unexpected discoveries. The pivotal episode is the feast in Matthew/Levi’s house which prompted the Pharisees to criticize Jesus for dining with tax collectors and sinners. Quite apart from the original question—who were those sinners?—another now raised its head: why did the Pharisees, so commonly regarded as Jesus’ adversaries, expect Jesus and his disciples to behave as they themselves did?

There seemed only one logical explanation, but it so violently conflicted with traditional evangelical teaching that at first I relegated it to a tentative suggestion in a footnote: that Jesus and his disciples were themselves Pharisees. As my research progressed I was startled to find abundant corroborating evidence elsewhere in the gospels. Consequently that footnote grew steadily and eventually became so persuasive that I was compelled to move its content into the main body of text, where it became the turning point in the dissertation’s argument. This was because of its implications for my original question: I concluded that the sinners were Jews outside the Pharisee movement; the gospels assume a Pharisaic environment, Pharisaism being the normative Judaism of first-century Palestine.

An internet search to discover whether any established scholars had reached similar conclusions led me to Professor Hyam Maccoby’s book, Jesus the Pharisee. The closing date for submitting my dissertation was almost upon me and I had time to read and cite only a few of the passages most relevant to my argument. Not until after my dissertation had been submitted did I read the book from cover to cover and find my attention drawn to further paradoxical elements in the New Testament’s portrayal of the Pharisees. Of course, Professor Maccoby was a Jewish New Testament scholar, approaching the subject with presuppositions rather different to mine. On some points he won me over, while on others I still beg to disagree. I was sorry to learn that he had died a few years previously as I would have enjoyed corresponding with him and perhaps even meeting him.

It was reading his book that sowed the seeds of this one. Now there was a vacuum in my life: I had finished and submitted my MA dissertation; health issues had forced the suspension of my preaching ministry; I needed a new project and had been bitten by the theological research bug. What more natural than that I study for a PhD, my doctoral dissertation being to some extent a critique of Professor Maccoby’s book? Because of family circumstances I decided against registering for a doctorate, but chose nevertheless to undertake the research and write the dissertation that I would have submitted (subject, of course, to the requisite approvals) had I opted to pursue that route. And, if the resulting document told a story that seemed to command sufficient interest, I would try to publish it.

In fact this work is far more than a critique of Jesus the Pharisee. It embodies some of the relevant material from my MA dissertation and seeks also to explain some of the other paradoxical elements in Jesus’ ministry that have occupied my thoughts for some years. Whether readers will be convinced by my arguments remains to be seen, but I hope that they will be challenged to think more deeply about the issues involved.

I am indebted to John King, leader of the New Testament Greek Group at the Percival Guildhouse in Rugby, who read an early version of this book, spotted many errors and suggested many improvements, and to Dr Pieter Lalleman, Academic Dean at Spurgeon’s College, who read a later version and not only provided the Foreword, but also spotted further errors and omissions.

Roger Amos,Rugby, England, 2015

Abbreviations

EVV English versions

KJV King James Version

LXX Septuagint (Greek translation of the Old Testament, 3rd–2nd century BCE)

MSS Manuscripts

NIV New International Version

RSV Revised Standard Version

1

Introduction

The paradox of the Pharisees

If the number of times the New Testament mentions a subject is a valid criterion of its importance, the Pharisees rank among its prime concerns. Not only does the Greek word Pharisaios occur 98 times, but it is supplemented by alternative terms such as grammateus, scribe, teacher of the law, (63 times), nomikos, lawyer, (9 times), and nomodidaskalos, teacher of the law (3 times), all of which are often used synonymously or nearly so with Pharisaios. Moreover, as will be demonstrated, in John’s Gospel many of the 67 occurrences of hoi Ioudaioi, the Jews, refer in fact to the Pharisees. This potential total of 240¹ mentions far surpasses that of such traditional Christian keywords as stauros, cross, (28 times), afesis, remission, forgiveness, (17 times), and apolutrōsis, redemption, (10 times). In the gospels, in particular, the Pharisees dominate the social landscape.

The Pharisees, however, get a bad press. According to the Chambers Dictionary, Pharisee is recognized even in everyday English as denoting a very self-righteous or hypocritical person. This is understandable in the light of their description in some New Testament passages. For example, in Matt 23:13–29 Jesus addresses them as hypocrites² six times. But the New Testament makes more serious allegations concerning them. The synoptic gospels imply that the Pharisees plotted to kill Jesus (Matt 12:14; Mark 3:6). In John 8:40–44 a similar plot leads Jesus to brand them children of the devil. It is not surprising that the late Professor Hyam Maccoby of the University of Leeds Centre for Jewish Studies describes these charges against the Pharisees as a powerful ingredient in the formation of Western antisemitism.³

Recently scholars have begun to recognize that, where the Pharisees are concerned, our conventional understanding of the New Testament is often misleading. N. T. Wright, for example, points out that traditional readings [of the gospels] have envisaged Jesus opposing the Pharisees, or they him, on the grounds that they supported a religion of outward observances and perceived him to be an antinomian threat . . . This double reading has recently been opposed . . . on the grounds of historical implausibility: Jesus did not ‘speak against the law.’ And what he did say would not have been particularly irritating to the Pharisees.⁴ Although Wright is referring primarily to the supposed doctrinal differences between Jesus and the Pharisees, his observation applies over a broader spectrum. All references to the Pharisees in the New Testament need careful interpretation in the light of the picture that they paint as a whole. For in that overall picture there are some surprising details which are easily overlooked, but nevertheless significant.

For example, the New Testament also contains passages that show the Pharisees in a favorable light. In Matt 5:20 Jesus acknowledges that they have righteousness of a kind, although he demands higher standards of his own disciples. When, in Matt 9:10–13, Pharisees criticize Jesus for dining with tax collectors and sinners, Jesus’ response implies that he regards the Pharisees as healthy and righteous and therefore, by implication, not in need of the attention that he is giving to those who do need it. In the same speech in which he six times declares the Pharisees hypocrites Jesus acknowledges their authority as interpreters of the law and enjoins obedience to them (Matt 23:2f). At times Jesus enjoyed friendly relations with them: Luke, who of the evangelists seems the least antagonistic towards the Pharisees, records three occasions on which Jesus accepted dinner invitations from Pharisees;⁵ although all three occasions formed part of their official surveillance of him, nevertheless their very nature presupposes a degree of congeniality between those concerned. Luke 13:31 describes another friendly act towards Jesus on the part of some Pharisees: far from attempting to kill him, they warn him that Herod Antipas is seeking his death and they advise him to leave Antipas’ territory in order to save his life. Finally, in Acts 5:27–41 when Peter and some other apostles are on trial before the Sanhedrin for preaching about Jesus, it is a Pharisee named Gamaliel, a teacher of the law, who was honored by all the people who addresses the Council and persuades it to release the apostles on the grounds that if their purpose or activity is of human origin, it will fail. But if it is from God, you will not be able to stop these men; you will only find yourselves fighting against God. What the author of Acts omits to mention is that this Gamaliel was not just an individual Pharisee, but the leader of the whole Pharisee movement. We learn this information from the rabbinic literature . . . As the leader of the Pharisees, Gamaliel naturally carried all the other Pharisee members of the Council . . . with him when the matter came to a vote, and Peter was duly rescued from death.⁶ So here is the leader of the Pharisee movement persuading its representatives on the Sanhedrin to release the apostles of the same Jesus whom Pharisees were allegedly plotting to kill not long previously.

It was probably inconsistencies such as these that led Professor Roland Deines of the University of Nottingham to describe the Pharisees as Good Guys with Bad Press.⁷ The inconsistencies raise a number of questions. Not least of them: precisely who were the Pharisees? What is known about them from the New Testament and other ancient sources? Were they really the murderous hypocrites that some New Testament passages claim? If not, why do those passages portray them as such? What was Jesus’ relationship with them? Do the gospels’ contrasting depictions of that relationship indicate that it changed over time? If so, what precipitated those changes? Another question that raises itself when we begin detailed study of the Pharisees in the New Testament is this: if, as the scholars convincingly demonstrate, Pharisees visited Galilee only rarely, why do the gospels record so many occasions on which Jesus encountered them there? Indeed this disparity has led some scholars to question the reliability of the gospel accounts.

Intriguing as these questions are, they are of more than academic importance. Much of what the gospels record of the actions and teachings of Jesus falls within the context of his encounters with the Pharisees. An essential prerequisite to understanding Jesus, then, is some knowledge of the people with whom he so frequently interacted. This study’s attempt to answer the questions raised above should therefore provide not only a clearer picture of the social and religious environment in which the Christian faith originated, but also a deeper understanding of Jesus, who is its very center.

Previous scholarship

The first volume of N. T. Wright’s study of Christian origins, The New Testament and the People of God, provides a useful overview of scholarship on the Pharisees as it stood at the time of its publication in 1992.⁸ He first considers the source texts and then the identity of the Pharisees, but devotes most space to their agenda and influence. He emphasizes the difficulty of researching the Pharisees:

At no point in these sources are we able to read a picture of the Pharisees straight off the text. But at no point are we forced, as some reconstructions have been, to eliminate altogether, or for that matter to elevate to a position of infallible objectivity, any one strand of the evidence. The Pharisees remain a complex and elusive group. But this has not prevented us from sketching in some basic historical probabilities about them, which will enable us . . . to show how their worldview and belief system formed an important variation within the broad spectrum of options open to first-century Jews.⁹

Wright’s fourth volume in the series, Paul and the Faithfulness of God published in 2013, updates the earlier account.¹⁰ Wright is now more confident about his sources: Despite the difficulty in using these sources, we can construct a relatively clear picture of the Pharisees in the first half of the first century ad, not least by building out from the certainties which these texts provide to others which speak of the same beliefs and practices but without using the word ‘Pharisee’ itself.¹¹ This implies recognition that Pharisaism was a broad movement which did not always use that name. The second volume in the series, Jesus and the Victory of God published in 1996, also contains material on the Pharisees, but dispersed throughout the volume. Particularly useful is a section overviewing Jesus’ encounters with the Pharisees.¹²

Until recently most scholars considered that at the time of Jesus Pharisaism was just one of a number of competing varieties of Judaism. The view of Giorgio Jossa in his 2006 monograph Jews or Christians? is typical: Judaism was not yet what would become, after 70, the rabbinic (and normative) Judaism of the Mishnah and of the Talmud, with its absolutely prevalent insistence on the observation of the law, but . . . it included a great variety of positions and orientations: the apocalyptic currents and the authority of the priests were no less important than the Pharisaic groups.¹³

Jossa may have been influenced by A. J. Saldarini who wrote what is perhaps the best known reference work on the subject: Pharisees, Scribes and Sadducees in Palestinian Society, first published in 1988 and republished in 2001 as part of Eerdmans’ Biblical Resource Series. He claims that, In the Hasmonean and Herodian periods the Pharisees were one, but only one, well known group, characterized by a distinctive way of living Judaism and constant social involvement.¹⁴ However, because of the contradictory source materials he concludes that, Data on the Pharisees is so sparse and difficult to evaluate that any historical reconstruction must remain incomplete and uncomfortably hypothetical. Many attempts have harmonized very different and contradictory sources and others have placed great weight on single texts and minor details; the results have been very speculative.¹⁵ Saldarini uses a sociological approach to overview Palestinian society, concentrating on social classes and groups, including a fascinating analysis of the place of the Pharisees in that society and of relationships within the movement.

In his survey of the literary sources—Josephus, the New Testament and the Rabbinic literature—Saldarini devotes a chapter to the Pharisees, scribes and Sadducees in Mark and Matthew,¹⁶ another to these groups in Luke-Acts and John¹⁷ and another on what can be gleaned about the Pharisees from Paul.¹⁸ His analysis of the authors’ usage of the terms is meticulous, perhaps inordinately so as he attaches variant meanings to each keyword and these vary from author to author—this study concludes from the tendency of the evangelists to use Pharisees and scribes interchangeably that they are sometimes synonymous, although they often carry distinct nuances that must be discerned from the context. Saldarini also attaches great significance to the locations in which the groups are encountered, ignoring the wealth of evidence in the gospels that at least one delegation of officials was sent from Jerusalem to Galilee to investigate Jesus. It is a pity that he relegates the Jews in John’ Gospel to little more than a footnote. Finally in a section dedicated to interpretation and synthesis he describes the social roles of scribes, the place of the Pharisees, and the leadership role of Sadducees.

Another eminent scholar in this field whose views are similar to Saldarini’s is E. P. Sanders, whose prodigious literary output covers many aspects of the New Testament and Judaism in New Testament times. He describes his Judaism: Practice and Belief 63bce–66ce, published in 1992, as the book I always wanted to write, or at least close to it.¹⁹ This comprehensive study devotes two chapters to the Pharisees: one to their history²⁰ and one to their theology and practice.²¹ The former usefully includes a detailed study of the first century bce. The whole of the volume, however, is helpful to students of the New Testament, as it also describes other Jewish groups such as the Sadducees and Essenes. While some recent scholarship disagrees with Sanders’ evaluation of the Pharisees’ importance, he has made a major contribution to Jewish studies through his emphasis on Common Judaism, to which he devotes ten chapters. This embraces those aspects of Judaism which were common to all its divisions and which made it one religion rather than a collection of several.

Some 15 years after the first publication of Saldarini’s book and 11 years after Sanders’, in 2003 Hyam Maccoby published Jesus the Pharisee, revealing views which in many respects are the antithesis of Saldarini’s and Sanders’. He finds no lack of data on the Pharisees, although well aware of the many paradoxes in this subject. He eloquently expresses one of these when he states that It is an extraordinary fact that while Jesus is portrayed in the gospels as a strong opponent of the Pharisees, he himself is the most recognizable Pharisee in the whole of first-century Jewish literature.²² He supports this claim with evidence from the rabbinic literature²³ including a comparison of the teaching content and methods used by Jesus and the rabbis of the second century and later. That rabbinical movement, he asserts, was a continuation of the Pharisee movement of Temple times; he offers evidence to support this claim too.

Another difference from Saldarini and Sanders is Maccoby’s contention that Pharisaism was not only the most influential religion of first-century Israel, but indeed the normative Judaism of that period: The Gospels, together with the similar testimony of Josephus, are our chief source for the prominence of the Pharisees as far more than a sect, but on the contrary the representatives of normative Judaism, the grouping to which ordinary Jews automatically belonged.²⁴ While this study accepts Maccoby’s conclusions enumerated above and offers further evidence from the New Testament that Jesus and many of his disciples were themselves Pharisees, it disagrees with some of his other assertions. For example, to explain the presence in the gospels of contradictory pro-Pharisee and anti-Pharisee passages Maccoby resorts to a complex theory involving multiple stages in the editing of the gospels, the later anti-Pharisee redactors conveniently neglecting to remove or tone down some of the work of their pro-Pharisee predecessors.²⁵ This study offers a simpler explanation that not only preserves the integrity of the gospel texts, but also explains other paradoxical elements in the evangelists’ accounts of the ministry of Jesus.

Maccoby was strongly influenced by Roland Deines’ essay The Pharisees between Judaisms and Common Judaism, published in English translation in 2001,²⁶ which he claims outstrips all previous work in careful analysis of the sources.²⁷ It is probably from Deines that Maccoby adopted the idea that the Pharisees were not a sect, because they existed for the people as a whole and laid down no exclusive conditions of entry. Deines’ work is indeed masterly, providing a feasible explanation of the situation portrayed in the New Testament. He concludes, "Pharisaism can be called normative, because whatever was integrated and thus legitimated by its recognized representatives . . . over time became the possession of all of Israel. In the consciousness of the majority of the people, the Pharisees were the religious group that determined the boundaries of what was still and what was no longer Jewish."²⁸

An earlier work that inspired Maccoby—he describes it as essential reading²⁹—is Ellis Rivkin’s A Hidden Revolution, published in 1978. Unlike Saldarini, Rivkin confines his attention to the Pharisees and teachers of the law, but like Saldarini he struggles with the sources: Yet the sources . . . are few in number, contradictory, highly subjective, and scanty in details. No source defines the name, pinpoints the origin, tells the story, describes the institutions, or pens the lives of the leading Pharisees.³⁰ Nevertheless he devotes a chapter to each of the three main sources: Josephus, the New Testament, and the Tannaitic (rabbinic) literature. Despite the alleged inadequacy of these sources, he concludes that, The hitherto discordant sources are now seen to be in agreement. Josephus, Paul, the gospels, and the Tannaitic Literature are in accord that the Pharisees were the scholar class of the twofold Law—nothing more, nothing less.³¹ It is Rivkin’s contention that the twofold (written and oral) law was the feature that distinguished the Pharisees from other movements, such as the Sadducees, who accepted only the Pentateuch, understood literally, as authoritative. The Pharisees’ oral law attempted to identify the principles underlying the written law and apply them in situations that the written law did not cover explicitly.

Rivkin proceeds to deliver two chapters of historical reconstruction. One of these, which dramatically explores the obscure origins of the Pharisee movement, concludes, The Pharisaic Revolution has remained a hidden revolution, but it was a revolution nonetheless.³² But of particular interest to both New Testament interpretation and the understanding of Christian origins is the third part of the work in which Rivkin claims that the Pharisees were the first to internalize the written and oral law. Further extending the principles that gave rise to the oral law, they taught that what God demands of