Jesus only loses his cool a smattering of times in theNew Testament(just ask the moneychangers in the Temple ) , but he let loose one of his fiercest tirades inMatthew 23against the Pharisees and other " teachers of the legal philosophy . "
In What Verses Does Jesus Criticize the Pharisees?
In verses 13 - 39 , known as " the seven woes , " Jesus calls the Pharisees " hypocrite " six meter . He also calls them " unsighted " ( five times ) , " children of hell , " " a brood of vipers " and compare the false piety and posturing of the Pharisees to " hush up tombs , which reckon beautiful on the exterior but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean . "
The Pharisees of the New Testament are clearly cast as the speculative guys , the arrant ideological and spiritual foils to Jesus and his followers . The Pharisees are portrayed as nitpicky enforcers of Jewish scriptures who are focused so intently on the letter of the law that they miss the flavour entirely . As Jesus tell :
But does this picture of the Pharisees — as legalistic dissembler — dig with what historians and religious scholar be intimate about the actual Pharisaic movement , which derive prominence during the Second Temple period of Judaism ?
We mouth with Bruce Chilton , a religion professor at Bard College and co - editor of " In Quest of the Historical Pharisees , " to comfortably understand what the Pharisees really believed and why they collide with the former Christians .
Who Were the Pharisees - and the Sadducees?
During the first one C C.E. , when Jesus lived , the Pharisees emerge as a spiritual movement within Judaism , not a disjoined sect . The Temple still place upright in Jerusalem and it was the centre of Jewish life . One of the greatest concern of Temple rites was pureness : that both the people who entered the Temple and the animals sacrificed there , were " pure " enough to satisfy God .
The Torah ( the first five Scripture of the Hebrew Bible , commence with Genesis ) contains save commandment that explicate the right fashion to conduct Temple forfeiture , but the Pharisees believed they had extra godlike instructions that had been passed down through centuries of unwritten custom .
" The Pharisees believed that they had a limited reticence of cognition for determining purity , " say Chilton . " They taught that their unwritten tradition went all the means back to Moses at Sinai , so not only was there a written Torah , which anyone could have access to , but there was also an oral Torah which was inside the Pharisaic social movement . "
What was typical about the oral practice of law of the Pharisees was that it expound the question of purity to life outside of the Temple . Even if a Judaic person lived far away from Jerusalem ( in Galilee , for deterrent example ) and was n’t be after to make a pilgrimage to the Temple , they could conduct their life in such a way as to be arrant enough to enter the Temple .
" In that sensation , the Pharisees became a movement for the purity of the Jewish the great unwashed , " says Chilton .
The Pharisees were not , however , the powerful elite of first - C Judaism . Those were another Jewish religious order : the Sadducees , the priestly family that controlled Temple worship and contain the most political influence with the Roman Empire , which ruled over Palestine . The Sadducees rejected the oral law in favor of the written law established in the Torah .
The Pharisees werea working - class movementconcerned with establishing a clear and consistent Jewish identity in everyday life . Interestingly , it was the Pharisees who trust in an afterlife and resurrection of the deadened , both of which were rejected by the Sadducees as they were not mentioned in the Torah .
Another direction Pharisees differ from Judaic tradition is believing that a messiah would come and bring pacification to the world , though most of them did not consider that messiah was Jesus .
The Pharisees are portrayed as a monumental stoppage in the New Testament , but Chilton state that while all Pharisees were concerned with purity , there was fierce debate among the Pharisees about how best to achieve it .
There were sure Pharisees who believed that purity was obtained from the exterior in , and who teach that ritual bath ( mikvahs ) and the ritual purgation of cups and cooking implement was the only way to achieve purity . In Matthew 23 , Jesus chew up the pharisaic custom of purifying the outside of cups and dishes while " at bottom they are full of greed and ego - indulging . "
" Because Jesus himself was engaged in the issuance of purity — but was n’t a Pharisee — his conflict with some Pharisees of his meter was inevitable , " order Chilton . " If you impeach somebody as impure , you ’re not saying honour does n’t matter ; you ’re saying the opposite — there ’s a better way to achieve it . "
But Chilton say there were other Pharisees who would have agreed with Jesus , that the true piece of work of purification set forth with a pure heart and faith in God . If you scan the New Testament closely , in fact , you ’ll see that Jesus won sympathetic supporters and even follower from the social station of the supposedly hat Pharisees .
Nicodemus , who visited Jesus at nighttime to expect him questions , and then provided money and spicery to give Jesus a proper Jewish burying after the crucifixion , was a Pharisee ( seeJohn 3 ) . And inLuke 13:31 , a Pharisee comes to warn Jesus that Herod wanted him down .
But perhaps the most interesting and consequential mention of " well-disposed " Pharisees number in the volume of Acts , when a chemical group of Pharisees is listed among the early followers of Jesus who stay on faithful after his death .
As Chilton explain , though , those Pharisees took an ideologic stance in opposition to influential apostles like Paul and Peter , which may excuse why the Pharisees get such a bad rap in the New Testament .
The Meeting That Doomed the Pharisees
InActs 15 , there is a coming together or " council " in Jerusalem go to by Paul , Peter , James , Barnabas and other apostles and followers of Jesus . The agenda of the meeting was to settle an crucial question among the early church service : Did non - Jewish mankind require to be circumcised to be baptized and receive the Holy Spirit ?
The Pharisees in attendance were the first to chime in . In Acts of the Apostles 15:5 , it says :
note that it says the Pharisees were among the " believers , " further proof some Pharisees , too , were early followers of Jesus .
Disagreements in Jewish Law
But here ’s where things go to the south . The apostles are in perfect variance with the Pharisees and say that everyone , circumcised or uncircumcised , can have their hearts sublimate through faith in Christ . Peter , acknowledging the physical pain sensation and danger of circumcise an adult , rebukes the Pharisees in verses 10 and 11 :
" By the fourth dimension you get to this meeting in 46 C.E. , now the Pharisees are on the other side of this extraordinarily eventful decision , " say Chilton . " Paul lash out anyone who corroborate the far-flung use of circumcision as being a phoney , a legalist and being cut off from Christ . And that ’s pretty much the take of the New Testament on the Pharisees . It seems that it was this intimate conflict among Jesus ' followers that develop this pure line of demarcation between Christians and Pharisees . "
Ancient Jewish Sects vs. Early Christian Believers
What ’s important to understand is that the four gospels of the New Testament ( Matthew , Mark , Luke and John ) were written start in the year 70 C.E. , decades after the meeting in Jerusalem . So it ’s very possible that Jesus himself would n’t have harbor such distaste for the Pharisees during his lifetime , but that the authors of the New Testament wrote the gospels with a microprocessor chip on their shoulder following their atrocious divorcement with the Pharisees over January 1 .
" The gospel are written from the point of view of a breach that had n’t pass off at the time of Jesus , " says Chilton .
What Happened to the Pharisees?
After the Second Temple was put down in 70 C.E. , Chilton says that the king social organisation of Judaic spiritual lifetime was tumble with it . The Sadducees , who had been the most influential force during the Second Temple period , were scattered , while the underdog Pharisees , " who had been very much on the outs , " says Chilton , " really emerged as the last authority standing in Judaic history . "
Over the result centuries , the oral traditions of the Pharisees were committed to writing in the Mishnah and then comment upon in the Babylonian Talmud , becoming the base for rabbinical Judaism . The Pharisaic " sages " who had transmitted the unwritten custom from the fourth dimension of Moses were replaced by learned rabbi who studied the Torah and the complex commentary find in the Talmud .
Modern Judaism is , in a sense , a continuation of the Hebrew intelligence first defend by the Pharisees .
