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Jewish religious/political movement (sect)

Pharisees

FAIR-ih-seez

A lay religious movement within Second Temple Judaism devoted to strict observance of the Torah as interpreted through an oral tradition of legal rulings, the Pharisees appear throughout all four Gospels and Acts as Jesus's most persistent religious critics and debate partners. They affirmed the resurrection of the dead, angels, and spirits — doctrines the rival Sadducees denied — and after the Temple's destruction in AD 70 their approach to Jewish law became the direct ancestor of rabbinic Judaism.

Life and work

The Pharisees emerged as an identifiable group sometime in the second century BC, during the Hasmonean period, as one of several competing approaches to Jewish law and piety alongside the Sadducees and Essenes. Unlike the Sadducees, who were concentrated among the priestly and landed aristocracy and accepted only the written Torah as binding, the Pharisees drew support from scribes, teachers, and ordinary townspeople, and held that alongside the written Law, Moses had also transmitted an oral tradition of interpretation that carried equal authority. This oral law extended Torah commandments into the details of daily life — ritual purity, tithing, and especially Sabbath observance — which is precisely where the Gospels repeatedly stage their conflict with Jesus (Mark 2:23-28; Mark 3:1-6; Luke 13:10-17; John 5:1-18; John 9:1-16). Pharisees also believed in bodily resurrection, a future judgment, and the existence of angels and spirits (Acts 23:8), beliefs shared by Jesus and the early church but rejected by the Sadducees.

In the Gospels, Pharisees function as recurring antagonists who test, question, and challenge Jesus, often paired with scribes or, in a few notable scenes, allied uneasily with their theological rivals the Sadducees and Herodians against a common threat (Matthew 22:15-16; Matthew 16:1-6). They press him on divorce (Matthew 19:3-9), fasting (Matthew 9:14-17), paying taxes to Caesar (Matthew 22:15-22), and above all on ritual purity — his disciples eating with unwashed hands (Matthew 15:1-20; Mark 7:1-23) and his own practice of eating with tax collectors and sinners (Matthew 9:10-13; Luke 15:1-2). Jesus's sharpest and most sustained public denunciation of any group in the Gospels is aimed squarely at the Pharisees and their scribal allies: the seven-fold "woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites" of Matthew 23:1-36, which likens them to "whitewashed tombs" that look clean outside but are "full of dead people's bones" within (Matthew 23:27), accuses them of tithing garden herbs while neglecting justice and mercy (Matthew 23:23), and of loving titles and the best seats at banquets (Matthew 23:5-7). Luke preserves a parallel set of woes (Luke 11:37-54). This is the dominant portrait the Gospel narrative gives of the group, and it should be read as exactly that — a polemical portrait shaped by real conflict, not a neutral sociological description.

Not every Pharisee in the story is cast as an adversary, and the New Testament itself preserves a more varied picture. Nicodemus, described as "a ruler of the Jews" and a Pharisee, comes to Jesus by night with a genuine theological question and receives the teaching on being "born again" (John 3:1-21); he later speaks up, however cautiously, in Jesus's defense before the Sanhedrin (John 7:50-51), and after the crucifixion he brings a substantial weight of myrrh and aloes to help Joseph of Arimathea prepare Jesus's body for burial (John 19:39-42). In Acts, the Pharisee Gamaliel — identified as a respected teacher of the law — persuades the Sanhedrin not to execute the arrested apostles, reasoning that if their movement is merely human it will collapse on its own, but if it is of God, opposing it means fighting against God himself (Acts 5:33-39). And Paul, the movement's most consequential convert-turned-critic, describes his own pre-conversion identity in the strongest terms available: "circumcised on the eighth day... a Hebrew of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee" (Philippians 3:5), trained "according to the strictest party of our religion" (Acts 26:5) at the feet of Gamaliel himself (Acts 22:3), and even after his conversion he invokes his Pharisaic credentials and the doctrine of the resurrection to split a hostile council in his favor (Acts 23:6-9).

Outside the New Testament, the Pharisees are attested as a real historical party primarily through the first-century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, himself a priest who claims in his autobiography to have aligned himself with Pharisaic practice in public life. Josephus repeatedly singles the Pharisees out among the Jewish "philosophies" for their reputation for precision in interpreting the law, their popular support among the common people, and their belief in fate working alongside free will and in the survival and future embodiment of the soul. Their influence waxed and waned across the Hasmonean and Herodian periods depending on which rulers favored them, and Josephus records real political episodes in which they clashed with or were courted by figures like John Hyrcanus, Alexander Jannaeus, and Salome Alexandra.

The Pharisees' most enduring historical legacy lies beyond the Gospel narrative altogether. When the Roman destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in AD 70 ended the sacrificial priesthood and, with it, the institutional basis of Sadducean power, it was the Pharisaic emphasis on Torah study, prayer, and legal interpretation — practices that did not depend on a functioning Temple — that proved able to survive and adapt. The rabbis who reconstituted Jewish religious life at Yavneh and afterward, and who eventually produced the Mishnah and Talmud, are broadly understood by historians to stand in direct continuity with the Pharisaic movement. This is a genuine and important point of historical nuance: the same group the Gospels portray, in a moment of intense first-century religious conflict, as legalistic hypocrites is also, more dispassionately viewed across the long span of Jewish history, the party whose vision of a portable, text-and-practice-centered Judaism ensured the tradition's survival without a Temple. Both things are true of the same historical actors, viewed from different vantage points and for different purposes.

Occupation
Primarily scribes, teachers of the law, and lay legal scholars rather than priests; their authority rested on learning and interpretation rather than temple office.
Places
Active throughout Judea and Galilee, especially in synagogues and towns rather than being centered on the Jerusalem Temple itself, though they also held seats on the Sanhedrin in Jerusalem.

Questions and debates

Scholars debate how much of the Gospels' sweeping, uniformly negative portrayal of "the Pharisees" reflects actual first-century conditions in Jesus's ministry versus the sharpened, retrospective polemic of the later communities that wrote the Gospels, who were themselves in active competition with an emerging rabbinic Judaism descended from Pharisaic circles after AD 70. This does not make the conflicts depicted fictional, but it cautions against treating every Pharisee described in the text as representative of the movement as a whole, several members of which (Nicodemus, Gamaliel, Paul before his conversion) are treated far more sympathetically.

There is ongoing scholarly discussion about exactly how much of what Josephus and later rabbinic sources describe as "Pharisaic" belief and practice can be reliably projected back onto the actual, more fluid and less centrally organized movement of Jesus's own lifetime, since both Josephus (writing decades later, for a Roman audience) and the rabbis (writing generations later still) had their own reasons to describe a coherent, continuous tradition.

The precise relationship between the Pharisees of the Gospels/Josephus and the later rabbinic sages of the Mishnah is debated in degree — virtually all scholars accept meaningful continuity, but historians differ on how direct, organized, or self-conscious that succession actually was in the decades immediately after AD 70.

Extra-biblical evidence

Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 13.5.9 (171-173)

In a survey of the three main Jewish 'philosophies,' Josephus describes the Pharisees as holding that some but not all events are governed by fate, with room left for human free will — distinguishing them from the Essenes (who ascribe everything to fate) and the Sadducees (who deny fate altogether).

Weight: Josephus is the single most important extra-biblical source on the Pharisees as an organized party; he writes as a contemporary with direct personal exposure to the movement, though as a Roman-sponsored writer with his own apologetic aims regarding the Jewish people.

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Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 18.1.3 (12-15)

Describes the Pharisees as living simply, valued highly by the common people, and skilled interpreters of the law who believe the soul survives death and that souls of the virtuous pass into other bodies, while the wicked are punished — a belief roughly corresponding to bodily resurrection.

Weight: A later, more detailed restatement of Pharisaic belief in Josephus's overview of the Jewish 'schools of thought,' consistent with his earlier account in Antiquities 13; generally treated by historians as reliable in outline, if colored by Josephus casting Jewish groups in terms a Greco-Roman readership would recognize as philosophical schools.

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Josephus, The Jewish War 2.8.14 (162-166)

Contrasts the Pharisees, who attribute events to both fate and human choice and affirm the immortality of the soul and resurrection, with the Sadducees, who deny fate's role entirely and reject any survival of the soul after death.

Weight: Josephus's earlier work (written before Antiquities) and generally considered a solid independent confirmation of the beliefs he later restates in Antiquities 18, though again filtered through his habit of framing Jewish sects as Greek-style philosophical schools for a Roman audience.

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Scripture references

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