Pharisees

Who the Pharisees Were

The Pharisees emerged as a distinct movement sometime in the 2nd century BC, emphasizing scrupulous obedience to the written Torah alongside an extensive body of oral tradition meant to apply it to daily life in careful detail. Unlike the priestly, aristocratic Sadducees, Pharisees affirmed the resurrection of the dead, the existence of angels and spirits, and divine providence working alongside human free will (Acts 23:8) — theological positions much closer to later Christian belief, and popular enough with ordinary people that Pharisaic teaching, more than Sadducean, shaped the Judaism that survived the temple's destruction in AD 70.

Origins and the Meaning of the Name

The Pharisees emerge into clear view in the 2nd century BC, during the Hasmonean period, and Josephus is the first writer to describe them as an organised party — his account of their falling-out with the Hasmonean ruler John Hyrcanus (who ruled from about 134 to 104 BC) is the earliest detailed narrative we have about them. Their beginnings before that point are genuinely obscure. A common account links them to the Hasidim, the pious resisters of the Maccabean revolt; this is plausible and often repeated, but the evidence connecting the two groups is thin, and careful historians present it as a reasonable guess rather than an established fact.

Even the name is uncertain. It is usually derived from the Hebrew perushim, 'the separated ones,' which would describe a group setting itself apart for purity — but scholars disagree about what they were separating from, and whether the label began as their own or as a jibe from opponents. An alternative derivation reads the root as 'to interpret,' making them 'the interpreters,' which fits their actual programme rather well. No source from the period settles it.

What the Ancient Writers Say

Almost everything known about the Pharisees comes from three bodies of writing, and each has a direction of bias worth knowing. Josephus, the Jewish historian writing for a Roman readership late in the 1st century AD, describes them in his Antiquities of the Jews and Jewish War as one of three Jewish 'schools of thought' alongside the Sadducees and Essenes; he reports that they were the most influential with the ordinary population, that they held to fate and human responsibility together, and — in Antiquities — that they numbered more than six thousand in Herod's time. He also states in his Life that he attached himself to the Pharisees as a young man, which makes him a valuable witness and an interested one.

The New Testament is the second body, and it is a polemical source: the Gospels record the Pharisees chiefly where they are in conflict with Jesus, which is a real historical memory but not a rounded portrait of a movement. The third is rabbinic literature, principally the Mishnah and later works, compiled from the 3rd century AD onward by heirs who looked back on Pharisaic teachers with approval. Notably, no document survives that was written by a Pharisee, in the period, identifying itself as Pharisaic. Historians therefore reconstruct the movement from outsiders, opponents and successors, and describe the result with corresponding caution.

How the Movement Ended, and What Continued

The Pharisees do not so much end as change form. The catastrophe of AD 70 destroyed the temple and with it the institutional base of the priestly Sadducees, but Pharisaic religion — centred on Torah, its interpretation, the synagogue and the home — needed no temple to continue. In the decades after the revolt a rabbinic movement consolidated at Yavneh (Jamnia) on the coastal plain, and the sages of that movement are generally regarded as the principal heirs of the Pharisees. The term 'Pharisee' itself falls out of use; the successors call themselves rabbis.

How direct that succession was is debated. The mainstream position holds a real continuity of people and ideas from the Pharisees to the early rabbis. A more cautious line, argued at length by Jacob Neusner among others, warns that rabbinic sources are late, that they had reasons to claim a Pharisaic pedigree, and that the continuity should not be assumed to be as tidy as the later tradition presents it. Both positions accept that Pharisaic emphases, rather than Sadducean ones, shaped the Judaism that survived.

For how the two parties differed from one another point by point — on Scripture, the resurrection, where their power sat, and why only one of them survived — see Pharisees and Sadducees Compared.

Pharisees in the Gospels and Acts

The Gospels record repeated conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees, especially over Sabbath observance, ritual purity, and Jesus's willingness to eat with 'sinners' and tax collectors. Jesus's sharpest words are reserved for their hypocrisy — meticulously tithing garden herbs 'and have left undone the weightier matters of the law: justice, mercy, and faith' (Matthew 23:23) — condemning the substance behind the practice, not necessarily every individual Pharisee. Not all Pharisees were hostile: Nicodemus, 'a ruler of the Jews' and Pharisee, comes to Jesus by night with real questions (John 3:1-21) and later helps bury him (John 19:39-40), and the Pharisee Gamaliel counsels the Jewish council toward caution rather than violence against the apostles (Acts 5:34-39). Paul himself was 'a Pharisee, a son of Pharisees' (Acts 23:6), trained under Gamaliel (Acts 22:3), before his conversion turned his zeal toward proclaiming the very faith he had once persecuted.

Scripture references

• Matthew 23:1-36 — Jesus's extended rebuke of Pharisaic hypocrisy
• Acts 23:6-8 — Pharisees affirm resurrection, angels, and spirits, unlike the Sadducees
• John 3:1-21 — Nicodemus, a Pharisee, comes to Jesus
• Acts 23:6 — Paul identifies himself as 'a Pharisee, a son of Pharisees'

Further reading

• Encyclopaedia Britannica: Pharisee