Pharisee

A Pharisee was a member of a prominent lay party within Second Temple Judaism, portrayed in the Gospels chiefly as a teacher and strict practitioner of the law who repeatedly meets Jesus in debate and dispute. The name is commonly connected to a Hebrew root meaning "to separate" or "separated ones," a derivation most reference works accept in general terms while differing over its precise nuance.

In the Gospels the Pharisees appear as a recognizable group with a shared identity and public standing. They come to John's baptism alongside the Sadducees, and he addresses both groups as "You offspring of vipers" (Matthew 3:7). They approach Jesus with testing questions about the law, such as whether a man may divorce his wife for any reason (Matthew 19:3). Matthew and Luke both gather a series of woes against them, and the charges there are concrete rather than vague: tithing mint, dill and cumin while neglecting "the weightier matters of the law: justice, mercy, and faith" (Matthew 23:23; compare Luke 11:42); cleansing "the outside of the cup and of the platter" while the inside is full of extortion (Matthew 23:25; Luke 11:39); and traveling sea and land to make one proselyte, only to make him "twice as much a son of Gehenna" (Matthew 23:15). Luke adds that they were "lovers of money" who scoffed at Jesus (Luke 16:14), and Jesus warns his disciples to beware of "the yeast of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy" (Luke 12:1).

The same passages show that relations were not uniformly hostile. A Pharisee invites Jesus to his table, though he doubts within himself whether Jesus can be a prophet (Luke 7:39). Jesus' parable in Luke 18:11 places on the lips of a Pharisee a prayer of self-congratulation—"God, I thank you that I am not like the rest of men"—which the parable uses to expose self-exaltation rather than to describe the group as a whole. Historically, the Pharisees are described by sources outside the New Testament, notably Josephus, as a significant movement concerned with ancestral traditions and ritual purity, influential with the wider population; historians generally hold that the sharpness of the Gospel polemic reflects in part the tensions of the decades after the destruction of the temple, and that the movement itself was internally varied.

Christian traditions read the term differently. In much Protestant preaching and catechesis, "Pharisee" has functioned as a byword for legalism and outward religion, a usage with a long history in Christian anti-Jewish polemic that many churches now explicitly disavow. Catholic and Orthodox teaching has more often stressed the Pharisees' place within the Judaism of Jesus' day, noting that the Gospels also depict them as table companions and as those whose teaching carries authority, and cautioning against reading the woes as a verdict on Jews or on Jewish law. Modern critical scholarship tends to treat the group as a diverse reform movement within Judaism rather than a monolithic party of hypocrites, while Jewish sources of the period present them considerably more favorably than the Gospels do.

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.