Pharisees

The Pharisees were a Jewish religious movement of the late Second Temple period, known for strict observance of the Torah and for ancestral traditions taught alongside it, and remembered in the Gospels chiefly as a party that disputed with Jesus. The name is generally connected with a Hebrew root meaning “separated ones,” though the etymology is debated among linguists; historically, the group is described by the first-century historian Josephus and appears in the New Testament as a recognizable body distinct from the Sadducees and the temple priesthood.

The Gospels present them mostly in controversy. They object to Jesus eating with sinners, and he answers with the parables of the lost sheep and of heaven’s joy over one repentant sinner (Luke 15:1–7). He charges them with teaching “as doctrine rules made by men” (Matthew 15:9) and, in the woes of Matthew 23, with tithing mint, dill and cumin while leaving undone “the weightier matters of the law: justice, mercy, and faith” (Matthew 23:23), and with long prayers made as a pretense while devouring widows’ houses (Matthew 23:13). Twice he sets against them the prophet’s words, “I desire mercy, and not sacrifice” (Matthew 9:13; 12:7), and the rebukes are framed by sayings about the ax at the root of the trees (Matthew 3:10), the humbling of the self-exalting (Matthew 23:12) and the rejected stone that becomes the head of the corner (Matthew 21:42). The same writings also present individual Pharisees more favorably, such as Nicodemus (John 3:1–2) and Gamaliel (Acts 5:34).

Historically, the movement was largely lay rather than priestly, centered on the synagogue and on the study and practice of the law, and closely associated with the scribes — which is why the Gospels so often name “scribes and Pharisees” together (Matthew 23:13, 23). Acts attributes to them belief in resurrection and in angels and spirits (Acts 23:8), and Second Temple sources describe an oral tradition held to be handed down alongside the written Torah; rabbinic Judaism later traced its teaching to Pharisaic circles.

Traditions read the term differently. In much Christian preaching and catechesis the Pharisee serves as a moral type — the outwardly scrupulous person who neglects the weightier matters — an application drawn especially from Matthew 23 and Luke 15. Since the twentieth century, historical scholarship and Jewish–Christian dialogue have emphasized that the Gospel polemic is an inner-Jewish argument voiced in the hyperbolic idiom of prophetic rebuke, that first-century Pharisaism was a varied renewal movement rather than a single stereotype, and that several churches have formally repudiated the use of “Pharisee” as a slur against Jews as a people. Other readers take the denunciations as straightforward moral warning and resist softening them. The live difference is over how far these texts address a particular historical party, a recurring religious type, or both.

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.