**Author:** [[3. Resources/Authors/Joseph Sievers and Amy-Jill Levine (editors)|Joseph Sievers and Amy-Jill Levine (editors)]] # Book Overview ![[The Pharisees Visual.excalidraw]] ## About the Editors Joseph Sievers is a professor at Rome's Pontifical Biblical Institute, specializing in Jewish history of the Second Temple period. He's a German Catholic scholar whose institutional position at the Biblicum gave him the connections and credibility to organize a major interfaith academic conference on the Pharisees in May 2019 -- the 110th anniversary of the Institute's founding. Amy-Jill Levine is an American Jewish New Testament scholar at Vanderbilt University, one of the few Jewish scholars working primarily on the New Testament. She's written extensively on how Christian readings of the gospels distort Judaism, including *The Misunderstood Jew* and *Short Stories by Jesus*. Together, they bring an unusual combination: a Catholic institution hosting Jewish and Protestant scholars, with a Jewish New Testament expert co-editing the results. Pope Francis granted the conference a special audience, and the Chief Rabbi of Rome participated in the closing session. ## Central Thesis The Pharisees have been caricatured for nearly two millennia. Christians turned them into legalistic, elite, money-loving hypocrites -- a foil for Jesus. Jews, meanwhile, came to see them as the respected teachers who helped Judaism survive the destruction of the temple in 70 CE. Both images are too simple. This volume assembles over twenty scholars from different disciplines -- Dead Sea Scrolls, Josephus, New Testament, rabbinic literature, archaeology, patristics, art history, film studies -- to reconstruct who the Pharisees actually were and to trace how their image got distorted across two thousand years of reception history. The book's most striking finding cuts against the standard Christian reading: the Pharisees weren't rigid legalists guarding an ossified tradition. They were countercultural innovators who offered lenient, popular alternatives to the stricter rulings of the temple priests and the Qumran community. This flips the conventional gospel contrast between a revolutionary Jesus and a conservative Pharisaic establishment. Several contributors independently reach the same conclusion from different source materials -- Qumran scrolls, Josephus, and rabbinic halakah all point to Pharisees as the more flexible interpreters of Torah. ## Why This Book Matters The negative image of Pharisees isn't just an academic problem. It bleeds into antisemitic discourse because Christians historically identified Pharisees as the forebears of Rabbinic Judaism. Calling someone a "Pharisee" remains a common insult meaning hypocrite in English, French, German, and other European languages. Sermons, catechisms, textbooks, passion plays, and films have all reinforced the stereotype for centuries. This volume doesn't just correct the historical record -- it provides concrete guidance for preachers, teachers, and filmmakers on how to stop perpetuating the distortion. The appendix includes Pope Francis's address acknowledging that "Pharisee" has become one of the oldest and most damaging stereotypes, making this a rare case of institutional backing for scholarly correction. --- # Chapter Summaries ## Prelude: What's in a Name? ### Ch. 1: Interpreting the Name "Pharisee" -- Craig E. Morrison Morrison tackles how the etymology of "Pharisee" -- commonly derived from the Hebrew root *prš* meaning "to separate" -- has prejudiced scholarly and popular understandings before anyone even reads the primary texts. Lexicons and Bible dictionaries have routinely glossed "Pharisee" as "the separated ones," and that gloss then gets applied to the historical group as if the etymology tells you who they were. Morrison uses onomastic theory (the study of names) to show this is a classic etymological fallacy -- the name "Baker" tells you nothing about someone's cooking skills. The word "Pharisee" developed a toxic descriptive backing in Christian imagination (pride, exclusivity, legalism) that functions independently of any historical evidence. ## Part 1: Historical Reconstruction ### Ch. 2: In Search of the Origins of the Pharisees -- Vasile Babota Babota examines the books of Maccabees, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Josephus, and rabbinic literature to find the Pharisees' origins and comes up largely empty-handed. The *Asidaioi* (Hasideans) mentioned in 1 and 2 Maccabees can't be straightforwardly identified with the Pharisees, and the texts don't tell us when, how, or why the Pharisees appeared during the Second Temple period. Babota's point is methodological: we need to be honest about what the sources don't say instead of filling gaps with assumptions. ### Ch. 3: Purity Concerns and Common Judaism in Light of Archaeology -- Eric M. Meyers Meyers uses archaeological evidence from Galilee and Judea -- chalkstone vessels, ritual baths (*miqva'ot*), handwashing practices, phylacteries, secondary burial -- to demonstrate that practices usually attributed specifically to Pharisees were actually widespread among Jews in general. The material culture doesn't let you distinguish Pharisaic practice from common Jewish practice. This undermines the idea that Pharisees were a distinctive purity sect imposing unusual demands on the population. ### Ch. 4: Pharisaic Halakah as Emerging from 4QMMT -- Vered Noam Noam's chapter is one of the volume's most important. She uses the Qumran scroll 4QMMT to reconstruct Pharisaic legal positions by identifying what the Qumran community opposed. Her analysis of sacrificial offerings, the red heifer, purity laws, and priestly gifts reveals that Pharisees were *less* conservative than the priests and the Qumran sectarians. They authorized lenient human agency and undermined priestly claims to exclusive holiness. This directly challenges the gospel portrait of rigid Pharisees confronted by a liberating Jesus. ### Ch. 5: Josephus's Pharisees -- Steve Mason Mason debunks several common assumptions: that Josephus was a Pharisee, that he was sympathetic to their program, and that Pharisees were popular leaders of the masses. In Josephus's thirty volumes, Pharisees appear rarely. When they do, Josephus depicts them as influential in ending the Hasmonean dynasty, as people who prey on the masses' gullibility, and as teachers of a leniency that Josephus (a priest who favored harsher penalties) rejected. Mason's Josephus matches Noam's Qumran analysis: the Pharisees were the lenient faction, not the strict one. ### Ch. 6: Paul, the Perfectly Righteous Pharisee -- Paula Fredriksen Fredriksen argues against the traditional view -- from the church fathers through the Reformers to today -- that Paul abandoned his Pharisaic identity on the road to Damascus. Paul called himself "faultless" (*amemptos*) regarding Torah obedience (Phil 3:6). He didn't become a former Pharisee; he became, in light of Christ, a better one. His view that Jews following Torah was commendable directly contradicts the conventional reading of Paul as champion of faith against Jewish "works righteousness." ### Ch. 7: Pharisees and Sadducees Together in Matthew -- Henry Pattarumadathil Pattarumadathil shows how Matthew's Gospel uniquely pairs Pharisees and Sadducees -- historically opposing groups -- into a single threatening body united by their rejection of John the Baptizer and Jesus. This Matthean redaction serves the narrative purpose of creating a unified opposition that eventually morphs into "the Jews" (Matt 28:15) who deny the resurrection. ### Ch. 8: Polemic against the Pharisees in Matthew 23 -- Adela Yarbro Collins Yarbro Collins reads the woe oracles against scribes and Pharisees in Matthew 23 as sectarian polemic comparable to rhetoric found in the Dead Sea Scrolls and rabbinic literature. Both Matthew and the early rabbis were responding to questions raised by Rome's destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70 CE, including who should lead the community. Matthew's Pharisees, indicted for hypocrisy, represent the evangelist's competition, not a disinterested historical portrait. ### Ch. 9: Luke-Acts as a Source for the History of the Pharisees -- Hermut Lohr Lohr identifies a tension in Luke's two-volume work: the Gospel stereotypes Pharisees as greedy, wicked hypocrites, while Acts presents individual Pharisees (Paul, Gamaliel) positively. He attributes this to different settings (Galilee/Judea vs. the Diaspora) and different protagonists (Jesus vs. Paul). The historical takeaway is that Luke's agenda to show Pharisees in close contact with Jesus and his followers is plausible. ### Ch. 10: Pharisees in the Fourth Gospel and One Special Pharisee -- Harold W. Attridge John's Gospel speaks more of "Jews" (*Ioudaioi*) than Pharisees, but the two converge in the narrative. Attridge focuses on Nicodemus -- the Pharisee who visits Jesus by night, later speaks in his favor, and helps entomb him with extravagant burial spices. References in Josephus and rabbinic literature to a Nicodemus family suggest a real historical figure behind the gospel character. Attridge reads Nicodemus as John's plea that even Pharisees can be taught. ### Ch. 11: The Shared Image of Pharisaic Law in the Gospels and Rabbinic Tradition -- Yair Furstenberg Furstenberg compares legal controversies in the Gospels and the Mishnah -- a genre both literatures share -- and finds that Pharisaic halakah authorized lenient human agency while undermining priestly views of purity and holiness. Jesus, conversely, sometimes sided with the less compromising Sadducean positions. This directly complements Noam's chapter and further erodes the standard Christian framing. ### Ch. 12: How Close Were Jesus and the Pharisees? -- Jens Schroter Schroter is the volume's dissenting voice on this point. He argues Jesus took a *more* flexible approach than the Pharisees on purity, diet, and Sabbath, attributing the differences to Jesus's messianic self-understanding. This runs contrary to Noam, Mason, and Furstenberg, who all find the Pharisees to be the more lenient party. ### Ch. 13: The Pharisees and the Rabbis -- Gunter Stemberger Stemberger tackles the perpetually fraught question of continuity between Pharisees and rabbis. He finds reason to be cautious about claiming Pharisaic identity for figures like Hillel, Shammai, and Yohanan ben Zakkai. Early rabbinic texts rarely mention Pharisees explicitly, and the connections to synagogue, canon formation, and Oral Torah need careful scrutiny. Continuity exists -- rabbinic literature didn't appear from nowhere around 200 CE -- but every claim requires source-by-source analysis. ## Part 2: Reception History ### Ch. 14: "Pharisees" and Early Christian Heresiology -- Matthias Skeb Skeb traces how four early Christian writers -- Justin Martyr, Hegesippus, Hippolytus of Rome, and Epiphanius of Salamis -- used the Pharisees as symbols for theological error rather than as historically grounded figures. Justin found them hypocrites. Hegesippus blamed them for James's murder. Hippolytus saw them as evidence of Judaism's decline into division. Epiphanius found their doctrine incoherent. For the church fathers, actual Pharisees were irrelevant; the label served polemical purposes. ### Ch. 15: A Statistical Approach to Pharisaios in the Greek Fathers -- Luca Angelelli Angelelli provides a statistical survey of how often *pharisaios* and *pharisaikos* appear in Greek patristic sources. The terms cluster in the fourth century, with concentrations in Cyril of Alexandria, John Chrysostom, and Origen. Before the fourth century, the terms aren't common -- suggesting the Pharisee-as-stock-villain became a developed trope later than often assumed. ### Ch. 16: The Forgotten Pharisees -- Shaye J. D. Cohen Cohen asks why rabbinic literature suppressed its own connection to the Pharisees. The Mishnah's framers didn't identify with them, and neither did Maimonides in the twelfth century. The change came when Jews rediscovered Josephus and the tenth-century paraphrase *Yosippon*, which first explicitly identified the "sages of Israel" with the Pharisees. This means the Jewish understanding of Pharisees as proto-rabbis is itself a relatively late development. ### Ch. 17: The Perushim in Medieval Jewish Sages -- Abraham Skorka Skorka examines how Rashi, Maimonides, and Nachmanides handled references to *perushim* in the Talmud. More likely, at least Maimonides understood *perishut* (separation) as a personal virtue rather than a group identity. This challenges the assumption that Talmudic mentions of *perushim* straightforwardly refer to the historical Pharisees. Notably, the medieval commentators show no polemical traces against Christianity in their discussions. ### Ch. 18: The Pharisees in Luther and Calvin -- Randall Zachman Contrary to what you'd expect (especially given Luther's antisemitic writings), the Reformers' view of Pharisees isn't entirely negative. Luther found Pharisaic hypocrisy in the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector but also described the Pharisees as epitomizing the best that human beings can accomplish on their own. Calvin condemned their pride and appeal to hidden meanings but praised their preservation of some good scriptural interpretations. Both Reformers also used Pharisees as stand-ins for Roman Catholic prelates. ### Ch. 19: The Pharisees in Art -- Angela La Delfa La Delfa surveys how visual art -- primarily in Roman Catholic contexts -- depicted Pharisees. The parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector shows the Pharisee as elite and lacking humility. Artistic depictions couldn't easily distinguish Pharisees from other Jews, a problem compounded by medieval church laws mandating distinctive Jewish dress. Yet artists including Michelangelo, Caravaggio, and Rembrandt offered sympathetic portrayals of Nicodemus and dignified Pharisees. ### Ch. 20: A Brief History of the Oberammergau Passion Play -- Christian Stuckl Stuckl, the play's director, describes both its history of antisemitic depictions and the changes he's made after consulting with scholars and Jewish advisors. The essay addresses the backlash from Oberammergau's citizens when the play was critiqued as antisemitic in the 1950s and 1960s, and it details revisions put in place for the 2022 production. ### Ch. 21: The Pharisees on Film -- Adele Reinhartz Reinhartz shows how films perpetuate Pharisee stereotypes in popular culture. She analyzes *Godspell*, Griffith's *Intolerance*, Pasolini's *The Gospel According to Saint Matthew*, Zeffirelli's *Jesus of Nazareth*, and Arcand's *Jesus of Montreal*. Her key point: the same image can function differently for different audiences. The monster in *Godspell* can represent technology or confirm for Bible-literate viewers that all Jews are monsters. Filmmakers improve their depictions when they consult both historians and Jewish community representatives. ### Ch. 22: The Pharisees in Modern Scholarship -- Susannah Heschel and Deborah Forger Heschel and Forger trace the scholarly image of Pharisees from the Enlightenment to the present, highlighting how theology and politics shaped supposedly objective research. They feature Abraham Geiger's pioneering Jewish scholarship and his German Protestant critics; the impact of Nazi-era ideology; the American contributions of Jewish scholars like Kaufmann Kohler and Louis Finkelstein; and the later work of Jacob Neusner and E. P. Sanders. Even post-war German scholarship repeated negative tropes from earlier generations. ### Ch. 23: A Textbook Case -- The Pharisees in Catholic Religion Textbooks -- Philip A. Cunningham Cunningham documents how Catholic textbooks in the U.S. and Italy continue to perpetuate negative Pharisee stereotypes despite official mandates for accurate presentations of Jews and Judaism. Textbooks erase distinctions among Jewish groups, divorce Jesus from his Jewish context, and ignore Vatican guidelines. He concludes with practical steps for bringing educational materials into line with Catholic teaching. ## Part 3: Looking to the Future ### Ch. 24: Preaching and Teaching the Pharisees -- Amy-Jill Levine Levine lays out the stakes of failing to change how sermons and Bible studies treat Pharisees. She identifies institutional, theological, and social reasons for Christian reluctance to make changes, catalogs the excuses commonly offered for anti-Pharisaic teaching, and provides practical responses -- from careful historical investigation to hermeneutical choices to concrete suggestions for how specific gospel passages mentioning Pharisees should be addressed in homilies. She recommends that both Catholic and Protestant churches consider lectionary changes. ### Ch. 25: What Future for the Pharisees? -- Massimo Grilli and Joseph Sievers Grilli and Sievers look at foundations for future historical and theological work on the Pharisees. They suggest the Golden Rule, attributed in different forms to both Hillel and Jesus, as a practical starting point for interfaith engagement. ### Appendix: Address of Pope Francis Pope Francis acknowledges that "Pharisee" has become one of the most ancient and most damaging stereotypes. He emphasizes how the agreements and positive interactions between Jesus and Pharisees are regularly overlooked. The command to love one's neighbor (Lev 19:18) is common ground between Jesus and the Pharisaic tradition, and Pope Francis proposes it as a basis for Jewish-Christian dialogue. --- # Key Takeaways 1. The Pharisees were lenient innovators, not rigid conservatives. Multiple contributors working from different sources (Qumran scrolls, Josephus, rabbinic literature) independently reach this conclusion, making it the volume's strongest finding. 2. The name "Pharisee" itself carries a prejudicial descriptive backing that predetermines how people read the primary texts. Etymology doesn't equal identity. 3. Paul never stopped being a Pharisee. The conventional narrative of conversion from Pharisaism to Christianity is a later theological construct, not Paul's own self-understanding. 4. The Pharisee-as-hypocrite trope was a late development even in Christian literature. Patristic sources don't frequently use the term until the fourth century. 5. Rabbinic Judaism's identification with the Pharisees is itself a relatively late development, emerging through contact with Josephus and *Yosippon* rather than from an unbroken self-understanding. 6. Archaeological evidence can't distinguish Pharisaic practice from common Jewish practice, which undermines the idea of Pharisees as a distinctive purity sect. 7. The volume's contributors openly disagree on key questions (compare Schroter with Noam/Mason/Furstenberg on whether Jesus or the Pharisees were more flexible), which strengthens rather than weakens the collection's credibility. --- # Notable Quotes > "For almost two millennia, various Christian churches have presented the Pharisees as legalistic, elite, money-loving, xenophobic hypocrites." > "Love of neighbor, then, represents a significant indicator for recognizing affinities between Jesus and his Pharisee interlocutors." -- Pope Francis --- # Connections & Further Reading - [[In Quest of the Historical Pharisees]] -- Neusner and Chilton's earlier edited volume, which this book explicitly builds on and extends - [[The Misunderstood Jew]] -- Levine's own work on how Christian readings distort Judaism - [[Paul and Palestinian Judaism]] -- E. P. Sanders' landmark work reframing Paul's relationship to Judaism - [[Josephus]] -- Steve Mason's work on Josephus as a primary source for Second Temple history - [[Jesus and Judaism]] -- Sanders' argument for Jesus within Judaism, not against it --- # Personal Reflection ## What surprised me? The convergence from multiple directions on Pharisees as the *lenient* party. Noam gets there from Qumran, Mason from Josephus, Furstenberg from rabbinic halakah. They weren't coordinating, but they reached the same conclusion. This inverts the standard sermon contrast where Jesus liberates people from Pharisaic legalism. If the Pharisees were already the flexible interpreters and the priests were the strict ones, the gospel conflicts look very different. ## What challenged my thinking? The chapter on Paul as a "perfectly righteous Pharisee" who never left his Pharisaic identity behind. The Damascus road narrative is so deeply embedded in Christian theology as a story of conversion *away from* Judaism that Fredriksen's argument -- that Paul saw himself as fulfilling, not abandoning, his Pharisaic calling -- requires rethinking foundational assumptions about Christian origins. ## How does this connect? The reception history chapters (art, film, passion plays, textbooks) show how academic knowledge fails to reach the people who actually shape public perception. Scholars corrected the Pharisee caricature decades ago, but sermons, catechisms, and movies keep repeating it. That gap between scholarship and popular understanding isn't unique to biblical studies -- it's the same pattern you see in any field where expert consensus and public narrative diverge.