Pharisees

Pharisees, so-called Jewish sect, more correctly a Jewish school, probably dating as a distinct body, or party, from the 2nd century bc. Their chief tendency was to resist all Greek or other foreign influences that threatened to undermine the sacred religion of their fathers, and they took their stand most emphatically upon Divine Law. They originated as the Hasidim, becoming known as Pharisees when John Hyrcanus was high priest of Judea. The Sadducees, or Zadokites, differed from them in political and to some extent religious matters. The Pharisees wished the state and all public and political affairs to be directed and measured by the standard of Divine Law, without regard for the priestly and aristocratic Sadducees or the heroes and statesmen who had brought the Syrian wars to a successful issue.

Their doctrine was of an ethical, spiritual, and sometimes mystical Judaism, which enabled the religion to survive the destruction (ad70) of the Temple, and which later became the dominant form of Judaism.

Jesus, in his condemnation of the Pharisees recorded in the New Testament (see Matthew 23), is in fact referring to the hypocritical Pharisees, also condemned in the Talmud. Among the five classes is the “shoulder Pharisee,” with his good deeds on his shoulder; but it also mentions the “God-fearing Pharisee,” like the Hebrew patriarch Job, and the “God-loving Pharisee.” These last appear even in the Gospels as sympathetic to Jesus (see Luke 7:37, 13:31), if not to his ideas.