Jesus and the Pharisees

If you’ve read the gospels, you know that Jesus had a fair number of run-ins with a group called “the Pharisees.” It’s easy to see them as the “bad guys” of the Jesus story. The Pharisees are variously portrayed as “hypocrites,” or “lovers of money,” or worse. But there are several problems with such a one-dimensional portrait of the Pharisees:

• Jesus was crucified as an insurrectionist, with the sarcastic title written on his cross: “King of the Jews.” But many Pharisees were looking for exactly that kind of a person, an anointed king who would lead the nation to military victory. Why would they have a problem with Jesus? 
• The Pharisees are often shown in the gospels as being in cahoots with another group of bad guys, “the Sadducees.” But the Pharisees and Sadducees were enemies. Why would they collaborate to bring down Jesus? 
• Rabbinic Judaism was founded towards the end of the first century, and it’s endured right down to our times. Some of the great documents of  rabbinic Judaism are the Mishnah and the Talmud, and these writings don’t sound at all like the work of “hypocrites” or “lovers of money”. They sound a lot like Jesus. 
• Some of the “good guys” in the gospel stories are Pharisees. Guys like Nicodemus. Joseph of Arimathea. The unnamed group of Pharisees who warned Jesus that Herod Antipas was going to try to kill him. How does that square with all the stories about the bad guy Pharisees?

Now would be a good time to talk about the various political parties within Judaism during the lifetime of Jesus. This is important because these parties changed radically within a few decades after Jesus died—and before most of the New Testament was written.

The Changing Story of Josephus

We’re very lucky to have some long documents written by Josephus, a Jewish priest who was born around the year AD 37 or 38, grew up in Jerusalem, fought in the Jewish Revolt in the mid 60s, was captured by the Romans, and retired to Rome after the war where he learned Greek and wrote his memoirs. This gives us an amazing inside track on the world of Jesus, written by an intelligent aristocratic Jew who was born shortly after Jesus died. The books Josephus wrote are about as long as the Bible, so we have a ton of information. 

In his book The Jewish War, published around the year AD 75, Josephus tells us that there were three “philosophical sects” within Judaism:

• The Pharisees
• The Sadducees
• The Essenes

But less than twenty years after he published The Jewish War, Josephus published Antiquities of the Jews (about the year AD 93 or so). There, he tells us with a completely straight face that there were four philosophical sects within Judaism:

• The Essenes
• The Sadducees
• The Pharisees
• The “Fourth Philosphy”

What’s going on here? Were there three sects or four? And does it matter?

I’ve thought about this for a long time, and my view is that it matters a whole lot, because I think Josephus is pulling a bit of a fast one on his readers. My view is that there were three sects in Judaism, but one of them had a schism—right around the time Jesus was born. And Jesus was caught in that schism.

So let’s look at each of these sects Josephus identifies, starting with the one that matters least.

The Essenes

Josephus says he admires the Essenes , and he claims he once studied with them. Most scholars believe that the Essenes were the group living in Qumran, a monastic compound near the shores of the Dead Sea. According to this view, the Essenes were a super-strict sect that considered the Temple to be hopelessly corrupt. They lived away from the rest of society so they could be as pure as possible. They seem to have been ascetic, although that’s not quite the picture Josephus paints. And they were the people who wrote and preserved the Dead Sea Scrolls. 

With very few exceptions, the Essenes didn’t participate in the Jewish Revolt. Josephus mentions a guy named John the Essene who fought in the war. But for the most part, they stayed at Qumran during the revolt, living their own lives. It did them no good. The Romans destroyed Qumran in the year AD 68, and the Essenes ceased to exist. 

John the Baptist worked near Qumran, and he may have had some ties to the Essenes, but we know less than we would like about his relationship to them. Jesus may also have had some interactions with the Essenes, but they were far more committed to ritual purity than he was, and I don’t see him as being close to them theologically. 

The Sadducees

The Sadducees were few in number, but they were rich and powerful. They were the oligarchs of Judea. Essentially all of them lived in Jerusalem. There were probably never more than fifty of them at any given time. But they were the wealthy aristocrats, the chief priests you read about in the gospels. The high priests were all Sadducees. 

The Sadducees don’t seem to have been liked by anyone. Josephus has no kind words for them, and neither do the gospels. Most scholars see them as collaborators with Rome. They were assigned the task of quelling Jewish unrest and running the local government in Jerusalem. They worked on behalf of the Roman governors, who mostly stayed on the coast, fifty miles or so from Jerusalem. 

The Sadducees are important to the story of Jesus because they brought him to trial and made sure he got executed. We can be certain of this because two of them are named. The four gospels are very clear on this.  

One of the two was Caiaphas, the high priest at the time Jesus was executed. The other was Annas (Hanan in Aramaic), who was the father-in-law of Caiaphas and the father of five sons, all of whom became high priest in the decades after Jesus lived. If you’ve read my City of God series, you’ll be familiar with his youngest son, Hanan ben Hanan, who later executed James, the brother of Jesus, around the year AD 62. 

The Sadducees collaborated with Rome right up until the Jewish Revolt, at which point they joined forces with the rebels and led the provisional government in insurrection against Rome. Few if any of them survived the war, and the Sadducees as a group completely disappear from history after the war. They are remembered as the “bad guys” in the rabbinic writings—the Mishhah, the Tosefta, and the Talmud. 

The Pharisees

My view is that Josephus fudged his facts a bit on the Pharisees. Josephus claims that he himself was a Pharisee, and I think we can believe him on this. But that must have made things uncomfortable for him, living in retirement in Rome on a stipend from the emperor. Because the Pharisees were the people who had instigated the Jewish Revolt. At least, one branch of them did. 

The Mishnah and the Talmud tell us that there were two schools of Pharisees—the School of Hillel and the School of Shammai. The rabbinic writings portray Hillel as a gentle, peaceable man and Shammai as a bit of a firebrand. Hillel’s followers are said to have opposed the war, whereas Shammai’s followers are said to have promoted it. 

Josephus wants to portray the Pharisees as the good guys, the peace-loving rabbis who opposed the war. He wants his readers to think he belonged to this party and that he himself opposed the war. But he had an inconvenient fact on his resume—Josephus had been a Jewish general, and he fought against the Romans right up until he was captured, at which point he switched sides. So his solution is that he claims he was secretly against the war, and he insists that the Pharisees were the party of peace. 

And how does he solve the problem that the School of Shammai supported the war? He makes them an entirely separate group. 

The Fourth Philosophy

Josephus tells us that there was a “fourth philosophy” founded by a radical named Judas the Galilean around the year AD 6. These are the people Josephus blames for sixty years of armed resistance. These are the people who started the war. Around the year AD 68, they created the Zealot party, but long before that, they boasted of their zeal for God. 

According to Josephus, the fourth philosophy are the real bad guys, the “innovators” who caused the war. He does this, in my view, to put a lot of daylight between himself and them. 

And what are the religious beliefs of this fourth philosophy? Josephus tells us, again with a completely straight face, that they are just like the Pharisees only different. The only difference is that they accept “no lord but God”—that they believed in armed resistance to Rome. 

My opinion is that this is splitting hairs, that the fourth philosophy is nothing more nor less than the School of Shammai. The fourth philosophy is just the more militant branch of the Pharisees, and in fact, they were the majority wing of the Pharisees after Hillel died (around the year AD 10). 

Josephus can’t admit that some Pharisees were militants, because he’s undeniably a Pharisee. So he simply creates a fourth philosophy out of thin air. It’s a common technique that we’ve all seen many times—create an enemy who has all your own faults, and make them the fall guy. 

What This Has to Do With Jesus

Jesus had his differences with the Sadducees, because he was preaching a kingdom of God, and they were backing the kingdom of Caesar. There could be no compromise possible with the Sadducees. 

Jesus had his differences with the Pharisees, but not with all the Pharisees. It seems entirely likely that he would have gotten on rather well with the School of Hillel. They, like he, favored peace. There’s a Talmudic story about Yohanan ben Zakkai, one of the leading rabbis of the School of Hillel. In this story, he quotes a biblical saying from Hosea—“I desire mercy, not sacrfice.” If that sounds like something Jesus would say, it is. The gospels tell stories about Jesus quoting exactly the same verse from Hosea. Jesus probably met Yohanan ben Zakkai, and they probably got along rather well. They were the same age and they lived in Galilee at the same time. 

Another rabbi from the School of Hillel was Saul of Tarsus. Saul studied under Gamaliel, the grandson of Hillel. Gamaliel was the leading rabbi in the School of Hillel during the adult life of Jesus, and the book of Acts portrays him as sympathetic to the Jesus Movement. 

The School of Hillel survived the war and founded rabbinic Judaism. Which is why some parts of the rabbinic writings sound a lot like Jesus. They were written by rabbis who were a lot like Jesus. 

But the School of Shammai probably did not get on very well with Jesus. The problem was that Jesus preached a radical new idea—enemy love. That would not have flown well with people who promoted violent resistance against Rome. 

When I read the gospel stories of the numerous conflicts Jesus had with “the Pharisees,” I find it helpful to mentally translate that into “Pharisees from the School of Shammai”—the majority party.

When I read the gospel stories of Pharisees occasionally acting in a friendly way to Jesus, I find it helpful to mentally translate that into “Pharisees from the School of Hillel”—the minority party. 

There’s no way to know for sure exactly how things played out between Jesus and the Pharisees. We just don’t have any documents written during the lifetime of Jesus. The New Testament documents and the works of Josephus were written decades later, after the cataclysmic war that completely shuffled the deck. And the rabbinic writings were written centuries after that. 

But I think the synthesis I’ve given above explains the data we have in a reasonable way.