Who Were the Pharisees? A Fair and Honest Assessment

"Pharisee" has become one of the most casually deployed insults in Christian vocabulary. We use it to mean a rule-obsessed hypocrite who has traded genuine faith for cold performance. But this caricature does not do justice to history — and more importantly, it prevents us from learning the genuinely important lessons the Pharisees have to teach us.

The Pharisees were not villains in robes. They were serious, devout, Scripture-loving people who made specific errors that Jesus diagnosed with precision. If we understand those errors accurately, we will find them uncomfortably familiar.

Historical Background

The Pharisees emerged as a distinct movement during the Maccabean period (2nd century BC), in the aftermath of the Seleucid Greek attempt to abolish Jewish religious practice. When Antiochus IV Epiphanes desecrated the temple and outlawed Torah observance, a group of devout Jews resolved that such a catastrophe would never happen again. The way to protect Jewish identity was rigorous, uncompromising adherence to the law.

Their name likely derives from the Aramaic perisha — "separated ones." They separated themselves from ceremonial uncleanness, from Gentile practices, and from Jews they considered insufficiently observant.

By the first century, the Pharisees numbered perhaps 6,000 in Judea. They were not a priestly class — most were laypeople. They were influential not through political power (that belonged to the Sadducees) but through popular respect. Ordinary Jews looked up to them as the ones who really took God seriously.

What They Believed

The Pharisees held several doctrines that put them closer to mainstream Christianity than to the Sadducees:

• Resurrection of the dead — a future bodily resurrection (Acts 23:8). The Sadducees denied this.
• Angels and spirits — belief in the supernatural realm (Acts 23:8).
• Divine providence — God's involvement in human history.
• Oral Torah — a body of tradition passed down alongside the written law, which they considered equally binding.

Paul, a former Pharisee, never denied his Pharisaic heritage when it came to resurrection doctrine. In Acts 23 he cleverly exploited his shared belief in resurrection with the Pharisee members of the Sanhedrin to divide the court. The Pharisees' belief in resurrection was correct.

Why Jesus Clashed With Them

Jesus did not criticise everything about the Pharisees. He told his disciples to obey what the Pharisees taught from Moses' seat (Matthew 23:2–3). He dined in Pharisees' homes on multiple occasions. Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea, both sympathetic to Jesus, were Pharisees.

But Jesus' rebukes of the Pharisees, particularly in Matthew 23, are among the most searing passages in the Gospels. The charge is not strict obedience — it is a cluster of related corruptions:

1. They made external compliance the goal, not heart transformation. "You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence" (Matthew 23:25). The law was always meant to shape the inner person, not just regulate behaviour. The Pharisees had turned it into a performance.

2. They used their interpretations to find loopholes in God's actual commands. Jesus's exchange about Corban in Mark 7:9–13 is a stunning example: by declaring money "Corban" (a gift devoted to God), a man could legally withhold financial support from his elderly parents while appearing pious. The oral tradition had been used to circumvent the Fifth Commandment.

3. They performed obedience for human audience. "All their works they do for to be seen of men" (Matthew 23:5). Prayer, fasting, giving — all visible, all calibrated for social approval. This is not the Pharisees being unusually wicked. This is human nature under religious packaging.

"Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith." — Matthew 23:23

The Lesson We Must Not Miss

The danger of reading the Pharisee narrative as the story of "those bad religious people" is that it immunises us against the very pattern we are most likely to fall into.

Pharisaism is not an ancient Jewish problem. It is the natural corruption of any sincere religious impulse. When orthodoxy becomes identity, performance becomes worship, and the goal shifts from pleasing God to being seen to please God — that is Pharisaism, and it is alive in every tradition.

Paul, who had been a Pharisee of the highest rank (Philippians 3:5–6), understood this better than anyone. His antidote was not less rigour but different motivation: "I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord" (Philippians 3:8). The Pharisees' error was not caring too much about the law. It was caring about the law more than about the Lawgiver.

A Fair Assessment

Many Pharisees were genuinely devout. Many were wrestling honestly with how to honour God in a complex world under occupation. The ones Jesus praised in Luke 18:11-12 had done impressive things — they fasted twice a week and gave ten percent of everything. Jesus' parable did not attack their practices. It attacked the posture from which those practices flowed.

We should have enough honesty to look at the Pharisees and recognise ourselves. The same Spirit who convicted them is still at work today.

Reflection: In what areas of your spiritual life are you most tempted to perform for human observers rather than for God? Take that specific area to prayer today.