There are four things that I wish to extinguish from from the tradition of Protestant Christian theologizing, the quadrilateral of oppression:
RACISM; SEXISM; ANTI-CATHOLICISM & ANTI-JUDAISM
Anti-Judaism comes in such an innocent form that one can barely recognize it as a prejudice. I am not talking here about the more severe & open forms of Christian supercessionism. When you here a sermon or see a poster that says that definitively, IT (whatever “it” is) is about relationship, not religion, did you ever stop to pause about the meaning of the cliche? Or if you ever watched a movie with vampires written by a Christian, did you ever stop to think where vampires, the notion of blood suckers came from? Anti-Judaism is just not learning from history the legacy of Hitler and the Nazis, for there was nothing unique about these folks. They were common human beings with experiences, loves and religions, who made choice after choice to persecute a religious minority until murdering a race of people became acceptable.
Now, there are many Christians who do believe that the right way to read the Gospels is to see them as an anti-Judaic polemic, and that any opinion contrary to that one, is a “slander.” (also note: if we want to talk about people who are slandering the Word of God, let us discuss those who would say that God endorses domestic violence in households, but I digress). The fact is that there is a history of Christian anti-Judaism, as if Christianity joined the Logos in its mission and fell out of the sky. What Christian theologians throughout history have chosen to do is to have a selective memory about its theological roots, its story, and have not admitted that we are in the process of being engrafted into the covenant as Gentiles. For example, as an undergrad taking a Judges course, I ran into St. Augustine’s interpretation of my favorite passages, Judges 6. His “allegorical” interpretation (dare I say pre-modern narrative interpretation) explained that this passage could mean that the Jews’ time had been dried up (think of Gideon and the moist wool as a sign) while Christianity had replaced it. Ask yourself, is this reading necessary, given the evidence of this text? Ugh, NO! That’s just one minor example, but there are plenty of others, including here in the U.S., with the colonies being the Promised Land and the Puritans the new Hebrews on the Exodus, making the Native Americans, oh, the Canaanites [another day, another time--- 
].
I am not trying to target Ant, but the series, Are YOU A Pharisee? is another case in point. What do you mean by Pharisee? These were real people. The apostle Paul did not say, “I once was a Pharisee, my enemies.” He says in Acts 23:6 (NRSV): “BROTHERS, I am a Pharisee. I am on trial concerning the hope of the resurrection of the dead.” Notice, Paul says I am, present tense, the greek work eimi, (I am), meaning, Paul remained a Pharisee in his religious identity. The essential difference in first century Judaisms between the Pharisees and the Sadduccees were many, but one thing that is well known is the idea that the Sadduccees did not affirm the resurrection. Paul did, Yeshua the Messiah did, and there are thinkers out there, because of Jesus’s heated debates with the Pharisees that Jesus practiced a form of Pharasaical Judaism.
We Christians relish in our reading of the Gospel, in the idea that the Pharisees are everything that we are not. However, insights from Jewish New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine, can help deconstruct our “delight.” Historical shows that the Pharisees did not become leaders in the Judaism until after the razing of the Second temple. This, along with scholarship that argues that the Gospels were recorded around this time 70 C.E., shows that it is a move on the part of the writers of the Gospel to differentiate themselves from their Jewish contemporaries. In the Gospel according to Luke, for example, Jesus uses a parable, of the tax collector and the Pharisee. In our contemporary supercessionist imaginations, Jesus is condemning the Judaism (since we continue to see the Pharisees as evil)of his day. But that is missing the point of the story. Levine notes, “To see the tax collector as justified is tantamount to a member of the local population claiming that an agent of a foreign, invading government, an agent whose job it is to take money from the local population to funnel it to the capital of the invading empire, is the one to be admired and to serve as the moral exemplar” (The Misunderstood Jew, page 38). As Levine argues, the Pharisees were more of the Mother Theresa’s or Billy Graham’s.
In other passages, Luke has a few anti-Pharisaical polemics, but as I used in the Acts example, he has a positive view of them overall. The negative views of the Pharisees come from Luke’s narrative, and not from the original context of Jesus the Messiah (p.40). Jesus’ parable is to make an inclusive congregation, that even those who work for the forces that exploit their own people may come to God’s house for worship.
Ruminate on that for a minute.
Lastly, in the parable mentioned above, the original Greek need not be read to say that the tax collector was seen as righteous RATHER than the Pharisee, but that the tax collector was MORE justified than our friend, the Pharisee. The Pharisee is recognized, he is just not held in more esteem than the tax collector, contrary to our view that the Pharisee is not justified at all. As Levine understands this, that the righteousness of the righteous benefit not only the holiest of persons, but the worst of sinners as well.
Thank God for the Pharisees.
Truth and Peace,
Rod
Related articles
- Are you a Pharisee? Characteristic 14 – Pharisees seek to catch others in their words (antwrites.com)
- Are you a Pharisee? Characteristic 13 – Pharisees are hypocrites (antwrites.com)
- Are you a Pharisee? Characteristic #11 – Pharisees are easily offended (compuadept.net)
Rodney,
I enjoyed this. I agree that the Pharisees are singled out because they were likely the closest the the early Christian movement, especially post-70. We don’t see the evangelist attacking the Sadducees all that much for the likely reason that after the fall of Jerusalem their following was close to gone. The Pharisees though are seen as the fathers of what became Rabbinic Judaism, therefore it makes sense that the Christian writers would focus on them.
And while Paul has his criticisms of his former life he does not deny that it was his Pharisees that handed him some of his insights. I would think resurrection could be one of those for which we should thank the Pharisees. Of course, Paul’s encounter with Christ morphed that a bit, but he already had bedrock in place because he was a Pharisee.
Exactly Brian, its about historical context.
Hi, I’m the author of the series “Are you a Pharisee?”, and while I understand your argument, all the 50 descriptions of Pharisees are taken directly from the gospels. The Pharisees were the ones that Jesus Christ was angry at the most. We were NOT to emulate them. The Pharisees crucified our Lord. I was a Pharisee, and I still am at times. The Pharisees represented the learned, Yeshiva trained “pastors” at the time. I was seminary trained, and I was a pastor, ALL which prevented me from truly understanding God’s ultimate purpose.
We are NOT to emulate the Pharisees. In Rabbinic law, once a Rabbe, always a Rabbe. רב
One of the factors that led me leaving the “clergy” (another example of a collective term like “Pharisee”), WAS verses like these.
What word should be used, if Pharisee is offensive?
Greetings Ant,
“What word should be used, if Pharisee is offensive?”
Perhaps legalist would be a more appropriate term.
The point of my post is that the historical Pharisees are dead, that they were real people in history.
“The Pharisees crucified our Lord. I was a Pharisee, and I still am at times. The Pharisees represented the learned, Yeshiva trained “pastors” at the time. I was seminary trained, and I was a pastor, ALL which prevented me from truly understanding God’s ultimate purpose.”
Just because a group of people are learned does not make them bad or wrong, first of all. Jesus was educated, so was Paul. Plus the Lord Jesus invites us to love God with all of our soul, our body, our hearts, and our minds. I don’t buy into Christian anti-intellectualism. It is not education that prevents us from knowing God or understanding God’s purposes, but our choices. God’s grace can work though the church and seminary.
And the whole narrative that the Pharisees crucified Jesus is not even true, first of all. Crucifixion was not a Jewish rite, it was a Roman imperial practice. To refuse to see the history of crucifixions as Roman is to deny history. Yes, Jewish leaders are implicated in the death of Jesus, but they were not all Pharisees. Not all Jews were Pharisees back then, there were the Zealots, there were the Essenes, the Sadducees, and others, oh, and the Hlellenists like the governors of Judea, to name a few.
No one here is arguing here for emulating the Pharisees. I am showing that Christian interpretation of what a Pharisee was do not add up with historical evidence. The Gospel accounts are recorded AFTER the historical Jesus interacted with the Pharisees in his day. That was the point when I said, “Historical [evidence] shows that the Pharisees did not become leaders in the Judaism until after the razing of the Second temple. This, along with scholarship that argues that the Gospels were recorded around this time 70 C.E., shows that it is a move on the part of the writers of the Gospel to differentiate themselves from their Jewish contemporaries”
Meaning: the polemic v. the pharisees show more about the writers of the Gospels who wrote down the stories some 40 years AFTER Jesus had died and risen, and ascended. It is a major difference that we must take into account.
No one today can be called a Pharisee, it is not some “eternal symbol” or label, they were real people.
And yes, we are to follow a Pharisee, his name is Jesus, Son of Man and Son of God.
We Christians relish in our reading of the Gospel, in the idea that the Pharisees are everything that we are not. However, insights from Jewish New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine, can help deconstruct our “delight.”
Amen. Great post, Rod! And have you read An Educated Man: A Dual Biography of Moses and Jesus by David Rosenberg? He makes a wonderful case for Jesus being an intellectual (like Moses was in Egypt); and, Jesus, he says, was a Pharisee himself in his outlook, or very close to it: “The outlook of Jesus was close to that of the Pharisees, and he regarded them as the true successors of Moses.” (Guess what, so was Paul; so did Paul. But, unlike Paul, I don’t think Jesus ever was a Christian, interestingly enough; nor was Moses.) Since you bring up the anti-Catholic points again, Rosenberg ends this book of his by reaching out to Catholics and by writing a letter of reconciliation to the Pope.
Hey JK,
I’ll have to check that book out.
And remember my favorite quote from Nietsche?
“There has ever been only one Christian in the world, and they crucified him.”
Legalist is a bad synonym. I explain what a legalist is in my other series “Law and Grace”
http://antwrites.com/2011/03/09/returning-to-mount-sinai-part-i/
I think legalist fits quite nicely into what you are setting up here, and more so appropriate than Pharisee, for even in Acts, as Joel has pointed out, Pharisees were among the believers (Acts 15:5). Your use of Pharisee really is not appropriate.
The real Pharisees were not so cut and dry as you have made them out to be. And the bible uplifts both educated and uneducated persons, they are equal in God’s sight. Moses was one, Ezekiel another, still Daniel and his friend another, I could go on and on.
And Christianity is not just about freedom, it is also about responsibility as well, they go hand and hand.
The problem with legalism is not whether there are rules to follow or not, but what is their purpose and how consistent are they with the virtues proclaimed by Scripture.
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It’s not only Amy-Jill Levine and David Rosenberg who have much to add here. There’s also Hyman Maccoby and Willis Barnstone.
Maccoby contends that “Jesus, usually represented as anything but a Pharisee, was one, while Paul, always represented as a Pharisee in his unregenerate days, never was” (page 33, The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity).
Barnstone, in the Afterword of his translation of the New Testament, says:
“In effect, the existence of the Pharisees was an embarrassment to later Christian writers, for not only were they separatists like the early Christian Jews, but from their rank came converts–Paul claimed to be a Pharisee–to the Jesus movement. Moreover, they were fiercely opposed to Roman occupation. If there is one historical reason that most contemporary scholars agree upon, it is that Yeshua was executed as a seditionist, that is, a Jewish revolutionary who wanted out of the Roman occupation…. The Pharisees’ uncomfortably similar views with the historical Yeshua executed by the Romans as a seditionist, together with their failure to accept Yeshua’s divinity, could not be tolerated. The solution was to co-opt the essential position of the dissenting Pharisees and turn them from opponents of Rom to instigators and enforces of the Romans’ ‘unwilling’ execution of Yeshua–to make the Pharisees [whole cloth] into the establishment by demonizing them as shameless legalists, liars, and killers. In one stroke, the enemy authority was Pharisee, unbeliever, murderer, and devil.” (pages 1423-24)
“the existence of the Pharisees was an embarrassment to later Christian writers”
And that embarassment continues to this day.
I think was Paul was a Pharisee, but I think he was more sicarii than Pharisee. More on that later, I guess
Can’t wait to see you try.
Thanks so much for this, Rod — spot on, and so frustratingly necessary.
And the only difference you’d need to make for this to be about Catholic blogging is to replace anti-Catholic with anti-Protestant, of course.
No problem Bridget!
I’m not fully sold on the historical claims about the Pharisees and the idea that the NT distorts their true nature, but I’m fully sold on the idea that ‘Pharisee’ is a term which is ready for its retirement, and that Jesus and Paul could very accurately be called ‘Pharisees’ though they each had important disagreements with some other Pharisees on a variety of issues.
Yah, I would not say that the NT distorts who the Pharisees were, just combines who the Pharisees were after the 2nd temple was destroyed and before, during Jesus’ day.
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