page_title: Pharisees
section_title: Pharisees and Christianity
hierarchical_section_title: Pharisees / Pharisees and Christianity
caption_attribution_description: Dispute of Jesus and the Pharisees over tribute money
context_page_description: The Pharisees were a social movement and a school of thought in the Holy Land during the time of Second Temple Judaism. After the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, Pharisaic beliefs became the foundational, liturgical and ritualistic basis for Rabbinic Judaism.
  Conflicts between Pharisees and Sadducees took place in the context of much broader and longstanding social and religious conflicts among Jews, made worse by the Roman conquest. Another conflict was cultural, between those who favored Hellenization and those who resisted it. A third was juridico-religious, between those who emphasized the importance of the Second Temple with its rites and services, and those who emphasized the importance of other Mosaic Laws. A fourth point of conflict, specifically religious, involved different interpretations of the Torah and how to apply it to current Jewish life, with Sadducees recognizing only the Written Torah and rejecting doctrines such as the Oral Torah, the Prophets, the Writings, and the resurrection of the dead.
  Josephus, believed by many historians to be a Pharisee, estimated the total Pharisee population before the fall of the Second Temple to be around 6,000.
context_section_description: The Pharisees appear in the New Testament, engaging in conflicts between themselves and John the Baptist and with Jesus, and because Nicodemus the Pharisee (John 3:1)  with Joseph of Arimathea entombed Jesus' body at great personal risk. Gamaliel, the highly respected rabbi and defender of the apostles, was also a Pharisee, and according to some Christian traditions secretly converted to Christianity.
  There are several references in the New Testament to Paul the Apostle being a Pharisee before converting to Christianity, and other members of the Pharisee sect are known from Acts 15:5 to have become Christian believers. It was some members of his group who argued that gentile converts must be circumcised and obliged to follow the Mosaic law, leading to a dispute within the early Church addressed at the Apostolic Council in Jerusalem, in 50 CE.
  The New Testament, particularly the Synoptic Gospels, presents especially the leadership of the Pharisees as obsessed with man-made rules (especially concerning purity) whereas Jesus is more concerned with God's love; the Pharisees scorn sinners whereas Jesus seeks them out. (The Gospel of John, which is the only gospel where Nicodemus is mentioned, particularly portrays the sect as divided and willing to debate.) Because of the New Testament's frequent depictions of Pharisees as self-righteous rule-followers (see also Woes of the Pharisees and Legalism (theology)), the word "pharisee" (and its derivatives: "pharisaical", etc.) has come into semi-common usage in English to describe a hypocritical and arrogant person who places the letter of the law above its spirit. Jews today typically find this insulting and some consider the use of the word to be anti-Semitic.
  Some have speculated that Jesus was himself a Pharisee and that his arguments with Pharisees is a sign of inclusion rather than fundamental conflict (disputation being the dominant narrative mode employed in the Talmud as a search for truth, and not necessarily a sign of opposition). 
  Examples of disputed passages include the story of Jesus declaring the sins of a paralytic man forgiven and the Pharisees calling the action blasphemy. In the story, Jesus counters the accusation that he does not have the power to forgive sins by pronouncing forgiveness of sins and then healing the man. The account of the Paralytic Man and Jesus's performance of miracles on the Sabbath are often interpreted as oppositional and at times antagonistic to that of the Pharisees' teachings.
  Some historians, however, have noted that Jesus' actions are actually similar to and consistent with Jewish beliefs and practices of the time, as recorded by the Rabbis, that commonly associate illness with sin and healing with forgiveness. Jews (according to E.P. Sanders) reject the New Testament suggestion that the healing would have been critical of, or criticized by, the Pharisees as no surviving Rabbinic source questions or criticizes this practice, and the notion that Pharisees believed that "God alone" could forgive sins is more of a rhetorical device than historical fact. Another argument is that according to the New Testament, Pharisees wanted to punish Jesus for healing a man's withered hand on Sabbath. No Rabbinic rule has been found according to which Jesus would have violated Sabbath.
  Some scholars believe that those passages of the New Testament that are seemingly most hostile to the Pharisees were written sometime after the destruction of Herod's Temple in 70 CE.  Only Christianity and Pharisaism survived the destruction of the Temple, and the two competed for a short time until the Pharisees emerged as the dominant form of Judaism. When many Jews did not convert, Christians sought new converts from among the Gentiles.
  Some scholars have found evidence of continuous interactions between Jewish-Christian and rabbinic movements from the mid to late second century to the fourth century.
caption: Gustave Doré: Dispute between Jesus and the Pharisees
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