[Tom O'Loughlin] One of the groups that is very frequently
mentioned in the New Testament is the Pharisees.
And if you listen to any news bulletin,
you'll also hear references to the Pharisees and Pharisaical,
and phrases with this word Pharisee in it. In fact,
it's a sort of an obscure term of abuse.
Sara, what do we mean by
the word Pharisee, and who were the Pharisees?
[Sara Parks] Well, that's an important question, Tom.
And the answer has changed over time,
obviously, because, as you mentioned, nowadays, I mean,
I've heard just this year a couple of different politicians
accuse each other of being 'hypocritical Pharisees'.
But where do we get the term?
Well, it's come down to us today,
largely through the New Testament.
But the way the term is used in
the New Testament is often polemically.
There's a lot of tension in
the New Testament and we're 2 thousand,
or almost 2 thousand years away from it.
And we aren't part of those groups anymore that had those tensions.
And so we lift out a caricatured version of this term Pharisee,
which was a Jewish group among
several others that were popular at the time, such as Sadducees.
We lift out the term and we just take those polemics at
face value and use it to mean someone who's hypocritical.
Someone who's 'holier than thou,'
righteous on the outside but not on the inside,
all these terrible things.
But what I wanted to draw our attention to today was
that if we take a step back and look at the term historically,
and then fast forward to now when there are
still in this world, Jewish people,
maybe it'll give us pause to think, 'hmm...
what does it imply about people
who come from a tradition that once had Pharisees in it,
if we still use that word as a slur?'
[Tom] And of course, the interesting thing is
that Josephus writing just shortly
after the time of Jesus, and writing towards
the end of the first century of the Common Era,
he mentions the Pharisees as just one of the Jewish schools.
In fact, he as a young man,
went and tried the Pharisees out.
[Sara] Yeah. You know how inside a family, two,
a brother and sister, might tease each other and call
each other names in a loving way
after a lot of trust has been established.
Well, sometimes in the New Testament,
groups that are all Jews who
are used to debating with each other,
part of their very identity is debate,
call each other out and criticize each other.
But we who aren't in that group should not jump in just
like some person shouldn't jump into that family
and call the person a name
if they're not part of the family.
[Tom] That's a very interesting metaphor you
use about the brother and sister in the family.
Because in many of the stories that come down to us about Jesus in,
in, in the canonical gospels,
you find a tension between Jesus on the one hand,
and the Pharisees on the other.
And you forget actually that the,
the group that was, that,
that if you had to try and say to...
'is Jesus like a particular group?'
the group he's probably most like is actually the Pharisees.
And so many aspects of Pharisee practice and belief,
just the very simple one,
that the whole people is a priestly people,
that wherever you are, you can pray,
you don't have to pray in the temple,
that prayer is something that can take place anywhere,
and that intercession for
the whole people takes place everywhere,
these are all basic Pharisee ideas and
Pharisee practices that have become
actually standard elements of,
of the Jesus group. [Sara] Exactly. A lot of people don't
realize -- they pit Jesus against Pharisees so easily --
but they don't realize that historical Jesus scholars,
if they had to put Jesus into one of the groups,
it would definitely be the Pharisees. Why is he with them so much?
What, what are they doing?
They're debating. That's what Pharisees do with each other!
And there's a tension between
more people-oriented groups and more elite-oriented groups,
such as Pharisees versus Sadducees.
Pharisees were kind of bringing Judaism to the everyday people.
And Jesus also was very focused on
everyday people over and
against the elite. [Tom] It's Pharisees you find out in the villages,
the very same villages that Jesus is presented as visiting.
What you have said here in
a couple of minutes should remind everyone
that if you're going to use biblical terms,
don't traduce them and don't make caricatures of them. Sara, thanks.