Joseph Sievers, Amy-Jill Levine, eds. The Pharisees. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2021. xxiii + 482 pp. $48.54 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8028-7929-5.
Reviewed by Daniel R. Schwartz (Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School for Advanced Studies in the Humanities The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Published on H-Judaic (November, 2022)
Commissioned by Robin Buller (University of California - Berkeley)
The Pharisees were a type (or sect) of ancient Jews, concerning whom considerable evidence is supplied by Josephus, the New Testament, and rabbinic and patristic literature. Moreover, there is much in other ancient Jewish literature (including the Dead Sea Scrolls) that is often thought to refer to or even be written by them, despite the failure to mention the Pharisees by name.[1] Similarly, it has become common to assume that the Dead Sea Scrolls' attacks on “Seekers of Smooth Things” and “Ephraim” were aimed at the Pharisees, and that a good number of legal arguments with unnamed adversaries were likewise directed against them.
With such a rich assemblage of ancient evidence, one might expect that historical scholarship has produced a fairly articulated—perhaps even consensual—picture of the Pharisees, and for a long time that was the case. For over a century, scholars were sure they knew a great deal about them. They believed they were a popular party that enjoyed much support among the Jews of ancient Palestine—one that functioned as competition with the priestly aristocracy, which was typically associated with the Sadducees, and that, as opposed to the Sadducees, was characterized by adherence to ancestral tradition and by belief in the afterlife and in some combination of human free will and divine providence. The Pharisees led popular opposition to the latter Hasmoneans, who had gone over to the Sadducees; focused on Jewish law, which could be observed anywhere and not only in the Temple (where the priests/Sadducees enjoyed a monopoly); and, as such, were able to survive the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE—after which their movement continued to flourish, its leaders having become known as the “sages” or “rabbis” who produced rabbinic literature.
What made and makes the nature of this ancient sect into much more than a detail of ancient history is the combination of three factors: the fact that there is much in the Gospels that is hostile to the Pharisees; the consensus, based mostly on Josephus and rabbinic literature, that the Pharisees were the most influential Jewish party in the late Second Temple period, which included the days of Jesus; and the widely held belief that Pharisaism survived as rabbinic Judaism. Together, these three points generate the conclusion that Christian sacred scripture teaches Christians to be hostile to the Pharisees, and so to Jews and Judaism in general. In an age in which we are very aware of the terrible consequences such hostility can generate or exacerbate, scholars who study the ancient sect come to the topic with a special burden.
While there are a variety of ways to attempt to prevent hostility toward the ancient Pharisees from generating animosity toward modern Jews—which include arguing that the Pharisees were not representative of ancient Jews, that they were more spiritual than the Gospels suggest, that “works righteousness” has its merits as a motivating force, or simply that the reprehensibility of an ancient sect should not have implications on Jews today—the present volume takes an approach grounded in acknowledging the limitations of knowledge. It attempts to nip the problem in the bud by arguing that, in fact, we know so little about ancient Pharisees and Pharisaism that our views about them should not be allowed to support much of anything at all, ancient or modern. It does so through a collection of twenty-five detailed studies: a prelude on the derivation and meaning of “Pharisee,” twelve studies on historical reconstruction (part 1), ten on reception history (part 2), and two closing essays on how to present the Pharisees in popular and educational contexts today. It is based on papers given at a conference on “Jesus and the Pharisees” at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome in 2019, and is accompanied by useful indexes of authors, subjects, and ancient sources.
The conference’s title (as well as its venue and auspices) reflects the collection’s orientation. Namely, the volume is the result of a Christian initiative that seeks to improve Christian-Jewish relations. Indeed, the preface reports that the conference came at the suggestion of a rabbi, David Rosen, who is intensively involved in such matters. As Erich Gruen writes of the volume in his opening blurb, it has “an admirable mission: to revise the stereotypical image of Pharisees that has fueled prejudice and anti-Semitism” (p. i). The volume, on a seemingly ancient topic, thus has a very contemporary purpose: to combat Christian anti-Semitism. The writers in the book are often quite prescriptive as to how that should be done, and the volume’s editors and contributors should be praised for being so open about the practical purpose it is meant to serve.
This orientation is clear and explicit from the opening of the preface (“For almost two millennia, various Christian churches have presented the Pharisees as legalistic, elite, money-loving, xenophobic hypocrites”) to the last item in the volume, which is Pope Francis’s address to the participants of the conference, in which he called upon them to study the Pharisees in order to increase love of their neighbors, the Jews (p. ix). Although the studies are by different scholars, each with his or her own take and emphases, they can also be quite programmatic. This is especially the case concerning the explicitly practical essays that conclude the volume: P. A. Cunnigham’s study of the presentation of Pharisees in Catholic textbooks, A.-J. Levine’s essay on “Preaching and Teaching the Pharisees,” and “What Future for the Pharisees?” by M. Grilli and J. Sievers. The latter even offers a list of practical suggestions in response to the question: “How should we present the Pharisees in Christian theology, catechesis, and homiletics?” What of the historical studies?
After summarizing the book’s mission, Gruen states that “the papers skillfully question or undermine numerous common assumptions” (p. i). C. E. Morrison’s detailed prelude concludes that we cannot know what the word means. In “In Search of the Origins of the Pharisees,” V. Babota comes up with next to nothing to fill in the Pharisees’ beginnings prior to their appearance on the scene in Josephus’s account of the late second century BCE. E. M. Meyer, in “Purity Concerns and Common Judaism in Light of Archaeology,” concludes that we cannot distinguish archaeological remains of Pharisees from those of others. S. Mason’s “Josephus’s Pharisees” argues that we cannot learn much about what really happened from Josephus’s references to the Pharisees. These are few and far between and appear “only because they serve his narrative interests” (which means, inter alia, that no one should depend on Josephus to support the notion that the Pharisees were the dominant party in Judea in the days of Jesus), and that Josephus, despite Life 12, was not a Pharisee (meaning that no one should depend on Josephus’s works as evidence for specifically Pharisaic beliefs and values) (p. 89).
Continuing part 1, H. Pattarumadathil’s study of “Pharisees and Sadducees Together in Matthew” concludes that the fact that Matthew treats both sects in tandem (3:7; 16:1–12)—although we know from Josephus and the rabbis that they were opposed to each other—basically vitiates the usefulness of Matthew’s evidence for the study of these sects in the days of Jesus and leaves it only as evidence for Matthew’s hostility to Jews in general. This conclusion is echoed by A. Y. Collins in “Polemic against the Pharisees in Matthew 23” and by J. Schröter in “How Close Were Jesus and the Pharisees?” Finally, part 1 is concluded by G. Stemberger’s “The Pharisees and the Rabbis,” which undermines the widespread notion that the rabbis (or “sages”) of the post-70 period were actually Pharisees under a new name. While he does not reject it completely, he concludes that we cannot build upon it: “we may not reconstruct Pharisaic thought and halakah based on rabbinic texts ... the year 70 certainly was no radical break; but much that was carried on was also transformed. This makes it most difficult to evaluate continuity and change” (p. 254).
Thus, of the first thirteen papers in the volume, eight are detailed reviews of the evidence that conclude by admitting either ignorance or that while we can know much about the sources themselves, we can learn next to nothing from them about the Pharisees, to whom they purport to refer. Perhaps the best motto for these papers is provided by the opening lines of Schröter’s: “One striking similarity between the historical Jesus and the historical Pharisees is our limited knowledge of both” (p. 220). But that, of course, means that it cannot be responsible for building much of anything, including modern attitudes toward Jews, on such elusive foundations.
The other five papers take another tack, attempting to portray the ancient Pharisees as more attractive, or less unattractive, than one might think. Two do this with Jewish legal materials, three with New Testament evidence. On the one hand, V. Noam’s “Pharisaic Halakah as Emerging from 4QMMT” and Y. Furstenberg’s “The Shared Image of Pharisaic Law in the Gospels and Rabbinic Tradition” focus on legal details and attempt to make the Pharisees more attractive. Noam concludes that the Pharisees were revolutionary, and Furstenberg, that they were human and compromising. Both points are at odds with the old picture of hidebound and hardline traditionalists. Instead, they leave that villainous role to the Pharisees’ opponents, Sadducees or Qumranites, a conclusion that has no dangerous implications today because no Jews presently claim to be Sadducees, Qumranites, or heirs of either group's traditions. These two papers thus have little need to isolate the Pharisees and sever them from the rabbis (and modern Jews). Furstenberg’s opening observation that “while early rabbis do not identify themselves as Pharisees, they clearly identified with the Pharisees’ legal positions and sought to transmit their traditions ... [and] early rabbinic literature thus preserves precious fragments of Pharisaic law” does not precisely contradict Stemberger’s conclusion, but certainly pulls in the opposite direction (p. 199).
Other scholars argue that alongside the usually hostile portrayal of the Pharisees in the New Testament, there are some nuances and exceptions. Thus, P. Fredriksen’s “Paul, the Perfectly Righteous Pharisee” contends that Paul not only began as a Pharisee (Philippians 3:5)—a point that is usually linked to his having persecuted the church prior to his conversion—but also that even as a Christian he considered himself to be a Pharisee, indeed a better one. H. Löhr’s “Luke-Acts as a Source for the History of the Pharisees” emphasizes the relatively positive picture of the Pharisees that Luke offers in Acts, which must mitigate the picture offered by the same author in his gospel. Finally, H. W. Attridge’s “Pharisees in the Fourth Gospel and One Special Pharisee,” after pointing to hostility to some Pharisees in John as evidence that they turned into “Jews” in accordance with the needs of the later Johannine community, goes on to focus on Nicodemus, a Pharisee (John 3:1) who is thrice presented in a positive way. Indeed, this “one special Pharisee” is something of a star in this volume. His exceptional status is also pointed to in four other articles, and he is the centerpiece of Pope Francis’s address.
The studies in part 2 resemble something of an inverted pyramid. On the one hand, the articles show limited Jewish reception of the Pharisees. S. J. D. Cohen’s “The Forgotten Pharisees” argues that prior to the birth of modern Jewish interest in Josephus, there was little Jewish interest in the Pharisees. Correspondingly, A. Skorka, in “The Perushim in the Understanding of the Medieval Jewish Sages,” shows that prominent medieval rabbis did not even realize that perushim was a proper noun denoting a specific group. They took it, instead, to be an adjective alluding to “separatists” from sin or from worldly affairs, which often connoted “chaste” or “modest.” Among Christians, on the other hand, the familiar references to the Pharisees in the Gospels and Acts ensured much interest, which was expressed in heresiological literature (studied here by M. Skeb) and other patristic literature (analyzed statistically by L. Angelelli); in writings of Luther and Calvin, which give a more balanced picture than might be expected (R. Zachman); art (A. La Delfa); passion plays (C. Stückl, director of the Oberammergau passion play); film (A. Reinhartz); and, of course, modern scholarship (S. Heschel and D. Forger, in a piece that could serve as something of an introduction to the volume). To the extent that a lot (although not all, as Zachman aptly shows) of what has been said in Christian circles was hostile and had deleterious consequences, but was based (as part 1 shows) on so little, the conclusion warns that such antagonism ought to stop, and underlines practical recommendations for preaching and pedagogy to further this goal.
What makes this an especially interesting book is the way it admirably combines its explicitly contemporary and practical goal (the suppression of anti-Semitism) with authentic historical scholarship. For it is not the case that all the denials and revisions of what we thought we knew about the ancient Pharisees are a result of the desire to undermine modern anti-Semitism. Rather, each one of them is based on detailed philological historical work on the relevant texts and other data, and each has its own history, outside of the context of the study of anti-Semitism and the desire to suppress it. Thus, for example, scholarly study of the Gospels as witnesses to their own times and contexts, rather than (only) to the life of Jesus, began long before anyone ever saw a need to defuse anti-Semitism. Similarly, it was the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls that led scholars to begin to doubt Josephus’s testimony about Pharisaic dominance in Judea, and it was the application of form- and composition-critical methods of literary scholarship to rabbinic literature that moved scholars to view it increasingly as evidence of its own post-70 times, rather than as a repository of traditional material that could be used as evidence for the Pharisees, who preceded them by centuries. What the present meticulous and comprehensive volume thus shows is that the confluence of such distinct trends in historical scholarship on antiquity can have a general impact on a broad field in which ancient history was thought to have modern implications. It remains to be seen whether possibility can become reality, whether others who plow the same field will be as conscientious as the editors and authors of this volume, and whether careful and responsible study of ancient sources can not only “skillfully question or undermine numerous common assumptions” but also put forward new and better-founded reconstructions of the Pharisees as they really were (p. i).
Note
[1]. For example, A. Geiger argued, in his Urschrift und Uebersetzungen der Bibel (J. Hainauer, 1857), that 2 Maccabees is a Pharisaic work, and a few decades later H. E. Ryle and M. R. James published their edition of the pseudepigraphic Psalms of Solomon under the title Psalms of the Pharisees (Cambridge University Press, 1891).
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Citation:
Daniel R. Schwartz. Review of Sievers, Joseph; Levine, Amy-Jill, eds., The Pharisees.
H-Judaic, H-Net Reviews.
November, 2022.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=57510
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