Pharisees

Definition

The Pharisees were a Jewish sect of the late Second Temple period noted for strict observance of the written law together with an oral tradition of interpretation, belief in the resurrection of the body and the existence of angels and spirits, and repeated opposition to Jesus Christ during his earthly ministry (Matt. 23; Acts 23:8).

Historical Origin

The Pharisees appear alongside the Sadducees and Essenes among the Jewish sects that “filled all Judea” by the time of Christ’s coming, Pictet writes, “and especially the sect of the Pharisees, who perverted the law by their interpretations of it.”¹ Where the Sadducees were drawn chiefly from the priestly and aristocratic classes, the Pharisees were distinguished as scribes and devout laymen, and the long rivalry between the two parties lasted until Jerusalem’s destruction in AD 70.

Beliefs and Practices

Van Mastricht identifies the oral law as the central point of dispute between the Pharisees and their rivals: “the Pharisees sought an oral law,” which the Sadducees, Essenes, and Samaritans all rejected in favor of the written law alone.² On the questions of the age to come, Hodge records the Pharisees on the opposite side from the Sadducees: they “believed in the resurrection of the body,” held “that the soul was in its nature immortal,” and taught that “the righteous only are happy after death” while “the wicked are eternally miserable.”³ Boettner preserves the Pharisees’ own argument for this position against the Sadducees, that “the existence of angels proves that spirits can and do live apart from the body.”⁴ The Pharisees developed the synagogue as a place of worship and instruction alongside the temple, and were noted in the Gospels for detailed observance of ceremonial law (Matt. 23:23).

Doctrinal Significance

Christ’s own teaching confronted the Pharisees’ standard of righteousness directly: “unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 5:20). Moore’s exegesis of the passage identifies what that standard actually failed to reach: a Pharisaical teaching that treated the law’s command against adultery as satisfied by avoiding the outward act alone, when the command “was not only to forbid the act of sin but also the inward desire to sin,” as the Tenth Commandment’s prohibition of coveting already shows (Ex. 20:17).⁵ On this reading, Christ was not asking his disciples to out-perform the Pharisees at the Pharisees’ own kind of righteousness, but confronting an entire standard that stopped at outward conformity rather than reaching the heart.

Thomas Goodwin draws the same passage into a wider argument about the limits of unregenerate moral effort: even a person elevated through “many such alterations as corrupt nature remaining still is capable of,” short of the Holy Spirit’s regenerating work, remains outside the kingdom, “for Christ hath said it…, ‘Except your righteousness exceed the righteousness of the Pharisees, ye cannot go to heaven.’”⁶ Pharisaic religion, on this reading, was not a uniquely wicked failure but the clearest biblical case of how far sincere, disciplined religious observance can go without reaching regeneration.

Related Doctrines

• Sadducees
• Essenes
• Sanhedrin
• Justification
• Legalism

References

1. Benedict Pictet, Christian Theology, trans. Frederick Reyroux (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1845), 238. ↩

2. Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 1, Prolegomena, trans. Todd M. Rester, ed. Joel R. Beeke (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2018), chap. 2, “Holy Scripture,” 245-246. ↩

3. Charles Hodge, “Chapter I. State of the Soul After Death,” in Systematic Theology, vol. 3 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1873), 717. ↩

4. Loraine Boettner, Immortality (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1956), “The Intermediate State,” 47. ↩

5. Jared Heath Moore, A Biblical and Historical Appraisal of Concupiscence with Special Attention to Same-Sex Attraction (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), chap. 5, “The Bible Teaches That Concupiscence Is Morally Culpable Sin, Even in Christians,” 165-166. ↩

6. Thomas Goodwin, The Work of the Holy Ghost in Our Salvation, in The Works of Thomas Goodwin, vol. 6 (Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1863), 81. ↩