114 A History of Judaism
We have seen that Josephus wrote about the three philosophies of Phar-
isees, Sadducees and Essenes in contrast to what he termed an ‘intrusive
fourth school of philosophy’. He claimed that this Fourth Philosophy
had brought disaster on Judaea in the first century ce and had led to the
destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans. The contrast on which Jos-
ephus insisted explicitly portrayed the other three philosophies as valid
expressions of Judaism despite their differences. Those differences, as
we shall see, were considerable.
Pharisees
‘Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you lock people out
of the kingdom of heaven ... Woe, to you, blind guides ... You blind
fools! ... You snakes, you brood of vipers! How can you escape being
sentenced to hell?’ The words of Jesus to ‘the crowds and his disciples’,
as reported in the Gospel of Matthew, have coloured all later images of
the Pharisees in Christian culture. The accusation against Pharisees,
who ‘sit on Moses’ seat’, was that they were only acting piety: ‘You are
like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful, but inside
they are full of the bones of the dead and of all kinds of filth.’ In Euro-
pean languages, ‘Pharisaism’ has come to mean self- righteous religious
formalism, a charge that can be, and has been, turned on co - religionists
within Christian society at periodic intervals, not least because an accus-
ation of hypocrisy and lack of the genuine spirit of piety is more or less
impossible for any religious person to refute – hence, for instance,
Edward Pusey, in the campaign of the Oxford Movement to reinvigor-
ate the Church of England in the nineteenth century, with his assertion
that ‘of all the Pharisaism of the day, our church- going seems to be the
masterpiece.’ On the other hand, identification of Pharisaism with the
rabbinic tradition by later rabbinic Jews has engendered in the popular
Jewish imagination a sanitized version of the Pharisees in which they
are envisaged as early rabbinic sages, despite the evidence, as we shall
see, that such identification is mistaken.^5
It is rather odd in any case to start an account of the Pharisees either
with the hostile Gospel evidence or with the retrojection of later rabbis,
since the source more likely to be able to tell us about Pharisaism in the
late Second Temple period was the contemporary Jew Josephus, who
asserted explicitly in his autobiography that he wrote about Pharisaism
as an insider: after submitting himself as a teenager to ‘hard training