116 A History of Judaism
under the law’. Josephus, by contrast, had much to say about Pharisees
as a group, and rather less about individual Pharisees, in his Jewish War
and Jewish Antiquities as well as in his autobiography. But he was writ-
ing for non- Jewish readers with a desire to demonstrate the excellence of
this Jewish philosophy, so it may be that he chose to depict Pharisees in
idealized Greek garb: he stated explicitly in his Life that the Pharisees
‘have points of resemblance to what is called Stoicism among the Greeks’.
A particular problem arises with his description of the Pharisees acting as
a political party in the Hasmonaean period, since his narrative of these
political events was derived from the historical writings of the Greek
intellectual Nicolaus of Damascus, who, lacking sympathy for or know-
ledge of Jewish religion, seems to have described Pharisees and Sadducees
as if they were political parties on the Greek model.^8
The characteristic doctrines of Pharisees according to Josephus were
their insistence on ‘attributing everything to Fate and to God: they hold
that to act rightly or otherwise rests, indeed, for the most part with men,
but that in each act fate co- operates’, and their belief that ‘every soul is
imperishable, but the soul of the good alone passes into another body,
while the souls of the wicked suffer eternal punishment.’ Elsewhere,
Josephus states that Pharisees believe that the rewards and punishments
of souls after death occur ‘under the earth’, that eternal imprisonment is
the lot of evil souls and that good souls receive an easy passage to a new
life (perhaps a reference to metempsychosis). Such notions of reincarn-
ation lacked any biblical base and probably reflect Greek influence. They
were not the only new ideas about life after death which engendered
controversy among Jews in the first century ce (see Chapter 8).
But what distinguishes the Pharisees above all is their presentation of
themselves as accurate interpreters of the law. Josephus states explicitly
of Simon son of Gamaliel that he was ‘of the hairesis of the Pharisees,
who have the reputation of being exceptional in their accuracy concern-
ing the ancestral laws’,^ and the same self- description is found in Paul’s
reference to his Pharisee background according to the author of Acts, in
his claim to have been ‘educated strictly according to our ancestral law,
being zealous for God, just as all of you are today’.^9
Strikingly absent from this list of distinctive Pharisaic doctrines are
any of the specific religious issues about which Jesus took the Pharisees
to task according to the Gospels. The vehemence of Jesus’ polemic in
the Gospels seems to reflect competition with Pharisees on the part
either of Jesus himself or (more likely) of the Christian communities
later in the first century ce in which the Gospels circulated. According to