‘jewish doctrine takes three forms’ 117
the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus exclaimed, ‘Woe to you, scribes and Phari-
sees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and the plate, but
inside you are full of greed and self- indulgence,’ but Josephus did not
attribute any special concern for purity to the Pharisees (although he
ascribed such a concern to the Essenes). According to Matthew, Jesus
said, ‘Woe to you ... for you tithe mint, dill, and cumin, and have neg-
lected the weightier matters of the law’; but Josephus (who wrote a
good deal about the giving of tithes) said nothing about this as a specif-
ically Pharisee concern. In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus responds to a
complaint by Pharisees that his disciples were plucking heads of grain
as they made their way through the cornfields with the bon mot that
‘the sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sab-
bath’, but a special concern for Sabbath observance was treated by
Josephus as a characteristic not of Pharisees but of Essenes. The early
rabbinic texts did indeed preserve evidence, as we shall see (Chapter 7)
of groups in the first century ce which were distinguished by their devo-
tion to scrupulous purity and tithing, and they also preserved evidence
of much discussion on Sabbath observance in the same period by the
sages whom they saw as their spiritual forebears and teachers. But they
did not ascribe any particular fascination with these issues to the Phari-
sees, except as a topic on which to express their differences with
Sadducees (see below).^10
What mattered to Pharisees was their approach to the Torah as a
whole. Characteristic of their approach as it is attacked by Jesus in the
Gospels is its scrupulousness. Pharisees insisted that oaths must be cor-
rectly formulated if they are to be binding. In the time of Herod a group
of Pharisees refused to take an oath of loyalty to the king (presumably
out of a concern that they might have to break such an oath, though
Josephus notes only that they were ‘a group of Jews priding itself on its
adherence to ancestral custom and claiming to observe the laws of
which the Deity approves’). It is to this self- professed scrupulousness
that can be attributed the remarkable influence of the Pharisees, since it
gave authority to their endorsement of a deeply conservative interpret-
ation of the Torah.
Josephus referred in a number of passages to this influence. The Phari-
sees ‘are extremely influential among the townsfolk’, and ‘all prayers
and sacred rites of divine worship are performed according to their
exposition.’ They ‘have the masses as ally’, in contrast to the Sadducees,
who persuade only the wealthy. What he fails to explain is why this
intense group of self- appointed legal experts should have carried such