118 A History of Judaism
weight with the rest of the population of Judaea. We do not know how
many Pharisees there were. The best we can provide is a minimum fig-
ure of 6,000 in the time of Herod, since that was the number of Pharisees
who refused to take the oath of loyalty to the king but were forgiven
after the wife of Pheroras, one of Herod’s relatives, paid a fine for them –
Josephus noted specifically that the women of Herod’s court were ruled
by the Pharisees. Neither this figure nor any other evidence about the
Pharisees suggests they constituted more than a small proportion of
the overall population of Judaea. In one passage Josephus stated that the
Pharisees were careful to simplify their lifestyle and avoid luxury, though
that is not incompatible with the accusation of Jesus in Matthew that
Pharisees ‘love to have the place of honour at banquets and the best seats
in the synagogue and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces and
to have people call them “rabbi” [“my master” or “my teacher”]’. But it
is hard to see why such self- promotion as dedicated ascetic experts in the
law would bring popularity unless the interpretation of the law was itself
welcomed by the wider population.^11
In fact Josephus, in stating quite explicitly the basis of Pharisaic
interpretation of the Torah, provides more than enough reason for their
popularity. The Pharisees ‘passed on to the people certain regulations
received from the fathers which had not been written down in the law
of Moses’, insisting that it is right to observe ‘the things from the trad-
itions of the fathers’. A similar term is used by the Pharisees in the Gospel
of Mark when they tackle Jesus for allowing his followers to eat with-
out first washing their hands: ‘Why do your disciples not walk according
to the tradition of the elders?’ The Christian heresiologist Hippolytus,
writing in the second century ce, described the Pharisees as accepting
‘ancient tradition’. As to how this tradition was handed down through
the generations, the sources on the Pharisees are silent apart from stat-
ing that they were not written down, but Philo asserted with some
passion that traditions of virtuous living are taught to children not
through writing or words but by example:
Another commandment of general value is ‘You shall not remove your
neighbour’s landmarks which your forebears have set up.’ Now this law,
we may consider, applies not merely to allotments and boundaries of land
in order to eliminate covetousness but also to the safeguarding of ancient
customs. For customs are unwritten laws, the decisions approved by men
of old, not inscribed on monuments nor on leaves of paper which the moth
destroys, but on the souls of those who are partners in the same citizenship.