‘jewish doctrine takes three forms’ 119
For children ought to inherit from their parents, besides their property,
ancestral customs which they were reared in and have lived with even
from the cradle, and not despise them because they have been handed
down without written record. Praise cannot be duly given to one who
obeys the written law, since he acts under the admonition of restraint and
the fear of punishment. But he who faithfully observes the unwritten
deserves commendation, since the virtue which he displays is freely willed.Religion is caught, not taught.^12
The influence of the Pharisees is thus easily explained, for as self-
proclaimed religious experts they endorsed to a wider Jewish population
the traditional modes of living according to the Torah. An individual
Jew who (for instance) saw handwashing before eating bread as an inte-
gral part of the tradition because this was what his grandparents had
done may not have been able to say whether his behaviour was influ-
enced by a Pharisee confirming the validity of this interpretation of the
law, but the Pharisee’s endorsement will have been welcomed, and the
Pharisee himself popular.^13
Becoming a Pharisee seems, from Josephus’ description of his teenage
spiritual journey, to have been a matter of personal choice. There does
not seem to have been any Pharisee organization or group to which it
was necessary to pledge allegiance, although Josephus noted that ‘the
Pharisees are affectionate to each other,’ while they ‘cultivate harmoni-
ous relations with the community’, and that ‘they show respect and
deference to their elders.’ We have seen Josephus’ explicit assertion that
the Pharisees had wide influence, but they remained distinctive, not least
(according to the standard version of Matthew) because they ensured
that they should be so: ‘They do all their deeds to be seen by others; for
they make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long.’ (Phylacteries,
or tefillin, are the small leather boxes containing biblical texts, worn on
the head and arm during prayer.) Since they endorsed the religious sta-
tus quo, which included extra- biblical practices, their relations to other
groups were defined largely by the attitudes of others to the normal
interpretation of the Torah. Thus we are told the Pharisees had frequent
‘controversies and serious differences’ with the Sadducees from the mid-
second century bce to the destruction of the Temple in 70 ce because
the Sadducees denied the validity of non- written traditions. The early
rabbinic texts consistently describe the relationship between the two
groups as antagonistic: ‘The Sadducees say “We cry out against you,
Pharisees, for you declare clean an unbroken stream of liquid [that is, a