120 A History of Judaism
liquid poured from a pure vessel into an impure one].” The Pharisees
say, “We cry out against you, O you Sadducees, for you declare clean a
channel of water that flows from a burial ground.” ’ It is all the more
remarkable that Pharisees and Sadducees were willing to share the com-
mon religious space of the Temple.^14
Relations between Pharisaism and other types of Judaism were more
complicated. It would presumably be possible to hold to Pharisee doc-
trines as a Christian, since, despite the vituperation about Pharisees
attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew, he is quoted as instructing
the crowd that, because the scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat,
‘therefore do whatever they teach you and follow it.’ Jesus’ objection,
according to the Gospel, was not to Pharisaic teaching but to hypocrit-
ical Pharisaic practice, ‘for they do not practise what they teach’. It was
presumably possible also to be both a Pharisee and a nazirite, provided
that you took the nazirite vow very seriously, since, according to the
Gospels, Pharisees were adamant on the sanctity of oaths, even if Jesus
is portrayed as claiming that this could result in a contravention of one
of the Ten Commandments:
Then he said to them [the Pharisees], ‘You have a fine way of rejecting the
commandment of God in order to keep your tradition! For Moses said,
“Honour your mother and father”; and, “Whoever speaks evil of father or
mother must surely die.” But you say that if anyone tells father or mother,
“Whatever support you might have had from me is Corban” (that is, an
offering to God) – then you no longer permit doing anything for a father
or mother, thus making void the word of God through your tradition that
you have handed on. And you do many things like this.’It would certainly be possible as a Pharisee to be dedicated to scrup-
ulous observance of the laws of purity and tithing like the haverim
(‘fellows’) known from the rabbinic texts (see Chapter 7), although
there is no reason to suppose that dedication to such observance indi-
cated that someone was a Pharisee.^15
That it would also be possible to be both a Pharisee and a rabbinic-
type sage is evident from the career of Rabban Gamaliel. According to
Acts, Gamaliel was the teacher of St Paul and a leading Pharisee in the
Sanhedrin in Jerusalem, ‘a teacher of the law, respected by all the people’:
his influence was sufficient to persuade the council to release the
apostles with a flogging on the grounds that the nascent Christian move-
ment was bound to fail in any case if it was not ‘of God’. The same Gamaliel
is mentioned in the Mishnah as giving rulings as a rabbinic sage for the