In the New Testament the Pharisees emerge as major adversaries of Jesus, and he refers to them several times as hypocrites, as in Matthew 23:13.

But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! because you shut the kingdom of heaven against men; for you neither enter yourselves, nor allow those who would enter to go in.

One major conflict between the Pharisees and Jesus is his refusal to keep the Sabbath holy by not working, the Sabbath being the seventh day of the week—you know, Saturday.

So the Pharisees tend to get a bad rap in the New Testament. Just who are these guys anyway?

According to Bart Ehrman in The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings:

The Pharisees were widely known as sincere and pious Jews who were intent above all else on keeping the Law that God had given Moses. As we will see, the later aspersions cast upon them for being hypocrites is not a fair representation of their own goals and aspirations; to join the Pharisees, Jews didn’t have to agree to be hypocrites (there was no “hypocritic oath”). They did, though, have to strive to keep all of God’s law as carefully as possible. The problem was that in many instances God’s commandments were not spelled out in precise detail. Thus, for example, God commanded the Israelites not to work on the Sabbath, but he did not indicate what, exactly, “work” entailed. The Pharisees debated issues such as this, and gave rulings that were passed down by word of mouth, traditions that explained how the laws of Moses were to be kept. In the Pharisees’ opinion, only those who followed these rulings, or “oral laws,” could be assured of having kept the “written laws” of Moses. For the most part, Pharisees appear to have been held in high honor for such rigorous piety.

Thus the Pharisees were far from being the hypocrites as they are portrayed by the gospel writers, but they did have legitimate religious disagreements with that itinerant apocalyptic prophet who was stirring up the masses. Just remember that the people who wrote the gospels had an agenda (in fact, each of them had a slightly different agenda!), and they weren’t particularly interested in writing fact-based histories.

By the way, as I mentioned the Sabbath a few paragraphs ago, it’s worth underlining the fact that to Jesus, a) the Sabbath was on Saturday, the seventh day of the week, and b) he had no problem working on the Sabbath. As he said in Mark 2:27: “The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath.”

It seems quite a few Christians don’t understand either of those things. Guess they never read their Bibles.

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