In Opposition to Jesus

• The Pharisees appear throughout the New Testament, as opponents to both John the Baptist and Jesus. They first appear by name in the New Testament in Matthew 3:7, in which John the Baptist groups them together with another Jewish religious and cultural movement, the Sadducees, as part of a "generation of vipers." In the New Testament, the Pharisees appear to represent the dominant philosophical and religious school of thought among the Jewish community. Unlike the elitist Sadducees, they represent a widely accepted form of religious orthodoxy.
  
  

The 'Woes of the Pharisees'

• Jesus presents a scathing criticism of the group in the passage known as "The Woes of the Pharisees" (Luke 11:37-54, Matthew 23:1-36). Although the two versions of this incident are slightly different, they share the same main point: Jesus criticizes the Pharisees for holding to an empty religious formalism while lacking virtue. They are compared with "whitewashed tombs, beautiful on the outside, but full of dead men's bones" (Matthew 23:27-28). The Pharisees are used here, as they are throughout the New Testament, to create an opposition between rule-bound religion and religion motivated by love.
  
  

The Historical Pharisees

• Other sources relating to the Pharisees, such as the Jewish historian Josephus and the later Jewish intellectual tradition, paint a somewhat different picture. Although the Pharisees were religiously strict, some of the positions attributed to them in the New Testament are not consistent with what is known about their beliefs from other sources. In particular, their obsession with avoiding ritual impurity appears to have been exaggerated. To make a point about the binary opposition between law and love, the authors of the New Testament may have used extreme examples of Pharisaic philosophy. In addition, the New Testament represents some of Jesus' followers as Pharisees. Saint Paul was raised as a Pharisee before being converted to Jesus' teachings. At least two more significant early Christians, Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea, were also Pharisees.
  
  

Modern Conceptions of the Pharisees

• Largely because of the portrayal of the Pharisees given in the "Woes of the Pharisees," the term "Pharisee" has become synonymous with hypocrisy. It is now used to mean anyone who behaves in an outwardly pious and self-righteous way without paying attention to internal moral virtues. "Scribes and Pharisees," a phrase taken from the "Woes of the Pharisees," was once a common term used to describe hypocrites, although the phrase is no longer widely used.