MetaCatholic

I’ve been reading the very interesting and stimulating In Quest of the Historical Pharisees, a collection of essays (written for this book) edited by Jacob Neusner and Bruce Chilton.¹ Questing for the historical Pharisees is an enterprise even more fraught than questing for Jesus, and the evidence more slender. This book seeks to bring a number of scholars with different specialist foci to the table, and explore what can be known, and how. I’ll offer a brief description with comment for each of the chapters, and then make some more general observations. The first part of the book looks at most of the main sources.

• The book begins with two chapters by Steve Mason. The first in particular is a superb survey of Josephus’ narrative portrayal of them (probably the best single essay in the book), which persuasively summarises Mason’s view that Josephus is uniformly hostile to them as a group, even if he can praise some qualities of some individuals.
• Mason’s second chapter examines the “philosophical school” passages, and situating them in a rhetorical display of Josephus wide-ranging knowledge, rather than a particular interest in the parties. Again, I think he is quite persuasive.
• Martin Pickup reviews Matthew’s and Mark’s Pharisees, sometimes seeming to veer a little uncertainly between talking about them as narrative or historical characters. He finds Matthew quite compatible with Mark in his presentation, and thinks that the main focus is on disputes that make more sense in the ministry of Jesus than in the early Church. I would be more inclined to see significant differences between the two gospels than he is.
• Luke’s Pharisees, tackled by Amy-Jill Levine, is sadly one of the more disappointing parts of the book. She does little more than review the isolated pericopes, and summarise the picture that emerges from them.
• The chapter on John’s Gospel, by Raimo Hakola and Adele Rheinhartz first explores John’s literary use of them as a device of opposition, and then explores it in terms of constructing social identity. It is all too tantalizingly brief, and concludes that John has almost no historical information to impart, but is seeking to construct his own group’s identity.
• Bruce Chilton contributes an extraordinary chapter, ostensibly on Paul and the Pharisees. In reality it is a reconstruction of the possible development of early Christianity focussed on James and the Jerusalem Council, in which Paul’s opponents, based on the single mention of believing Pharisees in Acts 15:5, are construed as Christian Pharisees. I found myself caught between admiration for this architecturally splendid house of cards, and a mischievous desire to pull a card out, and see how it fell down.
• The second of two chapters on Paul is no less strange in its way. Chilton and Neusner explore possible areas of congruence between Paul and Gamaliel, his teacher according to Acts. Never less than intriguing, it is perhaps unsurprising that it doesn’t get very far.
• James VanderKam’s section on the Dead Sea Scrolls argues that “those who seek smooth things” are indeed to be identified with the Pharisees, and show some congruence with some of the other historical sources in their picture, although the overwhelmingly negative nature of it needs to be taken into account.
• A short chapter on archaeology by James Strange draws more attention to the difficulties of assessing evidence than to any conclusion, though does suggest that “the broad distribution of artifacts associated with purity … suggests that some major group led the way in preserving the traditions of purity outside the Temple” (p251)

The second part of the book explores the Pharisees in Rabbinic Judaism

• There is a chapter on the Mishnah and Tosefta passages concerning the Pharisees and Sadducees by Jack Lighthouse which is careful and sceptical, and thinks one can say little more than that the editors / authors have a tendency to represent Mishnaic law as consistent with Pharisaic positions.
• Neusner contributes first a chapter on Rabbinic Traditions about the pre-70 CE Pharisees. His focus here is on the traditions contrasting (mainly) the houses of Hillel and Shammai. (He is generally less sceptical than Lighthouse about the traditions in the Mishnah) He finds congruence between these and the gospels in the themes of laws addressing purity and sabbath in particular.
• Next Neusner investigates the pattern of Laws attributed to pre-70 Pharisees, and notes the weighting of topics among them, with purity coming over as the dominant concern, particularly in relation to meals as a “perpetual ritualization of daily life” (p327)
• His third chapter looks at the different treatments of the pre-70 Pharisees before and after the watersheds of the destruction of the Temple and the Bar Kochba revolt respectively associated with Yavneh and Usha. He sees the work of the former as rationalizing the pre-70 Pharisaic traditions, and in their reorganization of them, effectively obliterating their antecedent forms. They are not interested in the history, perhaps because they don’t see themselves as significantly different from them. By contrast he sees the Usha period evincing a strong interest in creating historical themes to link themselves to the earlier Pharisees, and claim authenticity for their own developments

The final section of the book briefly explores the (mainly mis-)interpretation of the Pharisees first by the German theological tradition up to the 1930s and 40s (by Susannah Heschel) then Neusner looks at the Anglo-American tradition up to 1970). Both these essays are interesting surveys and appropriately and often scathingly critical of the ways in which scholarship was submerged by prejudice and stereotype. The final essay in this section is an editorial self-indulgence which really should not have been included, in which Neusner carries on his feud with Sanders in a quite unattractive and personalized way.

Then comes a wrapping-up section by William Scott Green which tries to draw various threads in the book together and concludes – well, not very much really.. The task would, no doubt have been easier if there had been a sense of this book as a conversation, whether growing out of a symposium, or an insistence that each contributor had read drafts of all the other contributions while theirs also was in draft form. As it is the essays stand almost in isolation. Chilton, without argument can assert that the Pharisees of the Antiquities are presented more positively than those of the Judean War. He seems not to know that the first two chapters of the book have argued precisely the opposite. Neusner (who does at least refer to other chapters) can assert that the Pharisees turned their back on political involvement at the end of Alexandra’s reign, without noting that Mason has argued for continuing influence up to Jospehus’ day. This sense of non-conversation weakens the book qua book, while still leaving many of the individual essays extremely valuable.

There are some occasional irritations, both Pickup and Levine, dealing with the Synoptics, assume that only the Two Document Hypothesis and Griesbach need mentioning, before proceeding on the basis of 2DH. There also seems to have been an inconsistent briefing by the editors suggesting an uncertainty about readership: some essays include only transliterated Greek, others untransliterated (and unpointed) Hebrew.

My biggest gripe, however, is the elephant in the room. Because the Paul chapters focus on a reconstruction based on Acts, and an investigation of the possible relationship between Paul and Gamaliel, Paul himself is largely unconsidered. No-one doubts that Paul is in all sorts of ways a problematic source for reading out information about the historical Pharisees, but the fact remains that he is the only known Pharisee whose writings we actually have.

It would be reasonable, I would think, to hypothesise that not only does Paul argue with that version of Jewish beliefs and traditions that he knows best, but that a very careful mirror reading of his messianic theological critique might reveal some further information about the Pharisees. It might prove impossible, because it is too overlaid with Christian ideas, as well as the long history of distorted Christians interpretation, but it seems to me that it is potentially a crucial plank in resolving some of the conundrums.

One example might suffice for now. It is highly unlikely that Paul only discovered apocalyptic eschatology in his reflections on the resurrection. It seems far too much part of the medium of his thought. An interest in such things, and their potential significance for indicating a stronger nationalist and purist politics (compatible with Paul’s active political persecution of a dissident movement) might tend to support Mason’s contention that Pharisaic influence remained important in political life up to Josephus’ time. The major shift from politics to Torah study (while not disallowing it as a longer-term phenomenon) can then be explored as belonging to the Yavneh and Usha redactions of earlier material.

This may not be proven on fuller investigation, but indicates one way in which taking Paul seriously might impact the debate. But to ignore this very problematic and atypical first-century Pharisee entirely as a source of knowledge in his own right seems to me to say that a major part of the task still needs to be done. However difficult it be, in what other field of enquiry would we ignore the first-hand writings of someone who was once a member of the movement being studied?

1. Baylor University Press, 2007 ISBN: 978-1-932792-72-0 [↩]