There is a curious sight to be seen in University College London’s Student Centre. In a glass case is the preserved skeleton of the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, topped with a wax likeness of his head, stuffed with straw, wool, and other upholstery, and dressed in his own clothes. According to a popular myth, Bentham’s “auto-icon” is wheeled into the Council Room as a present but nonvoting member of the College Council.

Bentham had instructed this preservation of his body, suggesting in his will, perhaps in jest, that, were his friends and disciples inclined to commemorate him as the founder of utilitarianism, his executor might on fitting occasions convey the case containing him into the room where they assembled. Unfortunately, the process of preservation went awry, leaving his face badly distorted, necessitating the wax substitute. While Bentham’s preservation may have been according to his will, a similar yet unchosen fate has befallen the sect of the Pharisees, whose misshapen likenesses have been wheeled into theological discussions for many centuries.

The Pharisees have long functioned as a paradigm case of misguided religion. Their prominence as antagonists in the Gospels has prevented this ancient Jewish school of thought from vanishing as a largely forgotten historical sect, yet at the cost of padding out their skeletal remains as a strawman, with distorted wax features, to serve as a silent foil for the true Christian faith. Even with no contemporary followers of his movement, the figure of the Pharisee remains.

The paradigmatic character that the Pharisees have assumed comes with a tendency to render their errors as archetypal and perennial errors of “human religion,” with later conflicts reenacting those between Jesus and the Pharisees. Perhaps the Pharisees have been regarded as antecedents of the Pelagians, with a faulty understanding of grace. Besides epitomizing “works-righteousness,” others, especially among Protestants, have focused upon the Pharisees as adulterating the true faith by human traditions, as characterized by exploitative and “legalistic” leadership, or as hypocrites.

Sometimes it was less the religious ideas of the Pharisees that were focused upon as the Pharisees themselves as archetypal antagonists, with Jesus’ conflict with them depicted in ways that evoked and encouraged contemporary tensions between Christians and Jews. The figure of the Pharisee could come to stand for that of “the Jew” more generally, with the contrast between an “Aryan” Jesus and the exaggerated semitic features of the Pharisees in various depictions serving to racialize the gospel narrative.

Besides the ways that they have served as paradigmatic props for theological and ethnic oppositions, the vulnerability of the Pharisees to caricature arises in some measure from the relative paucity of the evidence we have concerning them, coupled with the fact that much of that which remains comes from their rivals and others outside of their movement. The teaching of heretics in the history of the church often survives chiefly in the texts of their orthodox opponents, from which a sense of their beliefs must be derived by what is called “shadow reading”: something similar is often the case for the Pharisees.

Indeed, against widespread belief, it is by no means clear that the emerging rabbinic movement initially regarded itself as the successor of the Pharisees. Günter Stemberger suggests that the place of the Pharisees at the origins of rabbinic Judaism in the Mishnaic period perhaps results more from later attempts to accent continuity with, and discover precursors within, the forms of Judaism that predated the upheaval of the Jewish world with the destruction of the Temple in AD 70 and the later failure of the Bar Kosiba revolt in AD 135.1 One could compare this to attempts to read Protestantism back into sects that preceded the Reformation: distorted caricatures are not always the result of hostile portrayals of their objects. Even commonly assumed identifications of Second Temple figures such as Hillel as Pharisees have been disputed, as lacking robust early evidence.2 The more closely we look at the Pharisees, the more we might come to doubt even what we thought we knew. Any reconstruction of their beliefs will necessarily be quite speculative.

Much of the earliest evidence that we have concerning the Pharisees comes from the first-century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, who describes the Pharisees as one among several Jewish sects and movements of his day, alongside the Sadducees, Essenes, and Zealots (Wars of the Jews 2.162–166; Antiquities of the Jews 18.12–15). According to Josephus’s account, the Pharisees were held in high regard as experts in the law, had a reputation for virtue and asceticism, were noted for the honor they had for their elders, and were much less fractious a sect than the Sadducees (War. 2.162, 166; Ant. 18.12, 15). Significantly, unlike the Sadducees, the Pharisees believed in the resurrection of the dead and an afterlife (Ant. 18.14).

The primary early source of evidence concerning the Pharisees is the New Testament, within which the Pharisees frequently appear. Perhaps especially within Matthew’s Gospel, the Pharisees are portrayed as opponents. John the Baptist challenges them as a brood of vipers when they come to receive his baptism. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus cautions his disciples that “unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 5:20). He later characterizes them as “hypocrites” and “blind guides” (15:7, 12–14) and tells the parable of the two sons and the parable of the wicked vinedressers against them (21:45).

In Matthew 9:34 and 12:24, the Pharisees claim that Jesus performed his exorcisms by the power of the prince of demons. A chief cause of their opposition to Jesus was his Sabbath works, which provoked them to conspire to destroy him (12:1–14). The Pharisees also differed from the practice of Jesus and his disciples on fasting (9:14), challenged their practice of eating with tax collectors and sinners (9:11), and questioned his departure from traditions of ritual purity (15:1–11). After they test him, requesting a sign, Jesus explicitly warns his disciples against the teaching of the Pharisees and Sadducees in 16:11. Besides asking for a sign, the Pharisees try to trip Jesus up on several occasions (19:3; 22:15; 22:34–36).

Most notably, at the conclusion of his public teaching ministry, Jesus delivers an extended series of woes against them in Matthew 23, mirroring the Beatitudes with which that ministry began in 5:1–12. The placement of this lengthy denunciation of the Pharisees gives weight to their prominence as rivals. Jesus speaks of their hypocrisy (23:25–28), their preoccupation with the minutiae of the Law, while neglecting its greater principles (23:23–24), the subtle casuistry by which they negate God’s commands (23:16–22; cf. 15:3–9), and their continuation of the persecution of God’s prophets (23:29–35).

This devastating portrayal of the Pharisees is largely shared by Mark and Luke. However, within Luke we encounter a more complex picture. On three occasions Jesus is invited for meals by Pharisees (Luke 7:36; 11:37; 14:1), although on each occasion he goes on to challenge his host: the woes found in Matthew 23 are largely recorded in the second of these occasions in Luke. Many of Jesus’ parables are directed against the Pharisees in Luke, including those of the lost sheep, coin, and son. A Pharisee also features in the parable of the tax collector and the Pharisee. However, Jesus was warned by some Pharisees that Herod was seeking to kill him in 13:31. While the Pharisees are typically opponents of Jesus, it seems that at least a few were genuinely interested in and perhaps even sympathetic to him and his teaching.

This is more evident in John, where the Pharisee Nicodemus came to Jesus by night. Nicodemus later spoke in Jesus’ favor in 7:50–51 and, together with Joseph of Arimathea, laid Jesus’ body in the tomb and filled it with spices (19:38–42). While the Pharisees conspired against Jesus and sought to destroy him, when they sent officers to arrest him, they returned without doing so, marveling at the authority with which Jesus spoke (7:32–52).

The picture becomes more complex still in Acts, where the highly esteemed Pharisee Gamaliel advised the council to take care in their treatment of the apostles, lest they end up opposing a work of God (Acts 5:34–40). Acts 15:5 is perhaps more remarkable still, revealing that some of the early Christians were also Pharisees. The proposal of James and the elders that Paul and the four men under a vow perform the ritual of their vow’s completion to demonstrate their high regard for the Law to the believing Jews who were “zealous for the law” in Acts 21:17–26 was quite likely designed to allay any concern Christian Pharisees might have had about Paul’s disregard for the Law of Moses. While his later self-characterization as a Pharisee was likely chiefly calculated to cause dissension with the council, that Paul was prepared to describe him in such a manner in 23:6 (and then again later in 26:5) is striking.

Putting these pieces together, the picture that emerges is rather more complicated and less clear than the familiar one. While the Pharisees were predominantly vehemently opposed to Jesus and his movement, they were not universally so. The initial curiosity that some exhibited in the Gospels developed into secret sympathy among a few, and even into open membership in the church. Importantly, identification with the Jesus movement was not seen to require disidentification from the Pharisees. The same probably could not be said about the Sadducees, whose denial of the resurrection likely made their sect and the Jesus movement mutually exclusive. While the Pharisees as Jesus describes them were clearly extremely corrupt and misled as a movement, Pharisaism as depicted in the New Testament did not seem to be entirely beyond hope of reformation.

Familiar oppositions between Jesus and the Pharisees can present a message of grace over against works-righteousness, love over against law-keeping, “relationship” over against “religion,” radical equality over against hierarchy, a relaxed attitude to observance of commandments over against a preoccupation with the details. Yet, the closer we look, the more this account breaks down. While challenging the Pharisees, Jesus presents faithful law-observance as standing on his side of the opposition. When charging the Pharisees with failing to practice what they preach, Jesus nonetheless affirms them in their office as ordained interpreters of the law and surprisingly declares that their teaching should be observed (Matt. 23:2–3). While castigating them for their neglect of the weightier matters of the Law, Jesus does not fault them for their concern for its lesser commandments (23:23). His opposition to their traditions focuses more upon the way they circumvent the manifest will of God through artful casuistry (15:1–9); once again, the issue with the Pharisees is that in subtleties of their traditions, as in their sinful hypocrisy, they pervert the very Law that they purport to uphold.

Jesus sees the Pharisees’ perversion of the Law to be further evidenced in the way that they bind heavy burdens upon the people and exalt themselves, when the Law is supposed to be liberatory and those sitting in “Moses’ seat” (Matt. 23:2) should be distinguished by the meekness that marked its founder (Num. 12:3). The Sabbath was a key source of conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees, and the latter’s resistance to healing upon the Sabbath (e.g., Matt. 12:10–14) demonstrated an inability to understand the end of the Law, missing the gracious and liberatory purpose at the heart of it. Once again, however, Jesus’ opposition to the Pharisees had more to do with their frustration of, and resistance to, the purpose of the Law, rather than to some overly high regard they had for it.

In Matthew 5:17–20, Jesus’ public ministry begins with a powerful affirmation of the Law:

Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished. Therefore whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

In the rest of the Sermon on the Mount that follows, Jesus stresses the integrity of heart and practice for which the Law calls, and the transforming initiatives of kingdom life by which its inner purpose is fulfilled.3 For instance, just as God identified the seed of murder in Cain’s hatred of his brother, Abel, in Genesis 4, so Christ teaches that the sixth commandment requires a deeper faithfulness, one enacted in the work of reconciliation (Matt. 5:21–25).

When asked about inheriting eternal life in Luke, Jesus twice directs his interlocutors to the commandments (Luke 10:25–28; 18:18–22). Contrary to many Protestant interpreters, Jesus nowhere suggests that the Law is intended to induce despair due to our inability to keep it: properly understood within the gracious framework within which it was given, the Law was never intended to be a means of earning one’s standing with God.4

A central aspect of Jesus’ conflict with the Pharisees is the latter’s failure to perceive the advent of the kingdom of God and what this entails for the Law. The differences between Jesus and the Pharisees concerning the Sabbath should not be put down to a supposedly relaxed approach to Halachic requirements on Jesus’ part. Jesus implicitly grants the Pharisees’ claim that his disciples were breaking the commandment in Matthew 12.5 His argument is that such commandments are lawfully overridden by higher ends, giving the examples of David and his men eating the bread of the Presence and the priests performing sacrifices on the Sabbath. Jesus’ argument is that his commissioned kingdom ministry – proclaiming the Sabbatical year of the Lord’s favor (Luke 4:18–19) in the fulness of God’s time – must be prioritized over routine observance of the Sabbath. When God comes near to his people, things do not just go on as normal.

Twice in Matthew (9:13; 12:7), Jesus cites Hosea 6:6 against the Pharisees – “I desire mercy, and not sacrifice” – recalling his hearers to the primary end that the Law was designed to serve. “Sacrifice,” metonymic for the entirety of religious and ritual observance, is devalued relative to “mercy,” one of the “weightier matters of the Law” according to Matthew 23:23. Yet “sacrifice” is not abandoned but perfected, ordered to its proper higher end and established through the integrity of heart and practice, as the sort of enacted prayer it ought to be.

The popular portrayal of Jesus opposing the Pharisees as representatives of the law and religious observance is quite inaccurate. Jesus’ chief charge against the Pharisees was that they undermined the Law: in their hypocrisy they did not practice what they preached concerning it, they used their casuistry to resist its commands, they frustrated its liberatory purpose by using it to bind heavy burdens upon the people, they missed the forest of grace that the Law represents for the trees of its commandments, they failed to pursue and exhibit an integrity of heart and action, and, when the kingdom of God was at hand, they used the Law to reject its summons.

Against the Pharisees, Jesus was the champion of the Law and of true religion. The Sermon on the Mount, the great opening statement of Jesus’ public ministry, has the manner of true Law-keeping and true religion as its central theme. In 5:21–48, Jesus takes the second table of the Law, our duties toward our neighbor, showing how it is fulfilled in proactive pursuit of the kingdom, dealing radically with sin, all summed up in loving one’s neighbor – even though he be your enemy – as yourself. In this teaching, Jesus is not departing from Moses, but establishing him. The command with which the second table is comprehended – “you shall love your neighbor as yourself” – comes from Leviticus 19:17–18, where it focuses upon the way one treats a neighbor with whom one is at odds.

Having taught such deeper observance of the commandments, Jesus proceeds to discuss true religion: almsgiving, prayer, and fasting. As with the Law, Jesus’ opposition is to the perversion of religion, not to its practice, which he champions.

Jesus, however, is not merely advocating a more conservative or rigorous Halachic vision. Jesus’ teaching comes with authority, with a summons to follow. And, as such, his message was unsettling to the complacently righteous or religious. The lawyer of Luke 10:25–28 was faced with a charge to participate in the initiative of mercy by which strangers become neighbors in the kingdom of God. The ruler of Luke 18:18–23 was summoned to sell his possessions and follow Jesus. Conventional religious and moral observances, while not abandoned, are eclipsed by the imperative of the cause of the inbreaking kingdom and the call of its king.

It was possible, as Acts suggests, for committed Pharisees to respond to Jesus’ kingdom summons. The corruption to which Pharisaic forms of religion were susceptible, and to which much of it succumbed, was not unavoidable. Such Pharisees’ zeal for the Law would not be diminished by following Christ, but would be directed to its proper fulfillment. Likewise, their religious observances would not be abandoned, but enlivened by a new spirit of loving devotion.

Yet the advent of Christ also bursts old wineskins, challenging religious and law-loving people to perceive that which overrides, and the proper end of, their observances. To the commandments of the Law and the practices of religion, whose routine and familiar observance can too often cocoon people in a complacent sense of security, it addresses a strange and searching summons to leave one’s old world behind and to come follow Jesus.

Footnotes

1. Günter Stemberger, “The Pharisees and the Rabbis” in The Pharisees, ed. Joseph Sievers and Amy-Jill Levine (Eerdmans, 2021), 240–254.
2. See, for instance, Cana Werman, “Was Hillel a Pharisee?” in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity: Studies for Tal Ilan at Sixty (Brill, 2018), 66–106.
3. Glen H. Stassen, “The Fourteen Triads of the Sermon on the Mount,” Journal of Biblical Literature, 122.2, Summer 2003, 267–308.
4. Paul T. Sloan, Jesus and the Law of Moses: The Gospels and the Restoration of Israel within First-Century Judaism (Baker Academic, 2025).
5. Sloan, Jesus and the Law, 159.