01
The monster who never existed
Ask an English speaker what a Pharisee was and you will get some version of the same answer. A religious bully. A hypocrite in expensive robes. A sanctimonious official who loved rules more than people and had Jesus killed because He threatened his position. The word has become an insult in English, which tells you how settled the picture is.
That picture is almost entirely wrong.
It is not wrong in the way that a rounding error is wrong. It is wrong at the root, and the cost of it is high: if the Pharisees were simply corrupt men, then the gospel is a story about good people beating bad people, and Jesus died because He got on the wrong side of a political faction. That is not what the New Testament says, and it is not why the cross was necessary.
The Pharisees were, by every measure a human being can apply, the finest men in the country.
02
Where the Pharisees came from
Judah fell to Babylon in 586 BC and never really governed itself again. Babylon gave way to Persia, Persia to Greece, and Greece eventually to Rome. Roughly four and a half centuries of occupation, with one brief and violent exception in the middle.
That exception is where the Pharisees begin.
In 167 BC the Seleucid king Antiochus IV Epiphanes decided to end Jewish religious distinctiveness by force. He had an altar to Zeus Olympios erected in the Jerusalem temple and unclean animals sacrificed on it. Temple worship was suspended. Possessing a Torah scroll became a capital offence. So did circumcising your son.1
The Maccabean revolt followed, and against every reasonable expectation it worked. By 142 BC Judea was effectively independent under the Hasmonean house — a dynasty of priest-kings descended from the rebel family.
Out of that period a movement crystallised around the scribes and teachers of the Law. Their name says what they were for. Hebrew perushim (פְּרוּשִׁים), from the root p-r-sh, "to separate" — the Greek Pharisaios reaches us through the Aramaic perishayya. Separated ones.
Their diagnosis of the national catastrophe was theological, not political. We were conquered because we did not keep the Law. Their remedy followed from it with total consistency: never again. Not one commandment. Not one day.
- 586 BCJerusalem falls to Babylon. Four centuries of foreign rule begin.
- 167 BCAntiochus IV desecrates the temple and outlaws the Torah.
- 166 BCThe Maccabean revolt. The movement that becomes the Pharisees takes shape.
- 142 BCHasmonean independence.
- 103 BCAlexander Jannaeus becomes king and high priest.
- 88 BCEight hundred Pharisees are crucified in Jerusalem.
- 76 BCQueen Salome Alexandra reverses everything and puts the Pharisees in government.
- 63 BCPompey takes Jerusalem. Independence ends.
- c. AD 30The crucifixion of Jesus Christ.
03
Eight hundred crosses
If you want one story that shows what these men were actually made of, it is this one.
In 103 BC the Hasmonean king Aristobulus I died. His widow, Salome Alexandra, released his imprisoned brother Alexander Jannaeus, married him, and made him king. Jannaeus held both offices at once: king of Judea and high priest of Israel.
The Pharisees would not accept it. They disputed his fitness for the priesthood on the basis of a persistent claim that his mother had once been a prisoner of war — which, under the marriage restrictions the Law places on the high priest, would disqualify his line.2 They said so publicly, to a king with an army.
Josephus records that it came to a head at the Feast of Tabernacles. Jannaeus was officiating at the altar when the crowd pelted him with the citrons they were holding for the festival. He responded by turning his mercenaries loose in the temple courts. Thousands died that day.
A civil war followed and ran for six years. At its lowest point the Pharisaic faction invited the Seleucid king Demetrius III into Judea against their own ruler — a decision they would be judged for by their own countrymen and by the community at Qumran. Jannaeus survived it, and won.
Then, in 88 BC, he settled accounts.
As he was feasting with his concubines, in the sight of all the city, he ordered about eight hundred of them to be crucified; and while they were living, he ordered the throats of their children and wives to be cut before their eyes.
Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 13.380
This is not a devotional embellishment. Two independent ancient sources describe it. Josephus reports it twice, in the Antiquities and again in The Jewish War. And a scroll recovered from Cave 4 at Qumran in 1952 — the commentary on Nahum known as 4QpNahum — refers to a ruler it calls the Lion of Wrath, who "hangs men alive," in a passage that also names Demetrius and his invitation into Jerusalem.3 The Dead Sea Scrolls and Josephus were written by parties with no love for each other. They agree on this.
It is worth adding what happened next, because it is the opposite of what you would expect. Jannaeus died in 76 BC and Salome Alexandra took the throne in her own right. She dismantled her husband's policy, brought the Pharisees into government, and gave them authority over the courts and the interpretation of the Law. Rabbinic tradition remembers her nine-year reign as a golden age.4 The party that had been nailed to crosses ended up running the country.
So put two dates on the same line.
Eight hundred men, executed in one day for insisting that the Law of God be kept. Roughly a hundred and twenty years later, outside the same city, one Man was executed on the same instrument — and the spiritual heirs of these eight hundred were among those who wanted Him there. The same wood. The opposite side of it.
Whatever you thought a Pharisee was, revise it. These were men who went to the cross for their convictions long before they helped send anyone else there.
04
A discipline you cannot imagine
The heroism was not confined to crises. It was daily, and it was relentless.
A Pharisee rose before dawn. He washed according to prescribed ritual. He recited the Shema and prayed at fixed hours. He ate nothing that had not been prepared in accordance with the purity laws, which in practice meant he could not eat in most houses in his own country. He avoided contact with Gentiles and with anything that could transmit ceremonial uncleanness. He kept the Sabbath with a precision that governed how far he walked and what he was permitted to carry.
He fasted twice a week — we know because the Pharisee in Jesus' own parable says so, and Jesus does not dispute it. He tithed everything, down to the herbs in his garden. Jesus concedes that point too, in the middle of a rebuke: "ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin." The complaint is not that they failed to do it.
And he studied. Large portions of the Hebrew Scriptures were held in memory, verbatim. These men worked at the biblical text with an intensity that would embarrass most modern seminaries.
Whatever else you say about the Pharisees, do not say they were lazy, and do not say they were insincere. Then compare your own week.
Think about the people your own culture holds up as morally serious. Someone who resisted a dictatorship, was tortured for it, and never recanted. Albert Schweitzer abandoning a European career to run a hospital in Gabon. Mother Teresa in the streets of Calcutta. That is the register the Pharisees occupied in first-century Judea — not the villains of the story but its heroes, the men ordinary people pointed to and said, that is what faith is supposed to look like.
Even people today who despise organised religion make an exception for figures like that. First-century Judeans made exactly the same exception, and the Pharisees were who they made it for.
05
Paul's résumé
We do not have to reconstruct any of this from the outside. One Pharisee wrote his own credentials down, and his letter survives.
If any other man thinketh that he hath whereof he might trust in the flesh, I more: Circumcised the eighth day, of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, an Hebrew of the Hebrews; as touching the law, a Pharisee; Concerning zeal, persecuting the church; touching the righteousness which is in the law, blameless.
Philippians 3:4–6 (KJV)
Read the last phrase again. Blameless.
Paul is not being ironic and he is not exaggerating for rhetorical effect. He is stating, as a matter of record, that measured against the written Law he could not be faulted. Nobody in Jerusalem was in a position to contradict him.
Hold that thought, because Paul is about to tell us what he did with it.
06
So why did Jesus condemn them?
Here is the difficulty in its full weight. If the Pharisees were the most disciplined, most biblically literate, most self-sacrificing men in the nation, why did Jesus reserve His harshest recorded language for them?
Not mild correction. He called them a generation of vipers and asked how they expected to escape hell.
And before that, He had already set the entry requirement:
For I say unto you, That except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven.
Matthew 5:20 (KJV)
Notice what that sentence does to His audience. He has just named the highest standard of righteousness anyone present could conceive of — and made it the floor. Not the ceiling. The floor. Which means, stated plainly, that the scribes and Pharisees themselves were not going to make it.
Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness. Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.
Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! because ye build the tombs of the prophets, and garnish the sepulchres of the righteous… Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?
Matthew 23:27–33 (KJV)
That image is sharper than it looks in English. Whitewashing a tomb was not decoration. According to the Mishnah, graves were marked with lime before Passover precisely so that pilgrims would not step on them by accident and contract ritual uncleanness.5 The white coating was a warning label. It existed to tell you that death was underneath.
So Jesus is not saying you look nice but you are not. He is saying something more exact and more terrible: the very thing you are most proud of is the marker that tells God what is inside.
And note the concession buried in the accusation. Ye outwardly appear righteous unto men. He does not deny it. They really did look righteous, because to any human observer they were righteous. Human beings judge by what is visible. We have no other option.
God has another option.
07
Two standards of morality
Every human moral system, religious or secular, measures conduct. It has to. Conduct is all we can see.
God's standard begins one layer further in.
Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery: But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.
Matthew 5:27–28 (KJV)
On this standard the contempt you felt this morning and did not act on is already in the ledger. The resentment nobody detected. The thing you wanted and were only prevented from taking. Under human law none of it is actionable. Under God's law it is the offence itself.
This is why the Pharisees failed, and why they could not see that they had. They were being graded on a paper they had not read.
Jesus made the whole thing into a two-sentence story. A Pharisee and a tax collector go to the temple to pray.
The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican. I fast twice in the week, I give tithes of all that I possess.
And the publican, standing afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner.
Luke 18:11–13 (KJV)
Here is the detail almost everyone misses. Every factual claim the Pharisee makes is true. He was not an extortioner. He was not an adulterer. He did fast twice a week and he did tithe everything. He is not lying, and he is not boasting about things he has not done.
He goes home unjustified anyway. The tax collector — a collaborator who made his living defrauding his own countrymen — goes home justified.
Which raises an uncomfortable question about the rest of us. At least I'm not like him. I'm a decent person. I've never hurt anybody. That prayer has not gone out of use. It has just stopped being said in temples.
08
The thief and the philanthropist
This is where people get angry, so let us put it in its hardest form.
Two men. One spends forty years in genuine service — building clinics, giving away his money, caring for people nobody else would touch — and dies without Christ. The other is a violent criminal, justly convicted, who in the last hours of his life turns to Jesus.
Which of them is righteous before God?
The Bible does not leave this hypothetical. It reports the case.
And he said unto Jesus, Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom. And Jesus said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, To day shalt thou be with me in paradise.
Luke 23:42–43 (KJV)
A condemned criminal, hours from death, with no time to reform, no good works to offer and nothing to bring except the request. He is told he will be in paradise that day.
Most people's instinct is that this is unfair. It is worth being precise about why it is not.
The thief did not merely agree that a proposition was true. In the same conversation he admits his guilt — "we receive the due reward of our deeds" — states that Jesus has done nothing wrong, and throws himself entirely on Christ's mercy. That is repentance and faith together, and it is not the same thing as intellectual assent.
Nor does salvation by faith leave conduct behind. Paul puts both halves in one breath: "For by grace are ye saved through faith… not of works, lest any man should boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works" (Ephesians 2:8–10). Works are not the root of salvation. They are the fruit of it. A faith that produces nothing was never the thing Scripture is describing.
With that said, the original point stands, and it is not softened by the qualification. No quantity of good works — not the philanthropist's, not Schweitzer's, not Mother Teresa's, not yours — can generate the righteousness God's standard actually requires. That is not a verdict on any individual's eternity, which belongs to God alone and to which we have no access. It is a statement about the standard.
As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one… For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.
Romans 3:10, 23 (KJV)
Not most. Not most, excluding the exceptional. None.
09
The only righteousness on offer
So return to Paul, holding a flawless record and knowing exactly what it is worth.
Yea doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ, And be found in him, not having mine own righteousness, which is of the law, but that which is through the faith of Christ, the righteousness which is of God by faith.
Philippians 3:8–9 (KJV)
The word behind "dung" is skybalon. It means refuse — what gets thrown out, including excrement. Paul is not reaching for a polite word and missing. He chose the coarse one deliberately, and he applied it to the single most impressive moral record available to a first-century Jew: his own.
Why? Because he had finally understood what the whitewash was covering. His visible obedience had not come from a clean interior. It had been laid over one.
And in place of it he received something he did not manufacture. Christ kept the Law that no one else could keep, died as the representative of a guilty race, paid the wage that sin earns, and rose. Everyone who is joined to Him by faith is credited with His record — His obedience, His innocence, His righteousness. Not borrowed. Transferred.
That is why the criminal on the next cross could be told today. He had nothing. He was given everything that belonged to the Man beside him.
When people asked Jesus directly what God required of them, His answer was one sentence long:
Then said they unto him, What shall we do, that we might work the works of God? Jesus answered and said unto them, This is the work of God, that ye believe on him whom he hath sent.
John 6:28–29 (KJV)
They asked for a list. He gave them a Person.
10
What human righteousness finally produced
There is one more thing to say, and it has to be said carefully.
Judas then, having received a band of men and officers from the chief priests and Pharisees, cometh thither with lanterns and torches and weapons.
John 18:3 (KJV)
The arrest and trial were organised by the temple leadership — the chief priests and the ruling council, whose senior figures were largely Sadducean rather than Pharisaic. John records Pharisees within that coalition, and the Gospels record sustained hostility from Pharisees throughout Jesus' ministry. But it was not the whole party, and it was emphatically not the Jewish people.
Nicodemus was a Pharisee, and he defended Jesus in council and buried Him (John 7:50–51; 19:39). Gamaliel was a Pharisee, and he protected the apostles (Acts 5:34–39). Luke records believers "of the sect of the Pharisees" in the early church (Acts 15:5). Paul was a Pharisee. Any reading that turns this into a story about one ethnic or religious group being uniquely wicked has lost the plot of the passage and, historically, has done enormous harm.
Because the point of the New Testament's argument was never that one first-century faction was worse than everyone else. It is the reverse, and it is far more disturbing.
The point is that the highest righteousness human beings are capable of manufacturing, when it finally stands face to face with the real thing, defends itself.
These men had spent their lives building a structure of obedience. When Jesus arrived, the structure did not merely look smaller by comparison — it was exposed as counterfeit at the foundation. The respect, the deference, the standing they had earned at enormous personal cost: all of it was being dismantled by a carpenter from Galilee who could see straight through the whitewash.
And what came out was what had been under the lime the whole time.
Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him.
John 8:44 (KJV)
The pattern is as old as the fourth chapter of Genesis. Cain brought an offering from his own labour. Abel brought one by faith. Cain's was rejected, and Cain's response to the exposure was to kill the man whose acceptance had revealed it.
Self-made righteousness has always ended the same way when the light gets close enough. That is the fruit. Not because these particular men were monsters, but because that is what unaided human religion does at its very best.
11
The mirror
Which brings the whole thing home, and it is not comfortable.
The Pharisee is not a historical villain you can safely look down on. He is the best possible version of you — more disciplined, better read, more generous, more courageous — and he did not make it. If he did not make it on the strength of his record, the arithmetic on yours is not close.
The only real difference between him and us is that we have his story written down. We get to see how it ends before we finish living our own.
So the question the whole article has been walking towards is finally a personal one, and there are only two possible answers.
Will you trust your own record, or His?
Sources
Notes & sources
- On Antiochus IV's desecration of the temple and the prohibition of Torah observance: 1 Maccabees 1:41–61; 2 Maccabees 6:1–11; Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 12.248–256.
- Josephus, Antiquities 13.372 records the accusation regarding Jannaeus' mother and the disturbance at the Feast of Tabernacles. The same charge is recorded earlier against John Hyrcanus (Antiquities 13.288–292). The relevant restriction on the high priest's marriage is Leviticus 21:13–15.
- Josephus, Antiquities 13.379–383; The Jewish War 1.96–98. The Qumran parallel is 4QpNahum (4Q169), frags. 3–4, col. i, discovered in Cave 4 in 1952; editio princeps in J. M. Allegro, Discoveries in the Judaean Desert V (Oxford, 1968). See also Shani L. Berrin, The Pesher Nahum Scroll from Qumran (Brill, 2004).
- Josephus, Antiquities 13.405–408; The Jewish War 1.110–112. Rabbinic recollection of the reign appears at b. Ta'anit 23a.
- Mishnah, Shekalim 1:1, on the marking of graves before Passover; cf. Numbers 19:16 on corpse impurity. See also Luke 11:44 for the complementary image of unmarked graves.
- Scripture quotations are from the Authorised (King James) Version.
- Images: James Tissot, The Life of Christ series (1886–1894), Brooklyn Museum, public domain. Coin photograph by Itamar Atzmon, CC BY-SA, via Wikimedia Commons.