From a Second Temple Party to Rabbinic Judaism's Ancestor

The New Testament gospels repeatedly present Pharisees as Jesus's antagonists, accusing them of hypocrisy, of prioritizing legal minutiae over compassion, and of hostility toward Jesus's own teaching and healing on the Sabbath, a portrait that has shaped the word Pharisee's common English usage, as a byword for self righteous legalism, ever since. Modern historians of Second Temple Judaism read this portrait cautiously, as a text written some decades after the events it describes, in the context of an increasingly sharp separation between the early Christian movement and the Jewish community around it, rather than as a neutral eyewitness account of Pharisaic belief and practice on its own terms.

Rabbinic literature, composed by the heirs of the Pharisaic tradition themselves in the centuries after 70 CE, naturally tells a different story, one in which Pharisaic teachers are the direct forerunners of the rabbis who created the Mishnah and the Talmud and preserved Judaism through the Temple's loss. Most historians of the period accept some real continuity between the two, while treating the rabbinic sources' retrospective claim to represent Pharisaism in an unbroken, idealized line with the same critical caution applied to the New Testament's hostile portrait, since both are later texts shaping a Second Temple past to serve their own present concerns.