Jesus and the Pharisees: An historical note

Despite the fact that a number of my recent posts have been about religion and current American politics, this post is not meant to have any direct application to that or to be any sort of analogy.  It's just a few thoughts about the problem of self-righteousness and fanaticism as Jesus encountered them in his time within the Jewish context of which he was a part.

The Catholic Church currently stresses the comonalities in belief between Jesus and the Pharisees, who saw themselves as having a social mission and as trying to be flexible in their application of the principles of the Torah to daily life.  Part of the reason for the Church's position on this is ecumenical.  Because for most of its history, the Catholic Church has stressed the differences of Jesus with "the Jews," and often emphasized the alleged past and present perfidy of the latter.  That part of the Christian tradition has borne poisonous fruit in abundance.

And, as conservative (even reactionary) as the current Pope is, one thing even his most severe critics in the Church recognize is that he has done more than any other Pontiff in history to promote better relations and an "ecumenical dialogue" between Jews and Christians.

However, at least one of my favorite theologians, a dissident Catholic named Eugen Drewermann, argues that the reason the Church currently likes to de-emphasize the conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees is less from ecumenical considerations than because the stories about that conflict emphasize the degree to which Jesus was in conflict with the established religious authorities of his time.  They also stress the ways in which Jesus opposed much of the religious formalism and pious hypocrisy with which he came into contact.

I should mention that Drewermann technically lost the Catholic "franchise" a decade or so ago, in no small part because of his criticisms of the current Church hierarchy, so he can no longer claim to be a "Catholic" theologian.  But that's a different story.  Drewermann is very aware of the anti-Jewish bias displayed by the Gospel writers.  In his own translation from the Greek to German of the Gospel of John (1997), he says in the introduction that John's Gospel not only continues the tendency of the first three Gospels to see "the Jews" (of whom the Pharisees are frequently the representative) as "unbelievers."  He says, citing his agreement with Walter Jens, that of the four canonical Gospels, John's takes that position to "its most extreme theological consequences."

But he argues that the primary way in which John uses "the Jews," as in his confrontations with the hostile Pharisees, is to describe a hollow and superficial kind of piety.  So his decision in the translation was to insert in parenthesis after "the Jews" the phrase "die Gottesbesitzer," or "the owners of God," i.e., those who claim to be the exclusive possessors of God, to emphasize this aspect.

In his book Das Markus-Evagelium Teil 2 (1994), Drewermann looks at the differences between Jesus and the Pharisees with particular reference to the Gospel of Mark, which is generally accepted by critical scholars as being the oldest of the four canonical Gospels.  He describes two central differences between Jesus and the Pharisees.

One is that the Pharisees expected a Messiah who would sharply separate the righteous from the unrighteous.  Jesus was unwilling, argues Drewermann, to make such sharp distinctions about humanity, but rather stressed the common dependence of all on the grace of God.

The second is that the Pharsees expected the Messiah to bring some sort of secular, political deliverance, though Drewermann explains that some Pharisaic texts seem to give a more symbolic twist to this hope.  But he believes that it was mainly a hope for a material liberation, and, crucially, that for the Pharisees this represented a temendous accumulation of feelings of "resentment and hatred of all kinds."  Jesus, on the other hand, understood the Messianic kindom of God in a religious, transformative sense.

Michael Grant in Jesus: An Historian's Review of the Gospels (1977) discusses some of the other points of conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees.  Although a different sect, the Sadducees, controlled the Temple in Jerusalem, the Pharisees tended to be dominant in the synagogues and therefore in religious education.  So for most people in Judea, the Pharisees were the religious authorities with whom they normally had contact.  Grant writes:

For the constant references in the Gospels to strife beteween the Pharisees and scribes [Sopherim, specialists in religious law who worked with the Pharisees] on the one hand, and Jesus on the other, leave no doubt that such strife, even if the Gospels exaggerated it, had genuinely existed.  In addition to their resentment about what he said about themselves, and doctrinal differences of a more or less technical kind, they objected to his association with disreputable people.  They also objected to his abandonment of the synagogues for open-air pulpits.  But above all they objected to the very special relationship he claimed with the divine power.  They disliked such claims when other Galilean holy men put them forward.  But when Jesus made this assertion they disliked it even more, since it assumed a form which seemed to them to infringe blasphemously upon the monotheism which was essential to the Jewish faith.  This was because his mission to inaugurate the Kingdom of God had included the assurance that he himself had the power to forgive sins: John the Baptist before him, announcing the imminence of the Kingdom, had already 'proclaimed a baptism in token of repentance for the forgiveness of sins', but Jesus had gone further by asserting that forgiveness was conferred not by any such ritual means but by his own will.  This ... meant that Jesus was arrogating to himself a power which other Jews had reserved for God.