Reviewed by: The Pharisees ed. by Joseph Sievers and Amy-Jill Levine Joshua Garroway joseph sievers and amy-jill levine (eds.), The Pharisees (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2021). Pp. xxiii + 482. $54.99. This volume, which stems from a 2019 conference at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome, is remarkable in both length and scope, consisting of twenty-five essays that cover more than two thousand years of history. The book has two aims: first, to refine our understanding of the Pharisees, a group notoriously difficult to define or describe, by synthesizing voices from an array of disciplines and perspectives; and, second—and this is noteworthy for what is ostensibly an academic work—the editors aspire to correct the harmful prejudice against Jews, centuries old and still alive today, that has resulted from the disparaging representation of Pharisees in ancient, medieval, and modern Christian sources. The two objectives are connected, as the hope that a more complete, accurate, and historically informed description of the Pharisees will provide well-intentioned scholars, [End Page 184] teachers, pastors, and other leaders with the knowledge they need to counteract the negative distortions that have gained steam over the years. The book is divided into three parts, “Historical Reception,” “Reception History,” and “Looking into the Future.” Appended is the address delivered by Pope Francis at the conference in Rome. Part 1 is preceded by an introductory essay, “Interpreting the Name ‘Pharisee’” (pp. 3–2), by Craig E. Morrison, who tackles the long-standing etymological question of how the Pharisees got their name. Morrison’s answer? We simply do not know, but continued efforts to use supposed etymologies to describe the Pharisees, particularly when they stress “separation,” can lead erroneously to the stereotypical presentation of the Pharisees as privileged or aloof. Twelve essays follow: Vasile Babota, “In Search of the Origins of the Pharisees” (pp. 23–40); Eric M. Meyers, “Purity Concerns and Common Judaism in Light of Archaeology” (pp. 41–54); Vered Noam, “Pharisaic Halakhah as Emerging from 4QMMT” (pp. 55–79); Steve Mason, “Josephus’s Pharisees” (pp. 80–111); Paula Fredriksen, “Paul, the Perfectly Righteous Pharisee” (pp. 112–35); Henry Pattarumadathil, “Pharisees and Sadducees Together in Matthew” (pp. 136–47); Adela Yarbro Collins, “Polemic against the Pharisees in Matthew 23” (pp. 148–69); Hermut Löhr, “Luke-Acts as a Source for the History of the Pharisees” (pp. 170–84); Harold W. Attridge, “Pharisees in the Fourth Gospel and One Special Pharisee” (pp. 185–98); Yair Furstenberg, “The Shared Image of Pharisaic Law in the Gospels and Rabbinic Tradition” (pp. 199–219); Jens Schröter, “How Close Were Jesus and the Pharisees” (pp. 220–39); and Günter Stemberger, “The Pharisees and the Rabbis” (pp. 240–55). Several of the essays in part 1 follow Morrison in yielding inconclusive results. Babota, for example, warns against confidence in answering “such questions as when exactly, how, and why Pharisees appeared in the Second Temple period” (p. 40). Meyers concedes that, despite the efforts of archaeologists, Pharisees cannot be distinguished from other Jews in material remains. Stemberger destabilizes the identification of the rabbis as latter-day Pharisees, concluding that we should neither assume a continuity between the two groups nor “reconstruct Pharisaic thought and halakah based on rabbinic texts” (p. 254). Inasmuch as the goal of the book is to unmoor historic prejudices by correcting the record, so to speak, the most conducive chapters in part 1 are those by Noam, Mason, and Furstenberg. Noam undermines the popular Christian representation of the Pharisees as stodgy, conservative legalists by showing that, in comparison with 4QMMT, the position of the Pharisees on legal issues sometimes represents an innovative and more lenient alternative. So, too, Mason sees in Josephus’s descriptions of the Pharisees not “traditional Christian perceptions of a humorless legalism obsessed with petty details or out to impose an exacting severity,” but rather a class of lawyers who “mitigated the potential severity of the laws and provided guidance for living with them” (p. 109). Furstenberg’s comparative analysis of dispute narratives in the Gospels and in rabbinic sources produces a similar result: “The Pharisees promoted a human form of law . . . acknowledging their human state and weaknesses, and allowing them...
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Aug 4, 2024
Andrej Rasch 
