Pharisee

Josephus, himself trained among the Pharisees before later aligning with different factions at different points in his career, describes them alongside the Sadducees and the Essenes as one of the three principal Jewish schools of thought active in his lifetime, distinguished chiefly by their acceptance of a body of interpretive tradition, later called the Oral Torah, that they held to carry authority alongside the written Law of Moses. The Sadducees, drawn largely from priestly and aristocratic circles and controlling much of the Temple's formal administration, rejected this additional tradition and read the written Torah alone as binding, a narrower textual position that also led them to reject the Pharisaic doctrine of bodily resurrection, which the Pharisees defended as implicit within scripture even though it was not stated in the Torah in so many words.

Where Sadducee authority rested on Temple office and inherited priestly status, Pharisaic authority rested on learning and popular reputation, and Josephus records that the Pharisees enjoyed considerably wider support among the ordinary population of Judea than the more socially exclusive Sadducees did. This difference in social base helps explain why, when the Temple and its priesthood were destroyed in 70 CE, Pharisaic modes of authority, resting on interpretation and teaching rather than on a building and its cult, proved able to survive that destruction in a way Sadducee authority structurally could not.

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.