An Atheistic Bible Study Of The Gospels The Pharisees.

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Judaism was thrown into a crisis by the 70 year Babylonian exile. Without access to the original temple of Jerusalem, they used synagogues and designated houses of study. When the Persians liberated the Jews and permitted them to return to Jerusalem, there were strings attached. The Jews were forbidden from having monarchical kings and though allowed to rebuild the Temple destroyed by the Babylonians, it was to be built under strict Persian supervision. While some Jews embraced the new Temple, others felt it was tainted by the new regulation by the Gentile non-Jewish Persians. Many Jews set up movements using their own centres of worship, the synagogues and study houses, but not the temple itself. Priests ran the Temple services, while teachers, scribes and scholars preached and taught in the external synagogues. After various Hellenic rulers, including Alexander The Great, conquered Persia and its empire, the Jew found themselves again increasingly oppressed. Matters reached a peak with the rule of Antiochus 4th, who took control of the Temple itself. He was overthrown in a Jewish rising led by Simon Maccabeus. The priests at the temple now became politicised, but many disagreed with their policies, especially the most emergent opposition group, the Pharisees (meaning Separatists). They promoted the belief that rituals and laws observed in the Temple also applied to Jews outside the Temple too. They were quite democratic in outlook, possibly due to the influences of the Hellenistic knowledge of Greek philosophy. They were forerunners to the modern Jewish Rabbi. A political, social and educational movement, deeply opposed to Roman rule of the Near East. The Pharisees were a popular party among the Jews, and not as detached or elitist as the upper class Sadducees. (I’ll look at their significance in a future feature). They ended up in a prolonged violent civil war with the Sadducees when a Pharisee insulted the parentage of the Hasmodean High Priest, John Hyrcanus who started to promote Sadducee teachings more openly with intent to eradicate the Pharisees. The Pharisees were saved by the arrival of the Romans, and actually opened the gates of Jerusalem to let the invaders in, making sure the new rulers knew they had Pharisee support. Their later opposition to Herod led Herod to give stronger support to the Sadducees. In the Gospels The Pharisees are fierce opponents to John The Baptist and later to Jesus, though the Pharisee Nicodemus and Joseph Of Arimathea would appear to have become Christian converts. Pharisees were loyal supporters of Mosaic Laws, a literalist following of the teachings of Moses. Saul was a Pharisee before hi conversion into St Paul as he became a Christian overnight on his journey to Damascus. There is no mention of the Pharisees before the New Testament Gospels in the Bible but the historian Josephus provides much of their back-story. The Gospels depict the Pharisees as puritanical sticklers for ritual and tradition, with Jesus pushing for a more relaxed position where just believing in him trumps many digressions from the letter of the Mosaic law. After the destruction of the Temple in about 70 AD (CE) the Sadducees and other Jewish sects were largely crushed, leaving the Pharisees to shape modern Judaism in parallel to the rise of Christianity which gained greater numbers by openly converting in the Gentile population. Arthur Chappell