Jesus Was a Pharisee? Yes and No...

Jesus Was a Pharisee!!

Well, Technically, Maybe Not.

Jesus dressed as a Pharisee

Picking Out the Pharisee

How do you tell if a guy is a Pharisee? The best answer to that would be to ask him about his beliefs, and how he thinks a person should run their life. But Pharisees pop up throughout the Gospels and even into the first part of Acts, as if they were instantly recognizable. If that was so, it had to be something about how they dressed, or what they did with their hair and beards.

The Pharisees tried to stay true to Scripture, so we can rebuild some of how they looked from the specific instructions in the book of Leviticus. Here is an idea for the reconstruction of a first-century Pharisee. Movie-makers started from here and became more imaginative.

The Dress of a Pharisee

Picking Out the Sadducee

In both the Gospels and Acts, Pharisees and Sadducees sometimes appear together, and it seems that they Sadducees are instantly recognizable as well. Here we have no guidance from Scripture, and no clue to any differences between how the two groups interpreted the dress requirements.

One difference between the two groups is that not many Pharisees were priests, while a great many of the Sadducees were priests. Here is a reconstruction of how priests would have dressed. The person in the center and at right is dressed as the High Priest.

The Dress of Priests

The Social Setting of Pharisees

The Pharisees were middle-class to a great extent, and supported themselves with trades such as tent-makers, market operators, or--like Jesus--even carpenters. They were highly respected "laymen" (rather than priests), whose sphere of greatest influence was in the synagogue. Some of them were wealthy, and Nicodemus, who owned farmland in Galilee, developed a reputation of being the richest man in Jerusalem.

To become a Pharisee required a year of apprenticeship in which the student would learn how to handle the written and oral law, and how to dress and act. This left poor tenant farmers out; there were not many of them that  could take a "gap year" in subsistence farming just to  go to school. It also excluded women, who were never accepted into the rabbinical schools, nor enlisted as disciples to noted Pharisees.
(Jesus was the exception: he had female disciples.)

There were Pharisees in the Sanhedrin (high council and supreme court of the Jews), but the positions of power there were held by Sadducees during the time of Jesus. By no means was there universality of opinions about social and legal issues, and the Sanhedrin held many viewpoints. For instance, around AD 30 capital punishment became prohibited for the act of adultery. Such a change could not have been made without the involvement of the Sanhedrin.

Jesus, Pharisees, and the Crowd

The Social Setting of Sadducees

The Pharisees were upper-class to a great extent, and many of them were highly respected priests, whose sphere of greatest influence was in the temple. Many of them were wealthy, a result of being in power for generations. Their priority was the temple cult, with its sacrificial offerings and access to the priests. The Romans kept the Sadducees in power as the easiest group to negotiate with: the priest's needs for the temple were honored, while the pernicious idea of a conquering "messiah" was suppressed.

In the picture below, one person is wearing an "ephod" with twelve precious stones signifying the twelve tribes of Israel. Only the high priest (or his designate) was permitted to wear the ephod, a symbol of power. The Romans kept the high priestly ephod locked up in the Roman military barracks, and only issued it out to be worn on special occasions, such as the Day of Atonement.

Sadducees  and the High Priest

Richly Dressed

Since Sadducees were known to be wealthy, here is an imaginative drawing of them richly dressed.

Sadducees Richly Dressed

Love of Clothing

And since some Pharisees loved to dress up in impressive clothes, here is an imaginative depiction of that. This depiction fails to include the extra-long tassels that Jesus complained about.

Pharisees Imaginatively Dressed

Belief Systems

Sadducees

The Sadducees only accepted the five books of Moses as authoritative: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.  Other questions--conveniently-- could be decided by the Sanhedrin, in their opinion. They excluded the books of the Prophets, and the "Writings," which consisted of Psalms, Proverbs, etc. Even the book of Daniel, a more recent work, was considered to be just a "Writing," although Jesus accepted Daniel as a prophet, as did the Pharisees. The first five books had little to say about the Holy Spirit, the Messiah, or eternal life, so the Sadducees disavowed these.

Pharisees

Care for the poor was an important value for the Pharisees. They accepted the prophetic books, but also the "Oral Law" of Moses, supposedly handed down by word of mouth over many generations. The Oral Law largely "placed a fence around" the written law, to prevent accidental transgressions. Jesus said this placed "heavy burdens" on the populace, which they refused to alleviate.

Jesus

Jesus told his followers to pay attention to the Pharisees and the scribes--professional teachers of the Law. He said, "The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses' seat, so practice and observe whatever they tell you--but not what they do. For they preach, but they do not practice (Matthew 23:2-3). Jesus' pet peeve was their hypocrisy: they professed to follow the letter of the Law without having sought out its spirit.

Mixed Pharisees and Sadducees

So if Jesus dressed like a Pharisee and confirmed their teachings, why was he not then a Pharisee?

Simple: He lacked the diploma. The Pharisees complained that Jesus was uneducated--that he had not attended a recognized Pharisaic school nor had he been a disciple of a Pharisaic teacher.

Not only had Jesus been taught by a godly teacher--his adoptive father Joseph--but also Jesus was guided by the Holy Spirit and by the will of his Heavenly Father sought out in earnest prayer.

Jesus rebuking the Pharisees