Episode 278: Amy-Jill Levine – Who Are the Pharisees Actually?

Pete: You’re listening to The Bible for Normal People, the only God ordained podcast on the internet. I’m Pete Enns. 

Jared: And I’m Jared Byas.

Pete: Last call for summer school 2024 as our August class Banned Books: the Apocrypha Edition is coming up soon, and it’s going to be taught by the esteemed Brandon Hawk.

Jared: What’s the Apocrypha, you might ask? It’s the books that didn’t make it into the Protestant Bible. The class will cover what Apocrypha are, and why they matter for understanding the Bible, as well as the histories of Judaism and Christianity. It’s happening live on August 22nd from 8-9:30pm Eastern Time.

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Jared: Today on the Bible for normal people our topic is who are the Pharisees actually, and our guest is also a previous guest, AJ Levine. 

Pete: Yes, AJ is a friend of the podcast and she is known for just doing tireless work on helping Christians understand Jesus and the New Testament within a Jewish context, which seems like it’s something that doesn’t need to be said, but it really does.

And she’s written a ton of books, and she’s been at this for just a long time, has had a wonderful career talking about this with many, many people, and it’s a great discussion. 

Jared: The book that we’re going to be referencing throughout this episode is called The Pharisees. So, if you enjoyed the conversation, feel free to pick that up or one of her many other books that help Christians understand the Jewish context of the New Testament. So, with all that said, let’s get into the episode. 

AJ Levine: “And I’m thinking, you might be a Pharisee if you care about Torah. You might be a Pharisee if you’d invite Jesus for dinner. You might be a Pharisee if you preserved your tradition despite a devastating war. You might be a Pharisee if you’re interested in holiness. You might be a Pharisee if you’re capable of arguing with another person and then going out to dinner afterwards. So why not change the stereotype rather than continue to trade on negative stereotypes? Which is just, it’s, it’s bad history.”

Jared: Well, AJ, welcome back to the podcast. It’s great to have you again. 

AJ Levine: I’m glad you invited me back. 

Jared: Absolutely. So, we’re going to talk about something pretty specific that I think a lot of our listeners will have heard about, but I think they may be surprised at some of the things they learn here, and we’re going to talk about Pharisees.

So, if we can just start with, what does the word Pharisee mean and what is a Pharisee, historically speaking? Can you kind of walk us through that history? 

AJ Levine: It’s a little more complicated than most people think. We’re not sure about the etymology, we’re not sure about the origins, and the only Pharisee from whom we have written records happens to be Paul of Tarsus. So, figuring out who they are becomes a little bit of an act of historical investigation. 

In terms of the name itself, there are two major possibilities of the name derivation. The Hebrew root perush can mean “to be separated,” but then we have a problem of being separated from what? It’s clear the Pharisees were not separated from the general people, they’re out there teaching and they’re getting a lot of good response.

So perhaps separated from sin, or perhaps trying to separate the holy from the profane. But the term can also be related to another Hebrew root which means “to interpret”. And that would make sense because the Pharisees and all the sources that we have seem to be interpreters of Torah, interpreters of God’s law, or the Pentateuch, trying to figure out how you take this ancient text and make it relevant in a first century context, because all law codes have to be interpreted.

So are they separate? Are they interpreters? Did they even give this name to themselves? So here’s the weird thing. Sometimes we get called things that originally were not developed by us. Protestants didn’t call themselves Protestants. They called themselves Reformers. The term Protestant got lobbed onto them by their Catholic opponents. So, did the Pharisees even think of themselves as Pharisees? Huge question. 

Pete: So, do we know anything about their origins historically? I mean, there weren’t Pharisees in 500 BCE, right? 

AJ Levine: Not as far as we know.

Pete: Yes. I mean, when did we first hear of them? 

AJ Levine: [Chuckles] Josephus, who’s a first century historian, a slightly younger contemporary of Jesus, gives us the most details about Pharisaic history. The problem is, we’re not sure how good his sources are, and he, like all other historians, is pretty tendentious. He’s writing to tell a particular story, so he’s going to spin things the way he wants. Josephus, in fact, doesn’t like the Pharisees very much. To use the British term, they’ve up jumped, they’ve gotten ahead of their station.

Josephus, who’s a priest, which is in Judaism an inherited position, thinks that people ought to be listening to the priests, but instead they’re listening to these Pharisees, the slay group. Josephus locates them during a period before the time of Jesus, about a hundred years or so during what might be called the Maccabean or Hasmonean period.

So they originally start showing up along with another group called Sadducees and a third group called Essenes in Josephus’ history. They seem to be, a hundred years before Jesus, pretty strong political players connected to the independent Jewish monarchy at the time. Because Jews had political autonomy for about a hundred years, from about 165 to 63, before Jesus. They lost it when the Romans came in. 

So, political figures interested in how the country is run, supporting the one Jewish queen that we had, who ruled from 76 to 67, and interested again in how you interpret law. So, how does one behave? How much does one give to charity? How does one take care of the poor? How does one manifest what God wants us to do on a daily basis? 

Jared: Well, I know we’re going to get into this more, and I’m trying to maybe get into just a little bit for people. So, I don’t want to maybe do a deep dive quite yet, but I just thought of our listeners who maybe aren’t as familiar with the Bible maybe asking, why are we talking about Pharisees at all anyway?

And so, could you maybe just give us a little bit of why are they important in a conversation about the New Testament, or just, you know, maybe some of our listeners haven’t read the Gospels in quite some time, and they’re just trying to figure out who are these characters we’re calling Pharisees. 

AJ Levine: Right. Or your listeners may be familiar with them from a vacation Bible school or Sunday school where a very popular song, years ago, I know it’s still being sung because people keep writing to me about it, is something like, “I don’t want to be a Pharisee. I don’t want to be a Pharisee because they’re not fair, you see. I just want to be a sheep.” And it always seemed to me that Christian children should have higher career aspirations than just wanting to be a sheep. [All laughing]

But the point, the point is that, you know, right from the get go, very often little Christian children are taught about Pharisees as this horrible group of hypocritical, money loving, elite, nasty opponents of Jesus so that they get the impression that Jesus comes to fix what the Pharisees screwed up.

And because the Jewish tradition actually traces the rabbinic movement back to the Pharisees, when Christians are maligning this group, Jews are looking at this group as the ones who were able to preserve Judaism despite the disasters of this war against Rome in the middle of the first century, the destruction of the temple, and the increasing numbers of Jews taken into diaspora as slaves. The Pharisees were the ones who helped them maintain their identity apart from land and apart from temple. 

Pete: Yeah, okay, well, bottom line, just to introduce, how would you describe a Pharisee in a tweet length definition to someone who just knows nothing about them? What did they do? 

AJ Levine: They are prominent Jewish teachers who, according to much of the New Testament, are hypocritical opponents of Jesus, so they come off as the enemy. 

Pete: Okay. And so they deal with biblical interpretation and how, again, these are basic questions for some, but new, new issues for others. How are they distinct from those other groups that you mentioned, the Sadducees and the Essenes, and maybe throw the Zealots in there too while we’re at it?

AJ Levine: Well, our first century historian, Josephus, is our major source for what Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, and Zealots believed. 

Pete: Josephus again! We can’t do any better than that?

AJ Levine: Well, we can do some reconstructing from the Dead Sea Scrolls, from the Letters of Paul, from the Gospels, and from rabbinic literature. But the Gospel of John never mentions Sadducees. We have nothing from the Sadducees at all. All we have is reports from people who didn’t like them very much. So here’s the basic difference.

When Josephus talks about these groups, he compares them to Greek philosophical schools because he’s trying to make Judaism and the Jewish tradition look kind of posh in the Roman Gentile readers. So the Pharisees are like Stoics, they follow a middle path, they don’t celebrate luxury, they live a simple life, they’re good teachers, they’re out among the people, they’re very rational, they believe in a combination of fate and free will, and they believe in resurrection of the dead.

The Sadducees are kind of like Epicureans, I mean, they’re conspicuous consumers, they believe just totally in free will, because of course they believe they earned their positions of power and authority. They don’t accept the idea of resurrection of the dead. That’s why in New Testament we say the Sadducees didn’t believe in the resurrection of the dead, and that’s what made them “Sad-You-See”. They represent primarily the priesthood and the temple, so they’re the elites. 

The Essenes Josephus compares to the Pythagoreans, so they’re kind of like mystical mathematicians. They’re connected with the Dead Sea Scrolls. They seem to be interested in mysticism, in philosophical speculation. They believe pretty much everything is predetermined, so fate rather than free will, and they believe in some sort of afterlife, but the sources are unclear as to whether they believe we become like the stars in heaven or whether we become resurrected bodies.

The Zealots are kind of like Pharisees with knives. [Pete and AJ laugh] They have the same basic philosophical belief, but their primary concern is that they think the Romans are in the country illegitimately, because the country should be ruled by God, not by the emperor, so they spend a good deal of their time assassinating people who are engaged in Roman collaboration.

Jared: Oh, that’s a lot. So, I do want to kind of get to the, you painted the picture very well of how I would have been taught about Pharisees growing up. They’re just sort of the foil for Jesus and the disciples. Anything that good that Jesus and the disciples represent, the Pharisees are the opposite of that.

And so it is this good versus evil, hero versus villain story. So, can we start to break that down a little bit? And if we don’t have a lot of sources outside of the New Testament, how do we reconstruct maybe what the Pharisees were actually about and can we maybe make them a little more three dimensional than the Sunday School version?

AJ Levine: Absolutely. Even the tweet version or the very short description, it would be like asking someone, well, describe in an objective—or as objectively as you possibly can, describe the American political system in terms of the dominant parties. That’s really hard to do in a soundbite unless you’re being quite provocative or quite nasty about one group and quite positive about the other.

We can look to the New Testament first, which is a very helpful source for Pharisees. We have actually a couple of named Pharisees in the New Testament, and they’re all quite darling. Paul is our only self identified Pharisee. He talks in Philippians, his letter to the church at Philippi, about how he is as to the law of Pharisee, and under the law he describes himself as blameless.

So, we already know from Paul that Pharisees, or at least Paul the Pharisee, is not some neurotic, sanctimonious mess who’s trying every single moment to fulfill these impossible commandments. He’s doing really quite well, and he’s quite proud of himself. We have in the book of Acts, a Pharisee named Gamaliel, whom Acts identifies as Paul’s teacher.

And it’s Gamaliel who, when Peter the Apostle and John the Apostle get arrested by Sanhedrin members—probably Sadducees—Gamaliel gets up and says, wait a minute, it’s not clear that these people have done anything wrong. And you might as well let them go, because if they’re saying something really good, you don’t want to disrupt divine plans. So he comes off pretty well. 

In the Gospel of John, we have a fellow named Nicodemus who visits Jesus, recognizes he’s a great teacher, speaks up for Jesus in the Sanhedrin when the legal system is going a little bit wonky, and Nicodemus—together with a fellow named Joseph of Arimathea—wind up claiming Jesus body from the cross and then entombing it in a very, very wealthy tomb under a hundred pounds of myrrh, which is a lot of myrrh.

So, not only the named Pharisees that we have in the New Testament, but other named Pharisees that we have, for example, in Josephus or in rabbinic literature, all turn out to be remarkably darling. So we keep finding exceptions that call into question the general stereotype of the Pharisees as being legalistic, hypocritical, misogynist, horrible people.

Jared: What might motivate the New Testament writers to present it? Because it doesn’t, I guess in some ways I don’t understand why you would need to paint the Pharisees in such a negative light. If, is it just to promote Jesus’s arguments and contrast it with the Pharisees? I just don’t understand what the motivation might be. Do we have any sense of why that would be the case? 

AJ Levine: Well, we know a fair amount from looking at political rhetoric, whether it’s rhetoric in antiquity or rhetoric today. One way to get your message across is to have a negative foil on the Pharisees function in that way. The Pharisees were also the dominant leaders among the Jewish people, especially after the destruction of the temple, but before the destruction as well.

So they’re the primary rivals to this nascent Jesus movement. And people might say, well, why would we follow Jesus when the Pharisees have all this splendid teaching and they’re out here walking the walk and talking the talk, and they’re not talking about the end of the world coming, and they’re not telling us we have to be celibate, and they’re not telling us we have to aid our father and mother.

It’s also a case, just in general rhetoric, that the closer people are, the more nasty the rhetoric can get. I mean, family feuds are a whole lot more nasty than feuds between, say, fifth cousins. Because you’re so close, the struggle for self definition becomes even that more intense. 

Pete: Do you think, AJ, that the destruction of the temple in 70 CE might have affected how the gospel writers present the Pharisees, or is this irrelevant?

AJ Levine: Oh, I think it has a huge impact, in part because the Pharisees are now the stronger rivals. And the gospels all seem to be written after 70 anyway, so Paul writing prior to the destruction of the temple, being a Pharisee is something to celebrate, it’s not a problem. But if the Pharisees are representing the basic teacher, the Sadducees have now lost their power base because the temple is destroyed. The Qumran community gets wiped out when the Romans come through on their way to Jerusalem, so you don’t have the Essenes as rivals anymore. The Pharisees are up there picking up the pieces. And those are pieces that the Jesus people want to pick up as well. 

Jared: So, in some ways, what I hear you saying is we could have a fifth group of this Jesus movement amongst the, at least in a post 70 reality, or right prior to 70, we have these Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, Zealots, and would you put the Jesus movement as another one of these, and they’re kind of vying for what’s the true interpretation or true path of Judaism?

Is that a fair way of saying that? 

AJ Levine: Yeah, and they’re not the only ones. The group around John the Baptist is another, right? If John the Baptist thought that Jesus was the Messiah, then I don’t understand why he continued to keep his own disciples. You’re just gonna put them into the Jesus group, but he doesn’t.

And we know that followers of John the Baptist, who were not Jesus followers, continued through the centuries, even to today. So there are lots of different groups. Plus, you know, people in local villages had their own way of doing things. They’re distant from the temple, they might have local Pharisees coming by, they’ve got village scribes helping them, and they’re going into synagogues and interpreting the law for themselves.

I mean, we don’t, Jews don’t have a head Jew, and they never did. And I think if we did, we probably won’t pay attention anyway. Which means that the text is out there for anybody to interpret, and that’s what they’re going to do. So that what people do in Capernaum might be different than what people do in Nazareth, might be different than what people do in Caesarea, might be different than what people do in the Diaspora.

Pete: So I think basically what you’re saying is that the New Testament portrayal of the Pharisees, there’s some diversity there. 

AJ Levine: Yeah, there’s a lot of diversity. 

Pete: At least in John. Yeah, there’s some, but by and large, it’s what these squabbling family members might say about each other when they’re not getting along. So we’re not getting, obviously, an objective assessment of Pharisees and who they were and what they did. So, what do you think? I’m not trying to fuel people’s imaginations here, but what are some of the most horrible things that the gospel writers say about Pharisees? What are the things that really irk you?

AJ Levine: [Laughing heartily] How much time do we have? 

Pete: Well, you have, you know, as much time as you need, AJ.

AJ Levine: Uh, well, no, because there’s, much annoys me. In Matthew chapter 23, Jesus hauls off a list of major seven invectives. “Woe to you scribes and Pharisees and hypocrites.” And he accuses them of being whitewashed tombs, like, you know, icky and disgusting on the inside, but they look okay on the outside which is a good image of hypocrites.

John the Baptist in the Gospel of Luke, in the Gospel of Matthew, rather, refers to Pharisees as well as Sadducees as a brood of vipers, which is a terrible insult, because people back then thought that little viper babies ate their way out of their mother. So a brood of vipers are snakes that kill the parent tradition. What a great insult. 

Jesus accuses Pharisees of being interested in the letter of the law, but not the spirit. And this moves into the, the standard Christian stereotype of Jews as being legalistic and just interested in, in the law, but without any heart, without any soul, without any compassion. The Gospel of Luke says they’re lovers of money, Josephus says they’re exactly not. That’s a standard insult, by the way. 

And we can see the difficulties being ratcheted up. Here’s just one example. Most biblical scholars think that Mark was the first gospel, and that Matthew and Luke used Mark as a source. This is not controversial. And in Mark, in Mark chapter 12, Jesus is teaching. He’s teaching very well in the temple, and people are asking him difficult questions, trick questions. And because he’s Jesus, he gets out of it. 

And at one point after he’s answered a bunch of questions really well, a scribe comes up to him and says, “Hey, Jesus, great answer. What’s the greatest commandment?” Because there are 613, so you want to know which are the more weighty ones and which are the lighter ones.

And Jesus, who never actually answers a question directly as asked, comes up with two. Love of God, Deuteronomy 6, and love of neighbor, Leviticus 19. Great. Scribe says, “Fabulous answer, worth more than all the burnt offerings,” and Jesus says, “Yeah, you’re absolutely right.” And they get along famously. When Matthew picks up the same story in the same scene, the scribe has now gone missing. There’s no pleasantry exchanged at the beginning. It’s a lawyer from a group of Pharisees who’s coming up to test Jesus. There’s no affirmation by the lawyer of Jesus at the end of his statement, and there’s no affirmation by Jesus. So what Matthew has done is taken a quite benevolent story about a lawyer and turned it into a quite malevolent story about a Pharisee.

You can watch the negative impressions of Pharisees develop as you go from Matthew to Mark to Luke to John. 

Pete: Do you think, I mean, this is a question that I get, so I’m going to throw it to you. And you need to give me the answer here. Do you think that there is any historical validity to contentious moments between the historical Jesus and Pharisees?

AJ Levine: I do. I think Jesus argued a lot. I mean, this is what Jews do. And what could be more important than arguing over what God wants you to do? Now, the problem is, when Christian readers encounter these arguments, they look at Jesus as somehow removing himself from the broader Jewish system. Why? Uh, because Jews are an ethnic group, we’re a people, right, we’re like Americans.

You can’t throw us out, which means you can have whatever view you want, you can argue till whenever, but you’re still a member of the group. But Christians are a religion. And you get into a religion not by citizenship, not by birth, not by geographical origin. You get into a religion by belief. And consequently, Christians generally don’t argue very much because if you argue too much, you’re out of the system.

So when Jews argue with fellow Jews, and we actually have in rabbinic sources, a comment about arguments for the sake of heaven, good arguments worth having. Yeah, not so much in Christianity. You either agree or you’re a heretic. 

Pete: Yeah. 

AJ Levine: Or you join another church. 

Pete: [Laughs] Or start one of your own.

AJ Levine: Or start one, yeah.

Jared: Exactly. But I think that, I think that’s an important dynamic, and maybe you can say more about that, that we see this as representative, that if we see it, from within maybe the lens of Judaism, it is inner argument amongst family members, so to speak, or cousins here. Like we’re working out the particularities and the rhetoric is assuming some level of we’re still part of the same group.

And then when you, like, like you mentioned earlier, uh, within Christianity at least, the way I’ve seen it play out is we’re sort of winnowing down who’s really in. And so, you’re just arguing to kind of kick this group out and then now there’s, you know, 20 of us and eventually there’ll only be one of us because it’s sort of like we get so far into the weeds and then we think we’re the only right ones.

And I just think that’s a dynamic that a lot of our listeners are familiar with. So, can you just say more about how this relationship between Jesus and the Pharisees might represent a more common way of theologizing, maybe I’ll say it that way, than maybe Christians are used to? 

AJ Levine: When Jesus argues with Pharisees, he uses standard Jewish forms of argumentation, like from the lesser to the greater. If you’d pull a sheep out of a pit on the Sabbath, then you would heal a person on the Sabbath. This also tells us, by the way, that free health care is a miracle. Or he argues by precedent, you know, when David went into the temple and ate the bread that he wasn’t supposed to eat, well, if somebody greater than David is here, then my disciples can pluck heads of grain on the Sabbath.

But these are actually Jewish forms of argumentation. You look back to scripture, you argue from the lesser to the greater. And you argue because that’s how you try to figure out what it is that God wants you to do. And it may be that somebody else’s argument is better than yours, and this is a helpful way of actually running a system.

What happens, and here I really like your comment about the family argument. Because what starts as a family argument ceases to be so as soon as the words of Jesus are put into the pages of what becomes the New Testament. And then that text gets read by a group of people who aren’t Jews. So what originally starts out to be an internal discussion, which makes a good deal of sense internally, sounds like Jesus divorcing himself from the Pharisees, throwing the Pharisees out of the system completely. And that’s the problem of what happens when the words of Jesus get put in the Christian canon. 

Pete: You know, something is striking me here listening to this conversation, AJ, and that is perhaps a decision that Christians have to make in reading the Gospels, and this is not just for Pharisees, but this is a broader issue, but is, let’s say, a Christian theology, will it be based on how the New Testament presents certain things, like, let’s say, the Pharisees?

Or should Christians broaden their perspective, I guess, and define that relationship differently based on several things, such as maybe some historical data, maybe things Josephus says, or rabbinic literature, or maybe just realizing that all writing is from a perspective, and you’re not going to get the straight historical information from, from anyone writing anything.

I think that is something that many Christians have come to peace with, but it’s something that other Christians will have great difficulty doing, because it would come across like correcting the Bible or something like that. 

AJ Levine: Right. Well, if you begin from the perspective that everything the Bible says is not only God breathed but factually true, then our conversation is not going to help be very helpful, but if you’re concerned about not bearing false witness against your neighbor, that seems like a good commandment to pay attention to, then we might want to be a little bit more careful in reconstructing the history of people who have negative valences in our own sources in the New Testament. 

And we might want to look to see what the rabbis say, and the Dead Sea Scrolls say, and Josephus says. We might also want to stop, I think this would be a very good thing, stop maligning the Pharisees. So if the books out on, you know, I don’t, you might be a Pharisee if, which is some sort of a genre, like you might be a redneck if, or you might be a Republican if, but it’s usually something quite negative.

And I’m thinking you might be a Pharisee if you care about Torah. You might be a Pharisee if you’d invite Jesus for dinner. You might be a Pharisee if you preserved your tradition despite a devastating war. You might be a Pharisee if you’re interested in holiness. You might be a Pharisee if you’re capable of arguing with another person, and then going out to dinner afterwards.

So, why not change the stereotype rather than continue to trade on negative stereotypes? Which, which is just, it’s, it’s bad history. I think we all, we all do that. So we can look at other groups of Christians that didn’t make it into the New Testament, that what the church would call heretics and say, you know, they’re looking at the gospels going, well, this is ridiculous.

Let’s have some respect for other people’s religious traditions. I think that’s a very nice way of starting. And for those people who say to me, because people write to me all the time and say, well, you know, the New Testament says, blah, blah, blah. And I say, well, from all the historical sources that we get, here’s what we know about the Pharisees. They turn out to be out among the people. They turn out to be the liberalizers. They are not obsessed with ritual purity. They are not legalistic, quite to the contrary, because they’re making things easier, which is why the Dead Sea Scrolls refer to them as seekers after smooth things, right? They’re not the rigorous ones. Did I get the comment? “Well, you know, surely some Pharisees are like that.” And somehow I don’t find that type of argument to be particularly helpful. 

Pete: Yeah. And, um, again, I don’t want to repeat myself here, but the choice that people have to make, and I think what we do here on the podcast and Jared, I think we’ll agree with this, is we’re trying to make available to people, different paradigms, different ways of looking at things and, and to find a constructive way, and I know you do this sort of thing, but to find a constructive way of helping Christians not feel like they’re turning their back on the Bible, but still feel the need to interrogate it. 

AJ Levine: Faith and history should not be mutually exclusive. And historians who take delight in saying, well, this is a contradiction and this could not possibly have happened. I don’t find that particularly helpful because I don’t think that historians should be in the business of destroying people’s faith.

History, if it’s done well, which, I mean, I do try to do this, should enhance people’s faith by answering questions that people might have, by recognizing the historical contingency of all texts that we have. I mean, because otherwise, if we don’t recognize the historical contingency, then we’re all playing first century Bible land, and that would be a little silly.

Pete: But people do that. 

AJ Levine: Yeah, I know they do that. But it is kind of weird because I’m wondering, how did they ever wind up with indoor plumbing or, you know, penicillin? So, we need to move on a little bit.

Pete: But that’s not ordained by God and that’s not an errant, you see? Right? Gotcha. 

AJ Levine: Yeah. 

Pete: I just won this fundamentalist debate, didn’t I? Okay. 

AJ Levine: Yeah. Hmm. Yeah, I’m a Jew. It’s, it’s not my ballgame. 

Pete: Yeah. [Laughing]

AJ Levine: I think if we looked at, for example, some of the things that the New Testament says the Pharisees are concerned about, we might find ourselves to be concerned about that, too. Like, what should one do on the Sabbath? How does one honor a day of rest?

If God takes the time to rest on the Sabbath, we should do that, too. And the Pharisees at least had the intelligence to look at each other and say, well, if you’re not supposed to work on the Sabbath, maybe we ought to figure out what constitutes work. 

Jared: Mmhmm. 

AJ Levine: Because unless you have some sort of consensus, then everybody’s going to go off and do whatever they want, and then there’s no possibility of community.

The Pharisees are interested in how to interpret Torah as a group, and how to argue about it without losing the respect of your neighbor, and how to develop new arguments so that the text can be brought forward from a wilderness sanctuary a thousand years before, or more than a thousand years before the time of Jesus, up to something that’s usable today.

Because all laws have to be interpreted. That’s it. The Pharisees are interested in, um, determining what constitutes holiness, and in our increasingly secularized world, holiness is a really important topic that I think we’ve lost, and we can learn from the Pharisees, how to recover those moments when we’re closer to God, and closer to sanctifying our lives, and sanctifying our homes, and sanctifying the body.

This is all really important stuff. 

Jared: Mm. I think that’s really good, and it made me think, too, of just kind of trying to tie some pieces together from my background and tradition growing up. In some ways, the way you’re describing the Pharisees, I could imagine my tradition kind of doubling down, even in the sense that one of the origins might be to interpret and to say, oh, but interpretation, we just do what it says. We don’t interpret it. 

So, there’s a sense of, this rational thought and saying, okay, well, working on the Sabbath, we should interrogate what does that actually mean, can be seen in some traditions as like overcomplicating it. And I just think of probably the thing, the insult that we get lobbed at us most often is, “Sounds like Genesis and the serpent. Did God really say?” And it’s sort of like, we’re questioning the simplicity of what the text says. And in some ways, the Pharisees are interrogating it and saying, yeah, what does it mean? 

And in some ways, I guess what I’m saying is there is something that I think we can learn from the Pharisees to draw us into more questions that even on the surface, I feel like some more conservative Christian traditions would not want to do, even if you took the, some of the more negative insults, brood of vipers, whitewashed tomb, even just what the Pharisees are actually about could be offensive.

AJ Levine: Many things can be offensive. First of all, all people are interpreting, because if Christians weren’t interpreting, we’d have a lot more people with eye patches and prosthetic limbs. Because Jesus says, you know, if your eye offends you, pluck it out. If your foot causes you to stumble, lop it off. People have to interpret, “oh, that’s hyperbole,” right?

Because otherwise, if you take it literally, you got a problem. So everybody’s interpreting. But it seems to me that maybe interrogating is too strong a term. Wanting to know more about something is a form of love. So, if you fall in love with someone, you want to know more and more about that person, like where did you grow up, and what foods do you like, and what’s your favorite sports team, why do you wear that perfume, or what, you know, whatever it is, you just want to know more.

And the more you know, the more intimately connected you are. And it’s the same thing with looking at scripture. So, rather than just take it and just memorize it, you know, the Bible says it I believe it, that’s it, then it becomes just a book of stuff to memorize, you know, like the ABCs or the periodic table.

Why not dig deeper? Why not show that love by trying to figure out what does this text mean for me today? What might this text have meant in antiquity? Why is this word used rather than that word? And what exactly does God want me to do? Because clearly God wants us to do more than memorize. So what do we learn from this?

And if we can’t learn anything from the text, and how do we learn? We use the various tools that we have, whether it’s literary studies or sociology or linguistics and go learn Hebrew, learn Greek, or if you must, the King James Bible, but then learn something about how English was spoken 500 years ago. Then your appreciation of what you’re looking at just becomes deeper and deeper and the object of your affection just becomes more and more interesting and richer and more complex and more inspirational. How could this be bad? 

Pete: A lot of what you do, AJ, is trying to help people to, you know, have that broader appreciation for, let’s say the Jewish matrix of the New Testament. And this is one of those topics that comes up. So maybe just to get into that, generally speaking, Pharisees have probably been misunderstood really throughout Christian history, at least on the lay level and church levels. Would you agree with that? 

AJ Levine: Again, the evidence that we have is a little bit more complicated than the way the stereotype goes.

I mean, Martin Luther and John Calvin actually have some pretty nice things to say about some Pharisees. The parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector in the Gospel of Luke. They think this Pharisee is actually doing pretty well. He ties the tents of everything. I mean, most people don’t do that. He fasts twice a week as a spiritual discipline. You know, I can barely manage to make it to lunch without, you know, a piece of toast. Um, he, he prays in the temple. He doesn’t ask God for anything. He just gives a prayer of thanksgiving. How cool is that? 

So, we can look at them as actually having quite some honorable characteristics. So, why is it necessary for Christians always to pull out the negative rather than to look at the complexity of this group, which is in fact looking at the complexity of human beings across the spectrum?

We also, for my own concerns, yes, I’m interested in people knowing the Jewish background, but there’s a theological or Christological concerning the Christ part to that. In other words, I don’t think one needs to make Judaism look bad in order to make Jesus look good. And what typically happens is, the worst one can make The Pharisees, the better Jesus looks in contrast, and I think that’s maligning the Pharisees, and I think it’s selling Jesus really, really short.

Because if you have to make another group look bad in order to make him look good, then he’s not doing that great on his own. And I think he’s doing fabulously. 

Jared: Yeah, and I think that’s the rhetoric that I often hear. So, I think that’s just a really good point to consider that very, the framework of needing a foil and how do you help people move past that idea of, well, if Jesus is the hero, we need a villain and the Pharisees, which I think probably in the, you would certainly know better, but sometimes that can be inappropriately then spread, not just to Pharisees, but to Jews in general. And that is a very dangerous path. So how do you help people reconstruct that story of Jesus, of a hero in, in their own faith tradition without needing to villainize his opponents, if you will?

AJ Levine: Well, the reason this villainization happens is in part because the New Testament leads us there. So by the time we get up to the Gospel of John, all these Jewish groups, Pharisees, Sadducees, whoever, have all merged into one big massive Jew, so that John might start out telling a story about Pharisees, but by the end of the story, they’re all Jews, and the Jews wind up being the negative foils in this very dualistic gospel where John is separating light from dark and good from evil and children of God from children of Satan.

And so I think we need to read our text with some caution, in the same way that when we Jews look at comments about, say, uh, 400 years of slavery followed by genocide in Egypt, it doesn’t necessarily make us hate Egyptians. Uh, why? Because we have interpretive traditions that make it very clear that the Egyptians, too, are children of God and that everybody is created in the divine image. Uh, it seems to me that if a Christian wants Jesus to have an enemy, uh, the best candidate should be satan, not Mrs. Goldberg down the street. 

Pete: Okay. That’s good advice. 

Jared: That’s fair. Yeah. 

Pete: Well, listen, AJ, this is, this has been wonderful. I think you’ve clarified a lot of things for our listeners. And I do want to mention your book that you edited. That’s got a lot of good stuff in it and a lot of information, a lot of different angles from which to look at the Pharisees. And we wanted to thank you for taking some time to talk with us and to our listeners. 

AJ Levine: Oh, I’m delighted. Thank you for doing this. I mean, it sounds simplistic, but if we can stop bearing false witness against our neighbors, it seems to me we’re a little bit closer to that kingdom of God that Jesus talks about.

Pete: And our neighbors dead or alive, right? 

AJ Levine: Yeah, well, you know, even the ones we don’t like, um, and the Pharisees can here help us in terms of sanctifying daily life, in terms of learning how to argue, in terms of delving deeper into the scriptures to learn more and more about them because they love them, in terms of forming community with different opinions can be held together. This is all lessons we could use today. 

Jared: Absolutely. And I think it’s a great note to end on, is just that, and that’s what I’m starting to, even in this conversation, reformulate. When I read, there are things to learn from the Pharisees whenever you have that richer context for who they were and what they brought to the table. So thank you so much for bringing that, because I think that really does shift how we might read even the New Testament texts about the Pharisees. 

AJ Levine: I would hope so. Thank you. 

Jared: Well, thanks to everyone who supports the show. If you want to support what we do, there are three ways you can do it. One, if you just want to give a little money, go to thebiblefornormalpeople.com/give. 

Pete: And if you want to support us and want a community, classes, and other great resources, go to thebiblefornormalpeople.com/join. 

Jared: And lastly, it always goes a long way if you just wanted to rate the podcast, leave a review, and tell others about our show. In addition, you can let us know what you thought about the episode by emailing us at info@thebiblefornormalpeople.com. 

Outro: You’ve just made it through another episode of the Bible for Normal People. Don’t forget you can catch our other show, Faith for Normal People, in the same feed wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was brought to you by the Bible for Normal People team: Brittany Hodge, Stephen Henning, Wesley Duckworth, Savannah Locke, Tessa Stultz, Danny Wong, Natalie Weyand, Lauren O’Connell, Jessica Shao, and Naiomi Gonzalez.

Jared: You’re good with AJ, being referred to as AJ through the podcast, is that okay? 

AJ Levine: Absolutely. What am I supposed to call you? 

Jared: Um…

Pete: Well—

Jared: What’s your title these days? 

Pete: Professor, only my family has to call me that. [Jared laughs] Pete’s fine. 

AJ Levine: “Lord, Savior…”

Jared: Jared and Pete’s fine. Yeah, exactly. We go through cycles. Sometimes it’s, you know, Emperor, High Lord. 

Pete: Yeah. 

Jared: Uh, Your Reverence. It’s really depending. 

Pete: King of the Andals and the First of Men and the Old Gods and the New. [Jared chuckles] That’s a thing. That’s in Game of Thrones, by the way, AJ. 

AJ Levine: Yes, I did understand that. I actually prefer Peter over Pete. 

Pete: Peter’s fine. Yeah. People call me both. I really, I don’t have any sort of issues with what people call me, how they use my name. So that’s fine. 

Jared: Yeah. 

AJ Levine: Pete goes with smooth Scotch. Peter goes with good podcasts.

Pete: Ah. Well done. 

Jared: I like it. I like it. 

Pete: What if I like both?

AJ Levine: You can double dip. [All laugh][Beep signals end of blooper clips and end of episode]