The passion narrative is clear that largely Sadducean Jerusalem aristocrats engineered Jesus’ execution; first-century sources also suggest that Jesus’ Jerusalem followers and the Pharisees sometimes made common cause in subsequent decades. 99 Moreover, Jesus’ ethical teachings and even belief in the resurrection closely resemble that of the Pharisees. Why then would conflict arise between them?
We have noted that social conflict theory shows that disagreeing groups sharing the most ideology in common often experience the greatest friction.100 Indeed, some later rabbis even thought that debates between Shammaites and Hillelites (two schools of Pharisees in Jesus’ day) occasionally brought them to blows!101
What we can know of Jesus’ actions suggests that his ministry would have generated at the least vigorous debate with many of his Pharisaic contemporaries. 102 Although some scholars today have viewed Jesus’ denunciations of Pharisees as anti-Jewish because of their subsequent abuse, in Jesus’ lifetime these controversies were “in-house” Jewish controversies, part of a larger pattern of many debates among Jewish groups in that period. Even the harshest of polemic against scribes and/or Pharisees in the Gospels (Mk 12:38-40; “Q” material in Lk 11:39-52 and, more extensively, Matt 23:1-36) was intra-Jewish polemic, the sort elsewhere offered by one Jewish group against another.
Jesus was not alone in criticizing some fellow Jews for hypocrisy. Rabbinic Judaism, which probably sprang in large measure from Pharisaism, harshly condemned hypocrisy.103 Indeed, these later rabbis were quick to condemn the hypocrisy of some kinds of Pharisees whose motives were less than holy,104 and acknowledged hypocrisy among scholars105 and within Israel.106 They regarded hypocrisy in general as morally reprehensible and deserving of judgment.107 The Synoptic writers’ critiques, like these, are Jewish critiques within Judaism, “no more ‘anti-Semitic’ than the Dead Sea Scrolls,”108 and not intended for exploitation by Gentile anti-Judaism. (The Qumran scrolls in fact treat most of Israel as followers of Belial.)109 They are demonstrably quite different from the sort of Gentile anti-Judaism exemplified by Tacitus or Apion, who mocked Moses and Israel, rather than simply critiqued another Jewish group.110
The language of Jesus’ woes111 against scribes and Pharisees (Matt 23:13-29// Lk 11:42-47) reflects the regular conventions of ancient polemical rhetoric.112 In a detailed study, Overman has demonstrated that the language of Matt 23, the harshest of the passages, is not ancient anti-Judaic language, but the language of other sectarian Jewish sources like 1 Enoch, 2 Baruch or 4 Ezra against the establishments of their day that they viewed as corrupt.113 Even lawlessness was a charge sectarian communities regularly leveled against those outside.114 Josephus estimates only 6000 Pharisees in Jewish Palestine,115 surely far less than one percent of the population.116 It is thus irrational to assume that being anti-Pharisaic made one anti-Jewish.117
Josephus testifies that some aristocrats exploited popular piety for personal reasons, and that those who valued popular support dare not appear to fall short in such piety.118 As Davies and Allison point out, “hypocrisy belongs to the human condition and so can always be found in the enemy camp”119 as well as one’s own. Yet the Gospel writers at least sometimes turn this criticism into a moral warning for their own communities (fairly explicit in Matt 24:51).120 Indeed, in one of the most polemical contexts, Jesus even agrees that many of the ethical teachings of the scribes and Pharisees are good, simply critiquing them for not living up to them (Matt 23:2-3).
