US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth lashed out at the press at a briefing on April 16 for criticizing the war with Iran and for not appreciating the achievements of the US military.
Hegseth, who belongs to the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, accused the press of acting like Pharisees. He was referring to the Gospel of Mark, in which Jesus enters a synagogue on the Sabbath and heals a man with a shriveled hand. The Pharisees watching Jesus were not interested in the miracle they witnessed. Apparently, they were watching to see whether Jesus was violating the Sabbath.
Hegseth went on, “You see, the Pharisees, the so-called and self-appointed elites of their time, they were there to witness, to write everything down, to report, but their hearts were hardened, even though they witnessed a literal miracle. It didn’t matter. They were only there to explain away the goodness in pursuit of their agenda.”
The Pharisees are mentioned several times in the Christian Gospels, always in a negative sense. So who were the Pharisees?
According to the late Israeli scholar Menahem Mansoor (Encyclopedia Judaica), they emerged as a distinct Jewish group, or sect, shortly after the Hasmonean revolt, about 165-160 BCE. They were instrumental to the establishment of the synagogue as a focus of Jewish life beyond the Temple.
By the first century CE, the Pharisees represented the religious beliefs, practices, and social attitudes of the vast majority of the Jewish people.
The Pharisees and the Sadducees, the priestly caste that administered the Temple, shared leadership roles in Judea during the late Second Temple period. They shared the same written scriptures and many traditional practices.
Not all priests were Sadducees, and not all sages were Pharisees (See Malka Simkovich, Discovering Second Temple Literature).
However, there were differences, mainly, the Pharisees believed in resurrection after death and in the authority of the Oral Law as well as the Torah.
The irony is that it was the Sadducees who were the wealthy elites, not the Pharisees. And it was the Pharisees who made Judaism accessible to the common person in promoting synagogue worship, Torah study, and study of the Oral Law.
The Gospels also criticize the Sadducees, particularly in relation to their rejection of the concept of resurrection. However, they fade from Jewish history following the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. Pharisee Judaism continued on, evolving to become the Rabbinic form of Judaism that exists today.
The Second Temple sages Shammai and Hillel were Pharisees. It was Hillel who taught, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow,” some time before Jesus and the Golden Rule. And it was the Pharisee Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakai who was instrumental in maintaining Jewish continuity after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE, by establishing a Jewish academy at Yavne and reconstituting the Sanhedrin.
In fact, all the early post-Temple sages, the Tannaim, including those mentioned in the Passover Haggadah, were Pharisees.
A decade ago, New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine wrote an article in Sojourners titled “Quit picking on the Pharisees.” She wrote, “Just as we (the Jews) are heirs of centuries of racism, we are heirs of two millennia of negative stereotypes of Pharisees and, by extension, of Jews – for it is substantially from Pharisaic teaching that rabbinic Judaism springs.”
Hegseth was not the first American political leader to use the Pharisee label to attack opponents. In 2019, Pete Buttigieg, then mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and a presidential candidate, was taken to task for calling vice president Mike Pence a Pharisee.
'Modern-day Pharisee'
To some, the use of the term Pharisee has become so much a part of the vernacular as to refer to any individual who is legalistic, self-righteous, and or hypocritical. Articles with titles such as “12 signs you are a modern-day Pharisee” (Frank Powell, Outreach magazine, 2015) are appearing.
In whatever form it takes, such thinking is historically and theologically wrong. And it contributes to profoundly harmful stereotypes about Jews and Judaism.
The writer, a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is a retired professor at the University of Waterloo.