The Pharisees: Their History, Character, and New Testament Portrait

by Kent L. Yinger, Craig A Evans (Foreword)

A struggle is currently underway to figure out one of the central groups in the gospel story . . . the Pharisees. Were they ""hypocrites or heroes""? Or as one recent writer put it, maybe they were just ""good guys with bad press."" Scholars of Judaism and of the NT have been painstakingly correcting, even rehabilitating, the image of the first-century Pharisees, but this seems not yet to have affected most readers of Scripture. Here at last is a book that lays out for the non-specialist the evidence for the origin and true nature of the Pharisees . . . and challenges them to re-read the gospel stories with real Pharisees in mind rather than caricatures.

244 pages, Hardcover

Published May 19, 2022

Reviews

[Logan Williams · Rating 2 out of 5]

On the one hand, this book offers a helpful overview of the primary sources for our knowledge of the Pharisees with respect to their emergence, views, activities, and social status. For this, Yinger primarily depends on Josephus, and his reading of that material is helpfully informed by Mason's _Flavius Josephus on the Pharisees_ (at times offering his own proposals for various interpretations and translations). He touches briefly on the Qumran literature as well, and only barely on the Rabbinic material, the latter of which is not well understood—for example when he claims that the Tosefta is contained within the Talmud (apparently confusing "Tosefta" with "Tosafot" (p. 56)). For those looking for an up-to-date overview of what we can know about the Pharisees which is especially accessible to students, this book will still be useful.

On the other hand, though Yinger sets out to offer a more sympathetic portrayal of the Pharisees over against Christian caricatures of them as petty hypocritical legalists, he persistently falls back into classic Christian tropes about the Pharisees and misunderstandings about purity laws and practices. For example, he asserts (appealing to Craig Blomberg in a footnote) that the Pharisees' issue with Jesus' dining with tax collectors and sinners primarily concerned ritual purity; Jesus eating with these folk, says Yinger, signals his "more relaxed" approach to ritual purity (pp. 103–107). This unhappy proposal was (in my view) overturned by Hyam Maccoby's fatal criticism well over twenty years ago in a short article in Biblical Theology Bulletin ("How Unclean Were Tax-Collectors?", notably not cited by Yinger). Yinger also makes the strange proposal (again with an appeal to Blomberg) that the Pharisees, but not Jesus, thought impurity was transmissible (p. 107). This would be a truly remarkable view for Jesus to hold as a Jew—indeed, too remarkable to be plausible at all. Given that Luke 2.22–24 assumes that Jesus contracted impurity through Mary's lochia (a passage not cited by Yinger), it is highly unlikely that (at least) Luke (and the other gospel writers, for that matter) portrays Jesus as denying that impurity is transmissible. More misunderstandings about purity abound when Yinger claims that Jesus touching "lepers, corpses, and women with discharges" constituted "behaviours [that] raised purity concerns" (p. 113). Even though nothing in the gospels indicates that anyone accuses or even asks Jesus about these things, Yinger is certain that they would be concerning. Of course, contracting such derivative impurities would raise concerns for nobody (unless, as per Lev 21.4, 11, Jesus were a levitical priest, but he was not) since nobody thought contracting ritual impurity per se was sinful—a point Yinger notes multiple times but does not follow through to its implications. The old Christian caricature of the legalistic Pharisees comes out explicitly in Yinger's conclusion regarding Jesus' accusation of hypocrisy against the Pharisaic ruling on the qorban vow of Mark 7.11: "It was the Pharisees' stubborn focus on such legal details in the face of Jesus' God-sent hermeneutic that he branded as hypocrisy" (p. 117). Confusingly (but in keeping with his reading of the Pharisees as caring too much about "legal details"), he even claims that "Jesus does not, however, enter into _halakhic_ debate" with the Pharisees over this issue. Closer attention to Moshe Benovitz's volume _Kol Nidre_ would have quickly dispelled these suppositions. This book is cited in passing (p. 116n11), but it does not seem that Yinger has integrated Benovitz's conclusions at all, since Yinger appears not to understand that the vow of Mark 7.11 is a prohibitive qorban vow, not an actual dedication of something to the temple (pp. 115–117).

Yinger's book is to be applauded for presenting and analysing the source material for the Pharisees in an accessible format that is informed by recent research. Despite his insistence that we must break away from old Christian stereotypes about the Pharisees, one may fairly wonder if this book will help its readers do so.