The Pharisees themselves most emphatically did not regard their traditions as merely human! On the contrary, they affirmed an oral law from Moses handed down through successive lineage, and they claimed it was comparable in authority to the written law. This amounted to a similar kind of two-source theory to what we find in Roman Catholic Church today. D. A. Carson notes that Pharisees regarded their oral tradition as “having authority very nearly equal to the canon.”
