Fariseus punição

Third, even in cases of impure flesh, such as a carcass, rabbinic halakah excluded hides, bones, sinews, horns, and hooves from this impurity, and it considers the hide a separate, pure entity.39 

Sanders also noted that the chief priests living, like Josephus’s Pharisees, in Jerusalem, were monied and powerful aristocrats, accustomed to the deference of their Jewish contemporaries (Qumran sectarians excluded). The chief priests de facto ruled in Jerusalem, the second city after Caesarea in Rome’s new (if minor) Judean territory, working in prudent and effective concert with imperial prefects and, later, procurators. Not so, insisted Jacob Neusner against Sanders.

A parade example of this phenomenon is a recent article in the evangelical social-justice flagship magazine, Sojourners. The author explains that Pharisees are “rich and successful people who lived in fancy houses and stepped over their destitute neighbors who slept in the gutters outside their gates! Proud people who judged, insulted, excluded, avoided, and accused others!” He then equates these toxic Pharisaic practices with Judaism in general; speaking of who would be saved, he proclaims, “The very people whom the Pharisees despised, deprived, avoided, excluded, and condemned! Heaven’s gates opened wide for the poor and destitute … the sinners, the sick, and the homeless … even the prostitutes and tax collectors! In other words, all the people the Pharisees were careful to avoid were exactly the ones who would someday be welcomed into heaven! Imagine how this overturning of traditional language of hell must have shocked everyone—multitudes and Pharisees alike.”20 Many contemporary Christians, including a number of my students, approved of this article because they think, erroneously, that Jews (the “multitudes”) equate the rich with fidelity and the poor with sin. When several people wrote to the magazine to complain about such ahistorical stereotyping, Sojourners asked me to write a corrective, which I did.21

In the next generation of postwar scholarship, E. P. Sanders writes about the treatment of Judaism in the time of Jesus and Paul, “The possibility cannot be completely excluded that there were Jews accurately hit by the polemic of Matt 23, who attended only to trivia and neglected the weightier matters.” But “the surviving Jewish literature does not reveal them.”

After the sublime Essene account, Josephus’s remarks on Pharisees and Sadducees are perfunctory. Reminding his audience (cf. 1.110) that Pharisees have the reputation of interpreting the legal ordinances with precision (2.162), he gives both groups equally short shrift, reducing them to a formulaic affirmation/denial relationship.37 Pharisees ascribe everything to Fate in some sense; they consider the soul imperishable, with rewards and punishments awaiting after death; and they have a community in which members care for each other. Sadducees deny the soul and Fate and treat even fellow Sadducees harshly. In light of Ant. 13 and 18 (below), this last contrast may be an obscure reference to the Pharisees’ respect for their elders’ teaching, which Sadducees do not share.

he attached episode does not, however, match the anti-Pharisee headline. Hyrcanus throws a banquet, to which he invites leading Pharisees, Sadducees, and, apparently, others. During the meal he reasserts his commitment to Pharisaic rigor and asks members of the group to be sure to tell him if he goes astray. They all praise his piety, but another guest, a known rabble-rouser, brazenly demands that Hyrcanus relinquish the high priesthood on the ground that he is likely illegitimate since his mother was once a prisoner of Seleucid forces and was presumably raped—a rumor Josephus declares untrue (13.290–292). All the Pharisees are indignant with the man, but a Sadducee present sees an opportunity. He advises Hyrcanus that the Pharisees actually agree with the man—a point not obvious from their reaction. The way to prove it is to ask them what punishment he deserves. This is a trap, readers know, because Pharisees would not call for capital punishment despite their vehement disagreement with the fellow:When Hyrcanus asked the Pharisees what they considered a worthy punishment (for he would be persuaded that the slanders had not been made with their approval, he said, if they advocated punishing Eleazar with a commensurate penalty), they proposed lashes and chains, for it did not seem right to punish someone with death on account of verbal abuse and anyway the Pharisees by nature take a lenient approach toward punishments. At this response, Hyrcanus became extremely angry and assumed that the man had slandered him with their approval. Jonathan [the Sadducee] exacerbated his anger greatly and achieved the following result. He induced Hyrcanus to join the party of the Sadducees, to abandon the Pharisees, to dissolve the ordinances that they had established among the people, and to punish those who kept them. This is the reason, then, that hatred developed among the populace toward him and his sons. (13.294–96)

Back in Ant. 13, Josephus’s linked notices about the Pharisees’ leniency in punishment, their special interpretative tradition, and their resulting popularity are not signs of his esteem. Josephus makes the Pharisees culprits in the hostility toward his favorite ruler, John Hyrcanus. The Pharisee-led popular opposition actually begins when John dissolves the Pharisees’ legal system, and it will dog his sons Aristobulus and Alexander Jannaeus. The Antiquities thus gives a much fuller context to Queen Alexandra’s rapprochement with the Pharisees, briefly narrated in J.W. 1. In this version, however, she can no longer be naively duped by them because of her piety. Since they have been on the scene for a couple of generations as persistent agitators, her embrace of the Pharisees now appears as a Machiavellian move conjured by her dying husband to stabilize her power. He advises her that reinstating the Pharisees and their legal system will mollify the populace, and she eagerly agrees: “He himself … had come into conflict with the nation because these men had been badly treated by him” (13.401–402).

That souls have a deathless power is a conviction of theirs, and that subterranean punishments and also rewards are for those whose conduct in life has been either of virtue or of vice: for some, eternal imprisonment is prepared, but for others, an easy route to living again.

 Without elaborating, Josephus brings four points about the Pharisees into such close contact as to suggest a connection: the extrabiblical tradition guiding their interpretation of Moses’s laws, their reputation for precise (or distinction-making) interpretation, their tendency toward leniency in punishment, and their popularity with the masses, such that Jerusalem’s jurisprudence follows Pharisaic principles even when the magistrates are Sadducees. Notable Pharisees accordingly take their place alongside the chief priests, where Josephus finds his ancestry.

There are two types of woes, the prophetic woe, in which punishment plays a significant role, and the sectarian woe. In Matthew 23 the first two woe sayings and the seventh, the last, are prophetic woes. The others belong to the sectarian type.Marvin Sweeney defines the “woe oracle” in prophetic literature as “a type of prophetic announcement used to criticize the particular actions or attitudes of the people and to announce punishment against them…. [T]he ‘woe statement’ … includes the introductory exclamation hoy, ‘woe!’ … [which] functions basically as a rhetorical device in prophetic literature to catch the attention of the audience.”51 Ronald Hals suggests rather that the genre is only “sometimes” used to announce punishment. He notes further that the woe statement is “continued with a variety of forms,” such as threats, accusations, or rhetorical questions.52

The final collection of woes is the series of three in 100:7–9. The first one may refer to persecution of the righteous: “Woe to you unrighteous, when you afflict the righteous on a day of hard anguish and burn them in fire” (1 En. 100:7). The punishment will be that the unrighteous will burn “in the heat of a blazing fire” (1 En. 100:9). The last woe saying in Matthew 23 is similar in its accusation that the rivals persecute the prophets, sages, and scribes sent by Christ and in threatening them with punishment.

  [author missing] (2021) The Pharisees. [edition unavailable]. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/2984748/the-pharisees-pdf (Accessed: 19 October 2022).

At this, allthe Pharisees become indignant

(13.292). Josephus does not say that Eleazar was a Pharisee, and we

soon learn that non-Pharisees were also present. For certain Sadducees

in attendance cleverly exploit this opportunity by asking the Pharisees

what punishment they deem suitable for the offending man. When the

Pharisees call for (merely) severe corporal punishment—lashes and

chains, rather than death (Josephus notes editorially that the Pharisees

by nature take a moderate position in relation to punishments [

fuvsei

pro;~

ta;~

kolavsei~ ejpieikw`~

e[cousin

;

13.294])—the Sadducees are

able to convince Hyrcanus that their rivals approved

of

the man’s out-

burst, in spite of

what our narrator plainly says. The Sadducees’ device

for proving this, asking the Pharisees how they would punish Eleazar’s

outburst, after their unanimous condemnation of

his words, appears to

confirm that Eleazar was not one of

their school.

 Hyrcanus’s break with the Pharisees and Josephus’s explanationabout their influence receive space at this juncture, apparently,

because they are programmatic for the balance of

the Hasmonean

story.

This rift was not merely a personal one: it had ramifications for

the constitution of

the state because it meant the dissolution of

the

Pharisaic jurisprudence that

had been in place throughout

Hyrcanus’s reign. Although Josephus does not pause to explain why

Pharisees were so popular, or the nature of

their legal precepts, he

does drop an important hint in the banquet story: their penal code

was milder. He will confirm this point in a later note to the effect that

Ananus II, the high priest who executed Jesus’ brother James, was a

Sadducee and therefore

“savage” in punishment (

Ant

.

20.199).