Pharisees

18 Episodes

The Pharisees were a lay movement within late Second Temple Judaism, active from roughly the mid-second century BCE through the first century CE, centered on interpreting and applying the law beyond the temple cult. They accepted developing oral traditions alongside the written Torah, emphasized purity and legal interpretation in everyday life, and are widely understood as an important antecedent to later rabbinic Judaism.

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Why this topic matters

Questions about the Pharisees expose several of the show’s recurring concerns at once: how Second Temple Judaism actually worked, how legal interpretation developed, and how later Christian polemic flattened one Jewish movement into a stock villain. The conversations here stress that the Pharisees were not simply the New Testament’s antagonists, but a historically situated movement trying to work out how Torah should be interpreted and practiced beyond the temple, in ordinary life, amid political upheaval and competing Jewish sects.

Debates over the Pharisees also expose how much modern readers inherit from later caricature instead of ancient evidence. Again and again, the show returns to the fact that using “Pharisee” as shorthand for hypocrisy or legalism is historically sloppy and antisemitic, because it turns the predecessor of rabbinic Judaism into a slur. That makes the topic more than background for gospel stories: it becomes a test case for whether biblical interpretation will preserve inherited stereotypes or take seriously the diversity and internal arguments of early Judaism.

Where to start

Start here for the best in-depth listening on Pharisees: featured segments, featured episodes, and the episode with the most mentions.

Quotes from the Data

“The Pharisees are kind of a, a lay movement that are about, uh, the law and they're about purity.”

Dan McClellan Episode 123

“The biggest differences between the two, the Pharisees accepted this oral tradition and the authority of traditions about how to interpret the law.”

Dan McClellan Episode 123

“And like I said, the Pharisees would become rabbinic Judaism, which is the mainstream of Jewish tradition. Today. And so it is directly maligning the ancestor of contemporary Judaism.”

Dan McClellan Episode 123

“The Pharisees are one of the main schools of thought within Judaism, one of the main streams of tradition. They are the ones who end up becoming what becomes Rabbinic Judaism.”

Dan McClellan Episode 96

Top episodes

Ranked by mentions of Pharisees across the transcript. Start with the top mention above, then keep going here.

All episodes

Every episode currently tagged with Pharisees.