Politics and the Pharisees

Political Distortions and the Pharisees

The Gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke, known as the synoptic gospels, that is, “seeing together,” were the first writings within the Christian Bible that would come to be referred to as the New Testament. These Gospels were very similar and built upon one another through chronological development. The writings tell of the life and teachings of Jesus Christ through supposed first person accounts that cover the various miracles of Jesus and his miraculous death and resurrection (Thomas, 11/02). In the Gospels, Jesus is constantly portrayed as going against the status quo of the Jewish Pharisee sect and the Roman government in his quest to turn sinners into believers of his word. The Pharisee class is portrayed as the hypocritical antagonist by Jesus through the authors, though at times he is treated as a king by these very same Jews. In this paper I will argue that the three Gospel’s treatment of the Pharisee class was biased and historically inaccurate. The reason for this bias was Greek and Roman anti-Semitism that permeated the society of the day. In a time when the Jewish people were being persecuted from all directions, the propagators of the Gospels wished to distance t

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When they were threatened, they did not hesitate to die for their cause. The Jews, led by the Pharisaic class, are given the choice to free Jesus Barabbas, or Jesus of Nazareth, who are both in prison and soon to be executed for crimes against the State. But the Pharisaic class, which was made up of working-class teachers that had risen to the status of religious leaders through the creation and support of their oral tradition, was the true representative of the Jewish masses. In his time, the teachings of Jesus were in many ways similar to that of the Pharisees. Jesus, however, never seems to be brought into such politics in the Gospels. As is the case in many religions from antiquity through modernity, from Mesopotamia to Greece to Egypt, theology was often written to conform to the political situation of the day, and to strengthen one group’s claim to truth above another’s. The development of the Pharisaic movement was the immediate precursor to what is known and practiced today as Rabbinic Judaism.

I shall begin with the story of Jesus Barabbas (Documents, 66-68). There was a small priestly class, known as the Sadducees, that did in fact try to assimilate with the Roman class and become a part of the Roman government (Thomas, 11/02). The Pharisaic class was radical in that they would die for their beliefs, but only a small portion of their followers, known as the Zealots, were outright militants. Levine, The Jewish Theological Center of America, 1987. In the past, when Roman forces marched into the city of Jerusalem from their post at the Greco-Roman Mediterranean port city of Caesarea, about sixty miles northwest of the holy city, they would be careful to leave behind their standards, which portrayed idols, often Caesar himself as a divinity, as respect for the capital city of the monotheistic Jews.

Approximate Word count = 3005
Approximate Pages = 12 (250 words per page double spaced)

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