P˒rushim and Tz˒dukim (plural; singular Parush, Tzadok), “Pharisees and Sadducees.” These were the two main factions of the religious establishment in Yeshua’s time. In 586 B.C.E. Babylon conquered Judea and Jerusalem, laid waste the First Temple, which King Solomon had built, and deported the ruling classes to Babylon. With the Temple, the sacrifices and the cohanim no longer functioning, the Jews in exile and after their return seventy years later sought another organizing principle on which to center their communal life. They found it in the Torah (the “Law”; see 5:17N), as can be seen already in the report of the reading of the Torah by Ezra (Nehemiah 8). The earliest students, developers and upholders of the Torah seem to have been of the hereditary priestly caste—Ezra himself was both a cohen and a sofer (“scribe”). But later, as the cohanim were drawn back into caring for the sacrificial system as it developed during the Second Temple period, a lay movement which supported the Torah and favored its adaptation to the needs of the people arose and began to challenge the authority of the cohanim. The cohanim and their backers in the first century C.E. were known as Tz˒dukim, after the cohen gadol appointed by King Solomon, Tzadok (his name means “righteous”; compare 6:1–4&N, 13:17&N).

Meanwhile, under the Maccabees in the second century B.C.E. those whose main concern was not the sacrifices but the Torah were called Hasidim. (Except for the name, which means “pious ones,” there is no connection between these and the various Orthodox Jewish communities that follow the teachings spread by the talmidim of the seventeenth-century Eastern European teacher and mystic known as the Ba˓al Shem Tov.) The successors to the Hasidim were known as P˒rushim, which means “separated ones,” because they separated themselves from worldly ways and worldly people. These P˒rushim not only took the Tanakh to be God’s word to man, but also considered the accumulated tradition handed down over the centuries by the sages and teachers to be God’s word as well—the Oral Torah—so that a system for living developed which touched on every aspect of life.

In Yeshua’s day the Tz˒dukim tended to be richer, more skeptical, more worldly, and more willing to cooperate with the Roman rulers than the P˒rushim. However, the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E. ended the viability of the Tz˒dukim by destroying the venue of their chief responsibility; and whatever tradition they may have developed has for the most part been lost. See Ac 23:6&N.

The P˒rushim and their successors were then free to develop further their own received tradition and make it the center of gravity for Jewish life everywhere. Eventually, due to the dispersion of the Jewish people, which separated many from the living flow of tradition, these oral materials were collected and written down in the Mishna (220 C.E.), under the editorship of Y’hudah HaNasi (“Judah the Prince”). The rabbis’ discussions about the Mishna during the following two or three centuries in the Land of Israel and in Babylon were collected to form the Jerusalem and Babylonian Gemaras. Combined with the Mishna these constitute the Jerusalem and Babylonian Talmuds.

Centuries of Christian preaching have made the English word “Pharisee” virtually a synonym for “hypocrite” and “stubborn legalist”—witness the entry for “pharisaical” in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary:

“Resembling the Pharisees especially in strictness of doctrine and in rigid observance of forms and ceremonies; making an outward show of piety and morality but lacking the inward spirit; censorious of others’ morals or practices; formal, sanctimonious, self-righteous, hypocritical.”

While it is true that Yeshua himself lambasted “you hypocritical Torah-teachers and P˒rushim” for having many of these traits (see chapter 23 and 23:13N), Christians often forget that his hard words were delivered in a family context—as a Jew criticizing some of his fellow Jews. A glance at any modern Jewish community newspaper will show that Jews are still critical of each other and willing to endure such criticism—reproof and rebuke are normal and acceptable behaviors in many Jewish settings. However, Yeshua does not take his fellow Jews to task for being Pharisees but for being hypocrites—the former does not imply the latter. Moreover, Yeshua’s criticism was not of all P˒rushim but only of those who were hypocritical. While some Pharisees were insincere or overly concerned with externals, others were “not far from the Kingdom of God” (Mk 12:34), and some entered it and became followers of Yeshua without ceasing to be P˒rushim (Ac 15:5). In fact Sha’ul said before the Sanhedrin, “Brothers, I myself am a Parush”—“am,” not “was” (Ac 23:6).

Because of the subconscious negative associations most people have with the English word “Pharisee,” the JNT text uses the original Hebrew words “Parush” (singular) and “P˒rushim” (plural), and for the sake of parallelism substitutes “Tzadok/Tz˒dukim” for “Sadducee/Sadducees.”

This all happened at Bethany on the other side of the Jordan, where John was baptizing.