Hey. There were Saducees and Pharisees in the first century, and rando groups like Essenes who rejected the whole of Judean society at the time. The Saducees pretty much fell out of relevance with the Roman expulsion after the Bar Kokhba revolt., leaving the Pharisees to develop first century Pharisaic (talmudic) Judaism. Basically, the Saducees were dependent on Temple worship; the Pharisees developed the great interpretive documents of Talmudic Judaism that modern Jews would recognize as the basic Jewish faith that they distilled further, follow to the letter, or react against. Point of the post: The universally pejorative use of "Pharisees" is not quite saying "the Jews," but is closer than you think. Granted, the bias is baked into the language of Christian teachings, so usually Jewish people don't get that riled up (anyway, usually when we get riled up, we write long bbs lectures rather than taking violent action, except the guys in the Israeli gov't...)
Thanks for the history lesson. The Essenes wouldn’t fit the rhetorical role, and I don’t really understand the history of the Saducees to know how they’d fit. Classically my understanding of the role of the Pharisees, filtered through the lens of Christianity because of course that is the only yardstick defining reality that matters in this thread, has them as the lawgivers and judges that decided whether those spreading the gospel of Jesus were prophets or madmen inciting social threats. So in the context of my rhetorical construct they are well suited for the role of court inquisitor not because of any religious or ethnic alignment but because that is what they did.
Incidentally thinking of my view through the lens of a naive Christian I’m tempted to think of the Pharisees as being the Jewish Taliban developing Jewish Shariah. There are a couple of aspects to that worthy of discussion. One is that in those days it led to violence against or persecution of the Christian disciples of Christ. That’s where the problems arise, just as they do with the Muslim Taliban and the Muslin Shariah, and equally with today’s domestic Christian Taliban and Christian Shariah.
When I was a kid my father was a Goldwater Republican, and I remember one of his axioms being “your rights end where my nose begins.” I think that needs to be a guiding principle of religious freedom:
you are free to practice your religion up to the point it conflicts with anyone else’s right to practice their religion. For example, if you want to post Bible verses in public don’t discriminate by opposing those who would post from the Quran or the Talmud. Don’t erect statues and of Jesus and the Saints but oppose those of Vishnu or Krishna.
The other aspect worthy of discussion is that your commentary highlights how difficult it is to criticize the <%wildcard_religion%>_Taliban and <%wildcard_religion%>_Shariah in any way without being accused of attacking <%wildcard_religion%> itself. That’s a consequence of the nature of religious warfare I think, and illustrative of it as well. My choice to use the Pharisees as a rhetorical device was not because they were Jewish, but because of what they did the the Christian prophets. Of course that is leaving aside the detail that they did what they did in defense of their Jewish beliefs, but if we go there soon we have Crusaders up in arms defending their Holy Land, and that’s just too much for this screed.
That’s probably a good point to end this overlong ramble, now that I’ve proved that you’re not the only one who can post long bbs lectures, lol. Thanks for your patience!
