Dr. Helen Bond

Thank you, Tristan.

It's great to be here.

Yeah, that is the trouble, actually.

The two groups of people who are interested in them are Jews and Christians.

And we'll come on to this, but we've got very little evidence about the Pharisees.

And the problem is that Jews tend to see them as everything that's good.

They're the precursors of rabbinic Judaism.

They're the good guys of antiquity.

Christians, because they've had such a bad press in the New Testament, particularly the Gospels, tend to see them as everything that's bad.

And Luther didn't like them in the Reformation.

And they're sort of the poster boy for everything that's wrong with Judaism at the time of Jesus.

So it's really difficult to sort of steer your way between these two poles.

Very, very mysterious.

The difficulty is because there's so little evidence, people just fill in the gaps.

So, you know, Christians say, oh, well, you know, they must have been bad guys.

And, you know, rather than just looking at where do we get the evidence, what do we know about them?

So, yeah, it's very difficult.

Again, I could just say nothing.

We could leave it at that.

And that might actually be a good thing because the name might mean nothing at all.