Dr. Helen Bond

There's a variety spectrum of opinion.

And the Pharisees are the ones who have a level of education.

They know their texts.

They can come and kind of talk to Jesus and debate.

really try to understand.

And I think some of this too, undoubtedly has been affected by later debates between Christ followers and, you know, the local synagogues as very slowly, very gradually, and at different times in different places, the followers of Jesus start to become something different from Jews.

So I'm sure it's been enhanced by all of that later debates, later antagonism.

That's probably largely why the Pharisees come over so negatively.

The old fashioned view was that the Pharisees just continued as the rabbis who sort of emerged after the destruction of the temple as the sort of, you know, leaders of certain branches of Judaism.

So you get rabbinic literature being written at this time, the Mishnah.

about 200 CE, the Talmuds, Jerusalem and the Babylonian Talmuds written sort of a few centuries later.

So the traditional idea was that Pharisees just continued.

They morphed into the rabbis.

That's been questioned quite a lot recently.

Some people would say, oh, you can't make any connection at all.

I would go for something more moderate.

I mean, I think some of this Pharisaic

interest and the interest in the laws.

And also this whole idea about purity and how you extend temple purity is actually something that's very relevant once the temple has gone.

How do you make up for the lack of a temple now that we no longer have a temple?