Winter 1984 - 1985 - Quarterly Review

NEW TESTAMENT RECONSIDERED
religion, but that Judaism necessarily tends towards petty legalism,
self-serving and self-deceiving casuistry, and a mixture of arrogance
and lack of confidence in God. But the surviving Jewish literature is
as free of these characteristics as any I have ever read (Paul and
Palestinian Judaism, p. 427).
What one does find in reading Jewish literature is that the promise
and command of God are always kept in relationship to one another
and that the grace of God in choosing and ultimately redeeming Israel
is strongly emphasized.
Although brief, this description of the anti-Jewish interpretive
scheme provides the backdrop against which the new scholarship can
be represented.
THE PHARISEES
In the anti-Jewish paradigm which has just been reviewed, the
Pharisees are regarded as the chief examples of what went wrong in
Judaism; it was to what they stood for that Paul and Jesus were in total
opposition. Yet in the emerging scholarship it is precisely they whose
reputation is most being refurbished. Two points are involved, one
negative and one positive. Negatively, (a) Paul never mentions
Pharisees as his enemies, and (b) scholars increasingly recognize that
the conflicts between Jesus and the Pharisees in the Gospels are the
products of later hostility between the Pharisee leaders of the
synagogue and the church of the late first century. Writes Norman
Perrin:
So the diatribe against "the scribes and Pharisees" in Matthew 23
does not reflect a conflict between Jesus and the scribes and
Pharisees of his day, but one fifty years later between Matthew and
their descendants spreading their influence from Jamnia. 8
The late first century was a time of desperation and conflict for both
church and synagogue, each threatened by turmoil from within and
by the Roman Empire from without, and the later New Testament
writings reflect the Christian side of this dissension.
The positive point is that in the new scholarship the image of the
Pharisees is drastically improved. Here they are no longer the
polemically targeted "chief heavies" of the New Testament but,
rather, the one group of official Jews (the others being the Sadducees,
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