Pharisees and Evangelical Preaching

See the full Pharisees forum here:
https://www.ancientjewreview.com/read/2022/3/21/the-pharisees-an-sbl-2021-review-forum

For too many evangelical preachers the negative stereotype of Pharisees in the Gospels, especially as found in the vituperative rhetoric of the Gospel of Matthew, chapter twenty-three, has become such a strong trope that to call someone a “Pharisee” is a pungent criticism at the deepest level. Tragically, the negative trope has been transferred to Jews – all Jews of all time. Judaism then became for many evangelicals a religion that generates hypocrites, legalists, and picayune meticulosities. Pharisees, in much evangelical preaching, is another word for evil people who stand under God’s fiercest judgments for religious leaders. 

What complicates the trope for people in my circle of evangelicalism is two-fold: first, that the harshest words for Pharisees are from an incarnation of God, namely, from Jesus himself. Add to this a second: the Bible is an infallible record of not only what Jesus said but what Christians are to believe. These words carry divine authority for evangelical Christians the world over. These two complications have handed on to Christians and preachers an easy opponent. Too easy. And dangerously so. Atrocities and slander and libel propagate themselves, at times daily and systemically, from the Bible-based rhetoric of vituperation. Criticisms that came from a specific context spawned not only anti Judaism but also antisemitism, racism, and murder. How else to explain medieval Christians turning from a Eucharist in Holy Week into murderous rages!

I have myself worked hard to teach my students otherwise. To teach them what the Pharisees were like, and why Jesus and they differed over, and how we can do better in our language. The Pharisees, co-edited by Joseph Sievers and Amy-Jill Levine, however, humiliated me. More than once I put it down and lamented something I had thought, taught, or wrote. I consider The Pharisees socially redemptive and a substantive contribution to Christian discourse. That is, if it gets in the right hands and is read by the ones most in need of it.

Evangelical Christian faith and Jewish faith, with all their nuances and varieties, have every right to dialogue, debate, and disagreement, but when criticism of the Pharisees crosses the line into maligning persons with whom we differ we need to raise a flag of denunciation. Christians think Jesus is the Messiah, though most of them have very little idea what “Messiah” means in its Jewish world. Those who affirm Judaism (with the exception of Messianic Jews) think he was not. Each should be able to say so without crossing those lines and with mutual tolerance and respect. But this is a book for Christians to re-learn who the Pharisees were, so Christians can repent and lament from their history-impacting, and from their relentless, mistaken rhetorical denunciations.

Levine’s essay in this formidable volume picks up the entire substance of the book and walks straight into the classroom and behind the pulpit for some honest conversation. With her characteristic incisiveness and candor, she yields an abundance of suggestions that deserve far more space than a review can give. Her intent is to offer “how houses of preaching and teaching can be constructed on a firmer, nonprejudicial base” (403). She succeeds in her offer but whether evangelical preachers will listen is a question one must ponder. As Susannah Heschel and Deborah Forger have sketched, the pleas of Jews to Christians to knock it off have fallen on unlistening ears for centuries. So their instructions and corrections must be said over and over, and it would help most if evangelical leaders would just stand up and say “I’m sorry. We have been terribly wrong. Help us learn about the Pharisees and Judaism so we can get this right.” I know I am.

Levine points out Christian tone deafness, the lack of time spent to understand New Testament texts sufficiently and historically and contextually, the equation of Pharisee with “hypocrite” and then transferring that to social criticisms like white supremacy (I would add, because I’ve heard it, political correctness), a deep suspicion forming in the academy against the value of historical and contextual studies, diminishing the potency of the Gospel texts by saying they are not about all Pharisees [observing that “good” Pharisee only works if most are bad], lectionaries intensifying the problem by including texts that can easily be misread, and children’s educational curricula and teachings (406-415). Not long ago I heard this up close and personal in a church where I was worshiping. The children’s pastor used a historically mistaken understanding of the Pharisees as a foil for Jesus to make Jesus look good (415). I have for years heard Levine say Christians don’t need the Pharisees as a foil to make Jesus look good. She gave me ears to hear this better. I had just begun reading this book at the time that pastor said those words. Levine points to this by saying “Bashing Pharisees is a staple of some Sunday school curricula” (414). I’m sorry for this. I know professor after professor who will cringe in hearing such words, and many of them will double down in their commitment to teach a better view more intensively. We should.

Levine’s solutions are wise lessons rooted in decades of experience. There is of course “no easy fix” (415), but she proposes listening and looking and supporting the sermon by instructions in various forms that put to rest the stereotypes. She gives some examples, including urging Christians to read the excellent notes in The Jewish Annotated New Testament as well as her more contextually sensitive analogies to the Pharisee criticisms of the tax collectors, like seeing them more like “loan sharks and pimps, drug dealers and arms traders” (418), analogies I’ve never heard nor never used (but will now as this one tore fabric from my own cloth of interpretation). There is enough in Levine’s essay to raid the preacher’s toolbox, to lift the mistaken tools, and to toss them into Gehenna where they belong with other false idols. Entire curricula in both churches and schools deserve a thorough examination and purgation of bad history, dangerous tropes, and poisoned teachings. Some of this has been undertaken, and she sketches some of them, but they are but a beginning. I know of no evangelical movement to examine the various curricula, but I really like her idea of “sample homilies” on Pharisee texts (422). Evangelicals like to preach, so perhaps a volume of sermons about the Pharisees that is historically sensitive and socially tolerant will take a big step forward.

Levine expresses the heart of her pleas: “not one of censorship” but “sensitivity and mutual respect” (426). “We are stronger, we Jews and Christians, when we work together, and when we learn to listen through each other’s ears, and see through each other’s eyes” (426). That theme is followed through with an essay by Massimo Grilli and Joseph Sievers, who point to three fundamental issues in the Christian dangers of stereotyping Pharisees: (1) ontological – who were they really? (2) epistemological – how do we get to a historically responsible understanding of them? And (3) hermeneutical – how do we read Pharisee New Testament texts? None of these issues has easy and even uncontestable conclusions, but they pin to the mat the important topics. Scholarship of our day, from Jules Isaac to E.P. Sanders (who makes for one of the first readings for many Christians), has concluded that the story of the Pharisees has been not only seriously misunderstood (think of Joachim Jeremias, on whose works I first cut my teeth as an undergrad) but also seriously misused. Their conclusion is that a 1st Century history must be rewritten so Christians can see an alternative perspective.

Their appeal to a historical critical method, however, will meet some pushback by many evangelicals who have formed into tribes that care little for historical context and who dismissively label such revisions some kind of “woke” history. Any layering of the Gospel texts into earliest and latest redactions, any judgments against the historical veracity of the texts, and any suggestions that Jesus set a dangerous precedent will not win with them. But I can vouch for an evangelical appreciation for historical contextual studies that simultaneously enlighten a Gospel text and toss fresh light on who the Pharisees were. That kind of work will gain adherents. Such an approach will forge new understandings and changed perceptions.

Their appeal to find “points of contact” (438) can compel change. So also these (their) conclusions, though they have more than these: (1) study the Pharisees to find what they were really like; (2) discover the original contexts for what is said about Pharisees and how different that context is from ours; (3) when expounding a difficult text say so, provide alternative readings, and be candid; (4) work against using stereotypes; and I deeply appreciated another of their observations, namely (5) that the preacher can find positives about the Pharisees in the polemical texts. I’ve often told my students and audiences when approaching a Pharisee Gospel text that they made for the best of neighbors. Not a few have raised eyebrows, and that’s when I know something hit home.

The final section of this book is a generous plea for toleration and goodness by Pope Francis, which gives this book something special. He said to those at this conference that their work “will contribute to a more accurate view of this religious group, while also helping to combat antisemitism” (442). Most helpfully for evangelicals, he pulls out examples in the Gospel texts that do not fit the stereotype, like Nicodemus and the word of Jesus that said, “You are not far from the kingdom” (Mark 12:34). One of my favorites is the close connections of Jesus to Hillel and Rabbi Akiva in their teaching of a form of what Christians call the double commandment and Golden Rule.

Which is where this volume ends, on a harmonious note from Jesus and rabbis that the essence of a religious life is to love one another as ourselves. When we do this, we simply cannot act out in racial or religious prejudice.