Thread by @Delafina777

I've been seeing a lot of "well, we don't KNOW that the Pharisees = early rabbis so it's okay to let them be Literary Villains in the NT" and well, sorry, but we kind of do. (thread)

https://twitter.com/Delafina777/status/1369024911772053504

Part of the confusion is probably from the facts that

A) we don't know exactly HOW the term Pharisee was used

B) it was a term that was largely applied to people by others, rather than what they called themselves

so, as far as A) we don't know exactly HOW the term "Pharisee" was used:

what I mean by that is that we know that this was a religious/political (because they're not separate for Second-Temple Judaism) school of thought that opposed the Sadducees and Romans

but we don't know who among people who adhered to that school of thought it actually applied to

It has the same sort of fuzziness as "Democrat." That term can be used for:

-actual officially elected representatives who are members of the Democratic Party or professional political operatives employed by the party

We use the term in this sense when we say things like "the Democrats totally caved on that bill."

We're referring, for lack of a better term, to professional Democrats.

But we can also use it to mean voters who are officially registered with the Democratic Party, or even just people who largely agree with the Democrats and usually vote for them.

And there's a similar fuzziness around "Pharisee," since it was, for the most part, used by people talking *about* Pharisees, rather than Pharisees themselves.

They usually referred to themselves as chaverim, which can mean "friends," "associates," or "companions."

(A bit like the Quakers, in fact--their official name is The Society of Friends, and "Quaker" was initially a mocking epithet from their enemies, although it eventually became a normative term for them.)

So, we're not always sure whether a particular use of "Pharisee" referred to:

-An officially initiated and communally recognized member of a Pharisaic academy or other group.
-Someone from a Pharisee family.
-Someone who agreed with the Pharisees' take on Judaism.

And it's also not clear when, if ever, the term became a normative one for the Pharisees' self-identification. It seems like it started out as a term applied by others, and then by the time you get to the Mishnah and then the Talmud...

...the rabbis are largely rejecting it, because they don't want to be identified as members of a sect--they want to be understood as the sages, the experts on Judaism Full Stop, not a particular strain of Judaism.

(part of that attempt to shift themselves from being Pharisees, members of a particular sect, to sages, experts on The Only Judaism There Is, incidentally, means reinterpreting what are pretty clearly references to female Pharisees to mean something else entirely

but that's for later)