Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Note on transliterations
- Introduction
- Additional note: controversies against Sadducees and/or Boethusians
- 1 Josephus
- 2 Mishnah
- 3 Tosefta
- 4 Babylonian Talmud
- 5 Palestinian Talmud
- 6 Other rabbinic works
- 7 Megillath Ta'anith
- 8 Dead Sea Scrolls
- 9 Apocryphal works
- Bibliography
- Indexes
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Note on transliterations
- Introduction
- Additional note: controversies against Sadducees and/or Boethusians
- 1 Josephus
- 2 Mishnah
- 3 Tosefta
- 4 Babylonian Talmud
- 5 Palestinian Talmud
- 6 Other rabbinic works
- 7 Megillath Ta'anith
- 8 Dead Sea Scrolls
- 9 Apocryphal works
- Bibliography
- Indexes
Summary
The problems of identifying the Pharisees
There are two reasons why it is now virtually (perhaps totally) impossible to write an adequate history of the Pharisees: the first is that there is far too little evidence; and the second, that there is far too much. On the one hand, surprisingly little direct information about the Pharisees has survived: from this point of view alone, a detailed account of the Pharisees is not possible. Yet on the other hand, a number of sources do in fact refer to a group or sect known, in English transliteration, as the Pharisees – and for many people, the most familiar of the references are those in the Gospels. But since the Pharisees appear, in both Christian and Jewish sources, as a part of a very complex history, it follows that the Pharisees cannot be studied in isolation, but only as a part of the history of the whole Jewish people in the period in question – principally, the period of the so-called second commonwealth (from the restoration after the Exile to the fall of Jerusalem in 70 c.e.), and of the following hundred years.
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- Jesus and the Pharisees , pp. 1 - 52Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1973
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