Who Were the Pharisees?

Chapter TWO LIKE BIRDS HOVERING OVERHEAD: THE FAITHFULNESS OF THE GOD OF ISRAEL
2 Who Were the Pharisees?

Twenty years ago or so there took place a massive debate about who exactly the Pharisees were.11 The debaters included heavyweights like Ed Sanders and Jacob Neusner, with the rest of us watching from the sidelines and intervening cautiously, much as a mouse might venture to interrupt a fight between a cat and a dog. That debate has settled down now, and I have not seen good reason to change my mind from the basic conclusions I drew at the time in NTPG chapter 7: that the Pharisees were far more than a small pure-food club; that they were active not only in promoting their own holiness (trying to live at home as if they were actually in the Temple, though not necessarily as priests per se12) but also in persuading other Jews to do the same;13 that they were very popular and influential in the first half of the first century AD;14 and that – a crucial point, this – many of them were (what we would call) highly politically active...