History often saddles people with reputations that are undeserved. Take Florence Nightingale. The biographical facts show conclusively that she was pushy, domineering, and bitchy to an appalling degree. Yet such revelations will never shake her image as the caring nurse par excellence, the patient and saintly Lady With A Lamp. Judas Iscariot, good family man and excellent citizen of his time, is forever doomed to bear the stigmata of traitor to beat all traitors – and, by the way, should he not get great credit for being instrumental in fulfilling God’s plan to have His Son save all men through His crucifixion?
And what about poor old King Canute, that wise and witty ruler, whose age-old reputation for stubborn stupidity seems impervious to correction even though it has been pointed out time and time again that when he commanded the incoming tide not to wet his feet he was simply making a demonstration to his ridiculously sycophantic courtiers that he was not, and did not pretend to be, all-knowing and all-powerful.
Such stereotyping is hard to defeat. I have recently read a scholarly article about those excellent people the Pharisees, whose reputation has suffered sorely through the ages. The Archbishop of Canterbury, for instance, once launched a thunderous accusation that Britain had become a society of Pharisees with the implication that hypocrisy and selfishness and heartlessness had come to dominate that nation. And the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary actually defines Pharisee as “a self-righteous person; a formalist; a hypocrite.”
This is grossly unfair. In real life the Pharisees were kind, modest and studied their opponents’ views before their own. Josephus, the first century historian, reports that unlike the Sadducees – a priestly and conservative elite – the Pharisees stressed universal and egalitarian values. Their driving idea was that holiness was not a privilege of birth or social class. The doors of religious knowledge and sanctity were open to everyone.
In their day they strongly espoused an option for the poor. Indeed their mixture of piety and egalitarianism, social as well as spiritual concern, made the Pharisees famous among the Jews of the time of Jesus Christ. Far from being self-righteous they taught that “No person should be righteous in his own eyes.”
It is particularly strange that such a negative stereotype should be inflicted on the Pharisees at a time when Christian Churches all over the world are increasingly opting for the poor. Many of the leading Pharisees of their day were members of the urban poor. They defended the dignity of the underprivileged. They strove to make Judaism classless and enacted laws “so as not to put to shame those who do not have.”
Indeed the more I read about the Pharisees, the more admirable they seem. They balanced a strong belief in the individual’s responsibility for his own actions with a firm doctrine that individual success should contribute to the community at large. Individual responsibility did not mean for them that each man is responsible only for himself, but that each of us is responsible in ourselves for the welfare of society as a whole. Nor was this mere teaching. The disciples of the Pharisees turned their personal values into laws and social policy. Housing, welfare, and education were the responsibility of the community and were to be equally accessible to all. Profits on essential commodities were to be limited. Employees’ rights were to be protected. Their harsh portrayal in the Christian Gospels, amounting to outright character assassination, is completely undeserved.
The Gospel portrayal, and now the dictionary definition of Pharisee are a grave libel on a good people. It provides yet another lesson for us to beware brain-washing and always to dig for the facts and not to believe everything that we have grown accustomed to hearing repeated again and again as an article of faith. After all, it was Hillel, the great first century sage and archetypal Pharisee, who wrote some words which I do not think can be bettered as guidance for us in this, or any, time:
“If I am not for myself, who is for me. But if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?”
