“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees , you hypocrites! You shut the kingdom of heaven in men’s faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to. “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees , you hypocrites!
The Pharisees asserted that God could and should be worshipped even away from the Temple and outside Jerusalem. To the Pharisees , worship consisted not in bloody sacrifices—the practice of the Temple priests—but in prayer and in the study of God’s law.
Pharisees – This name means ‘the separate ones’. They regarded themselves as morally superior to many in society – like tax collectors, Gentiles (non-Jews) and sinners. They liked to keep themselves ‘pure’ and separate from such people. Their main responsibility was to make sure that all the Jewish laws were kept.
Pharisees were members of a party that believed in resurrection and in following legal traditions that were ascribed not to the Bible but to “the traditions of the fathers.” Like the scribes, they were also well-known legal experts: hence the partial overlap of membership of the two groups.
The 613 commandments include “positive commandments”, to perform an act (mitzvot aseh), and “negative commandments”, to abstain from certain acts (mitzvot lo taaseh).
Their name comes from the Hebrew and Aramaic parush or parushi, which means “one who is separated.” It may refer to their separation from Gentiles, sources of ritual impurity or from irreligious Jews. As Josephus noted, the Pharisees were considered the most expert and accurate expositors of Jewish law.
The Sadducees refused to go beyond the written Torah (first five books of the Bible) and thus, unlike the Pharisees , denied the immortality of the soul, bodily resurrection after death, and the existence of angelic spirits.
Many Rabbis believe that the traditional method of burial is the correct one and that cremation is prohibited. Although there is no explicit prohibition about Judaism and cremation , there is material to support both cases.
During the Second Temple Period, the Sadducees, High Priests, denied any particular existence of individuals after death because it wasn’t written in the Torah, while the Pharisees , ancestors of the rabbis, affirmed both bodily resurrection and immortality of the soul, most likely based on the influence of Hellenistic
General. The Sadducees rejected the Oral Torah as proposed by the Pharisees. Rather, they saw the written Torah as the sole source of divine authority. The written law, in its depiction of the priesthood, corroborated the power and enforced the hegemony of the Sadducees in Judean society.
He came to Jesus at night, sneaking off to see the man behind the miracles. He was a powerful Pharisee , a member of the Sanhedrin, the Jewish ruling council.
Gentile , person who is not Jewish. The word stems from the Hebrew term goy, which means a “nation,” and was applied both to the Hebrews and to any other nation. The plural, goyim, especially with the definite article, ha-goyim, “the nations,” meant nations of the world that were not Hebrew .
Like the Pharisees , the Herodians wanted political independence for the Jewish people. Unlike the Pharisees , who sought to restore the kingdom of David, the Herodians wished to restore a member of the Herodian dynasty to the throne in Judea.
In 63 bce the Roman general Pompey captured Jerusalem. The Romans ruled through a local client king and largely allowed free religious practice in Judaea. At times, the divide between monotheistic and polytheistic religious views caused clashes between Jews and Gentiles.