Was Jesus a Pharisee?

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Incredible as it may seem to conventional Protestant piety, Arnold Toynbee (in The Crucible of Christianity: Judaism, Hellenism and the Historical Background to the Christian Faith, 1969) argues that Jesus was a Pharisee, albeit a confrontational, eccentric one who was distinct from the Pharisaic mainstream. Jesus alienated the Pharisaic leadership because he taught with authority and did not seek truth in a rabbinic consensus.

Jesus' differentiation from the Pharisaic majority extends to a number of levels -- most importantly, in his interpretation of the Mosaic Law. He critiqued it and advanced a moral position challenging its authority, seen, for example, in his affirmation of a permanency of marriage in the denunciation of divorce, claiming "for this cause a man leaves father and mother and they become one flesh" (Matthew 19:3-9).

Further, in the episode of his disciples rubbing wheat between their hands ("threshing") on the Sabbath, we can see his sovereignty over the law. "The Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath" (Mark 2:27).

Jesus remained faithful to the conviction that there exists a providential God who ordains a way of life for those who are "believers," but he did not hold that the rabbinic understanding of Torah, and especially Oral Torah, encapsulated that divine moral demand. At many points, as we noted, he had a more flexible, situational view. At other points, like his rejection of divine permission of divorce, we readily see his autonomy and we might be surprised that he appears at these points more rigid in his interpretation of a cosmic moral order.

Regrettably, I have neither the time nor energy to research the provenance of the Pharisees, but I operate under the following assumption: The Pharisees were a group within the Jewish nation holding to a pious fidelity to the Torah, now patently accessible after Ezra's canonization of the Pentateuch in 444 BC. The Hellenists come on the scene after the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC. Their impact on Palestine occurs under the successor kingdoms of the Ptolemies and the Seleucids. Thus, the simultaneous appearance of Pharisaism and Hellenism around 300 BC makes it logical to hypothesize that the Pharisaic emergence is inspired not only by separation from the religiously lax "poor of the land" but also by resistance to an attractive and seductive Hellenism.