Pharisees Sentence Examples

The Pharisees were troublesome counsellors and doubtful allies for an ambitious prince.

The authors were Pharisees.

The Pharisees, who dominated the bulk of the Jews, 'were content to accept Herod's rule as a judgment of God.

The Pharisees held that the intention of the accusers was equivalent to murder.

This section was written therefore after 134 B.C., when the breach between John Hyrcanus and the Pharisees took place and before the savage massacres of the latter by Jannaeus (95 B.C.); for it is not likely that in a book dealing with the sufferings of the Pharisees such a reference would be omitted.

Thomas Bagley was accused of declaring that if in the sacrament a priest made bread into God, he made a God that can be eaten by rats and mice; that the pharisees of the day, the monks, and the nuns, and the friars and all other privileged persons recognized by the church were limbs of Satan; and that auricular confession to the priest was the will not of God but of the devil.

But it remains true that the contrast with the " righteousness of the scribes and pharisees " has always served to mark the requirement of " inwardness " as a distinctive feature of the Christian code - an inwardness not merely negative, tending to the repression of vicious desires as well as vicious acts, but also involving a positive rectitude of the inner state of the soul.

In general, the views reflected in the book are those of the Pharisees.

The Pharisees were convinced they had earned the gratitude of God.

And that is why Jesus called the Pharisees hypocrites.

Jesus's reply was simply a well known maxim of the Pharisees.

I guess these Pharisees wouldn't have even allowed you to turn the telly on.

Every single one of them can fall into the errors which so typify the Pharisees in the day of Jesus.

A Sadducean friend advised Hyrcanus to ask the whole body of the Pharisees to prescribe the penalty.

The Pharisees decided that they could not take action on either side, since the elder son of Alexandra was directed by the Idumaean Antipater; and the people had an affection for such Asmonean princes as dared to challenge the Roman domination of their ancestral kingdom.

Not all Pharisees were prepared to take such action, in order that Israel might " tread on the neck of the eagle " (as is said in The Assumption of Moses).

Later Sadducees, who actually bore the name, resisted this and all the characteristics of the Pharisees and continued to flatter the predominant foreigner - Greek or Roman - by imitating him with less reckless bravado than the first Hellenizers and with growing assurance.

Dante, who had become embittered against Boniface while on a political mission in Rome, calls him the "Prince of the new Pharisees" (Inferno, 27, 85), but laments that "in his Vicar Christ was made a captive," and was "mocked a second time" (Purgatory, 20, 87 f.).

I did not know that any Pharisees had any sacerdotal responsibilities.

Now it was just to such homes that the sect of the Pharisees owed their origin.

I guess these Pharisees would n't have even allowed you to turn the telly on.

And in the other, he warns about the yeast of the Pharisees that can destroy.

This prosperity and the apparent security of Judaism led to a breach between Hyrcanus and his spiritual directors, the Pharisees.

But Salome Alexandra, his brother's widow, who released him from prison on the death of her husband and married him, was connected with the Pharisees through her brother Simon ben Shetach.

Eight hundred Jews who had held a fortress against him were crucified; 8000 Pharisees fled to Egypt and remained there.

On his deathbed it is said that Alexander advised his wife to reverse this policy and rely upon the Pharisees.

In any case the Pharisees were predominant under Alexandra, who became queen (78-69) under her husband's will.

Hyrcanus her elder son was only high priest, as the stricter Pharisees required.

The great saying of each of these rabbis is concerned with the duties of a judge; the selection does justice to the importance of the Sanhedrin, which was filled with Pharisees.

Against their natural desire for revenge may be set the fact that the Pharisees did much to improve the status of women among the Jews.

In the midst of all this civil strife the Pharisees and all who were preoccupied with religion found it almost impossible to discern what they should do to please God.

The Pharisees, who regarded his rule as an inevitable penalty for the sins of the people, he encouraged.

How well their teaching served his purpose is shown by the sayings of two rabbis who, if not identical with these Pharisees, belong to their period and their party.

When all the Jewish people swore to be loyal to Caesar and the king's policy, the Pharisees - above 6000 - refused to swear.

When it came to the ears of the king he slew the most responsible of the Pharisees and every member of his household who accepted what the Pharisee said.

So far as this influence extended, the Jewish community was threatened with the danger of suicide, and the distinction drawn by Josephus between the Pharisees and the Zealots is a valid one.

So there was once more a king of Judaea, and a king who observed the tradition of the Pharisees and protected the Jewish religion.

Thenceforward the remnant of the Jews who survived the fiery ordeal formed a church rather than a nation or a state, and the Pharisees exercised an unchallenged supremacy.

With the Temple and its Sadducean high priests perished the Sanhedrin in which the Sadducees had competed with the Pharisees for predominance.

Under Johanan ben Zaccai the Pharisees established themselves at Jamnia.

They " were written in Hebrew in the later years of John Hyrcanus - in all probability after his final victory over the Syrian power and before his breach with the Pharisees - in other words, between 109 and 106.

Our book had hardly been published, when Hyrcanus, owing to an injury done him by the Pharisees, broke with their party, and, joining the Sadducees, died a year or two later.

As it was written by a Pharisee, it could not have been composed after the breach arose between John Hyrcanus and the Pharisees towards the close of the 2nd century B.C. Thus the period of composition lies between 153, when Jonathan the Maccabee assumed the high-priesthood, and the year of the breach of John Hyrcanus with the Pharisees; some time, therefore, between 153 and 107.

There appears to have been a difference of practice between the Sadducees and the Pharisees on such occasions, the former keeping to the strict rules of the Law and sacrificing on the Friday, whereas the Pharisees did so on the Thursday.

Protestants have condemned these formulae as so much magic, and in this modern science tends to agree with them; but to orthodox Protestants at least Catholics have a perfect right to reply that, in taking this line, they are but repeating the accusation brought by the Pharisees against Christ, viz.

But such literature was not confined to the members of these communities, but had been current among the Chasids and their successors the Pharisees.'

The Book of Jubilees was written in Hebrew by a Pharisee between the year of the accession of Hyrcanus to the high-priesthood in 135 and his breach with the Pharisees some years before his death in 105 B.C. Jubilees was translated into Greek and from Greek into Ethiopic and Latin.

A precocious student of the Law, he made trial of the three sects of Judaism - Pharisees, Sadducees and Essenes - before he reached the age of nineteen.

In each of these cases their name is coupled with that of the Pharisees.

As the haggada is the poetic, so the halakha is the legal element of the Talmud (q.v.), and arose out of the faction between the Sadducees, who disputed the traditions, and the Pharisees, who strove to prove their derivation from scripture.

Some who saw it report the act to the Pharisees; the Sanhedrim meets, Caiaphas declares that one man must die for the people, and henceforward they ceaselessly plan His death.

From the foundation of the Hasmonean state to the time of Herod the history of the high-priesthood merges in the political history of the nation; from Herod onward the priestly aristocracy of the Sadducees lost its chief hold over the nation and expired in vain controversy with the Pharisees.

The struggle between the Pharisees and Sadducees, between the party of the scribes and the aristocracy, was a struggle for mastery between a secularized hierarchy whose whole interests were those of their own selfish politics, and a party to which God and the exact fulfilment of the law according to the scribes were all in all.

The Pharisees themselves could not but see that their principles were politically impotent; the most scrupulous observance of the Sabbath, for example - and this was the culminating point of legality - could not thrust back the heathen.

The nation threw itself on the side of the Pharisees; not in the spirit, of punctilious legalism, but with the ardour of a national enthusiasm deceived in its dearest hopes, and turning for help from the delusive kingship of the Hasmonaeans to the true kingship of Yahweh, and to His vicegerent the king of David's house.

It must not indeed be supposed that the doctrine was as yet the undisputed part of Hebrew faith which it became when the fall of the state and the antithesis to Christianity threw all Jewish thought into the lines of the Pharisees.

Between the Messiah of the Jews and the Son of Man who came to give His life a ransom for many there was on the surface little resemblance; and from their standpoint the Pharisees reasoned that the marks of the Messiah were conspicuously absent from this Christ.

For the Messianic hopes of the Pharisees and the Psalter of Solomon see especially Wellhausen, Phariseer and Sadduccer (Greifswald, 1874).

During its later years his reign was much distrubed, however, by the contentions for ascendancy which arose between the Pharisees and Sadducees, the two rival sects or parties which then for the first time (under those names at least) came into prominence.

On the one hand it might be maintained that the Essenes out-Pharisee'd the Pharisees.

The fact that the Pharisees and Sadducees so often figure in the pages of the New Testament, while the Essenes are never mentioned, might plausibly be interpreted to show that the New Testament emanated from the side of the Essenes.

They are there regarded as being " simply the rigorists among the Pharisees."

But we are also told that " the Pharisees characterized the Essene as ` a fool who destroyed the world.'

Before setting out, he quelled with the utmost cruelty a sedition of the Pharisees, slaying nearly 3000 of them.

Consequently the Pharisees, who seem to have been an order of religious teachers, were concerned to make converts (proselytes), and some of their greatest teachers were of non-Jewish parentage.

Fate is the Stoic term for God; and these forerunners of the Pharisees judged that the time had come for them to take action rather than to wait passively on God.

But then and always the prime concern of the Pharisees was the extension of God's sovereignty (the Kingdom of God) throughout the world.

When Judas reconquered Jerusalem and re-dedicated the desecrated Temple, his work, from the Pharisees' point of view, was done.

When Alexandra came to the throne the Pharisees were the real rulers and imposed upon the people the deductions from the written Law which formed the growing body of their oral tradition.

Attempts have been made in modern times to represent the Apocalyptists as opposed to the Pharisees and as occupying the position in popular estimation which Josephus ascribes to the Pharisees.

The Pharisees were occupied with the piecemeal realization of the dreams of their supposed opponents, which gain a vague glory from their being far off.

The gospels generally have left upon the minds of men an impression unfavourable to the Pharisees.

It is to be remembered that the Pharisees were the only sect of the Jews who survived in Christian times and that the Pharisees were never a homogeneous body possessed of a definite policy or body of doctrine.

Moreover it is clear that our Lord denounced not all the Pharisees but the hypocrites only, as did the rabbis whose sayings are reported in the Talmud and other Jewish books.

Again the third gospel in particular betrays relations between the Pharisees and Jesus very different from those of the common Christian view, which conjures up an impossible picture of an absolute breach between the Prophet of Nazareth and the whole corporation of the Pharisees as a result of a quarrel with certain members of that dissident sect of independent thinkers.

Indeed they are corroborative evidence for the reverence with which the Pharisees were regarded by the people generally, and for the zeal with which they strove to fulfil God's will as contained in the Law and elucidated by the Tradition.

Not a rough prophet in the desert like John, not a leader striking for political freedom, not a pretender aiming at the petty throne of the Herods, not even a great rabbi, building on the patriotic foundation of the Pharisees who had secured the national life by a new devotion to the ancient law.

They therefore sent a joint deputation of Pharisees and Herodians to entrap Him with a question as to the Roman tribute, in answering which He must either lose His influence with the people or else lay Himself open to a charge of treason.

This narrative clearly presupposes a series of miracles already performed, and also such a conflict with the Pharisees as we have seen recorded by St Mark.

After this we have the healing of a dropsical man on the Sabbath, with a reply to the murmuring Pharisees; and then a parable of the failure of invited guests and the filling of their places from the streets.

At last a priestly family at a village called Modein committed themselves to active resistance; and, when they suspended the Sabbath law for purposes of self defence, they were joined by the Hasidaeans (Assidaeans), who seem to have been the spiritual ancestors of the Pharisees.

Consequently the Jews were divided into two parties - Pharisees and Sadducees - of whom the Pharisees cared only for doing or enduring the will of God as revealed in Scripture or in the events of history.

This division bore bitter fruit in the reign of Pharisees Alexander Jannaeus (104-78 B.C.), who by a standing army achieved a territorial expansion which was little to the mind of the Pharisees.

Later he was utterly defeated by a king of Arabians and fled to Jerusalem, only to find that the Pharisees had raised his people against him and would only be satisfied by his death.

Under Alexandra, his widow (78-69 B.C.), the Pharisees ruled the Jews and no expansion of the kingdom was attempted.

The net result is not only new but re volutionary; so was it understood by the Pharisees.

Josephus displays no knowledge of the work, but he may have been animated by the same prejudice as the Pharisees of St Jerome's day, whose displeasure, that father tells us, he had to face in giving to Latin readers a book which was against their canon.

Sidetes in 128 left him a free hand, Hyrcanus (135-105) soon carved out for himself a large and prosperous kingdom, which, however, was rent by internal discord owing to the antagonism developed between the rival parties of the Pharisees and Sadducees.

The accession of his widow Salome Alexandra (78-69) witnessed a complete reversal of the policy pursued by Jannaeus, for she chose to rule in accordance with the ideals of the Pharisees.

The book was written between 135 B.C. and the year of Hyrcanus's breach with the Pharisees.

Nay more, it cannot have been written after the open breach between Hyrcanus and the Pharisees, when the former joined the Sadducean party.

Hart in The Jewish Quarterly Review for July 1907, the gist of which is that Jesus commends the Pharisees for insisting that when a man has vowed a vow to God he should pay it even though his parents should suffer.

According to all the authorities, the essential qualification for the title is the denial of certain beliefs which the Pharisees held to be implicitly contained in Scripture, and therefore necessarily part of Judaism as soon as they were formulated.

From the standpoint of the Pharisees who championed the hope of everlasting life and believed in the existence of angels, through whom God could communicate with men, they were infidels.

As the Pharisees accumulated the oral tradition which was afterwards codified and elaborated or preserved by fragments, which served some useful purpose, in the Talmud and other Rabbinic writings, the Sadducees acquired concrete regulations to oppose so long as they dared.

The Pharisees even improved upon the Temple ritual, and their popularity enabled them to force the Pharisees into adopting the improvements.

The controversies of the Pharisees and Sadducees afford a typical example of this process.

The Pharisees, who pruned and fed the tree of Judaism so that it might bear fruit for the healing of the Nation - and the nations in the latter days - gave them the opportunity of posing as the champions of the primitive standards.

In contrast with the mutual friendliness and loyalty of the Pharisees, their behaviour towards one another is lacking in courtesy, and when they mix with their fellow-countrymen, they are as offhanded as if their fellows were aliens."

In the New Testament there is already a tendency to ignore the Sadducees and to transfer to the surviving and active sect of the Pharisees denunciations addressed to hypocrites.

Its object was to support the attempts of the Pharisees to bring about a reform in the administration of the law courts.