Pharisees outside Judea?

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Ken Olson
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Pharisees outside Judea?

Post by Ken Olson »

Paul says he was a Pharisee in Phil. 3.5. I don’t believe he ever says where he was from in his epistles, but Acts says it was Tarsus in Acts 21.39.

Do we have first century sources that refer to the sect of Pharisees operating outside of Judea/Palestine? (I’m not counting Josephus claim to have decided to live according to the rules of the Pharisees and to have travelled to and lived in exile in Rome).

Best,

Ken
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Re: Pharisees outside Judea?

Post by Jero »

Hi, Hope this helps
Although I am not a fan of Saul/Paul, as, from the old school, I see him as the enemy of the followers of Jesus, liar, murderer and a false apostle (Acts 1:21).
Paul tells us that he was a Jew born in Tarsus, was well-schooled as he studied under Gamaliel (Acts 22:30). Also, Paul claims to be a Pharisee as well as the son of a Pharisee (Acts 23:6), and was from the tribe of Benjamin, extinct from 599 BCE! What Paul claims cannot be correct! As all this information is solely from Paul. However, the Church-fathers such as Jerome (347-420) contradicts, and state that Paul was born in Gischala...when the whole province was devastated by the hand of Rome and the Jews scattered throughout the world, they were moved to Tarsus a town of Cilicia; the boy Paul inherited the lot of his parents” (St. Jerome, Commentary on Philemon, vs. 23-24).
Jerome lived in the 4th and 5th-century, and he does not mention Saul/Paul as being a Pharisee, so it begs the question—was Paul’s writings later inserted with lies about the little man?
(However, Jerome was historically incorrect when he stated: “the Jews scattered throughout the world” if the Old Testament is correct. As Gischala (the modern name is Jish). See etymology in the link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jish in biblical time it was in north Galilee home since 721BCE for the pagan people the repopulated Samaria/Kingdom of Israel [2 Kings 17:24]. Matthew calls it Galilee of the Gentiles [Matthew 4:15-16 NABRE] meaning the Samaritans. So Jerome and many modern writers forget this period of the Ten lost tribes of Israel and put Jews outside of Judaea. Either the OT is wrong or Josephus or other modern sources are wrong. Whatever it is it is just as contradictory as the NT. )
The Church-father or other sources contradict everything we read of Paul. Church-fathers such as Eusebius of Caesarea aka Eusebius Pamphili (263-339), Epiphanius (c. 310-403) and Jerome (347-c. 420) and the Jewish/Israel Chronology tell other storeys.
The scholar Hillar writing on Epiphanius who was writing on the Gospel of the Ebionites and Paul, wrote: Eusebius maintains that the Ebionites rejected the Epistles of Paul and called him a “renegade” from the Law... Amongst other books they used, Epiphanius mentions the Acts of the Apostles, Ascent of James, and the Itinerary of Peter by Clement of Rome. They also attempted to “denigrate” Paul, for example, by saying that he was a pagan, with a pagan mother and father…They claimed that Paul became a proselyte because he wanted to marry the priest’s daughter. He was rejected, however, and turned against circumcision, the Sabbath, and the Law...[Marian Hillar, From the logos to Trinity: The Evolution of Religious Beliefs from Pythagoras to Tertullian, pp. 116-118, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012]

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Re: Pharisees outside Judea?

Post by John2 »

Ken Olson wrote: Thu Aug 13, 2020 9:11 am Paul says he was a Pharisee in Phil. 3.5. I don’t believe he ever says where he was from in his epistles, but Acts says it was Tarsus in Acts 21.39.

Do we have first century sources that refer to the sect of Pharisees operating outside of Judea/Palestine? (I’m not counting Josephus claim to have decided to live according to the rules of the Pharisees and to have travelled to and lived in exile in Rome).

Best,

Ken

I'd never thought about this before, and according to Forbes on page 134 in All Things to All Cultures there is "no other evidence to suggest that Pharisaic communities or schools were to be found in the Jewish Diaspora" besides Paul and Josephus, but in footnote 42 he asks, "what do we make of Jesus' comment in Matt 23:15 about Pharisees crossing land and sea to make converts?"


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Re: Pharisees outside Judea?

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John2 wrote: Fri Aug 14, 2020 5:45 pmI'd never thought about this before, and according to Forbes on page 134 in All Things to All Cultures there is "no other evidence to suggest that Pharisaic communities or schools were to be found in the Jewish Diaspora" besides Paul and Josephus, but in footnote 42 he asks, "what do we make of Jesus' comment in Matt 23:15 about Pharisees crossing land and sea to make converts?"
I took a quick look through some books and files not long after Ken posted the OP, and could find nothing besides Paul (in Acts) and Josephus on my own. Did not even think of Matthew 23.15 in this context. Interesting.
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Re: Pharisees outside Judea?

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Despite the lack of evidence, I'm thinking that given the influence of Pharisaic/Rabbinic Judaism on/in the Diaspora after 70 CE that the situation was more or less the same before 70 CE, because even though there were other sects, the Pharisees (according to Josephus) were the dominant one in Judea and thus I figure they would have had a more or less similar influence on the Diaspora then as Rabbinic Judaism came to have after 70 CE.
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Re: Pharisees outside Judea?

Post by Giuseppe »

The 12 apostles were originally an embassy system of the Temple of Jerusalem working in the Diaspora. The Didache was their manual of instructions. References in J.M.Robertson, The Jesus Problem.
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Ken Olson
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Re: Pharisees outside Judea?

Post by Ken Olson »

Thanks for the replies.

What originally inspired my question was Ben’s post about Sabazios which tangentially addressed the question of where the New Testament was written. Wherever Paul was from, and wherever Matthew was wriiten, did they have Pharisees there?

If the sect of Pharisees was not active outside Judea, then there are some internal tensions in my own thinking that ought to be resolved:

1 I was persuaded by a large number of scholars who argued that Matthew, and probably the church to which he belonged, had a particular animosity toward the Pharisees that reflected conflicts within the synagogues after 70 (Davies, Sim, Overman, Saldarini, Stanton). Matt 23 especially suggests that Matthew’s audience was familiar with Pharisees dominating the synagogues and he considers their interpretations of the law legitimate (it’s their hypocricy he’s criticizing). Also Matt 12.9 ‘their synagogue’ seems to presuppose Pharisaic domination. But when Matt describes the persecution Christians will face, he doesn’t say anything about having to leave Judea and relocate elsewhere (like to Antioch).

2 I was persuaded by John Knox’s argument in Chapters in a Life of Paul that the lack of internal evidence in Paul’s letters supporting (1) Paul’s training as a Pharisee by Gamaliel in Jerusalem in Acts 22.3 and (2) Paul’s persecution of Christians in Jerusalem itself in Acts 8.3, and the apparent contradiction of this idea by Gal. 1.22, that these two claims were the author of Acts’ embelishments of Paul’s more basic claims to have been a Pharisee and to have persecuted the church.

I can think of several ways to try to resolve this.

1 The reading of Matthew that holds that it refelects the experience of Matthew’s church is simply wrong. Matthew is just recording what Jesus said in his own time. (I don’t believe in Q, but I think the same argument would apply if we substitued the Q community for the Matthean community).

2 Despite the lack of explicit evidence for it, there were Pharisees outside Judea, in Antioch and Syria and at least as far north as Tarsus in Cilicia.

3 Matthew usually refers to ‘scribes and Pharisees’ and scribes were pretty much everywhere there were Jews, bibles, and synagogues. He’s simply combined and generalized Pharisees in Judea with scribes elsewhere.

4 Judea was the conceptual homeland of the Jews and Matthew wrote about the experience of his church as though it had taken place in Judea, using terms appropriate to a Judean setting. (This probably overlaps with the above a great deal).

5 Matthew may not have been written in Antioch and Paul may not have been from Tarsus (we have only Acts for this), but then where? Where was Paul trained as a Pharisee? I suppose he could have been trained by a solitary travelling Pharisee.

Best,

Ken
Last edited by Ken Olson on Sat Aug 15, 2020 2:17 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Pharisees outside Judea?

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Just a few scattered thoughts here. Not committed to any of this.
Ken Olson wrote: Sat Aug 15, 2020 7:30 amDespite the lack of explicit evidence for it, there were Pharisees outside Judea, in Antioch and Syria and at least as far north as Tarsus in Cilicia.
What would Matthew 23.15 mean if not something like this? Even if we grant it is an exaggeration, what would it be an exaggeration of? Staying put in the homeland and never going anywhere? Is it so metaphorical that it lacks any geographical component at all, and journeying "by land and sea" means merely, say, that they left no argument untouched in their quest for converts? It has always sounded geographical to me, not merely metaphorical.

Also, would not Jewish people of virtually any or all persuasions have found homes outside of the homeland after the destruction of Jerusalem? The more so after Simon bar Kokhba, of course. Josephus talks about Sicarii who fled to Africa, but he appears to discuss them only because of the trouble they caused once they arrived. Would there not have been other, less militant refugees moving away, as well?
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Re: Pharisees outside Judea?

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Ken Olson wrote: Thu Aug 13, 2020 9:11 am
Paul says he was a Pharisee in Phil. 3.5 ...

Do we have first century sources that refer to the sect of Pharisees operating outside of Judea/Palestine? (I’m not counting Josephus claim to have decided to live according to the rules of the Pharisees ...
Ken Olson wrote: Sat Aug 15, 2020 7:30 am
If the sect of Pharisees was not active outside Judea, then there are some internal tensions in my own thinking that ought to be resolved ...

I can think of several ways to try to resolve this ...
There is another way to resolve this --- Paul was not a Pharisee.

Paul never actually claimed to be a Pharisee, only that he followed the precepts of the Pharisees ---

… of the tribe of Benjamin; a Hebrew of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee … (Philippians 3:5)

I don’t see Paul’s claim as substantively different from that of Josephus ---

Being now in my nineteenth year I began to involve myself in city life, deferring to the philosophical school of the Pharisees … (Josephus, Life).

In Judean culture of the times, philosophy, religion and the law were intertwined. Here's Josephus again ---

Now, for the Pharisees ... they are able greatly to persuade the body of the people; and whatsoever they do about divine worship, prayers, and sacrifices, they perform them according to their direction … (Antiquities, 18.1.3).

Josephus is far from universally considered to have been a Pharisee. And according to Josephus, a great many people followed the religious and legal precepts of the Pharisees, but were not evidently considered by their peers to be (appropriately trained and schooled) “Pharisees”.

Ken Olson wrote: Sat Aug 15, 2020 7:30 am
....the lack of internal evidence in Paul’s letters supporting (1) Paul’s training as a Pharisee by Gamaliel in Jerusalem in Acts 22.3 and (2) Paul’s persecution of Christians in Jerusalem itself in Acts 8.3, and the apparent contradiction of this idea by Gal. 1.22, that these two claims were the author of Acts’ embelishments of Paul’s more basic claims to have been a Pharisee and to have persecuted the church.
Another example of how the second century legends in Acts have contributed to a biased interpretation and understanding of Paul.
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Re: Pharisees outside Judea?

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Ben C. Smith wrote: Sat Aug 15, 2020 8:06 am Just a few scattered thoughts here. Not committed to any of this.
Ken Olson wrote: Sat Aug 15, 2020 7:30 amDespite the lack of explicit evidence for it, there were Pharisees outside Judea, in Antioch and Syria and at least as far north as Tarsus in Cilicia.
What would Matthew 23.15 mean if not something like this? Even if we grant it is an exaggeration, what would it be an exaggeration of? Staying put in the homeland and never going anywhere? Is it so metaphorical that it lacks any geographical component at all, and journeying "by land and sea" means merely, say, that they left no argument untouched in their quest for converts? It has always sounded geographical to me, not merely metaphorical.
Yes. I agree that Matt 23.15 does sound like Matt’s talking about actual travel. That’s one of the reasons I suggested Paul may have been instructed by a travelling Pharisee. But much of Matt 23 and the reference to ‘their synagogue’ sounds like these were
not itinerant Pharisaic missionaries but resident Pharisees with institutional power in the synagogue community.
Also, would not Jewish people of virtually any or all persuasions have found homes outside of the homeland after the destruction of Jerusalem? The more so after Simon bar Kokhba, of course. Josephus talks about Sicarii who fled to Africa, but he appears to discuss them only because of the trouble they caused once they arrived. Would there not have been other, less militant refugees moving away, as well?
Yes, I suppose so, and we know (as much as we ‘know’ anything) that the center of the Pharisaic/Rabbinic school (if we can assume some sort of institutional continuity between the two) moved from Jerusalem to Yavneh to Galilee (though those are all still in Judea/Palestine).

Added: I forgot to mention that maybe, outside of Judea, and after the destruction of Jerusalem, the distinction between Pharisees and Scribes was less important or negligible because of the absence of Sadducees and the temple cult.

Best,

Ken
Last edited by Ken Olson on Sat Aug 15, 2020 1:56 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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