Quotes About Pharisees

Religious people love to hide behind religion. They love the rules of religion more than they love Jesus. With practice, Condemners let rules become more important than the spiritual life.

So this was all which these Pharisees and Scribes could see in the miracle of Christ's feeding the Multitude--that it had not been done according to Law! Most strange as it may seem, yet in the past history of the Church, and, perhaps, sometimes also in the present, this has been the only thing which some men have seen in the miraculous working of the Christ!

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cumin.

It was to answer the accusation of the scribes and Pharisees to the effect that Jesus chose the companionship of sinners that he spake the parables concerning the lost sheep, the lost silver, and the prodigal son, and in these presentations showed that his mission to the world was not to make miserable, not to condemn and destroy, but to recover that which was lost.

We Protestants automatically assume that the Pharisees are the Catholics. They are the self-righteous people who have made Christianity a form of legalistic religion, thereby destroying the free grace of the Gospel. We Protestants are the tax collectors, knowing that we are sinners and that our lives depend upon God's free grace.

I have since learned—helping me to understand what then began to happen within me—that the truth can be quickly received, or received at all, only by the sinner who knows and admits that he is guilty of having sinned much. Stated another way: only guilt admitted accepts truth. The Bible again: the one people whom Jesus could not help were the Pharisees; they didn't feel they needed any help.

In particular, Jesus' clash with the Pharisees came about not because he was an antinomian, or because he believed in justification by faith while they believed in justification by works, but because his kingdom agenda for Israel demanded that Israel leave off its frantic and paranoid self-defense, reinforced as it now was by the ancestral codes, and embrace instead the vocation to be the light of the world, the salt of the earth.

To babble unintelligible prayers, to read masses, to recite rosaries, to practice ceremonies of religious worship empty of meaning, this is the conduct of the dead. Man tries to turn completely into an object, to subject himself entirely to the rule of what is alien. Such service is called devoutness. PHARISEES!

The Pharisees had an ethic of avoidance, and Jesus had an ethic of involvement.

Pharisees lived "according to the strictest party of . . . religion."3 The name itself is probably derived from the root "to separate." Pharisaism was essentially a conservative "holiness movement." So

The Pharisees and Sadducees came to Jesus and tested him by asking him to show them a sign from heaven. He replied, "When evening comes, you say, 'It will be fair weather, for the sky is red,' and in the morning, 'Today it will be stormy, for the sky is red and overcast.' You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times." (Matthew 16:1-3)

Show me the person ready to step from any, let it be the narrowest, sect of Christian Pharisees into a freer and holier air, and I shall look to find in that person the one of that sect who, in the midst of its darkness and selfish worldliness, mistaken for holiness, has been living a life more obedient than the rest.

It is far too easy for Protestants to take the sting from Jesus' words by thinking what Jesus was really saying was not that his followers had to do more, but that they were to trust in the righteousness of Christ while the scribes and Pharisees were trusting in themselves. Or to say the Pharisees were externally righteous only. For this view, "surpasses" is really about kind of righteousness and not degree.

While the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them a question, saying, "What do you think about the Christ?" (Matt. 22:41–42)

Hence was the different effect that Christ's miracles had to convince the disciples from what they had to convince the Scribes and Pharisees. Not that they had a stronger reason, or had their reason more improved; but their reason was sanctified, and those blinding prejudices, that the Scribes and Pharisees were under, were removed by the sense they had of the excellency of Christ and his doctrine. 2.

We are to see a need and meet it—no questions asked. We are to love even our enemies with an unconditional, nonjudgmental love, and, thereby, offer everlasting life to all who are thirsty. To do this means we must refrain from doing what Jesus never did: namely, positioning ourselves as wiser, morally superior guardians and "fixers" of others. Moral guardianship is what the Pharisees did—not Jesus.

Jesus wasn't real loving sometimes. He called the Pharisees vipers, snakes, whitewashed tombs. So, you have to understand the world in which we live is dangerous.

4. To cite one well-known example of this ignorance of Jewish customs: Mark 7:3 indicates that the Pharisees "and all the Jews" washed their hands before eating, so as to observe "the tradition of the elders." This is not true: most Jews did not engage in this ritual. If Mark had been a Jew, or even a gentile living in Palestine, he certainly would have known this.

in fact it is very difficult to find any instance in which he actually did what the law forbade. What he violated was the understanding and interpretation of the law by other Jewish leaders of his day, especially the Pharisees, who had developed complex rules to be adopted in order to be sure the law was kept.

The Pharisees were not hypocritical in developing these rules: they simply believed that one should do everything possible to do what God had required and so formulated policies to help make that happen.)

I think most decent people would be horrified at what happens today, even in our enlightened country. There are still mean, self-righteous Pharisees, who have a sick need to punish others whose troubled lives they can never begin to understand, much less feel compassion for.

The sentiments attributed to Christ are in the Old Testament. They were familiar in the Jewish schools and to all the Pharisees, long before the time of Christ, as they were familiar in all the civilizations of the earth — Egyptian, Babylonian, and Persian, Greek, and Hindu.

Montefiore's impression of Jesus was wrong. Jesus loved the Pharisees, although He denounced them publicly. And I love the Communists, as well as their tools in the Church, although I denounce them.

A great deal of the friction between Christians and Pharisees was due to the similarity of their views, rather than to their difference.