Were the Pharisees Hellenized?

[jaybreak]

I recently read The Cross Examination of Jesus Christ (Randy Singer), about the trial of Jesus under Pontius Pilate, and a few of the milestones that lead up to it. The middle chapters were a mix of Gospel readings, and commentary with personal anecdotes. They were adequate if you can endure the evangelical cheeseball routine aftertaste. The real gems were the bookending chapters, which were a fictional account of Pilate's dealings with Jesus, from the perspective of his assesore--a close legal advisor.

One bit of information mentioned in passing in the book spoke of the Pharisees not being Hellenized, in contrast to the Sadducees, who were Hellenized. Picture, if you will, my surprise. I didn't know the specific of the matter but I had assumed that the Jewish groups vying for power at the time were all more or less Hellenized. 

What to do? After some Googling around digging into the dusty nethers of arcana, it turns out the Pharisees were actually Hellenized, though the issue is a little more broader than that.

The page here gives a bird's eye overview of the situation:

However much they failed to acknowledge it, the Pharisees also drew from Hellenism. They had been attracted by the student-teacher relationship that had been common in the Hellenistic world but alien to Judaic society. They had been impressed by that part of Hellenistic education that tried to develop character in students and that had a high regard for individuality. Under Pharisaic influence the synagogue became a university for the Jews, a place where they gathered to learn and read the words of sacred writings from the past, where they read from the Torah and studied, sang and prayed.

The Pharisees were impressed by Hellenism's Stoic philosophers, who taught an inner standard impervious to happenstance and suffering. And the Pharisees were attracted to Hellenistic law-making: Greek-style legislative bodies. The Pharisees created the Beth Din ha-Gadol (Great Legislature) as a lawmaking, law-transmitting and law-confirming body. They had not lifted the idea of this institution from scripture, but they saw their legislative body as having its authority in God rather than from a constitution, and they saw laws created by the legislature as having origins in divine revelation.

More detailed is this chapter from the book Judaism: Revelation of Moses or Religion of Men?*:

Continuing [John] Phillips' quote: "Instead of the allegories and homilies of the Midrash, the Tannas employed logic and reasoning borrowed from the Greeks.... Like the Midrash, [the Mishnah that developed] was a somewhat jumbled exposition of truth, and, like the Midrash, it kept on diluting the Word of God with liberal quantities of fallible human opinion" (p. 59; emphasis added). “The artless commentaries of the Midrash”—the simple, oral exegesis of Scripture—" were [during the time of Ptolemaic rule of Judah] seen by the Jews as inadequate in an age of Greek enlightenment. Adding Greek logic to their hermeneutics, the rabbis [scribes] overhauled their views and developed the Mishnah” (p. 63; emphasis added).

By "artless," Phillips suggests that the scribes' midrashim were, as yet, uncontrived. They were genuine attempts to explain the Scriptures. But the idea of a so-called "oral law" was most contrived. In fact, with religious constraints cast off, new ideas found fertile ground among these Jewish scholars. Thus, while outwardly supporting the Scriptures and resisting Hellenization, the scribes could justify virtually any doctrine by making the claim that it was part of an esoteric oral tradition—hidden all along in the depths of the written Torah.

To sum up the issue: Hellenization started, obviously, with Alexander the Great, and it continued well after his death and the subsequent Ptolemaic and Seleucid rule over Jewish life. It seems that Jewish life in general was peppered in all places with Hellenized thought, religious life included. The Pharisees may have openly contradicted Hellenization, but the damage had already been done with the adoption of Greek logic to interpret scriptural truth before Jesus came onto the scene.

The Pharisees were a populist faction that governed the religious aspect of the Jewish life at that time. Their pedigree was working-class, as opposed to the aristocratic Sadducees, who openly embraced the entirety of the Hellenism the pagan Greek culture had on the menu. The Pharisees, in particular, enjoyed the democratic aspect of Greek politics, contrasting themselves from the elitist Sadducees, who cozied up close to imperial Rome. You can see why the everyday Jew might identify with a Pharisee than a Sadducee. Sadducees wouldn't have been involved with the down-and-dirty Jewish rabble as the Pharisees were. Perhaps this is why Jesus dealt with the latter much more so.

I'm mentioning all of this because, to the thoughtless, Jesus would seem implicitly pro-Hellenization because the Pharisees constantly antagonized Him. I believe strongly that He wasn't, since His issue with the Pharisees had more to do with their behavior and attitudes. Both the Pharisees and Sadducees, despite any possible propaganda from the former, had already been thoroughly damaged by the spread of Hellenism and abandonment of their forefathers' mysticism. 

Jesus didn't seem to take any explicit sides in the pro- or anti-Hellenization debate, but sidled up with lots of different segments of society. In this sense, His important work had more to do with proactively bringing God's shalom to people directly, than bringing down institutions. Those institutions often got in His way; He simply worked around them, in spite of them. There's something we can extract from that fact.

* The Midrash was commentary on the Torah that eventually became the Talmud. Tannas was a newly-formed group of Hellenized Jewish scholars.