In Quest of the Historical Pharisees

CHAPTER 10. The Pharisees and the Sadducees in the Earliest Rabbinic Documents

CHAPTER 10 THE PHARISEES AND THE SADDUCEES IN THE EARLIEST RABBINIC DOCUMENTS Jack N. Lightstone 255 INTRODUCTORY REMARKS: THE LARGER QUESTION AND THE FOCUS OF THIS CHAPTER One underlying problematic informing this volume’s subject is that the ancient evidence about the Pharisees is variegated. More important still, these different, sometimes divergent, portrayals of the Pharisees in the ancient sources stem, to a significant degree, from the variety of the types of sources from which the evidence comes—from Hellenistic-historiographical and Hellenistic-autobiographical texts (Josephus), through aretalogical-evangelical documents (the gospels), to rabbinic-legal treatises (the Mishnah and the Tosefta), and so on. Of course, the various ancient authors or “authorships” (to use Neusner’s term for early rabbinic documents, which have a more “collective” provenance) will bring their own idiomatic perspectives and tendentious agendas to bear on their portrayal of the Pharisees. But in addition, the literary and rhetorical conventions that govern the types of writing, genre, or expression within which each author or “authorship” works affects how matters are portrayed. Finally, not only must modern historians of religion cope with a variety of idiomatic perspectives, agendas, and literary-rhetorical conventions in the sources, they must also consider the question: Which author or “authorship” was in a position to know what about whom, and how? The upshot of the above is that over the course of the last thirty years of historical scholarship on the ancient Pharisees, the problem of how to read and assess the historical value of the ensemble of witnesses in an either integrated or composite fashion has been at the forefront. Much, if not most, of the scholarly debate has in effect 256 JACK N. LIGHTSTONE revolved around whether such an integrated or composite reading is methodologically possible. What may be glossed over or lost of the idiomatic nature of the various bodies of evidence in their respective portrayals of the Pharisees, if scholars rush to propound some composite picture, impelled by the desire to “discover” the “historical” Pharisees? With these considerations in mind, this chapter considers one particular type of evidence about the Pharisees, from a specific swath of early rabbinic literature. I analyze those passages in which the term “Pharisee(s)” is juxtaposed with “Sadducee(s)” (or “Boethusian[s]”). Moreover, I restrict my attention to those passages meeting these criteria in the Mishnah and Tosefta.1 SOME CONCEPTUAL AND METHODOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS The Primacy of Mishnaic and Toseftan Evidence Why I focus on passages in which “Pharisees” are juxtaposed with “Sadducees” will be made clearer in subsequent sections of this chapter . Why I concentrate on Mishnaic and Toseftan passages is simple. The Mishnah is the earliest document produced and promulgated as authoritative in the early rabbinic movement. The Tosefta is arguably the first attempt within the early rabbinic movement to compose (or compile, as some would prefer to state) a sustained commentary of sorts on the Mishnah; hence, the Tosefta is more likely than other ancient rabbinic texts to contain materials that date to a period and provenance close to the Mishnah’s.2 While it is possible that later rabbinic documents, like the Babylonian Talmud, contain information (for example, in its beraitot) of so-called “tannaitic” provenance and contemporaneous with the Mishnah and its sources, it is less probable that an allegedly ancient “tradition” that first appears in the Babylonian Talmud stems from the same era as evidence in the Mishnah and Tosefta. Therefore, what the authorships of the Mishnah and Tosefta “know,” believe they “know,” or wish us to “know” about the Pharisees and Sadducees is not likely to be improved on by the search for more reliable evidence in later rabbinic writings. Moreover, the THE PHARISEES AND SADDUCEES 257 primacy and authority of the Mishnah and the passages of the Tosefta for later rabbinic authorships means that parallel passages in later rabbinic documents most often reinterpret and recontextualize these earlier (so-called) tannaitic witnesses.3 It is less likely and, in my own scholarly experience, less frequently the case that the parallel in the later rabbinic document can be shown to have preserved the earlier version. Hence, limiting this study to passages in the Mishnah and Tosefta is a methodologically cautious stance. It is one I favor in full recognition that some allegedly “tannaitic” traditions in later rabbinic texts might proffer evidence contemporaneous with that in the Mishnah or Tosefta.4 All this being said, while the passages...