Often, and increasingly, I fear I am in danger of being a Pharisee.  Many of my fears are not unwarranted: my hypocrisy knows no bounds.  But I have also found myself erring on the other side: Thinking I or someone else has a Pharisitical attitude when in fact that’s not the case.  So it’s important to keep in mind what Jesus’ criticisms of the Pharisees were.

In this clip, Ligon Duncan describes a common misconception we have of the Pharisees and how Jesus interacted with them.

The following is an edited transcript:

Dever: So what is the work that EP Sanders has done in the first century context useful for?

Duncan: I think if there is one thing that we could get out of this for evangelicals, it would be to reorient ourselves to the Pharisees.  I think for a long time evangelicals have viewed Pharisees as people who care too much about the law; they’re nitpickers; they love minutiae; they’re harsh; they’re mean, etc.  So I think if you could get anything out of these guys, one thing you’re going to get is a reorientation to the Pharisees.

Jesus never accuses these men of caring too much about God’s law. He always tells them, your problem is you act like you care about God’s law, and you trash it.  So what he ends up doing is holding the law up in front of them and showing them the law is much greater than they ever thought it was, and that they have never ever done it service.

Even in stories like the rich young ruler. Remember the question, “What must I do?”  And the answer is, “Keep the law.”  That’s an interesting answer from a gospel preacher. . . . And then the retort, “I’ve done that since I was a child.”  But Jesus’ response, “Okay, sell everything you have.”  He holds up the first commandment before the man, thus showing that he has not kept the law.  It’s a very interesting interaction — not accusing him of caring too much about the law, but of not appreciating the demands of the law.

We paint a picture of the Pharisee that would not look anything like us, when the fact of the matter is, we look a whole lot more like the Pharisees than we would like to admit. . . .

We don’t think of them as a dedicated, evangelizing, lay movement, which it was.

The full interview, “Justification & the New Perspective”, is available at 9marks.org.