Pharisaism Then & Now
I’m trying to work my way through NT Wright’s The New Testament and The People of God. It’s a huge book with a lot of great material, Wright’s chapter on Critical Realism is a great treatment of the issue.
I just finished a chapter dealing with different facets to the growth of diversity in Judaism during the 2nd Temple Period. I came a cross a quote related to the focus and agenda of the Pharisees that seems to have some modern day analogues.
…faced with social, political and cultural ‘pollution’ at the level of national life as a whole, one natural reaction (with a strong sense of ‘natural’) was to concentrate on personal cleanness, to cleanse and purify an area over which one did have control as a compensation for the impossibility of cleansing or purifying an area - outward and visible political one - over which one had none. (187)
What do you think? See similarities today?
