"How do you catch a cloud and pin it down?" ask the nuns in The Sound of Music, lamenting their inability to pin down the irrepressible Maria. Historians in quest of the Pharisees might utter the same refrain.
The Pharisees were a Jewish group that flourished in the late Second Temple period. Despite constituting but a fraction of the Jewish population, the Pharisees elicit historical fascination because (a) they are generally understood as the forerunners of the rabbis and (b) the Gospels portray them as among Jesus' primary rivals. Yet what sort of group the Pharisees were and what role they played in Jewish life elude scholarly consensus. Historians have portrayed them as a religious sect, a political party, a philosophical order, a bureaucratic or scholarly class, or some combination thereof.
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