The quote heading the page today on The Thinklings is, “The radicals of one generation become the pharisees of the next.” I don’t know who said it (since they don’t, and I hadn’t heard it before), but whoever it was got the matter significantly wrong. The fact is, the Pharisees were the radicals of their own generation (or at least, they were one of the radical groups—there were certainly others); it was the Sadducees who were the Establishment. This isn’t an isolated phenomenon, either, as the pharisaical spirit is far more often found among the radicals and other fringe groups of the day than it is among those who are established and in positions of authority; the Establishment rarely has the energy to be pharisaical, and it has any number of other concerns to distract it from such efforts and attitudes. Radicals, on the other hand, have both energy and reason for it, just as the original Pharisees did: if you’re trying to build a movement to change society, that’s the most efficient way to do it.Our problem in understanding the Pharisees is that we only see them through the lens of the New Testament and their reaction to Jesus, who was, in essence, one of their own outflanking them from an even more radical position. Their faults are magnified, and their approach is interpreted in terms of centuries of subsequent Christian legalism; this is understandable, but does skew our picture somewhat. As a consequence, we miss the very real energy of their reform movement, and the hope it generated for some—and thus we interpret them as stick-in-the-mud never-change reactionary old-guard Establishment conservatives, when in reality they were anything but; when in reality, their problem was that they were leading change in the wrong direction, and not far enough.
