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Updated: June 19, 2025
Ah me! you talk in pharisaic whispers of the Nautch girl; in righteous anger against the dainty geisha; in horror of the weaving Salomes as known in Western cities; wait, however, before you pour the last drop from your vials of wrath and indignation until you have seen an Arab dance "al-fajr" which, being translated, means the dawn.
We know nothing of the Apostle's residence at Jerusalem except the name of his teacher. But it was at this time that he became steeped in the Pharisaic doctrines which loamed the framework in which his earlier Christian beliefs were set. It is now recognised that Pharisaism, far from being the antipodes of Christianity, was rather the quarter where the Gospel found its best recruits.
There is unsoundness in the deluded and unamiable person who, by a grim, repellent, Pharisaic demeanour and address excites in the minds of young persons gloomy and repulsive ideas of religion, which wiser and better folk find it very hard to rub away.
The Catholic Church, on the other hand, is essentially a Church of slavery. First, in discipline, an enormous weight of observances and duties is laid upon her children, comparable only to the Pharisaic system. The Catholic must worship in this church and not in that, in this manner and not in the other.
It was, in short, a meeting of the teachers of the colleges, of the chief priests, and of the doctors most noted in the city for learning the leaders of opinion, expounders of the different creeds; princes of the Sadducees; Pharisaic debaters; calm, soft-spoken, stoical philosophers of the Essene socialists.
Their profanity smites them with a curse. We hold up our hands in no Pharisaic spirit of holy horror, but we ask the men and women of this generation and of those classes from which these mutterings and threatenings of revolt mainly emanate we ask them, whether marriage, as they understand the term, can be other than a bloodless martyrdom?
Scoff as I might at "Sabbatarianism," was I not always glad when Sunday came? The bells of London churches and chapels are not soothing to the ear, but when I remember their sound even that of the most aggressively pharisaic conventicle, with its one dire clapper I find it associated with a sense of repose, of liberty.
We read in Mark vii. 13, “Making the word of God of none effect, through your tradition, which ye have delivered; and many such like things do ye.” Jesus had been setting the law given through Moses over against the Pharisaic traditions, and in doing this, He expressly says in this passage that the law given through Moses was “the word of God.” In 2 Sam. xxiii. 2, we read, “The Spirit of the Lord spake by me, and His word was in my tongue.” Here again we are told that the utterance of God’s prophet was the word of God.
It was the perception of this which made Paul an apostle to the Gentiles, and it is this very thing itself, which some would degrade into an awkward, unintelligent, and outworn rag of Pharisaic apologetic, which is the very heart and soul of Paul's Gentile gospel. Paul himself was perfectly conscious of this; he could not have preached to the Gentiles at all unless he had been.
The scribes made much of "divers washings," but not with any such significance as would furnish to John his baptism of repentance and of radical change of life. That he was not following a pharisaic leading appears in the question put to him by the Pharisees, "Why, then, baptizest thou?" They saw something unique in the ceremony as he conducted it.
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