What is a Pharisee?

Pharisees, I contend, were one of the most misunderstood sects of Judiasm by Christians throughout history, up to and including today. A conversation with poster "karateka" led to this explanation, which I have made before (more or less) in the very first post of this blog.

In human terms, all true Christians are the successors of all true Pharisees. All true Pharisees were true believers in Judaism. There is no Christ without Judaism.

The term Christian was applied to those persons who inhabited Churches seeded and built up by the Apostle Paul. Those persons were gentile mirrors of the sect of Judaism known as the Pharisees, with the modification that they realized, as all true Pharisees would, that Christ was Messiah.

This hardly makes them perfect. This does not make their vision the only vision of Christ. This does not make them right. This DOES make those who believe as they did the legitimate and first claimants to the name Christian, which was interestingly enough, a derisive epithet flung at them by unbelievers in Antioch.

Sects such as the Essenes are not mentioned in the texts of Scripture on which our historic understandings of Christianity rely.

The Sadducees are in my view, most complicit of all in the murder of our LORD, and they no longer exist.

The documentary evidence says, that whether it was a large number of them or not, it was the Pharisees, as a sect, who contributed the largest number of converts to Early Messianic belief. In all likelihood more that called themselves Pharisees did not convert, but only they are mentioned in the earliest annals of Christianity.

"Certain" Pharisees once "saved" the life of Christ.

Proverbs 13:24: "He that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes."

Hebrews 12:6: "For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth."

Christ devotes most of his negative attention to the Pharisees, as opposed to the Sadducees. It is not proof of love that you are punished, but it is proof of hatred, that you are not.

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The 21st Century Pharisee

One of my prayers has been answered. I was offered some tech help, and of course, took it. The Modern Pharisee is now even more modern, over the next few weeks, months, years, I hope to make more changes to improve the blog. Want to know how?

The first change relates to page rank which I am finding is hardly an arbitrary category. By hiding some of the content behind a "read more" teaser (as my helpful assistant calls it), I get two things. Page rank tells me with rough approximation who became more involved in a post to the point of "reading past the fold" or to the "continued" section of an article.

This crowds more content to the front page of the blog which in times of old (newspapers) was called "above the fold." If a newspaper is lying in front of you the most important content in terms of exposure is "above the fold." At a newspaper stand or seller or vendor, that's what you would see to attract you to buy the paper. Buying it is one level of interest (the Modern Pharisee's content is FREE) and opening it, another and going past page one to other pages, yet another.

Content is why people come to a publication. The front page is the honey for the bear. The rest of the publication in a less than perfect world is how content gets paid for. Content goes to work and advertisers clamor increasingly for space next to popular content. When you click to the "Read More" portion of the article on the front page, more space is available for advertising and appears next to the article of interest.

On the internet, articles have keywords and advertising tends to be relevant to those keywords and also relevant to viewer origin. You might see "Bitter Root Motors" and I might see "New Haven Nissan" because of where we are located. If the article is about Baboons, we might both see an ad for a local zoo or a "save the Baboon" fund.

All of this is to increase blog rank, position as a result of search engine inquiries and revenue. Revenue makes the Modern Pharisee warm at night, eat when he's hungry and give him a bigger carbon footprint. In view of the fact that we're not really warming anymore, but cooling instead, it is my social obligation to belch, smoke cigars, leave big clouds of diesel soot and otherwise cloud the planet with greenhouse gasses. As God intended.

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