Pharisees

The Pharisees appear in the novel as a Jewish group devoted to the Law of Moses, but not as a single, unchanging voice about Jesus. Shmuel’s research places them within a range of ancient Jewish interpretations, and his imaginative reconstruction makes proximity to Pharisaic teaching part of the background for Judas’s role in the origins of Christianity. These accounts are arguments and remembered traditions within the novel, not a single settled verdict on Jesus or the group.

Identity and Place in Jewish Tradition

In the account Shmuel copies from Rabbi Yehuda Arie of Modena, the Pharisees are among several factions that upheld the Law of Moses while differing over how its commandments should be interpreted and observed. The same passage names the scribes alongside them as the sages from whom the Mishnah emerged, and distinguishes other groups, including the Sadducees, the Boethusians, and the Essenes. Jesus, in this reading, chose to join the Pharisees and remained within Jewish religious life rather than rejecting its principles.

Rabbi Yehuda Arie’s interpretation, as Shmuel records it, emphasizes Jesus’s statements about the Law. It points to his instruction that his disciples observe what the scribes and Pharisees teach, while not following their example, and to his declaration that he had come not to abolish the Law or the Prophets but to fulfill them. The argument presents Jesus as affirming both the Written Law and the Oral Law. It therefore treats his disputes with teachers as disagreements within Jewish tradition, not proof that he meant to found a new religion or claim divinity.

A Contested Historical Record

The novel sets this sympathetic account against a varied record of Jewish references to Jesus. In its discussion of Josephus, the narrator describes a passage in Jewish Antiquities that presents Jesus in explicitly Christian terms, including as the Messiah and as resurrected after crucifixion. The passage also notes the view, attributed to the modern scholar Gustav Yom-Tov Eisenschloss, that the wording was likely inserted by later Christian hands. A different version attributed to Agapius says Josephus reported the beliefs of Jesus’s followers without affirming the Messiahship or resurrection as fact. These competing transmissions make the historical record itself part of the problem Shmuel is studying.

Rabbinic references in the novel are likewise described as fragmentary and disputed. Some passages may allude to Jesus, but their identification is presented as conjectural. Three Babylonian Talmud passages, by contrast, are described as explicitly derogatory, portraying Jesus in different hostile terms; the novel says they were later removed from almost all printed editions because Jews feared how Christian neighbors might react. The contrast matters: what survives in religious texts is shaped not only by belief and polemic but also by the danger surrounding their circulation.

Medieval Jewish writing adds further distinctions rather than a uniform position. Rabbi Gershom ha-Cohen objected to crude insults against Jesus even while challenging the authority of the New Testament. In The Kuzari, Yehuda ha-Levi gives a Christian sage an account of Jesus and the Trinity that the Khazar king finds unpersuasive, but presents the biography without mockery or distortion. Maimonides calls Jesus a false prophet while also treating Christianity as a stage in humanity’s movement away from paganism toward belief in the God of Israel. Together, these examples show that Jewish accounts could criticize Christian doctrine without reducing every treatment of Jesus to ridicule.

Pharisees in Shmuel’s Reconstruction of Jesus

Shmuel’s principal model is Rabbi Yehuda Arie’s Shield and Sword, a late polemical work that, in Shmuel’s notes, argues through logic and critical reading rather than blasphemy or apologetic pleading. Yehuda Arie portrays Jesus as a genuine Pharisee who differed from his teachers only on marginal legal matters and never abandoned the foundations of his faith. Shmuel copies the argument late at night with growing excitement, especially its insistence that the Gospel accounts depict Jesus as a human being who upheld the Law.

That research becomes the springboard for Shmuel’s own account of Judas. He imagines Judas as a wealthy, educated man from Judea, familiar with the Written and Oral Law and close to Pharisees and priests. In Shmuel’s reconstruction, Jerusalem’s priestly leaders send Judas to join and observe the Galilean preacher, whom they regard as one of many wonder-workers. Judas instead becomes Jesus’s most devoted disciple and the first person to believe with certainty in his divinity. The Pharisees are thus part of the social and religious world from which Shmuel’s Judas emerges, but the account does not make the group collectively responsible for Judas’s later actions.

Shmuel’s version turns the familiar meaning of betrayal inside out. Convinced that Jesus must demonstrate his divine power publicly, Judas urges him to go to Jerusalem, where a crucifixion followed by a miraculous descent from the cross would, he believes, bring about universal recognition and redemption. When Jesus remains fearful and uncertain, Shmuel’s Judas uses his connections among Pharisees and priests to arrange the execution. The reconstruction recasts the crucifixion as a disastrous attempt to force a public messianic revelation, not as a transaction motivated by the traditional story of payment. Its logic belongs to Shmuel’s speculative interpretation, rather than to an independently confirmed account of Pharisaic action.

Belief, Power, and the Limits of Interpretation

Across these episodes, the Pharisees occupy a boundary between continuity and dispute: the group stands for adherence to the Mosaic Law, yet its members and teachers inhabit a tradition of disagreement. Rabbi Yehuda Arie’s account uses that continuity to claim Jesus as a Jewish teacher who remained within the Law; Shmuel’s extension of the argument then makes Judas’s faith, rather than simple treachery, the engine of the crucifixion plot. The same material that allows Jesus to be reclaimed as Jewish also permits Shmuel to reinterpret the role long condemned as betrayal.

The novel keeps these claims within their speakers’ contexts. Shmuel is reading polemical texts, recording their arguments, and building a conjectural narrative from them; the disagreements among Josephus’s transmitters, rabbinic passages, and medieval writers remain visible rather than being resolved into one authoritative history. That method gives the Pharisees significance beyond their place in the ancient setting: they mark how interpretations of Jesus change with religious allegiance, historical pressure, and the effort to distinguish a teacher’s own commitments from what later followers made of him.