Were the Pharisees the Precursors of the Rabbis? https://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/history-ideas/2015/06/were-the-pharisees-the-precursors-of-the-rabbis/

June 10, 2015 | Joshua Ezra Burns
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Probably, writes Joshua Ezra Burns, but the rabbis sought to obscure the connection:

Since the Middle Ages, Jews and Christians generally have assumed that the first rabbis were Pharisees. . . . Like the Pharisees, the rabbis claimed to maintain a sacred tradition of scriptural exegesis. The Mishnah, the earliest record of the rabbinic legal tradition, . . . approvingly cites select opinions ascribed to the Pharisees. Later rabbinic sages espoused teachings on fate, free will, and the afterlife ascribed to the Pharisees in the New Testament and by the contemporary Jewish historian Flavius Josephus. . . .

While modern readers may easily draw these connections, neither the authors of the Mishnah nor their successors acknowledged that their intellectual forerunners were Pharisees. . . . Why might the earliest proponents of the rabbinic movement have wished to obscure their connection to Pharisees if that connection indeed existed?

Many contemporary scholars . . . suggest that the earliest rabbinic sages, though once Pharisees themselves, did not wish to implicate themselves in the volatile politics of their sectarian forerunners. The Pharisees had been among those Jewish parties whose agitation against Judea’s Roman [rulers] contributed to the outbreak of the disastrous revolt of 66-73 CE, [leading to] the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. Those who survived the war reinvented themselves as rabbis to efface their new movement’s sectarian pedigree without purging their minds of what they deemed its more valuable cultural effects. They thus chose neither to draw attention to their Pharisaic pedigree nor to deny it.

Read more on Bible Odyssey: http://www.bibleodyssey.org/people/related-articles/pharisees-and-rabbinic-judaism.aspx