Pope Francis is being urged by experts to take greater care when referring to “hypocritical” Pharisees, a stereotype that fuelled centuries of bad blood between Catholics and Jews.
Catholic-Jewish relations blossomed after the Second Vatican Council — which in 1965 finally urged respect for Judaism — and Francis is a clear friend of the Jews, insisting the Church continue to seek pardon for anti-Judaism.
But for centuries, Jesus’s Jewish origins were obscured and the Jews were held collectively responsible for his death.
And the pontiff’s tendency to quote directly from the New Testament, where Jesus slams members of the small religious and political group as “hypocrites”, has been troubling rabbis concerned about anti-Semitism.
Some 400 Jewish and Christian bible scholars gathered in Rome last week to exchange research notes on the Pharisees, a group which little is known about historically but which came to represent all Jews.
The image of the treacherous Pharisees appears down the centuries in dictionaries, academic articles, films and Protestant and Catholic preaching, with the word “Pharisee” becoming a synonym for hypocrite in the West.
“They lacked life. They were, so to speak, ‘starched’. They were rigid… The people didn’t matter to them: the Law mattered to them,” Francis said of Pharisees in a homily in October.
The 110-year-old Pontifical Biblical Institute, headed by Jesuits, organised the conference and helped write a speech Francis delivered to the participants Thursday, in which he acknowledged the dangers of quoting the Bible without context.
“The word ‘Pharisee’ often means ‘hypocritical’ or ‘presumptuous’ person. For many Jews, however, the Pharisees are the founders of Rabbinic Judaism and therefore their spiritual ancestors,” the Argentine pontiff wrote
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