Thank you for your thoughtful engagement with this post. I will answer your question, but first I want to say that I hope this can be a learning opportunity.
[I would also request to my followers that you be kind in your responses to my teaching reblogs. This post attracted a LOT of attention, which is great but also means that it's going to draw in a lot of folks who have not yet really unlearned a lot of antisemitism baked into the primary texts of Christianity and their interpretations over time, and I'd like to take this opportunity to talk about it with the interested demographic.]
So the problem here isn't the word "Pharisee" but rather invoking the concept of Pharisees as the binary opposite of what Jesus taught. Jesus likely was a Pharisee. Or, at least, the Jews he taught and traveled amongst almost certainly saw him that way. Importantly, Pharisees may have been the religious authorities for the Jewish community, but they didn't actually have real power. That would be the occupying Romans, who were pagan and too busy crucifying Jews for fun and to hold down rebellion to give even an iota of a shit about what the Pharisees (or, should I say, proto-rabbis) had to say.
Casting the Pharisees as the main enemy of Jesus and treating their relatively minor religious authority as having the same kind of major political power and hegemonic rule that right-wing Christians have in the US today is both inaccurate and antisemitic.
Unfortunately, this is an easy trap to fall into, because the New Testament itself does this in places. This is because it was written in retrospective after early Christianity had well and truly split from Judaism and had become a majority....... Roman gentile. Of course they're going to soften the colonizing role of Rome and try to recast what were mostly either healthy "arguments for the sake of heaven" or legitimate intra-Jewish issues into their main guy rabble-rousing against The Establishment [who are Jews].
I strongly encourage you and any other progressive Christians to read this article to learn more about this topic:
Progressive Christianity has a lot about it that is good and compelling, but Christianity will never be truly progressive until it has unpacked and reinterpreted the baked-in antisemitism that built and violently spread it. I've seen far too many otherwise excellent Christians - good, kind, and caring people by almost every measure - who fail really hard when it comes to allyship with Jews. There's a lot to unpack and a lot to rework and rethink. I would ask that everyone who saw my first two posts really sit with this follow up and consider what things your Christianity, your church, and your community might need to do to get there. And it starts by listening to Jews when it comes to issues of antisemitism and taking seriously what we have to say about it.
