Pharisees
the most numerous of the three divisions or orders of Judaism in the time of Christ, the other two being the Essenes and the Sadducees. They were so called because they kept aloof from Levitically impure food, separated themselves from the lawless people of the land, and united to keep the Mosaic law.
They arose immediately after the return from the Babylonian captivity. As all the students of the law naturally joined this association, the appellation Member, Associate, chaber, or Pharisee, parush, became synonymous with with student, disciple, lawyer, scribe.
Accordingly, they represented the national faith of orthodox Judaism. Some Pharisees fell into extravagances, and laid more stress on trifling and petty formulæ than on the spirit of the law, to whom the rebukes of Christ refer, and who have given rise to the term Pharisee being used as synonymous with a strict observer of external forms of religion without the spirit of it. See SADDUCEE.