Pharisees
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Pharisees. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
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 They arose immediately Mosaic law. 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 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.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
far'i-ses, an ancient sect of the Hebrews. They were noted for a strict observance of the letter of the law. In doctrine they held to the resurrection of the body, to the actual existence of angels and spirits, and to the paternal care of a personal God. They were scrupulous in the observance of all points of Hebrew ritual. At the time of Christ they had a reputation of being hypocritical in their lives. See Sadducees Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye devour widows' houses, and for a pretence make long prayer: therefore ye shall receive the greater damnation. Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves.-St. Matthew xxiii:14-15.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Both accounts take the Gospel polemic at face value: Aiton's in 1910 states flatly that the Pharisees "had a reputation of being hypocritical," and Collier's in 1921 explains how their name became a byword for empty formalism. Scholarship since the Second World War has largely dismantled that reading. E. P. Sanders's Paul and Palestinian Judaism (1977) and the work of Jacob Neusner recast the Pharisees as a lay reform movement within a Judaism grounded in God's covenant rather than in legalistic bookkeeping, and Matthew 23 is now generally read as polemic from a period when Christians and Jews were separating, not as neutral reportage. Churches followed: the Second Vatican Council's Nostra Aetate (1965) and later Catholic and Protestant statements have explicitly cautioned against the hypocrite stereotype, and the Pharisees are now widely credited as the ancestors of rabbinic Judaism, the one strand that survived the destruction of the Temple in AD 70.
Written for this edition, 2026.