Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has been making headlines recently by routinely invoking God and Christianity to give the war in Iran religious legitimacy. Mr. Hegseth’s crusader-like rhetoric, in tandem with computer-generated images of President Donald Trump sitting on the Throne of Peter, lovingly embraced by Jesus and even as Jesus himself, has produced great consternation among Trump fans and critics alike, including charges of sacrilege. 

On April 16, Mr. Hegseth offered further parallels between Jesus and the Trump administration by comparing today’s media with the New Testament Pharisees. Drawing on a healing narrative in Mk 3:1-6, he opined: 

You see, the Pharisees, the so-called and self-appointed elites of their time, they were there to witness, to write everything down, to report. But their hearts were hardened. Even though they witnessed a literal miracle, it didn’t matter. They were only there to explain away the goodness in pursuit of their agenda.

Mr. Hegseth continued: 

Our press is just like these Pharisees. Not [everyone], but the legacy Trump-hating press, your politically motivated animus for President Trump nearly completely blinds you from the brilliance of our American warriors. The Pharisees scrutinized every good act in order to find a violation, only looking for the negative.

Two weeks later, at a Senate Committee hearing on April 30, he again used “Pharisees” polemically, saying “I feel like it’s a pretty accurate term for folks who don’t see the plank in their own eye [Mt 7:3-5] and always wanted to see what’s wrong with an operation…”   

The analogy is that just as the Pharisees hated Jesus and vigilantly watched for opportunities to condemn him, the media today hates Mr. Trump and vigilantly looks for opportunities to condemn him. 

Mr. Hegseth’s remarks invoke an ancient anti-Jewish trope: the caricature of the first-century Pharisees as law-obsessed, murderous enemies of Jesus. This has received little notice in the midst of all the controversy, perhaps because the stereotype of Pharisees as “legalistic, elite, money-loving, xenophobic hypocrites,” as Joseph Sievers and Amy-Jill Levine put it (The Pharisees, Preface), is deeply embedded in Western culture. These scholars observe that “[b]ecause Pharisees, in the Christian imagination, represented an ossified, degenerate Jewish culture that both Jesus and Paul sought to correct and are the forebears of Rabbinic Judaism, negative descriptions of the Pharisees bleed over into antisemitic discourse.” Importantly, media reports about Mr. Hegseth’s accusations often served to uncritically reinforce the stereotype. 

The caricature of Pharisees is difficult to overcome because it has origins in certain New Testament texts and because of its usefulness in anti-Jewish Christian polemic over time. However, although there is not a great deal known about them, Catholic teachings provide key guidance. 

In 2019, Pope Francis observed: 

The history of interpretation has fostered a negative image of the Pharisees, often without a concrete basis in the Gospel accounts. Often, over the course of time, that image has been attributed by Christians to Jews in general. In our world, sadly, such negative stereotypes have become quite common. One of the most ancient and most damaging stereotypes is that of a “Pharisee,” especially when used to cast Jews in a negative light.…Among Christians and in secular society, in different languages the word “Pharisee” often means “a self-righteous or hypocritical person.” For many Jews, however, the Pharisees are the founders of rabbinic Judaism and hence their own spiritual forebears.

The pope’s last sentences link the misrepresentation of Pharisees with possible antisemitic sentiments against Jews today. Testifying to the continuing potency of this “negative stereotype,” even Pope Francis could occasionally fall under its spell, as in his Angelus reflections on Mark 7 in September 2024.

Using the Pharisees as forces of darkness to starkly contrast with the luminous Jesus easily slides over into “the Jews” collectively or to the Jewish contemporaries of Christians of whatever century. The Christian imagination consequently and unjustly regards Jews as the inveterate opponents of Christianity. It is even more disturbing to see the Pharisees so caricatured at the same time that some politicians are claiming that it is a defining Christian belief that “the Jews” were collectively responsible for the crucifixion.

These kinds of assertions illustrate the dangers of biblical fundamentalism, which the Catholic Church rejects.

The Pontifical Biblical Commission has described biblical fundamentalism as excluding “every effort at understanding the Bible that takes account of its historical origins and development,” and therefore, with regard to the Gospels, “fundamentalism does not take into account the development of the Gospel tradition but naively confuses the final stage of this tradition (what the evangelists have written) with the initial (the words and deeds of the historical Jesus)” (”The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church” 1993). 

Since the Gospels were likely written four to seven decades after the crucifixion of Jesus, the commission wrote, “the presentation of the Pharisees in the Gospels was influenced in part by subsequent polemics between Christians and Jews.” These later arguments occurred in the context of his followers’ professions of faith that God had raised Jesus from death to transcendent life and after the decimation of Jewish leadership by the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in the year 70 C.E. The Gospel writers infused Jesus’ earlier debates with other Jews over Torah observance with their own more heated arguments with Pharisaic contemporaries about Jesus’ divine Sonship. 

But back during his ministry, Jesus mainly conversed with fellow Jews, including Pharisees, about how to best observe the Torah’s commandments. In fact, according to the Pontifical Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, Jesus shared many essential ideas and practices with Pharisees and was, in fact, “closer to them than to other contemporary Jewish groups” (III, No. 8). 

Despite Mr. Hegseth’s claims, Jesus’ Pharisaic contemporaries held little political power in comparison to the Temple priests, whose chief, importantly, was appointed by the Roman governor. Contrary to the widespread notion that Pharisees were involved in the crucifixion, it should be observed that they barely appear in the four Gospel passion narratives. Furthermore, they were generally well respected by ordinary Jews for their knowledge of Israel’s Scriptures and traditions. There is a broad scholarly consensus that Pharisees were non-priestly Scripture scholars whose mode of biblical “interpretation was less strict than the Essenes and more innovative than the conservative Sadducees who accepted only the written Law,” according to the Pontifical Biblical Commission. Against the stereotype that Pharisees were harsh, it should be noted that sometimes Jesus’ reading of the Torah was stricter than theirs—for example, on the topic of divorce. 

In short, when it comes to the Pharisees, the Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews could not have been more prescient when it observed in 1985 that “The urgency and importance of precise, objective and rigorously accurate teaching on Judaism for our faithful follows too from the danger of anti-Semitism which is always ready to reappear under different guises.”

Rigorously accurate depictions of the Pharisees seem needed today more than ever. 

Philip A. Cunningham is professor of theology and co-director of the Institute for Jewish-Catholic Relations of Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.