The Pharisees as Legitimate Interpreters
and Teachers of Scripture
Calvin knows that the Pharisees
cannot be accused of the wholesale corruption of Scripture and doctrine because
both Jesus and Paul seem to endorse their teaching. At the beginning of his
longest polemic against the Pharisees, Jesus makes the remarkable claim, “The
scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat; therefore, do whatever they teach
you and follow it” (Matt 23:2-3). Calvin is not quite sure what to make of this
injunction. On the one hand, he reminds his readers that Jesus accuses the
Pharisees of perverting the meaning of Scripture, even though that made them
immensely popular. On the other hand, Calvin claims that the teachings of the
Pharisees is fine; it is their actions that should be avoided. Hence the
Pharisees do not in this instance represent a sectarian deviation but have the
authority of teachers: “Whoever sits on Moses’ seat, then, teaches by the Word
and the authority of God and not on his own account or by his own
interpretation. Of course it entails a rightful calling; Christ bids men to
listen to the scribes because they were public teachers of the church” (Comm.
Matt. 23.2). Calvin thinks that Jesus explicitly names the Pharisees as
those on Moses’s seat “because at that time their sect’s government of the
Church and their interpretation of Scripture had a leading influence” (Comm.
Matt. 23:2).
Calvin has the same ambivalence
when he describes Paul’s past life as a Pharisee. On the one hand, he wants to
insist that the Pharisees corrupted the whole of Scripture by their inventions.
On the other hand, he claims that because “they retained some sound
interpretations, handed down by the ancients, they were held in the highest
esteem” (Comm. Phil. 3:5). Calvin therefore tries to exempt Paul from
his general characterization of the Pharisees as perverting and corrupting
Scripture. For instance, when Paul speaks of his former zeal for the tradition of
his fathers (Gal 1:13), which sounds exactly like the tradition of the
Pharisees of which Calvin is so critical, Calvin interpreters Paul to mean “not
the additions that had corrupted the law of God, but that law of God itself
which he had been educated in from his childhood and had received through the
hands of his parents and ancestors” (Comm. Gal. 1:13). We see the same
qualification when Calvin interprets Paul’s claim that he was educated at the
feet of Gamaliel the Pharisee according to the strict manner of the law of his
fathers (Acts 22:3). Calvin denies that “the law of our fathers” is the oral
law of the Pharisees. “He seems to me to be distinguishing the purer form of knowledge
with which he had been imbued, from the general instruction, which had departed
rather far from the original sense of the Law.” Hence Gamaliel preserved the
sounder interpretations of the fathers and di not corrupt the interpretation of
the law, even though he was a Pharisee, as was Paul. “Paul takes justifiable
pride in the in the fact that he was trained in the Law of their fathers
properly and diligently” (Comm. Acts 22:3). This training explains why
Paul appeals to his own identity as a Pharisee in defending the preaching of
the resurrection over against the Sadducees (Acts 23:6). Calvin claims that the
Pharisees had preserved the true doctrine of faith more than had the Sadducees
and Essenes. “For although they had corrupted the Law in many of its aspects,
yet it was right that the influence of that sect in the protection of the true
faith should be valued more than that of others, which had departed further
from the original purity” (Comm. Acts 26:4). Indeed, Calvin appeals to
the teaching of the Pharisees on the resurrection, as well as on the reality of
human and angelic spirits, over against his Anabaptist contemporaries who teach
that the soul sleeps with the body between death and the general resurrection
(John Calvin, Treatises against the Anabaptists and against the Libertines,
trans. Benjamin Farley [Grand Rapids: Baker, 1982], 123).
Calvin reinforces this more
positive view of the Pharisees when he insists that they were both the most
distinguished teachers of the law, as those who sat on Moses’s seat, and were
also invested with the governance of the church (Comm. Matt. 12:14).
Calvin contrasts the authority of the Pharisees with that of other scribes,
saying that “the Pharisees were the leaders; they had the most honor and the
government at that time was in their hands” (Comm. Matt. 15:1). Calvin
claims that the Pharisees were part of the priesthood and held the highest
place among them. “At that time the ordinary power in the Church was in the
hands of the scribes and the priests, and the Pharisees were in the chief
position” (Comm. Matt. 16;12. By this he means that they are chief among
the priests. This is clear from other passages in his commentaries as well.
Both Calvin and Luther thought that Pharisees were priests, although that may
be true only for a small percentage of them).
As we saw with the discussion of
Moses’s seat, this means that the Pharisees were invested with divine authority
in their office, as Calvin points out when he speaks of the Pharisees coming to
see John the Baptist. “He says that they were Pharisees, who held then the
highest place in the Church, to teach us that they were not some minor figures
of the Levitical order but men endowed with authority” (Comm. John 1:24).
In this sense, the Pharisees at the time of Jesus are directly analogous to the
papacy at the time of Calvin: both are invested with authority in the church. (Randall
Zachman, “The Pharisees in the Theology of Martin Luther and John Calvin,” in The
Pharisees, ed. Joseph Sievers and Amy-Jill Levine [Grand Rapids, Mich.:
Eerdmans, 2021], 313-15)