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Second Temple Judaism

When Did the Pharisees Start?

The Shared Table Archive · Updated 2026-09-05 · 10 min read
When Did the Pharisees Start?
In shortThe Pharisees have no recoverable founding year. Josephus places Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes in a passage set during Jonathan's Hasmonean leadership in the mid-second century BCE, but scholars debate how precisely that dates the groups. His first substantial Pharisaic episode occurs under John Hyrcanus I, who ruled from 135/134 to 104 BCE. The best historical answer is therefore that the movement emerged in the second century BCE and was established by its later decades.
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The dated answer: visible by the late second century BCE

No surviving source gives a founding year for the Pharisees. The safest historical answer is that they were an identifiable Jewish movement by the reign of the Hasmonean ruler John Hyrcanus I, conventionally dated 135/134-104 BCE. Josephus places Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes in an earlier passage set during the leadership of Jonathan, whose Hasmonean rule ran from 160 to 143 BCE and whose high priesthood began in 152 BCE. Whether that passage securely dates all three groups to Jonathan's own time is debated.

This is why careful accounts often say the Pharisees emerged in the second century BCE, during the Hasmonean period, rather than assigning them a birthday. The first attestation tells us when a source locates an already named group. It does not tell us when the relationships, practices, and interpretive habits behind that name began.

The movement was not founded to oppose Jesus. It was already part of Jewish public life more than a century before Jesus' ministry. Their later prominence in the Gospels belongs to a much later chapter of a Jewish movement whose origins must be reconstructed from sparse and interested evidence.

Three dates answer three different questions

Arguments about the Pharisees' beginning often collapse three distinct dates:

Question Best working date What that date establishes
When does Josephus first place named Pharisees in his narrative? The time of Jonathan, in the middle second century BCE Antiquities 13.171 says three Jewish schools existed "at this time"
When does Josephus first narrate sustained Pharisaic political activity? The reign of John Hyrcanus I, 135/134-104 BCE Antiquities 13.288-298 depicts influence, a dispute, and a break with Hyrcanus
When did Josephus write these accounts? War around 75 CE; Antiquities in 93/94 CE His narratives are later reconstructions, not contemporary minutes from Hasmonean Judea

All three dates matter. Quoting only the first can make a narrative placement sound like contemporary documentation. Quoting only the third can imply that Josephus invented the movement after 70 CE. The evidence supports neither shortcut.

What Josephus actually says under Jonathan

In Jewish Antiquities 13.171-173, Josephus pauses a narrative about Jonathan and introduces three groups, which he presents to Greek-reading audiences as schools or sects: Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes. He distinguishes them by their accounts of divine providence and human agency.

The phrase translated "at this time" supplies the usual mid-second-century starting point. The surrounding narrative concerns Jonathan, so many readers take Josephus to mean that the three groups existed during Jonathan's leadership. Josephus Sievers notes that this placement has led many scholars to date Pharisaic emergence around 150 BCE.

But the passage is a compact authorial aside written roughly two and a half centuries after the setting. It does not narrate a Pharisee doing anything under Jonathan. It does not name a founder, meeting, institution, or decree that created the movement. Nor does its grammar settle how far back Josephus believed the schools extended. It is evidence for Josephus's historical scheme, not an archaeological date stamp.

The right conclusion is narrow: Josephus's later Antiquities locates named Pharisees in the age of Jonathan. That makes a mid-second-century date plausible, but it does not provide an exact origin.

The first substantial episode is under John Hyrcanus

Josephus gives much more narrative detail in Antiquities 13.288-298. Here John Hyrcanus hosts Pharisees at a meal, asks them to correct him if he has departed from the right path, and then breaks with them after a dispute over an insult and its punishment. Josephus also contrasts regulations handed down from earlier generations with positions attributed to Sadducees.

Historians debate the shaping and reliability of this story, but its narrative function is clear. Pharisees appear as an established group with public influence, collective judgments, inherited practices, and a relationship to a Hasmonean ruler. Cambridge's introduction to Second Temple Jewish varieties therefore states the cautious minimum: according to Josephus, Pharisees existed as early as John Hyrcanus's reign.

That reign is the secure floor most introductory histories can use. A movement already able to advise and then oppose a ruler did not spring into existence at the dinner table Josephus describes. Its formation must be earlier than the episode, even if the surviving evidence cannot say how much earlier.

Josephus later places Pharisees amid the violence of Alexander Jannaeus's reign and the politics of Salome Alexandra's rule. These episodes show growth and contest, not a founding sequence. For the movement's positions beside other Jewish groups, see Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes compared.

Why the first attestation is not the beginning

Movements rarely begin when an outsider first names them. A recognizable label usually follows a period in which people form networks, argue about authority, transmit rulings, and distinguish their practices from those of rivals.

For the Pharisees, at least four stages may have preceded clear naming:

  1. teachers and interpreters developed positions on Torah and inherited practice;
  2. households and followers adopted some of those positions;
  3. disagreements became stable enough for opponents and observers to recognize a group;
  4. a name circulated and later entered a surviving text.

We do not know how long those stages took or whether the participants experienced them as the creation of a new movement. "The Pharisees started in 150 BCE" compresses this uncertain process into a false event. "They are first placed in the mid-second century BCE and clearly active by John Hyrcanus" preserves what the evidence can carry.

Did the Pharisees descend from the Hasideans?

First Maccabees mentions the Hasideans, or Hasidaioi, during the Maccabean revolt. In 1 Maccabees 2:42 they join Mattathias's forces; in 7:13 they appear among those initially seeking peace. Because these pious law-observers appear before Josephus's named schools, an older reconstruction made them the seedbed of the Pharisees, the Essenes, or both.

That remains a hypothesis, not a documented lineage. First Maccabees never calls the Hasideans Pharisees. It does not describe a meeting at which one group changed its name, nor does it trace named leaders from one movement into the other. Modern work on Pharisaic origins continues to debate whether "Hasideans" identifies a stable organization at all and how, if at all, that label relates to later schools.

The proposal is attractive because it fills a chronological gap: law-focused allies in the revolt appear before named Pharisees in the Hasmonean state. Attraction is not demonstration. The most one can say is that Pharisaic emergence occurred in a world already marked by conflict over Hellenistic rule, priestly authority, Torah, and the legitimacy of Hasmonean leadership.

Did conflict with the Hasmoneans create the movement?

Another reconstruction treats Hasmonean state formation as the decisive environment. Jonathan's acceptance of the high priesthood in 152 BCE, territorial expansion under later rulers, and the combination of priestly and political power generated disputes about legitimate authority. Josephus's accounts then place Pharisees alternately near, against, and influential over Hasmonean rulers.

This model explains why the movement becomes visible when it does. It does not prove that opposition to a particular ruler created it. In Josephus's Hyrcanus episode, the ruler is initially close to the Pharisees before the breach. Under Salome Alexandra, Josephus portrays them as highly influential. The relationship is not a single line from support to opposition.

A careful reconstruction therefore says that Hasmonean politics may have helped consolidate or publicize Pharisaic identity. It should not turn that context into an unsupported founding story.

What the Dead Sea Scrolls can and cannot add

Some Dead Sea Scrolls use hostile labels such as "Seekers after Smooth Things" for opponents. Many scholars identify at least some of these opponents with Pharisees, especially where the texts seem to intersect with the period of Alexander Jannaeus. That identification can provide independent evidence of legal and political conflict beyond Josephus.

The scrolls do not simply print "Pharisees" beside the sobriquet. Academic discussions describe the identification as common or likely while acknowledging that it is not certain in every passage. A coded opponent in a sectarian commentary cannot supply an exact Pharisaic founding date unless the identification and the text's own date are first established.

Used cautiously, the Scrolls support a picture of competing Jewish interpretations and alliances in the Hasmonean period. They do not solve the origin question by themselves.

Why later sources must not be read backward without control

The evidence becomes richer in the first century CE, but later abundance does not repair earlier silence automatically.

Josephus

Josephus is indispensable because he names Pharisees, describes their public role, and places them in a longer Hasmonean narrative. He also writes for Roman-era audiences, uses Greek categories to explain Jewish groups, and composes long after the earliest events. His two major works do not arrange all the material in the same way. Those features require source criticism, not dismissal.

Paul and the Gospels

Paul identifies himself as a Pharisee in Philippians 3:5, providing rare first-person evidence from someone claiming that affiliation in the first century CE. The Gospels depict Pharisees in debates over Torah, purity, Sabbath, authority, and table practice. These texts are crucial for the Roman-period movement and for later Jewish-Christian relations, but they were not written to chronicle a second-century-BCE foundation.

Reading Gospel disputes as proof that Pharisees began around Jesus reverses the evidence. Reading polemical scenes as neutral portraits of every Pharisee repeats another error. Jesus and the Pharisees in context treats these disputes as Jewish arguments transmitted in later literary settings.

Rabbinic literature

The Mishnah and later rabbinic texts preserve traditions, legal positions, remembered teachers, and accounts of earlier debates. They are central to studying continuity after the Temple's destruction. Yet the Mishnah was compiled around 200 CE, and later works organize the past through rabbinic concerns. A chain of tradition inside those texts is not automatically a contemporary register of a Pharisaic institution centuries earlier.

The Pharisees are important to the ancestry of rabbinic Judaism, but ancestry is not identity without change. The transition from Pharisees to rabbinic Judaism separates continuity from a simple one-to-one equation.

Where did the Pharisees come from?

The source record points to Judea under Hasmonean rule, with Jerusalem and the Temple central to the political and legal world in which the movement becomes visible. Josephus's earliest detailed stories concern rulers, priesthood, law, and public influence. That does not prove a single Jerusalem founding house, a countryside origin, or one social class.

By the first century CE, sources place Pharisees in a wider Jewish landscape. Their movement cannot be reduced to priests, scribes, urban elites, rural teachers, or ordinary householders on the evidence currently available. "Judea in the Hasmonean period" is a defensible setting. "Founded in Jerusalem by X in year Y" is not.

The broader identification question is covered in who the Pharisees were, including what can and cannot be inferred about membership, practice, and influence.

A chronology that marks confidence honestly

Date Evidence Confidence for Pharisaic history
160-143 BCE Jonathan leads the Hasmonean movement; high priest from 152 BCE Context for Antiquities 13.171, not a recorded founding
Mid-second century BCE Josephus places three named schools "at this time" Earliest narrative placement, debated as a precise date
135/134-104 BCE John Hyrcanus rules First sustained Josephus episode involving Pharisees
103-76 BCE Alexander Jannaeus rules Josephus and commonly identified Qumran opponents suggest severe conflict
76-67 BCE Salome Alexandra rules Josephus depicts strong Pharisaic political influence
First century CE Paul, the Gospels, and Josephus provide multiple portrayals Secure evidence for an established, internally varied movement
70 CE Jerusalem Temple destroyed Major transformation of Jewish institutions, not the date Pharisees began
Around 200 CE Mishnah compiled Foundational rabbinic evidence, later than the movement's origin

The table deliberately distinguishes events from the date of the text that reports them. Ancient history becomes clearer when the evidence is allowed to remain uneven.

The conclusion historians can defend

The Pharisees probably emerged during the second century BCE and were certainly established by the later Hasmonean period. Josephus's earliest placement points to Jonathan's time in the mid-second century BCE; his first substantial political narrative concerns John Hyrcanus in the late second century BCE.

Beyond that, reconstructions divide. The Pharisees may have developed from legal and scribal networks, from circles connected in some way with the Hasideans, through disputes sharpened by Hasmonean priestly rule, or through more than one of these processes. None supplies a documented founder or exact year.

The narrow answer is therefore the strongest one: mid-to-late second century BCE, with no recoverable founding date. That uncertainty is not a failure of the history. It is what the surviving sources actually permit.

Sources

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FAQ

What year did the Pharisees begin?

No surviving source records a founding year. Josephus places three named Jewish schools, including the Pharisees, in a passage set during Jonathan's leadership in the mid-second century BCE. His first sustained story about Pharisees concerns John Hyrcanus I in the late second century BCE. Historians therefore use a second-century-BCE range rather than an exact date.

Who founded the Pharisees?

No ancient source names a founder of the Pharisees. The movement likely formed through networks of teachers, followers, inherited interpretations, and disputes over law and authority. Later sources preserve named Pharisees and rabbinic chains of tradition, but reading those backward as a contemporary record of one founding event would exceed the evidence.

Did the Pharisees come from the Hasideans?

Some scholars have proposed a connection because First Maccabees names law-observant Hasideans before Josephus names Pharisees. The texts do not document a direct transition: First Maccabees never calls the Hasideans Pharisees or traces leaders from one group to the other. The connection remains a reconstruction, not an established lineage.

Where did the Pharisees originate?

They become visible in Judea during the Hasmonean period, in a political and legal world centered strongly on Jerusalem, the Temple, priesthood, and Torah interpretation. The evidence does not identify a single founding place or one social class. Judea under Hasmonean rule is the defensible setting; a precise Jerusalem address or founding assembly is not.

Were the Pharisees created to oppose Jesus?

No. Pharisees were an established Jewish movement more than a century before Jesus' ministry. The Gospels preserve important first-century disputes involving Jesus and Pharisees, but those later debates do not explain the movement's origin. Treating Pharisee as a synonym for hypocrisy also turns Christian polemic into a harmful stereotype about a diverse Jewish movement.

Did the Pharisees begin after the Temple was destroyed in 70 CE?

No. Josephus locates Pharisees in Hasmonean history, and first-century sources attest them before 70 CE. The Temple's destruction transformed Jewish institutions and is important for the later development of rabbinic Judaism, but it was not the birth of the Pharisees. Pharisaic ancestry and rabbinic Judaism should be connected historically without treating them as unchanged identities.