James Finn
1 min readJan 25, 2023

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Very much so! Btw, and this is not criticism, just information that I find fascinating. Did you know that many Jews find condemnation of Pharisees to be offensively anti-semitic? I didn't either until recently when Ken Wilson (author of "Solus Jesus" and "A Letter to My Congregation") pointed out to me that rabbinical Jews, meaning almost all observant Jews today, are religiously descended from the Pharisees and know they are. After Rome destroyed the Second Temple, Judaism found itself in crisis, floundering without their center of religious practice. Judaism without the temple at the center seemed impossible to many Jews.

The Pharisees came to the rescue, offering Talmudic discourse as a path to practical worship and a new center of Jewish practice.

Early and medieval Christians weaponized this fact against European Jews, painting them (accurately) as Pharisees to classify them as enemies of Jesus and the Church. Other factors also fed into early Christian anti-semitism, but hatred of the Pharisees played a very important role.

I try to keep that in back of my mind today as I remember that Jews today are literally (in an historical sense) Pharisees.

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James Finn
James Finn

Written by James Finn

James Finn is an LGBTQ columnist, a former Air Force intelligence analyst, an alumnus of Act Up NY, and an agented but unpublished novelist.

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