The Pharisees were the most influential Jewish religious party in Jesus' day. They arose during the Maccabean period (~150 BC) as a lay movement devoted to rigorous obedience to the Torah and its rabbinic interpretations. Unlike the Sadducees, who were priestly aristocrats, the Pharisees were mostly laymen who saw all of life — meals, work, marriage, speech — as an opportunity to obey God's law in detail. They believed in the resurrection, angels, spirits, and the afterlife (Acts 23:8). They accepted not only the Torah but the whole Hebrew Bible and an extensive oral tradition (later codified as the Mishnah). Jesus' relationship with them was complicated. He shared many of their beliefs — resurrection, the authority of Scripture, God's sovereignty — but He denounced their hypocrisy, their elevation of tradition over God's commandment, their outward show, and their harshness toward sinners. The seven "woes" of Matthew 23 are Jesus' most blistering public rebuke, all directed at the Pharisees. Yet some Pharisees became Christians: Nicodemus, Joseph of Arimathea, and most famously Paul, who was "a Pharisee, the son of a Pharisee" (Acts 23:6). After AD 70 and the destruction of the temple, Pharisaic Judaism survived and became the foundation of rabbinic Judaism — the form of Judaism practiced to this day. The Pharisees serve as a permanent warning to serious religious men: you can love the Bible, keep rules rigorously, and still miss the Messiah standing in front of you.