Their first appearance in the New Testament is the place to say plainly who they were. The Pharisees were a lay renewal movement, about six thousand strong in the historian Josephus's count (Antiquities of the Jews, book 17, written about AD 93), whose program was to extend the Temple's holiness into ordinary life: the ordinary table kept as carefully as a priest's, the whole Torah kept in detail by the whole people. They held that alongside the written Torah an oral Torah had come down from Sinai teacher to teacher; the Mishnah's ethics tractate opens with that chain: “Moses received the Torah at Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua, Joshua to the elders...” (Pirkei Avot 1:1). The Sadducees were the priestly aristocracy centered on the Temple: they accepted the written Torah but rejected the oral tradition and denied the resurrection of the dead (Acts 23:8 says so directly). After the Temple fell in AD 70 the Sadducees vanished; the rabbinic Judaism that survives to this day descends from the Pharisaic side.

Two cautions keep the reader honest for every scene that follows. “Pharisee” is not a synonym for hypocrite: the movement's aim was devotion, its ranks included honest seekers (Nicodemus, Gamaliel, and Paul, who says “I am a Pharisee” in the present tense, Acts 23:6), and on the resurrection its doctrine stands with Christian confession against the Sadducees. And the Gospel collisions are arguments WITHIN first-century Judaism about how the Torah is rightly kept, not a contest between Jesus and Judaism.