At a time of mass political rebellion and a flurry of pharisaic independent MPs, Edmund Burke seems an ideal role model: a backbencher for all ages.
Nonetheless, no matter how unpopular the priesthood of the Jerusalem Temple became with some segments of the population the Qumrān community seems to have denied its legality, and the Pharisees complained bitterly about its arrogance and exactions, attempting, when feasible, to impose and enforce Pharisaic regulations upon it reverence for the Temple seems to have remained a widespread sentiment.
They rejected the Pharisaic "traditions of the fathers" and maintained some old-fashioned theological opinions.
The equation of Pharisaic with "normative" Judaism can no longer be supported, at any rate not before the destruction of the Temple in 70 ce.
Rabbinic sources, including the earliest layers of the traditional order of worship, provide insights into an apparently Pharisaic mode, and passages from the Acts of the Apostles concerning James and other Jewish Christians suggest still other varieties.
Some modern scholars have sought to interpret the Pharisees' opposition to the Sadducees wealthy, conservative Jews who accepted the Torah alone as authoritative as based on an urban-rural dichotomy, but a very large share of Pharisaic concern was with agricultural matters.
On the one hand, the picture of normative Judaism is broader than at first believed, and it is clear that there were many differences of emphasis within the Pharisaic party.
In Palestine, no less than in the Diaspora, there were deviations from Pharisaic standards.
Almost none of it was retained in Pharisaic (rabbinical) Judaism, which became the normative Jewish tradition after the Roman conquest of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Second Temple.
Philo was a devotee of Judaism neither as a mystic cult nor as a collateral branch of Pharisaic Judaism.
Despite the attempts of the Pharisaic leaders to restrain the wave of Greek influence, they themselves showed at least superficial Hellenization.
