The problems of identifying the Pharisees

There are two reasons why it is now virtually (perhaps totally) impossible to write an adequate history of the Pharisees: the first is that there is far too little evidence; and the second, that there is far too much. On the one hand, surprisingly little direct information about the Pharisees has survived: from this point of view alone, a detailed account of the Pharisees is not possible. Yet on the other hand, a number of sources do in fact refer to a group or sect known, in English transliteration, as the Pharisees – and for many people, the most familiar of the references are those in the Gospels. But since the Pharisees appear, in both Christian and Jewish sources, as a part of a very complex history, it follows that the Pharisees cannot be studied in isolation, but only as a part of the history of the whole Jewish people in the period in question – principally, the period of the so-called second commonwealth (from the restoration after the Exile to the fall of Jerusalem in 70 c.e.), and of the following hundred years.