>>513042079
Before Judaism there was Semitic polytheism. Judaism doesn't come into being until the Persians in the 5th century BC, and even then it was a kind of unstable hybrid of Zoroastrianism and Semitic polytheism. With the Greeks it takes on a more familiar shape. Then they produced their ‘history’ and holy books, and invented themselves.
It’s likely that Pharisees come about as dissidents from the Temple under Greek rule, initially sticking closer to the Zoroastrian Proto-Judaism, hence their Persian name. Yet they are still subject to heavy Greek influence as a group whose focus is books and intellectual culture instead of cultic practice.
Jesus’ beef was likely actually with the Sadducees not the Pharisees. A Jewish Messiah who wanted the Romans gone also wanted the Jewish collaborators with the Romans gone. Rome was Babylon, and Babylon’s Whore were these elite Temple Jews in bed with the occupying Romans. The Essenes and Pharisees were similar in that they both wanted a Messiah. The Pharisees were less militant, but when wars broke out, they fought.
The gospels are not written until after the destruction of the Temple. Pharisees were the only Jews still around, as you say. They were the Jews people knew— and people didn’t like them, for all the same reasons to feel that way today. Jesus would have never said it about them, but the author of the gospel put his own opinion about Pharisees into the mouth of the Jewish messiah.
If you are selling a religion to Romans, you make your Jew insurgent god Rome-friendly; you make Roman representative Pontus Pilate sympathetic to him; and you don’t make Jesus’ enemy the Sadducees who were effectively Rome’s ally.
“We are the real origin” is the master trope of the Abrahamic religions. An Historical fiction seeks to establish primacy through revision of origins. And it all starts with the Persian lie about the “Returners from Exile” being Jews there to restore the ancient truth.
