figure out one of the central groups in the gospel story . . . the Pharisees. Were they ""hypocrites or heroes""? Or as one recent writer put it, maybe they were just ""good guys with bad press."" Scholars of Judaism and of the NT have been painstakingly correcting, even rehabilitating, the image of the first-century Pharisees, but this seems not yet to have affected most readers of Scripture. Here at last is a book that lays out for the non-specialist the evidence for the origin and true nature of the Pharisees . . . and challenges them to re-read the gospel stories with real Pharisees in mind rather than caricatures.