(printed p. 129 — Book II)
It was certainly very great among the whole people. Josephus, book 13, chapter 18, says that they had such influence over the multitude that whatever they said against either king or high priest was immediately believed. He gives this more fully and with stronger testimony in the same book, chapters 23 and 24, where King Alexander, as he is dying, prescribes to his wife Alexandra what she ought to do, and she does what he prescribed. He wishes that, after he is dead, she should go splendidly to Jerusalem and grant some power to the Pharisees. For, he says, if they praised her in return for this honor, they would make the nation well-disposed toward her. He said that these men had great power among the Jews: they could harm those whom they hated and help those toward whom they were friendly; and the multitude especially believed them when, even out of envy, they spoke harshly against someone.
(printed p. 130)
Again, in book 17, chapter 3, Josephus says that there was a group of Jews who prided themselves on the exactness of the ancestral law, to whom the deity was thought to be gracious, and to whom the women’s quarters were subject. They are called Pharisees. They were especially able to resist kings: prudent men, but readily moved into conflict and into causing harm.
And in book 18, chapter 2, he reports how almost everything was conducted according to their judgment, so that if the Sadducees wished to take up magistracies and dignities, they had to accommodate themselves to the will of the Pharisees.
But the greatest authority of all belonged to those who lived at Jerusalem, as in the metropolis. For this reason their arrogance, pride, and wickedness were also often greater, as Saint Chrysostom, Theophylact, and Euthymius note on Matthew chapter 15, and as is clear from the things Josephus narrates in the cited book 13, chapter 23.