Sincerely Misdirected: Rethinking What Jesus Meant by “Hypocrite”
We Need a Better Translation
People today tend to use the word “hypocrite” as a weapon aimed at others: the calculating religionist—pious in public while privately guffawing at people of faith, the politician who quotes Scripture at the podium and lies (or worse) before lunch, the churchgoer who is ruthless Monday through Saturday but the picture of graciousness on Sunday.1
According to the American Heritage Dictionary, this is all very Pharisaical, since, in American vernacular, a “Pharisee” simply is “a hypocritically self-righteous person.”
Folks seem to reach for the word effortlessly, typically when labeling someone else. This reflexive aim is worth our scrutiny. What if our certainty that we understand the word, and our certainty about others, are symptomatic of what Jesus diagnosed?
What’s a “Hypocrite”? Some Important Background
The word in question is ὑποκριτής (hypokritēs), and it comes to Jesus in the gospel narratives from two directions. Neither of them easily maps onto common English usage of our term, hypocrite.
The first is the theater. Classically, ὑποκριτής refers to a stage actor—the one who plays a role, wears a mask, and gives voice to a character not his or her own. The actor’s defining feature isn’t dishonesty or duplicity, but orientation: Actors wear masks to support their performance before an audience. Their work is structured around being seen, being approved.
This notion maps pretty well onto what Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount, where the targets of his critique do their giving, praying, and fasting “in front of people to draw their attention” (Matt 6:1; see 6:1–18). (He’s talking to “y’all,” not especially to Pharisees.) For example: “When you pray, don’t be like hypocrites. They love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners so that people will see them” (6:5). There’s no bait-and-switch here, no double-dealing, no chicanery. Instead, such people, we might say, are performing for the wrong audience.
Israel’s Scriptures bear witness to a second tradition. In their Greek version, ὑποκριτής translates the Hebrew ḥānēp, a term that signifies godlessness or profane or corruption. The term appears in Job, for example, not to describe a conscious fraud but to identify someone in a condition of fundamental disorientation toward God. What’s in focus here isn’t really a psychological condition, but more of a structural one. In other words, one can have misdirected zeal without knowing it. The word describes a state of being wrongly oriented toward God regardless of what those in question see in or believe about themselves.
With reference to both streams, it’s clear that ὑποκριτής isn’t really focused on “knowing better and pretending otherwise.” No deceit or misrepresentation is required. Referring to someone with the term ὑποκριτής comprises a structural charge: Your piety is organized around the wrong thing; it’s improperly oriented, whether you know it or not.
A Case Study: Paul the Pharisee
A test case might help us here. Consider the pre-Damascus-Road Paul.
In Phil 3, Paul surveys his credentials prior to his transformation: circumcised on the eighth day, tribe of Benjamin, Hebrew of Hebrews, a Pharisee: “With respect to devotion to the faith, I harassed the church. With respect to righteousness under the Law, I’m blameless” (3:6; see vv. 5–6). Those are impeccable credentials. Notice the common thread that runs through them all. They’re visible, documentable, and socially legible. They’re markers of standing within a particular human community. They comprise a portfolio of observable achievements, validated by the gaze of others.
Luke presents Paul in similar terms:
“I’m a Jew, born in Tarsus in Cilicia but raised in this city. Under Gamaliel’s instruction, I was trained in the strict interpretation of our ancestral Law. I am passionately loyal to God…. I harassed those who followed this Way to their death, arresting and delivering both men and women into prison. The high priest and the whole Jerusalem Council can testify about me” (Acts 22:3–5).
Before the Jerusalem Council, he declares, “Brothers, I have lived my life with an altogether clear conscience right up to this very day” (23:1).
Before King Agrippa, he identifies himself as a Pharisee (26:5), then insists: “I really thought that I ought to oppose the name of Jesus the Nazarene in every way possible” (26:9).
Paul was genuinely convinced that opposing Jesus’s name was what God wanted him to do. Indeed, Luke’s narrative of the Damascus encounter emphasizes this: The risen Jesus confronts Paul as someone zealously persecuting, not as someone cynically exploiting, the tradition. Paul zealously pursues (what he genuinely believes to be) God’s agenda, even though the Lord characterized his behavior as kicking against the goads—in this case, a graphic metaphor for stubbornly, painfully, resisting God’s direction (26:14). Luke’s portrayal leaves no room for imagining that Paul discerns any mismatch between his heart and his life. No, they are perfectly aligned.
Whatever your view of the authorship of 1 Timothy, one of its autobiographical notes continues this diagnosis, though with an added caveat: “I used to speak against [Christ Jesus our Lord], attack his people, and I was proud. But I was shown mercy because I acted in ignorance and without faith” (1:13; italics added).
Nowhere in this range of testimony do we find a portrait of Paul acting duplicitously, two-facedly. Instead, this last witness has him looking back on his ignorance, his faithlessness—in a word, his hypocrisy.
Wait: Was Paul a Hypocrite?
So, was Paul a hypocrite? If we turn to contemporary English, where a hypocrite is the knowing fraud, where hypocritical lives are marked by a disparity between public performance and private conviction, then the answer is a resounding no. (No!) Paul was entirely sincere. Paul was zealous (for God!), morally serious, blameless. There was no rift separating what he believed and what he did.
What, then, to make of Jesus’s indictment of Pharisees as hypocrites? Does Paul escape this charge? Is Paul the Pharisee a hypocrite? No—that is, not according to common, contemporary, English usage.
And yet, Jesus’s criticism does land on Paul. Paul is a “hypocrite,” but not in the usual sense.
To draw on Paul’s words, his devotion to God had been structured around “confidence in rituals performed on the body” (Phil 3:3) or “confidence in the flesh” (AV, NIV, NRSVue) or “appearances” (MSG)—that is, around what was visible, legible, and accredited by human observers. His abuse of Jesus’s followers signaled no departure from this orientation but served rather as its most violent expression. Even here, Paul was defending a form of devotion configured around visibility and human validation—sincerely practiced but nonetheless misdirected.
Paul’s sincerity didn’t protect him from distortion.
In a terrible way, his sincerity enabled it.
The Damascus Road doesn’t catch Paul in a lie. Rather, it cracks open the prism through which he had heretofore understood God. To change the metaphor, Paul’s encounter with the Lord dismantles the scaffolding of his piety, a scaffolding that was flawed in ways he couldn’t see.
The Leaven of Hypocrisy
This is precisely why, in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus’s use of the image of leaven is so significant.
“Watch out for the yeast of the Pharisees,” he tells his disciples, before identifying that yeast, that leaven, as ὑπόκρισις (hypokrisis, Luke 12:1)—usually translated as “hypocrisy” (e.g., AV, GNT, NET, NLT, NRSVue).
He doesn’t refer to their teaching or their bad intentions, but to their leaven.
Why is that important? Sharply put, leaven symbolizes pervasive, subtle, inwardly active, transformative influence. Leaven works invisibly, we might say, below the level of conscious choice. Bread doesn’t decide to rise. The transformation happens from within, and by the time it’s visible, it’s already complete.
This is the distinction our standard reading of hypocrisy and hypocrite obscures. We typically imagine that the distortion of hypocrisy requires a knowing agent, someone who recognizes the gap between appearance and reality and chooses appearance anyway. Sincerity is key, and hypocrisy is calculated deceit. But leaven doesn’t need a knowing, self-aware agent. It needs only a supportive environment and time.
This emphasis on what is hidden, what is unknown, is advanced in the very next verse: “Nothing is hidden that won’t be revealed, and nothing is secret that won’t be brought out into the open” (12:2).
Think again about Paul. His harassment of the church aligns with his inner convictions about Torah, purity, and the threat posed by the Jesus-movement. In Acts, Paul narrates his former life without minimizing its violence but does so with an eye on his error, not his duplicity. (“I acted in ignorance and without faith,” as later Pauline reflection has it.) Here, there’s no attempt at cover‑up, there’s no posing.
People who know their devotion is hollow can, at some level, do something about it. Those whose genuine piety has been slowly, invisibly permeated by the need for visibility, approval, and countable markers of standing—whose faith has become a performance for human observers even without their having determined to make it so—have no way to flag the problem. They feel sincere. They feel sincere because they are sincere. And that sincerity is exactly what masks the distortion from view.
Luke captures Jesus’s critique in ch. 11: The Pharisees are scrupulous when it comes to tithing even their garden herbs while “neglecting “justice and love for God” (11:42). Observable practices are intact. What has quietly gone missing would be the interior dispositions those practices were meant to form.
So … We’re Sincere?
This word, ὑπόκρισις, doesn’t let us off the hook on account of our sincerity.
Today, people use hypocrite as a way of identifying the frauds among us, while, implicitly and unwittingly, exempting ourselves. (We are genuine, after all.) But the leaven-metaphor moves us in a different direction entirely. The question is not whether we mean it. We typically do. The question is what our devotion is actually organized around, underneath the level of our sincere intentions and self-understanding.
Is it shaped by the love of God—radical (“all the way down”), unquantifiable, invisible to observers, and appearing on no one’s ledger, including our own? Or has it been quietly configured around what is legible, displayable, calculable, validating? Is it practiced before God, or performed before a human audience—including the internal audience of our own self-regard? The questions press hard, but not because our devotion to God is interior-only or heartfelt-only. No, they press hard because of the ease with which our devotion to God becomes yet another way of gaining human approval and self-satisfaction rather than graciously putting into practice that double-love, love of God and love of neighbor.
These aren’t questions sincerity can answer. Saul of Tarsus was as sincere as anyone, and sincerity gained him an audience before the high priest where he could request letters of arrest. What cracked the prism, what dismantled the scaffolding, was not an act of self-examination but an encounter he really couldn’t have generated from within. He didn’t look into himself and find the distortion. The Damascus Road encounter was an apocalypse, a revelation. It found him, from outside, on a road he thought he knew.
Paul, afterward, does not look back and say: “O, what a fraud I was!” He doesn’t say, “My deceit has been discovered!” As the later tradition puts it, Paul testifies that he was wrong in ways he didn’t know and couldn’t see, and yet he received God’s mercy. And that is a more searching account of what ὑπόκρισις entails than the word our English translations have given us.
Jesus’s question isn’t whether we can identify hypocrites or the hypocrisy in others. It’s whether, with the humility of genuine uncertainty, we could tell whether we are. Watch out, he urges, for the yeast of misplaced devotion—for those structural life-patterns mostly invisible to the pious, realized as performance aimed at people rather than toward God.
Unless otherwise noted, all biblical citations follow the Common English Bible.