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My guess would be because most of the audience it's said to are much more familiar with Christianity than with 0000s Judaism. If the person hearing the comparison don't know anything about the operand then for them it becomes a meaningless comparison.

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If anyone's familiar with Christianism they will be also familiar with Pharisians, mentioned probably mentioned more frequently in the New Testament than the old (Jesus often recused their ways)

I was raised Christian and yes, the Pharisees were not just taught about, but a subject of focus.

This makes the modern American strain of Christianity all the more puzzling to me, with how it in many ways shares more with the Pharisees than it does with the religion's namesake, but that’s a topic for a different post.

Ehh ... it's indisputable that in $CURRENTYEAR that there are a lot of people whose only experience with Christianity is "things people said on the Internet".

If many random readers won't understand a reference to "Pharisee", and people trying to make a point stop using it as a result, then even fewer Internet-educated readers will get the reference.

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