Were the Pharisees good or bad?

Mostly bad. As a party they were hypocrites who prized their own reputation, loaded burdens on ordinary people, and finally killed the Messiah. A few individuals among them, notably Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea, were exceptions, and on one point, the resurrection of the dead, the Pharisees were right and the Sadducees were wrong. Mostly bad, and our Lord said so at greater length and with more heat than He used on anyone else. Read Matthew 23 and count the woes. Blind guides. Whitewashed tombstones, beautiful outside and full of dead men's bones within. Men who strain out a gnat and swallow a camel. "You serpents, generation of vipers, how will you escape from the judgment of hell?" That is not a tone Jesus took with tax collectors or prostitutes. He reserved it for religious professionals. Look at what He actually charges them with, because the specifics matter. They tithed mint and anise and cumin and cast aside the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy and faith. Having assumed the seat of Moses, they assumed with it the right to collect tithes, and rather than take tithes from a man's general storehouse as the Law prescribes, they demanded he tithe even of herbs used for flavoring. They built oath loopholes: an oath sworn by the temple did not bind, only one sworn by the gold of the temple, so they could impress the crowd with their austerity in public and slip out of the commitment in private. They devoured the households of the defenseless and covered it with long prayers, for which our Lord says they will receive the greater judgment. And they shut the kingdom of heaven against men by their false doctrines, refusing to go in themselves and blocking those who would. Notice something in the Greek of Matthew 23:2 that most translations flatten. "The scribes and the Pharisees sat on the chair of Moses" uses an active aorist, not a present tense. They had assumed the seat; they were not appointed to it. The word for chair, kathedra, is the same one from which we get the phrase ex cathedra, and it was already being used figuratively for corrupt authority: the Shepherd of Hermas says "he who sits on the chair is a false prophet." So Jesus tells the people to do what they say, because the Law itself is still the Law, but not to do what they do. He honors the office and indicts the men. They also multiplied the Law into something no one could carry. The Judaic tradition gave them 613 commandments, 248 positive and 365 negative, and on top of the Mosaic law they layered their own interpretations, which then became laws in their own right. The Corban rule is the standard example: a man could declare his property dedicated and thereby escape supporting his own parents. That is how you strain a gnat and swallow a camel. Now the honest qualifications. First, the exceptions were real. St. John tells us that many even of the authorities believed in Jesus but would not confess it for fear of the Pharisees, because they loved the praise of men more than the praise of God. To be liked and honored was the driving force of their lives, even though they knew in their hearts who He was. Only Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea may have escaped that temptation. Joseph is called a counselor, "a good and a just man," and Luke notes that he "had not consented to their counsel and doings." So a man could be a Pharisee and be saved. St. Paul was one, and said so before Agrippa. Second, on the great doctrinal question dividing Jewish parties, the Pharisees were on the right side. The Sadducees were aristocratic monarchists, friendly to Hellenization, focused on the Temple and its revenues, rejecting the resurrection: a rich man's religion that wanted no thought of a judgment on its lifestyle. The Pharisees resisted Hellenization, were more popular and democratic, and believed in the resurrection of the just and the unjust. Paul used that fault line deliberately in his own defense, telling Felix that the whole controversy was over the resurrection, the hope of all twelve tribes. Against the Sadducees, the Pharisees were the orthodox party. So the verdict is not that Pharisaism as a set of beliefs was false. The verdict is that these men knew the truth, taught much of it correctly, and lived a lie, and that they loved their own standing more than God. That is a warning aimed straight at religious men in every century, and I will say plainly that I see it in the liberal theologians and churchmen of our own day: men who hold the seat, whitewash the outside, load burdens on the faithful that they do not carry themselves, and shut the kingdom against the people by their false doctrines. Today's Pharisees do not wear phylacteries. They write footnotes.