The scribes (many of them Pharisees ) and the Pharisees are the most dangerous adversaries of Jesus in the first part of the gospel. After entering Jerusalem and the Temple, the adversaries will be the High Priest and the members of the Sanhedrin (14:10-11).
“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees , you hypocrites! You shut the kingdom of heaven in men’s faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to. “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees , you hypocrites!
The Differences. The main difference between the Pharisees and the Sadducees was their differing opinions on the supernatural aspects of religion. To put things simply, the Pharisees believed in the supernatural — angels, demons, heaven, hell, and so on — while the Sadducees did not.
Pharisees were members of a party that believed in resurrection and in following legal traditions that were ascribed not to the Bible but to “the traditions of the fathers.” Like the scribes, they were also well-known legal experts: hence the partial overlap of membership of the two groups.
Who are the Pharisees today ? A Pharisee spirit is one who believes they somehow do faith life better than others. They judge people for what they wear, what they drive, what church they go to, how often they pray, what version of the Bible they read, who they associate with.
The Pharisees asserted that God could and should be worshipped even away from the Temple and outside Jerusalem. To the Pharisees , worship consisted not in bloody sacrifices—the practice of the Temple priests—but in prayer and in the study of God’s law.
Pharisees and Sadducees come. to his baptism, he said unto. them, O generation of vipers , who hath warned you to flee.
The 613 commandments include “positive commandments”, to perform an act (mitzvot aseh), and “negative commandments”, to abstain from certain acts (mitzvot lo taaseh).
The written law, in its depiction of the priesthood, corroborated the power and enforced the hegemony of the Sadducees in Judean society. According to Josephus, the Sadducees believed that: There is no fate. God does not commit evil.
Before introducing the woes themselves, Matthew states that Jesus criticized them for taking the place of honor at banquets, for wearing ostentatious clothing, for encouraging people to call them rabbi. The woes are all woes of hypocrisy and illustrate the differences between inner and outer moral states.
The Sadducees refused to go beyond the written Torah (first five books of the Bible) and thus, unlike the Pharisees , denied the immortality of the soul, bodily resurrection after death, and the existence of angelic spirits.
The first time Nicodemus is mentioned, he is identified as a Pharisee who comes to see Jesus “at night”. John places this meeting shortly after the Cleansing of the Temple and links it to the signs which Jesus performed in Jerusalem during the Passover feast.
Like the Pharisees , the Herodians wanted political independence for the Jewish people. Unlike the Pharisees , who sought to restore the kingdom of David, the Herodians wished to restore a member of the Herodian dynasty to the throne in Judea.
He came to Jesus at night, sneaking off to see the man behind the miracles. He was a powerful Pharisee , a member of the Sanhedrin, the Jewish ruling council.
Gentile , person who is not Jewish. The word stems from the Hebrew term goy, which means a “nation,” and was applied both to the Hebrews and to any other nation. The plural, goyim, especially with the definite article, ha-goyim, “the nations,” meant nations of the world that were not Hebrew .