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).
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.
For whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted. “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees , you hypocrites !
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.
Sadducee , Hebrew Tzedoq, plural Tzedoqim, member of a Jewish priestly sect that flourished for about two centuries before the destruction of the Second Temple of Jerusalem in ad 70.
The term “ passion narrative” is used primarily to refer to the accounts given in the canonical gospels of the suffering and death of Jesus. Generally, scholars treat the passion narratives as beginning with Jesus’ agony and arrest in Gethsemane and concluding with his burial.
Pharisees and Sadducees come. to his baptism, he said unto. them, O generation of vipers , who hath warned you to flee.
General. The Sadducees rejected the Oral Torah as proposed by the Pharisees. Rather, they saw the written Torah as the sole source of divine authority. The written law, in its depiction of the priesthood, corroborated the power and enforced the hegemony of the Sadducees in Judean society.
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.
The 613 commandments include “positive commandments”, to perform an act (mitzvot aseh), and “negative commandments”, to abstain from certain acts (mitzvot lo taaseh).
“And when you pray , do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray , go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen.
The World English Bible translates the passage as: “Don’t think that I came to destroy the law or the. prophets. I didn’t come to destroy, but to fulfill.”
Their name comes from the Hebrew and Aramaic parush or parushi, which means “one who is separated.” It may refer to their separation from Gentiles, sources of ritual impurity or from irreligious Jews. As Josephus noted, the Pharisees were considered the most expert and accurate expositors of Jewish law.
Many Rabbis believe that the traditional method of burial is the correct one and that cremation is prohibited. Although there is no explicit prohibition about Judaism and cremation , there is material to support both cases.