What Was Religion Like in Christ’s Day?

Jesus knew the dangers of religion. He was hated by some of the most religious people in Jerusalem. While the sinners and outcasts of society were attracted to Him, the religionists of His day — the Pharisees, scribes, Sadducees, and priests — were with very few exceptions, His bitter enemies. Let me describe these 4 groups to you…
The Pharisees were a Jewish religious group that attempted to keep Israel free of Gentile contamination by vigorously adhering to the Scriptures and to a large body of oral tradition that applied the Law of God to the details of daily life.

The Scribes were experts in biblical law (also called lawyers) who were often found among the Pharisees. The Pharisees depended on the scribes for a right interpretation of Scripture.a

The Sadducees were an upper-class Jewish religious group that rejected the oral tradition of the Pharisees and insisted on a rigid interpretation and adherence to the Mosaic Law.

The Priests were descendants of Aaron who inherited the responsibility of attending to the ritual of the Temple in Jerusalem. They were often associated with the Sadducees.

Jesus did not flatter these religious leaders. He didn’t leave room for the notion that they were godly men who had just made a mistake about Him. He said that if they had known His Father, they would have known Him. To their face, He called them hypocrites and blind leaders of the blind.
This isn’t the storyline many of us might expect. We might expect Jesus’ enemies to surface among the atheists, secular thinkers, and criminal elements of society. But that wasn’t the case. Street people were attracted to Him. Sinners were among His friends. Even Pilate, the pagan Roman governor of Judea, was inclined to give Jesus more consideration and benefit of the doubt. The religious Sadducees and Pharisees of Jerusalem, however, were always trying to discredit Jesus. They had no use for Him, and they were convinced that the world would be a better place without Him.

A Closer Look at The Pharisees.
They were not all bad. Respected as some of the most godly and spiritually committed of the Jews, they were:
* Theists, who because of their belief in the God of Israel, advocated a God-                centered life.
* Separatists, who were determined to protect Israel from being compromised,                 swallowed, and absorbed into a Gentile world.
* Biblicists, who believed that Israel’s future depended on whether or not they                 honored and practiced the Law of God.
* Populists, many of whom were craftsmen and tradesmen, therefore identifying         with the common man.
* Pragmatists, who wrestled not only with what the Law said but how it looked                 and applied to the smallest details of life.
* Traditionalists, who carefully memorized, repeated, and entrenched                     themselves in the ways of their spiritual forefathers.

The Pharisees, however, took some wrong turns in their attempt to make the Law of God relevant and practical to Israel. As they made an effort to show what the Word of God “looked like” in daily life, their concrete applications became an end in and of themselves. Before long, they were lost in specifics and, according to Jesus, were “teaching as doctrines the commandments of men” (Matthew 15:9). They became focused of the details and lost the heart of the gospel.
Tomorrow, we’ll look at why Christ was a threat to religion.