Most people in the world have a soft spot for Jesus, even if they do not call themselves Christians or have an active faith in him. They view Jesus as one of the great figures of history, and a teacher of wide-ranging influence – perhaps even a prophet. 

Yet, the gospels frequently show us Jesus interacting with many people who opposed him. It raises the question why someone of such towering significance and good reputation could have had so many opponents in his own day. 

Who were these opponents, and why exactly did they take issue with Jesus? Understanding who these opponents were, how they emerged within Judaism, and what their respective agendas were, actually gives us a better appreciation of Jesus himself.

God’s Law, plus...

In the early part of Jesus’s public ministry, most of his opponents were Pharisees and scribes. The Pharisees were a fundamentalist lay movement that arose within Judaism during the second century BC. Their movement was characterised by a desire to promote precise piety within the Jewish nation in the hope that this would speed the fulfilment of God’s promises to Israel. 

Their desire was not ill-conceived but stemmed from God’s word issued through the prophets of old: “Return to me... and I will return to you” (Zech 1:3). If the nation could repent and do as God desired, the nation would fulfil its mandate to be a holy nation, and God would return to them and fulfil his promises. 

But the Pharisees’ brand of piety tended to go further than what the Law required. They developed a set of rules, regulations and customs that, they argued, stipulated exactly how to please God. These traditions came to be known as the Oral Law, and the Pharisees argued that it had just as much authority as the written Law of Scripture. In fact, they even argued that God had given the Oral Law to Moses on Mount Sinai. So, the Pharisees argued, to ignore their Oral Law was displeasing to God.

In 142BC, the Jews gained their independence as a nation – a situation that lasted until the Romans conquered Jerusalem in 63BC. During this period of independence, the Pharisees started to win widespread influence. Indeed, during the reign of the Jewish Queen Salome Alexandra (76-67BC), the Pharisees gained significant political power, due largely to the fact that Queen Salome Alexandra was from a prominent Pharisee family. She even helped her brother, Simeon ben-Shetach, become president of the Jewish Sanhedrin. 

During her reign, the Pharisees’ brand of piety was enforced upon the Jewish population as binding law. And while the Pharisees did not maintain the same level of political power after Salome Alexandra’s reign, their influence among the people remained. To borrow a term coined by Jesus, the “yeast of the Pharisees” (Luke 12:1) had leavened throughout the covenant nation.

What really pleases God

One of the ways this influence spread was through the establishment of synagogues. Synagogues were not actually Jewish churches, but rather Jewish schools in which children were educated in the ways of the Law. The teachers in these schools were mostly (but not exclusively) Pharisees, and the most famous of them also had adult students – disciples. 

Synagogues were places of education, where the Jewish scriptures were read and discussed. On the sabbath, the devoted among the population could also attend the public reading and discussion of the scriptures – kind of like a classroom open to the public. 

The need for scrolls of scriptures to facilitate this program of education led to the rise of the scribes (people trained in the production of scriptural scrolls), who thereby became experts in the scriptures. Thus, the scribes came to be closely associated with the Pharisees, who were primarily responsible for educating the populace.

The reason Jesus had so many confrontations with the Pharisees and scribes was not so much that he was at odds with their purpose. On the contrary, Jesus and the Pharisees and scribes had a similar aim: they wanted the Jewish nation to know the scriptures, so that they could understand God’s purposes, repent, live godly lives in accordance with God’s desires, thus promoting the holiness of God’s covenant people, and prompting the fulfilment of God’s ancient promises (Matt 5:17-20). 

In this, they shared the same turf. This is why Jesus regularly attended the synagogue (Luke 4:16), engaged in discussion with the Pharisees (Matt 15:1), dined with them (Luke 7:36), and even received critical information from them (Luke 13:31). Where they differed was on the purpose of the scriptures and the interpretation of the Law. 

The Pharisees supplemented the scriptures with their own traditions, which focused upon a hyper-literal precision of practice. For example, they argued that the sabbath was to be kept as a national priority, even if it resulted in severe inconvenience or personal harm. Jesus, on the other hand, tended to look at the purpose of the Law as the key to interpretation, focusing on the welfare of people and the primacy of love over literalism. Thus, he argued that helping others during the sabbath was not a breach of God’s commands regarding the sabbath. 

These divergent interpretations resulted in a wide gulf between Jesus and the Pharisees in understanding what pleased God. 

Towards the end of his ministry, Jesus castigated the Pharisees and scribes for impairing people’s relationship with God, rather than fostering it (Matt 23:13-36), leading him to bemoan the future of the covenant nation (Matt 23:37-24:51). In other words, Jesus argued that the Pharisees were not achieving their aim of promoting the holiness of the people and the fulfilment of God’s promises but rather hindering them both.

Why others opposed Jesus

During the last week of Jesus’s public ministry, when he arrived in Jerusalem, he had several hostile confrontations with the priests and Sadducees. Indeed, it was the priests who conspired to have Jesus arrested, tried, and handed over to Pontius Pilate, the Roman Prefect. 

Why were they so hostile towards Jesus? And why was Jesus so critical of them?

To understand this friction, we need to go back to the Davidic covenant. In 2 Samuel 7, King David has the intention of building a house (temple) for Yahweh that would be of equal dignity to his own house (palace). But Yahweh prevents David from doing this. Instead, Yahweh says that he would build a house for David – that is, a dynasty – and that David’s house (dynasty) would then build Yahweh’s house (temple). 

The most surprising element of this promise was that Yahweh said he would become the father of David’s son, and David’s son would become his son. To put it another way, God promised to enter the Davidic dynasty and become the father figure of the dynasty, and his son (the Davidic heir) would rule Yahweh’s covenant people on his behalf. 

This was to be a permanent arrangement. Indeed, the permanence of the temple, in contrast to the portability of the tabernacle, became a symbol of the permanence of Yahweh’s commitment to David’s dynasty. The son of David was, therefore, viewed as the son of God, and his primary task was to build the house of God.

In 586BC, the Babylonians destroyed the Davidic kingdom, exiled the Davidic king and razed the temple to the ground. This was a theological catastrophe, as it called into question God’s commitment to the House of David. But, some decades later, a small remnant returned to Jerusalem, led by the Davidic heir, Zerubbabel, who rebuilt Yahweh’s temple in Jerusalem. 

In this, Zerubbabel did what was expected of a Davidic descendant. And yet, the Davidic heir was not an independent king, but subservient to foreign empires. This produced an incongruent situation: the covenant nation had a temple, the symbol of Yahweh’s commitment to the Davidic dynasty, but they did not have a Davidic descendant ruling over them. Across the centuries, this produced messianic hope – the desire to see a Davidic descendant overthrow foreign nations and establish the reign of Yahweh’s kingdom once again.

Since the temple was there in Jerusalem but there was no Davidic king, the priests who worked in the temple ended up with all the civic power within the Jewish nation. This was never how it was meant to be. The Davidic king was the one who ruled God’s people, and the priests were simply employees in the temple for which he was responsible. 

Over the centuries, the priests took civic power and began to see themselves as the fulfilment of God’s purposes. They eventually began to deny the ongoing relevance of God’s promises to David. In fact, they eventually began to suppress, persecute and even kill anyone who questioned their power.

The Sadducees were a political party that developed out of the ranks of these priests during the second century BC. They denied that God had any further intentions with the dynasty of David. They therefore had little interest in eschatology – God’s future actions – and were instead interested only in preserving their own power as the managers of the temple and ensuring the Jewish people supported worship in the temple that they managed.

When Jesus arrived in Jerusalem for the final week of his public ministry, he was hailed as the son of David (Matt 21:9) – the one with the right to build and maintain the temple of God, who should also rule the covenant nation as God’s son. Upon arrival, Jesus challenged the authority of the priests, who had subverted God’s plans, by overthrowing the tables of the moneychangers, commanding that the temple be destroyed, and promising to build a new temple (John 2:13-19). 

Jesus was executing his role as the Davidic descendant with authority over the temple and the right to rule the nation. But the priests and Sadducees challenged Jesus’ authority and authorised his arrest. At his trial, the High Priest Caiaphas asked Jesus directly if he was the son of God – that is, the Davidic heir. When Jesus affirmed that he was, Caiaphas condemned him and arranged for Jesus to be tried by Pontius Pilate and eventually executed by crucifixion.

The reason the Sadducees and priests opposed Jesus was because they understood his claim to be the son of David and so perceived him as a threat to their own power. In having Jesus executed, they believed they were securing their ongoing ascendancy within the Jewish nation. 

But Jesus prophesied that the magnificent temple that was their base of operation would be destroyed – a prophecy that came to pass in 70AD when the Romans brutally suppressed a Jewish revolt and razed the temple to the ground. And yet, by rising from the dead, Jesus established a new temple – his body. 

His physical resurrection guaranteed the building of a new house of God, the Church, in which all people – Jews and Gentiles – could come to worship God under the rule of a Davidic descendant, who had not simply been given civic power in Jerusalem, but all power in heaven and on earth (Matt 28:18). 

It is this honourable task of building the temple of God that Jesus has entrusted to us, his followers.

The Rev Dr George Athas is Director of Research and a member of the Old Testament department at Moore College.