Matthew, Scribes, and Pharisees
Why is it that Mt's gospel exhibits so much hostility toward the scribes and Pharisees?
After the destruction of the temple, the rabbis, teachers of the law, became the central figures in Judaism. During the Jewish war with Rome (68 CE), a rabbi named Yohanan Ben Zakkai broke with the war party in Jerusalem. He "went into the camp of Vespasian and requested permission to settle in Yavneh on the coast of Palestine, in order to found a new school" (Koester, 385). Vespasian welcomed the establishment of a more moderate Jewish faction, and he granted his permission. Eventually, more Jews, both before and after the war, settled in Yavneh. Many Jews believed that the defeat at the hands of the Romans and the destruction of the temple was punishment for Israel's disobedience, and the rabbis who settled in Yavneh felt that the situation called for a strict fulfillment of the law. Yavneh became a center for rabbinic teaching and scholarship, and a reorganization of Judaism was begun there.
Rabbinic Judaism emerged as the dominant form of Judaism after the destruction of the temple, and the kind of Judaism that was practiced by the Pharisees became significantly more widespread. Without the temple, the Jewish people had to turn to the law in order to mark out their identity and to maintain their religious practice.
It's no surprise, then, that a community of Jewish Christians living some ten-to-fifteen years after the destruction of the temple would come into conflict with the Pharisaic groups. While the Jewish Christians were saying that the Messiah had already come and was crucified by the Romans, the Pharisees would have seen this statement as patently false. The Christian teachings were rejected by most Jews, and the rabbinic/Pharisaic leaders would have been at the forefront of such rejection. This dynamic has greatly shaped the telling of the Gospel of Matthew, in which the anti-Pharasaic and anti-scribal rhetoric is significantly heightened in comparision to Mt's forerunner, Mk. Thus we read:
Remember that, in the war against Rome, the temple in Jerusalem was destroyed (70 CE). It is difficult to overestimate the importance of this event for the subsequent development of Judaism. The destruction of the temple was a truly devastating event. Josephus describes the conflagration in terms which cannot but evoke sympathy in the reader: "As the flames went upward the Jews made a clamor, such as so mighty an affliction required, and ran together to prevent it; and now they spared not their lives any longer, nor suffered anything to restrain their force, since that holy house was perishing, for whose sake it was that they kept such a guard about it" (
War,
6:253).
He then goes on to relate:
As for the seditious, they were in too great distress already to afford their assistance [towards quenching the fire]; they were everywhere beaten; and as for a great part of the people, they were weak and without arms, and had their throats cut wherever they were caught. Now, round about the altar lay dead bodies heaped one upon another; as at the steps going up to it ran a great quantity of their blood, whither also the dead bodies that were slain above [on the altar] fell down (6:259).
Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful, but inside they are full of the bones of the dead and of all kinds of filth. So you also on the outside look righteous to others, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.
In 27.24-26, we encounter a passage that had devastating consequences for the Jewish people in the centuries after its writing:
So when Pilate saw that he could do nothing, but rather that a riot was beginning, he took some water and washed his hands before the crowd, saying, "I am innocent of this man's blood; see to it yourselves. Then the people as a whole answered,
"His blood be
on us and on our children!"
So he released Barabbas for them; and after flogging
Jesus, he handed him over to be crucified.
Understanding Mt in context will help us to put its anti-Pharisaic, and sometimes seemingly anti-Jewish, rhetoric into perspective. Part of what we are witnessing in Mt is something of a family dispute: two different types of Judaism in conflict with one another; family disputes, however, can sometimes be the most bitter.
Sources:
Josephus, Flavius.
The Works of Flavius Josephus.
New updated edition.
Trans. William Whiston.
Peabody, MA, Hendrickson, 1987.
Koester, Helmut.
Introduction to the New Testament,
2nd ed., vol. 1. New York and Berlin: Walter de
Gruyter, 1995.