Matthew 23: Yeshua and the Pharisees, from Moses’ Seat to True Discipleship

Institutions Born in Exile

There are no synagogues, no rabbis, no Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, or yeshivas anywhere in the Hebrew Bible. These are all institutions that came into existence only in the inter-testamental period. When the Israelites returned from Babylonian exile, they came back to a Jerusalem and a Temple in disrepair and an economy in bad shape. The Torah's provision for hard legal cases to be brought "to the place the Lord chooses" gave them a basis to establish entirely new institutions. They built houses of learning — Beit Midrash — because they heard the Torah read publicly for the first time in generations when Ezra and Nehemiah and the Levites read it before the Feast of Tabernacles (Nehemiah 7-8). The Pharisees emerged as a puritan group determined to take the Torah seriously and restore it as the authority for Jewish life.

What the Pharisees did was, in a sense, what Martin Luther tried to do fifteen centuries later: they made the Torah approachable and accessible to ordinary people, not just to priests and Levites. From that point forward, decisions about the Torah were made through discussion and deliberation among rabbis rather than waiting for a fresh divine revelation for every question. Yeshua functioned within exactly this system — He preached in synagogues throughout the Galilee, and

Yeshua was not an outsider attacking the system. He was a participant inside it.

The Crowd, the Stairs, and a Political Risk

When Yeshua says,

He is speaking to multitudes gathered at the Temple market place, a large paved area on the south side of the Temple Mount with stairs leading up into the Temple itself, through several gates. There was no television, no posters, no social media to announce the time and place. And still, multitudes gathered. Yeshua's reputation alone drew the crowd.

What Yeshua does next is politically loaded. In the actual Torah text, there are no Pharisees and no Sadducees — only priests and Levites. Yeshua substitutes the Pharisees for them. And the Pharisees were a small minority — only about 6,000 people in all of Jerusalem — while the Sadducees controlled the Temple itself, the very ground Yeshua was standing on when He said this. Giving interpretive authority to the smaller, less politically powerful group, on the very turf of their rivals, was no small statement.

The Plagues of the Pharisees

When Yeshua then turns and pronounces "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees" seven separate times in Matthew 23, He is not inventing a new accusation. About sixty years earlier, King Yannai himself had leveled the same charge. The Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Sota 22b, records a list of seven types of hypocritical Pharisees — the shikmi Pharisee, the nikpi Pharisee, the kizai Pharisee, the "pestle" Pharisee, and others — a list the Talmud itself calls "The Plagues of the Pharisees." Yeshua's seven woes mirror this seven-part Jewish critique almost exactly. He is not the first to call out Pharisaic hypocrisy, and He was certainly not the last Jew to do so.

I call some of my own Christian brothers and sisters "hypocrites" too, sometimes — and I say it because I love them, because I have high expectations for them, and because I see them falling into the same standard religious hypocrisies: faithful on Sunday, indistinguishable from the world on Monday. It would be easy to dismiss all of this as "old stuff" — we live in a modern world with iPhones made in China and a virus also made in China — we don't need some teaching from a Jew who lived 2,000 years ago. But that dismissal is exactly the trap.

"I Am Just a Disciple of Jesus"

At this point I'd like to share an event from the late 1960s in Tel Aviv. A young Jewish American rabbi, recently immigrated from New York, gathered about 50 leaders of evangelical churches in Israel in a building owned by the Baptists and asked each one to introduce himself. Forty-nine identified themselves by denomination — Baptist, Methodist, Pentecostal, Seventh Day Adventist, Catholic, Assemblies of God. One man, a road engineer who was building the first four-lane highway from Haifa to Ashdod, said simply: "I am just a disciple of Jesus." The rabbi responded: "I am so happy that at least one of you is a disciple of Jesus!"

We must take the words and teachings of Yeshua much more seriously than we take Santa Claus or our own favorite teachers and pastors. It is never too late to be self-examining — to be like King David, who made mistakes and let the Lord restore him. We all need to read Matthew 23 every few months, at minimum once a year, and ask ourselves honestly where we stand.