scribes

• kept Jews in terrible bondage to ritual, traditions

121:7.3The scribes, the Phar­isees, and the priest­hood held the Jews in a ter­ri­ble bond­age of rit­u­al­ism and le­gal­ism, a bond­age far more real than that of the Ro­man po­lit­i­cal rule. The Jews of Je­sus’ time were not only held in sub­ju­ga­tion to the law but were equally bound by the slav­ish de­mands of the tra­di­tions, which in­volved and in­vaded ev­ery do­main of per­sonal and so­cial life. These minute reg­u­la­tions of con­duct pur­sued and dom­i­nated ev­ery loyal Jew, and it is not strange that they promptly re­jected one of their num­ber who pre­sumed to ig­nore their sa­cred tra­di­tions, and who dared to flout their long-hon­ored reg­u­la­tions of so­cial con­duct. They could hardly re­gard with fa­vor the teach­ings of one who did not hes­i­tate to clash with dog­mas which they re­garded as hav­ing been or­dained by Fa­ther Abra­ham him­self. Moses had given them their law and they would not com­pro­mise.

• with rabbis comprised Pharisees

137:7.6The scribes and rab­bis, taken to­gether, were called Phar­isees. They re­ferred to them­selves as the “as­so­ciates.” In many ways they were the pro­gres­sive group among the Jews, hav­ing adopted many teach­ings not clearly found in the He­brew scrip­tures, such as be­lief in the res­ur­rec­tion of the dead, a doc­trine only men­tioned by a later prophet, Daniel.

• many were honest of heart

140:8.22Je­sus did not ve­he­mently de­nounce even the Phar­isees, as did John. He knew many of the scribes and Phar­isees were hon­est of heart; he un­der­stood their en­slav­ing bond­age to re­li­gious tra­di­tions. Je­sus laid great em­pha­sis on “first mak­ing the tree good.” He im­pressed the three that he val­ued the whole life, not just a cer­tain few spe­cial virtues.

• spiritually blind but thoroughly moral

162:3.1It was dur­ing this visit to Je­ru­sa­lem that Je­sus dealt with a cer­tain woman of evil re­pute who was brought into his pres­ence by her ac­cusers and his en­e­mies. The dis­torted rec­ord you have of this episode would sug­gest that this woman had been brought be­fore Je­sus by the scribes and Phar­isees, and that Je­sus so dealt with them as to in­di­cate that these re­li­gious lead­ers of the Jews might them­selves have been guilty of im­moral­ity. Je­sus well knew that, while these scribes and Phar­isees were spir­i­tu­ally blind and in­tel­lec­tu­ally prej­u­diced by their loy­alty to tra­di­tion, they were to be num­bered among the most thor­oughly moral men of that day and gen­er­a­tion.

• refused to enter kingdom; prevented others from entering

175:1.12“Woe upon you, scribes and Phar­isees, hyp­ocrites! You would shut the doors of the king­dom of heaven against sin­cere men be­cause they hap­pen to be un­learned in the ways of your teach­ing. You refuse to en­ter the king­dom and at the same time do ev­ery­thing within your power to pre­vent all oth­ers from en­ter­ing. You stand with your backs to the doors of sal­va­tion and fight with all who would en­ter therein.