Seven times in one chapter (23) of the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus curses the “scribes and Pharisees” as hypocrites and blind guides. This occurs after numerous disputes with leaders of the Jewish community in Galilee and a series of confrontations with the authorities in Jerusalem. Finally, Matthew’s Jesus mounts a climactic attack on his opponents, castigating them in a vitriolic, though coherent and comprehensive, series of charges intended to undermine their program for the Jewish community and their legitimacy as leaders. “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!” is the refrain (Matthew 23:1–36). “You blind fools,” he calls them. “You serpents, you brood of vipers.”
The language of the gospel is neither charitable nor politically correct. The author’s charges, that the scribes and Pharisees are corrupt murderers uninterested in justice and mercy, strike post-Holocaust Christians seeking to correct the deadly legacy of anti-Semitism as embarrassingly offensive at best and virulently dangerous at worst. And for Jews—well, anti-Jewish attacks by Christians are an old and dangerous story. Students of antiquity will recognize Matthew’s attack against his opponents as a robust example of the less than admirable genre of religious polemic. Vilification and misrepresentation of the opposition serves to establish the identity and boundaries of the polemicist’s group and weaken the power and attraction of the opposing group.1 But is historical distance and ancient practice enough for understanding the Gospel of Matthew?
Christian theological interpreters of the gospel will be torn by the contradictions in the text. The author composed the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5–7) as an admirable exhortation to a life of love and justice and as a summary of the attitudes and behavior expected of members of the Jesus movement. Matthew’s Jesus instructs the crowd to “rejoice and be glad when people persecute you” (Matthew 5:12) and to “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:44). Elsewhere he describes Jesus, using a passage from Isaiah (Isaiah 42:2–3), as one who “will not wrangle or cry aloud, nor will anyone hear his voice in the streets; he will not break a bruised reed or quench a smoldering wick” (Matthew 12:19–20). How can the reader reconcile 034these passages with the intemperate curses against the scribes and Pharisees in Matthew 23? Why this vicious and contorted text?
The easy answer connects Matthew’s curses of the scribes and Pharisees to the long history of Christian anti-Semitism. Christians have attacked Jews unjustly and mercilessly for nearly 2,000 years, having learned to do so partly from such passages as Matthew 23, as well as from other New Testament writings. But was Matthew really a “Christian” attacking “those Jews”?
The majority of interpreters date the Gospel of Matthew to the late first century (80–95 C.E.); its author had been born a Jew, but became a follower of Jesus. According to this theory, the author wrote the gospel soon after his group of followers of Jesus had separated from the synagogue, that is, from the community of religious Jews. That schism, so this theory goes, had been so acrimonious and painful that the Gospel of Matthew was composed to justify the withdrawal of the author and his group and to vilify the position of their opponents who had expelled them.2
My view is different. I believe the author of this gospel and his group not only still considered themselves Jews, but also were considered Jews by their contemporaries. In short, the Matthean group saw themselves as part of the people of Israel, not as a new religion or as “Christians” rather than Jews.3 Understood in this way, the author of Matthew attacked the scribes and Pharisees to delegitimate rival Jewish leaders and to legitimate himself and his group as the true leaders of Israel, the accurate interpreters of the Bible and the authentic messengers of God’s will.
The warrant for this interpretation lies in the life and teaching of Jesus as presented in the Gospel of Matthew.
Matthew does not present Jesus as God in the manner of later Christian Trinitarian theology. Instead, he draws on designations and titles from Jewish scriptures—what Christians would later call the Old Testament. Thus Matthew tells us that Jesus was sent to Israel by God as anointed leader (“messiah,” as the term is rendered in Psalm 2:2), the son of Man (as in Daniel 7) and son of God (as in 2 Samuel 7:14 and Psalm 2:7). Matthew accords Jesus a very high status, but he does not say Jesus is God. Rather, Matthew writes as a member of the late-first-century Jewish community, using the words, symbols and thought patterns of his age in an attempt to establish Jesus’ way of life as the authentic way of living the Jewish tradition.
Let me be clear about the distinction I am drawing. I am not turning the “Christian” Matthew into a Jew or trying to deny the integrity of later Jewish and Christian communities. I am denying that there were two communities with sharply defined boundaries in Matthew’s geographical area at the time the gospel was written. Thus Matthew could not have “become a Christian” because he did not have this word or the understanding of God, Israel and church that stands behind the concept “Christian.” Rather the author of Matthew’s gospel was a Jewish leader and teacher who led a group of first-century Jews. His group, like many other Jewish groups in the late first century, had its own understanding of the Bible, Jewish traditions and God’s will. With second-century hindsight we may call Matthew “Christian,” but in the first century he was part of the large and diverse world of the Jewish community.
My interpretation of Matthew requires a new understanding of both Jewish communities and Christian communities in the first century. Neither so-called “Christianity” nor “Judaism” was a uniform, unified whole. True, by this time Paul had recruited many gentiles to accept the biblical God and Jesus as God’s son; but this does not mean that by the late first century all Christian communities knew of and accepted Paul’s teaching. Distance and difficulty of communication guaranteed that groups who believed in Jesus would be diverse in traditions, customs and outlooks. As New 035Testament documents themselves testify, early followers of Jesus had many different experiences and beliefs. We cannot retroject a later orthodoxy onto the first century.
The same kinds of variations can be seen in Jewish groups in the first century. After the Roman destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E., the rabbinic or Talmudic way of living Judaism took several centuries to develop and mature. Prior to that “orthodox” synthesis, Jews understood, interpreted and lived their traditions in many ways, as they do today. In the late first century C.E. the Rabbis and their teachings had not yet taken shape, much less taken control, of the Jewish community.4 Rather, a number of groups competed for the highest levels of power and influence within the Jewish 036communities in Judea, Galilee and beyond, among whom the most prominent were priests, members of the Herodian family and Pharisees who survived the destruction of Jerusalem.5
Matthew’s gospel testifies to the ferment in the Jewish community in the wake of the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple. The scribes, Pharisees, priests and elders in the narrative symbolize Matthew’s late-first-century opponents.6 Though the precise identity of these community leaders is hard to establish, some of the specific items in Jesus’ disputes with the scribes and Pharisees suggest that they represent the emerging rabbinic leadership that gradually gained power over the Jewish community during the next few centuries.7
The contents and development of the Mishnah, the earliest compilation of rabbinic law edited at the end of the second century, suggest that in the years following 70 C.E. the rabbis were a small group interested in preserving and reinterpreting the practice of Judaism without the Temple. They were not a community elite, as has traditionally been held,8 but most probably a coalition of scribes, Pharisees, priests and landowners seeking to define Judaism in new circumstances.9 In the 037late first century, this early rabbinic coalition, based at Yavneh or Jamnia, was a reform movement within the larger Jewish community—just as Matthew’s group was. They and Matthew were rivals for influence and access to power in the assemblies and other institutions of the Jewish community in or near Galilee. These reform movements sought not to form new sects, but rather to assemble disparate groups and forms of Judaism into one fold.10 At this stage, neither group was dominant in the Jewish community as a whole. But in Matthew’s city or area the rabbinic group’s program was more influential than Matthew’s Jesus-centered Judaism. Matthew’s rancor against the leadership indicates that they, not he, had been successful in attracting most of the people of the Jewish community to their reform program.
We do not know where the Gospel of Matthew was written. Because it is written in Greek, the author must have been in a city large enough to have a Greek-speaking population and a substantial Jewish community, some members of which were followers of Jesus. Antioch, on the Orontes in northern Syria, is the location most often put forward, though without much supporting evidence. Matthew’s city might have been in Galilee (Sepphoris or Tiberias would do as well) or in an area contiguous with Galilee (Transjordan, the Mediterranean coast or southern Syria).11 Any city within or close to Israel is a likely location for Matthew and for his opponents, the early rabbis, who were based in Galilee.
This location fits the narrative about Jesus too. Matthew places Jesus’ home in Capernaum (Matthew 4:13) and most of his work in Galilee (Matthew 4–18). Good-sized cities, such as Sepphoris and Tiberias, or even Capernaum and Bethsaida, had both Jewish and gentile Greek-speakers, as well as the social resources to educate and support leaders and writers like the author of Matthew. And if not Galilee, one of the surrounding cities with a Jewish community, such as Caesarea or Tyre on the coast or Gerasa in Transjordan, would fit the social setting as described in Matthew’s gospel. Galilee and its neighbors, with their complex and cosmopolitan society and tightly woven cultural and commercial networks, could easily have supported the nascent rabbinic-Jewish and Christian-Jewish movements, as well as the other apocalyptic, priestly, messianic, revivalist and revolutionary currents then running through society.12
The Gospel of Matthew reflects an uneasy tension concerning how to interpret biblical law, and it contains justifications for particular interpretations of Jewish tradition against those of other Jewish groups. Against the program of emerging rabbinic Judaism, the author of Matthew sought to establish and legitimate his form of Christian Judaism by a two-pronged attack: (1) a detailed and lengthy exposition of his outlook and way of life (comprising the bulk of the gospel); and (2) a polemical denigration of his opponents’ Jewish thought and practice. It is the latter that we find in chapter 23.a
Matthew, then, attacks a rival Jewish group, another group striving for leadership of the community, in his polemic against the scribes and Pharisees in chapter 23. He does not deny the fundamental legitimacy of Israel, its law or its community structures. To do so would be to destroy the basis of his own claim to legitimacy. Rather, he seeks to undermine the legitimacy of a certain group of Israel’s leaders by attacking their personal integrity and the accuracy of their interpretations of Jewish law and divine will. The seven “woes,” with their mocking of Jewish practices and exaggerated accusations leveled against Jewish authorities, are an attempt to delegitimate those leaders and their teachings in the eyes of the whole Jewish community.
The seven statements in Matthew 23 are “woe” oracles, a literary form frequently found in prophetic literature, either singly (Amos 5:8, 6:1; Isaiah 1:4, 3:11, 10:5) or in a series (Isaiah 5:8–24). The “woe” (“woe is he who…”) is usually followed by a description of the wrongful action or by a negative characterization of the antagonist. Appended to the “woe” may be a variety of rhetorical questions, threats, and so on. A “woe” oracle is a mild form of curse that functions as a public denunciation.
Matthew’s seven indictments of the scribes and Pharisees (Matthew 23:13, 15, 16, 23, 25, 27, 29) are not a random selection of complaints, but a structured series of charges aimed at key aspects of their program and leadership role in the Jewish community. The first two woes concern competition for followers (see the sidebar to this article). According to Matthew, the Jewish leaders prevent their fellow Jews from following Jesus’ teachings and from attracting gentiles to their Christian-Jewish way of life in the Jewish community. This frustrates the major goals of Matthew’s group, who wish to teach the lost sheep of the house of Israel (Matthew 10:6) and all nations (Matthew 28:19) to follow Jesus’ teaching. Matthew charges that his rivals’ teachings frustrate God’s purpose embodied in Jesus’ message of the kingdom of heaven.
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The next three woes, which are concerned with oaths, tithes and purity, attack prevailing interpretations of the law, economy and customs that hold the Jewish community together and give it identity and coherence. Oaths and vows are assumed and permitted in the Bible and are common in most cultures as a means of defining public social relationships, economic contracts and judicial proceedings. Both Jewish and Greco-Roman authors expended great effort in preserving the sanctity and seriousness of oaths, preventing people from swearing frivolous oaths or from making imprudent vows, and distinguishing valid from invalid vows and oaths.13 Matthew satirizes distinctions between some valid and invalid oaths and vows.14 His radical solution is to forbid oaths (Matthew 5:33–37) and avoid the whole problem. This kind of suggestion is typical of a new, enthusiastic group characterized by close relations with one another and personal commitment.
In the fourth and fifth woes, Matthew addresses the value of paying tithes to the Temple and its priesthood and of preserving ritual purity in the consumption of food. They are important, but not as important as other things. Both tithes and purity are mandated by the Bible, so Matthew cannot forbid them outright. Since his opponents stressed them as a special mode of fidelity to God and the Temple (even after the Temple was destroyed), however, Matthew emphasizes other parts of the 039tradition and ridicules his opponents’ priorities. The appropriateness of contributing tithes to the Temple, even tithes of herbs, is affirmed but subordinated to “the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy and faith.” The ritual cleanliness of cups and plates remains a valid concern, but it is subordinated to the cleansing of the inner self from extortion and intemperance. Matthew’s distinction of inner and outer and his distinction of more and less important laws unfairly caricatures law-observant Jews who differ from him. He proposes “justice, mercy and faith” as central criteria for group membership, ignoring (just as politicians often do today) the fact that all first-century Jewish sects and movements supported these virtues in their own ways. The Pharisees and early rabbis stressed the purity laws as a way of articulating Israel’s sanctifying relationship with God and of supporting the community’s commitment to “justice, mercy and faith.” Matthew rejects his opponents’ interpretation of their common tradition.
The last two “woes” bring the attack to a climax by accusing the established leaders of bad faith and lack of integrity and by calling them lawless murderers. The sixth woe continues the contrast between inner and outer mentioned in the fifth woe by comparing scribes and Pharisees to the beautiful outside and corrupt inside of tombs.15
The accompanying charge of lawlessness against the scribes and Pharisees—who interpret, create and promote a distinctive set of Jewish laws—is a deeply ironic attack by the author of Matthew. They are accused of lawlessness because, in the eyes of the Matthean group, they do not discern and act on the true will of God.16 The seventh woe picks up the tomb imagery of the sixth and accuses the scribes and Pharisees of building tombs to the prophets and martyrs for whose death they (according to Matthew) were responsible. The charge of killing the prophets leads to a final warning of imminent judgment (Matthew 23:36).
Matthew’s vitriolic tone and detailed accusations strongly indicate that he is attacking the Jewish leaders in his city. Matthew attacks them in order to legitimate his own teaching and status and delegitimate theirs in the eyes of his followers and the whole Jewish community. The construction of this long and sophisticated attack was probably occasioned by the expulsion of Matthew’s group from a local Jewish assembly (in Greek synagogue, meaning “assembly”). Expulsion did not mean that Matthew’s group was no longer Jewish, but that the conflict intensified. Matthew formed a new assembly (ekklesia, another word for “assembly” in Greek). As leader of that assembly he continued to seek recognition for his understanding of Jewish life and tradition.
Because of this conflict over authority and because of their differing understandings of Jewish tradition, the author of Matthew does not fairly or sympathetically present the Pharisees and scribes: All scribes and Pharisees are grouped together as a symbol for Matthew’s opponents in the late first century.
Historically, scribes were found at every level of society and did not form a cohesive group. Some of them were surely officials and teachers and thus had contact and conflict with Jesus.17 The Pharisees had a program for the reform of Jewish society and had won influence and sometimes power in society since the Hasmonean period (152–37 B.C.E.). The author of Matthew does accurately portray the scribes as lower-level officials who would have interacted with Jesus, and the Pharisees as a reforming group who also would have interacted with a deviant group of Jews who followed Jesus (the Matthean community) in the late first century. Neither the Pharisees nor the Matthean community was in control of society; the Roman government, the chief priests and families in Jerusalem and Herod Antipas in Galilee had that role. The Pharisees did have some power, influence and status, which they sought to preserve by receiving public honor and titles (Matthew 23:1–12) and by controlling the interpretation of community custom and justice. In these activities they probably had negative encounters with early followers of Jesus.
The author of Matthew, however, evaluates the scribes and Pharisees as “bad guys,” like Pharaoh in Exodus. The repeated use of pejorative epithets 045like “hypocrite” and “blind” besmirches the morality of the scribes and Pharisees, undermines their authority and leads to the ironic charge that they are “lawless” (Matthew 23:28), the very opposite of what they claim to be and probably were. The accusation that they are murderers of the prophets and righteous (Matthew 30–31, 35) seeks to explain and condemn their opposition to Matthew’s group (Matthew 23:34). The eschatological threat of judgment in verse 36, the lament over Jerusalem in verses 37–39 and the eschatological discourse (Matthew 24–25) all invoke God’s judgment as the final resolution of the conflict.
Note three concrete limits of even this intemperate polemic. The author of Matthew disputes with particular leaders, rather than attacking all Jews without distinction (unlike many later anti-Jewish diatribes). Second, Matthew argues with his opponents about concrete laws and customs, not about law or legalism in general or about vague charges of inferiority or decadence. Finally, although the author of Matthew invokes divine judgment on his opponents, he does not call for their deaths, much less cause their deaths.
And yet, Matthew’s attacks overflowed their limited and concrete boundaries all too easily. Just a few decades later, Christian writers charged all Jews with lack of integrity, rebellion against God and deicide. They rejected the law as a punishment reserved for sinful Jews, claimed the rest of the Bible for Christianity and anointed themselves as God’s chosen people. Matthew did not make such claims, but his rhetoric was quickly recruited for new purposes. The contemporary “success” of Matthew’s polemic can be measured by the modern English use of the word “Pharisaic” to mean “hypocritical.”
As many have noted with distaste in recent years, Matthew’s anti-Jewish rhetoric is dangerous and needs careful interpretation in a post-Holocaust world. His rhetoric is harsh and certainly not a model for “Christian charity.” And here lies the problem posed earlier: How can Matthew be so contradictory? He teaches love of enemies yet calumniates his own opponents as killers. Historically speaking, the gospel author was following the conventions of his time in calumniating and misrepresenting his opponents even as he taught love of enemies as an instruction from Jesus. But this is not a full answer.
The gospel itself contains hints of a possible solution, even if the author of Matthew does not see it. Careful study of chapter 23 reveals that the author focuses his attacks with precision on the Jewish community leaders, taking issue with laws, leaders and institutional structures that threaten his views and practices. He seeks to delegitimate established Jewish leaders from whom he has broken. He wants to establish his own legitimacy as an authentic interpreter of God’s will. He does not attack all Jews, nor does he oppose them for being Jews. After all, he is a Jew himself. He disagrees with many of his fellow Jews concerning God’s will, Jesus’ role in relation to God and numerous other Jewish practices and understandings of the tradition. Yet he argues with his fellow Jews on the basis of a shared heritage. In this, the author of the gospel distinguishes himself from those Christians of the next 1,900 years who reject and condemn Jews generally, as well as their covenant with Yahweh.
Religious disagreements inevitably lead to sharp exchanges, which easily threaten the integrity of both parties. Authentic religious disagreements between Christian and Jews, however, will faithfully preserve the shared core of biblical tradition and will honor the integrity of each community with its practices and beliefs, even in the face of competing claims and non-negotiable differences.
But what of a final resolution of the conflict? That too is answered by the common tradition: God, not humans, provides the ultimate resolution of human confusion, suffering and evil.
Seven times in one chapter (23) of the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus curses the “scribes and Pharisees” as hypocrites and blind guides. This occurs after numerous disputes with leaders of the Jewish community in Galilee and a series of confrontations with the authorities in Jerusalem. Finally, Matthew’s Jesus mounts a climactic attack on his opponents, castigating them in a vitriolic, though coherent and comprehensive, series of charges intended to undermine their program for the Jewish community and their legitimacy as leaders. “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!” is the refrain (Matthew 23:1–36). “You blind fools,” he calls them. […]
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Luke 11:37–52 contains a story of Jesus dining with and rebuking a Pharisee, followed by three “woes” against the Pharisees and three against lawyers. The contents of this attack have many sentences and phrases in common with Matthew, but the order is different. So is the position in the gospel. The Lukan woes occur in the middle of the gospel, in a long teaching section, not at a climactic point near the end, as in Matthew. Parts of Matthew 23 and Luke 11 were probably derived from the hypothetical Sayings Source, designated as Q, but both authors reshaped the materials to fit their purposes.
Endnotes
1.
Luke T. Johnson, “The New Testament’s Anti-Jewish Slander and the Conventions of Ancient Polemic,” Journal of Biblical Literature 108 (1989), pp. 419–441. Johnson contextualizes the polemics within the stereotyped and accepted literary attacks found in Greco-Roman philosophers and Hellenistic Jewish writers.
2.
Graham N. Stanton, A Gospel for a New People: Studies in Matthew (Edinburgh: Clark, 1992).
3.
For the complete case for this position, see Anthony J. Saldarini, Matthew’s Christian-Jewish Community (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1994).
4.
See Shaye J.D. Cohen, “The Place of the Rabbi in Jewish Society of the Second Century,” in Lee I. Levine, ed., The Galilee in Late Antiquity (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary; Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1992), pp. 157–173; and Lee I. Levine, “The Sages and the Synagogue in Late Antiquity: The Evidence of the Galilee,” in The Galilee in Late Antiquity, pp. 201–222.
5.
Seth Schwartz, Josephus and Judean Politics, Columbia Studies in the Classical Tradition 18 (Leiden: Brill, 1990). Schwartz argues that changes in Josephus’s attitudes reflect the struggle for political power in Palestine and Roman attitudes among the Jewish leadership toward various social groups in the latter third of the first century.
6.
For the Jewish leaders as a corporate character in Matthew’s plot, see Jack Dean Kingsbury, Matthew as Story (Philadelphia: Fortress, 2nd edition, 1988), pp. 17–23.
7.
This is the thesis of J. Andrew Overman, Matthew’s Gospel and Formative Judaism: The Social World of the Matthean Community (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1990).
8.
This is the thesis of Jacob Neusner, which has won increasing acceptance. Out of Neusner’s many writings, the following are especially useful for this topic: Judaism: The Evidence of the Mishnah (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1981); “The Formation of Rabbinic Judaism: Yavneh (Jamnia) from A.D. 70–100,” in Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römischen Welt II.19.2, ed. H. Temporini and W. Hasse (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1979), pp. 3–42.
9.
See Neusner, Judaism, pp. 230–256, for the contributions of scribes, priests and householders to the Mishnah. Schwartz, Josephus, pp. 200–208, suggests that an initial gathering of scribes, judges and teachers by Johanan ben Zakkai failed to establish itself, as did an attempt by the surviving high priestly families to reassert their power. In the late first century, Gamaliel II, the descendent of an aristocratic, Pharisaic, Jerusalem family, who was not among Johanan’s disciples, successfully gathered a coalition of some of Johanan’s followers, some upper and lower priests and others of varied backgrounds.
10.
For the synthetic thrust of the rabbinic movement, see Shaye J.D. Cohen, “The Significance of Yavneh: Pharisees, Rabbis, and the End of Jewish Sectarianism,” Hebrew Union College Annual 55 (1984), pp. 27–53. The loss of the Temple leadership against which sects often reacted and the constant need to guard the community’s integrity probably encouraged unity. Even so, the emergence of a relatively united rabbinic Judaism as a dominant community influence took several centuries.
11.
For a review of positions, see Graham Stanton, “The Origin and Purpose of Matthew’s Gospel: Matthean Scholarship from 1945–1980,” in Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römischen Welt II.25.3, ed. H. Temporini and W. Hasse (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1985); and W.D. Davies and Dale C. Allison, The Gospel According to Saint Matthew, vol. 1, International Critical Commentary (Edinburgh: Clark, 1988), pp. 138–147. Galilee is supported by J. Andrew Overman (Matthew’s Gospel, p. 159) and Eduard Schweizer (“Matthew’s Church,” in The Interpretation of Matthew, ed. Graham Stanton [Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983], pp. 129–130).
12.
See 2 Baruch and 4 Ezra; G.W.E. Nickelsburg, “Enoch, Levi and Peter: Recipients of Revelation in Upper Galilee,” Journal of Biblical Literature 100 (1981), pp. 575–600; Graham Stanton, “5 Ezra and Matthean Christianity in the Second Century,” in A Gospel for a New People, pp. 256–277.
13.
See Mishnah and Tosefta Nedarim and Saul Lieberman, Greek in Jewish Palestine: Studies in the Life and Manners of Jewish Palestine in the II-IV Centuries (New York: Journal of Theological Studies, 1942), pp. 115–143.
14.
These two distinguishable forms of swearing were often interchanged for one another in the first century.
15.
Since contact with corpses and tombs was a source of ritual impurity (Numbers 6:6; 19:16), the later Mishnah says that graves were marked with whitewash, especially at times of feasts, so that people would not stray over them and become ritually unclean (Mishnah Ma’as.sh. 5:1; Mishnah Sheqal. 1:1).
16.
The Greek word anomia means literally “lawlessness,” but in its various forms it also suggests wickedness and godlessness and generally the opposite of justice. For example, those who do not do the will of God are designated, in the words of Psalms 6:9, “doers of lawlessness” (compare Matthew 7:23). Overman (Matthew’s Gospel, p. 98) associates lawlessness with the sectarian language in Matthew. Matthew levels the charge of anomia against those who do not do God’s will and who are not bearing fruit (7:21–23).
17.
For a full discussion of the scribes see Anthony J. Saldarini, Pharisees, Scribes and Sadducees in Palestinian Society (Wilmington: Glazier, 1988), pp. 159–166 and chap. 11.
