Image Details

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC/Art Resource, NY

“WOE UNTO YOU, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you compass sea and land to make one proselyte [convert]; and when he is made, you make him twice more the child of Hell than yourselves” (Matthew 23:15). Jesus’ debate with the Pharisees in Jerusalem, depicted here in a pencil-and-watercolor work by the 19th-century American artist Lawrence W. Ladd, is the only biblical passage that mentions Jewish missionary activity. It is also the only historical reference to associate a specific Jewish sect—the Pharisees—with missionary activity.