He uses towards them such designations as these: "Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites;" "you blind guides;" "you fools and blind;" "thou blind Pharisee;" "you serpents, you generation of vipers." If we may believe that he was the author of a parable contained only in Luke, he used a Pharisee as his typical hypocrite, and held up a publican—one of a degraded class—as far superior in genuine virtue to this self-righteous representative of the hated order (Lu. xviii. 9-14).
Had the Pharisees been actually guilty of the exceeding wickedness which Jesus thought proper to ascribe to them, his career would surely have been cut short at a much earlier stage. As it was, they seem to have borne with considerable patience the extreme license which he permitted himself in his language against them. Nay, I venture to say that had he confined himself to language, however strong, he might have escaped the fate which actually befell him. And the evidence of this proposition is to be found in the extreme mildness with which his apostles were afterwards treated by the Sanhedrim, even when they acted in direct disobedience to its orders (Acts iv. 15-21, and v. 27-42). Only Stephen, who courted martyrdom by his language, was put to death, and that for the legal offense of blasphemy. Ordinary prudence would have saved Jesus. For his arrest was closely connected with his expulsion of the money-changers from the temple court. Not indeed that he was condemned to death on that account, but that this ill-considered deed was the immediate incentive of the legal proceedings, which subsequently ended, contrary perhaps to the expectation of his prosecutors, in his conviction by the Sanhedrim on a capital charge. Let us consider the evidence of this. For the convenience of persons going to pay tribute to the temple, some money-changers—probably neither better nor worse than others of their trade—sat outside for the purpose of receiving the current Roman coinage and giving the national money, which alone the authorities of the temple received in exchange. Certain occasions in life requiring an offering of doves, these too were sold in the precincts of the temple, obviously to the advantage of the public. Had Jesus disapproved of this practice, he might have denounced it in public, and have endeavored to persuade the people to give it up. Instead of this, he entered the temple, expelled the buyers and sellers (by what means we do not know), upset the money-changers' tables and the dove-sellers' seats, and permitted no one to carry a vessel through the temple. "Is it not written," he exclaimed, "'My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations?' but you have made it a den of thieves" (Mk. xi. 15-18; Mt. xxi. 12, 13; Lu. xix. 45-48). The action and the words were alike unjustifiable. The extreme care of the Jews to preserve the sanctity of their temple is well known from secular history. Nothing that they had done or were likely to do could prevent it from remaining a house of prayer. And even if they had suffered it to be desecrated by commerce, was it, they would ask, for Jesus to fall suddenly upon men who were but pursuing a calling which custom had sanctioned, and which they had no reason to think illegal or irreligious? Was it for him to stigmatize them all indiscriminately as "thieves"? Plainly not. He had, in their opinion, exceeded all bounds of decorum, to say nothing of law, in this deed of violence and of passion. Thus, there was nothing for it now but to restrain the further excesses he might be tempted to commit.