Welcome back to James Popery. I'm Joe Heschmire. And a common accusation against Catholics is that were modern day Pharisees.

I think Pharisees, Pharisees and Roman Catholic leaders have a lot in common nowadays.

Yeah.

The Reformers chose to follow the Bible while the Jesuits chose to fight against it on behalf of the traditions and power of the Catholic Church.

The view of the Jesuits toward the Bible could be likened to that of the ancient Pharisees

two thousand years ago who opposed Christ.

As Jesus said of them, full well, ye reject the commandment of God that ye may keep your own tradition.

He was telling the Pharisees, your sons of the devil. He said, I knew your father. You're just like them.

Can you imagine saying that to the Catholic Church or just saying that to a denominational church?

But Jesus was continually confronting people who had taken the place of God.

The Pharisee connection happens for any number of reasons, but often it goes something like this.

Pharisees back then and Catholics today don't believe in Scripture alone, Soliscriptora.

Instead, we have these other

standards as well like tradition. I think these criticisms misunderstand not only Catholicism,

but also what it was that Jesus was rebuking about the Pharisees in the first place. Many of the

traditions in question were attempts to live out the Mosaic law.

Now, not only is that not a bad thing, it's an unavoidable thing.

Anybody who is trying to keep the Sabbath holy is going to have to figure out what does and doesn't violate the nature of the Sabbath Day, for instance.

But as we're going to see, the Pharisees often fell short, but they did so in two opposite directions,

sometimes by obeying the letter of the law too rigidly, and other times by actually not living out the law rigidly enough. Now, the first of those two errors is the one they're more

famous for. It's that attitude of legalism in the sense of observing the letter of the law,

but in such a way that you miss the point of the law.

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