We started talking about the Pharisees yesterday.

My argument was that growing up, these guys were

just big dads. They were just, you know, naughty bad guys who just wanted to see the world burn and

just because they're evil and selfish and awful. But the more I've been around the New Testament,

and the more I've learned about the Pharisees, the more I've come to believe, dang, I might have

initially been on their team back in the

times of Jesus because in terms of good ideas, they had a lot of them. They were pretty dialed in

on trying to do the right thing. And maybe their motives weren't perfect. That kind of comes to the

surface as we go through the Gospels. But on paper,

at least, they were team nice or trying to be. They were trying to be team good guy. And they come,

they talk to John here, John the Baptist, that is, in John chapter one, the Levites and priests, it looks like, they take a run at John,

they ask him a bunch of questions, and then the Pharisees kind of jump in, and they try it their way.

Now, some Pharisees who had been sent questioned him, John the Baptist.

Why then do you baptize if you're not the Christ nor Elijah, nor the prophet?

And then John gives an answer that we're

going to get to later on. So who are these Pharisees? What do they think? And are they really as

multidimensional as I've been trying to convince you to believe that they are? Well, I could give

you a bunch of speculation that I took from people who took it from somebody else who took it

from somebody else who took it from somebody else who took it from

somebody else or I could just read you some original material. So we're going to we're going to do the

latter. All right over here in Josephus's the antiquities of the Jews book 13. This is around chapter 5,

chapter 6, this edition. I don't know, maybe it doesn't have the chapter

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