But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees come to his baptism, he said unto them, O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?
Matthew 3:7
O generation of vipers, how can ye, being evil, speak good things? For, out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.
Matthew 12:34
The Pharisees whom both John and his cousin Jesus called a brood of vipers were in first century Palestine the counterparts of what today we would call the Woke Enforcers of Political Correctness. Not of Justice, properly so called. Just of Political Correctness.
The Pharisees had no de jure power (although they had, of course, much influence over that de jure power). They were not like the Sadducees and their lawyerly scribes (and the formidable Temple Police) legal officers of the quisling Temple Establishment. On the contrary, the Pharisaical rabbis in the provincial synagogues (not all rabbis were Pharisees) and their minions were all independent operators (not unlike their Prophetic precursors; this is a normal and so indeed for the most part salutary character of Hebrew culture (and pagan culture; viz., the schools of Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle, or for that matter of Shankara, Ramanuja, or Madhwa)). Each of them, individually and in their schools, acted as they thought fit. And they thought quite carefully, indeed; so much so, that even today we revere some of them as authorities. They were, then, apart from the most careful and judicious amongst them – and with the best of intentions, I doubt not – not so much established legal authorities as they were the running dog lackeys, the secular idiots useful to the corrupt Temple Establishment. Most of them were fools, after all; as most men are. Their influence upon the Hebrews was not official, but rather cultural, indeed rhetorical – and, so, at bottom, cultic. Their power was not de jure, but de facto: they could by their sophistical pronouncements declare this or that person in this or that provincial town non grata, and so cancel him – and, all the women who anywise depended upon him.
Which, in those days, was almost tantamount to a sentence of death.
Excursus: We are right now verging on just such a state of affairs, with the advent of debanking of agents insufficiently correct. What are you going to do, when as debanked you have no access to money? Good thing that the banks are being bailed out by the government … which is to say, by us. Don’t get me started …
The Pharisees thought themselves correct, and righteous altogether. And, usually, they were! They had to have conferred some preponderant benefit of legal order upon the shattered society of 1st century Palestine, after all, or nobody would have paid heed to them for a moment. God help them, and all such as they. Legal order is ever a two edged sword.
Thing is, no matter how righteous you are, you are dust, and to dust you shall return. Genesis 3:19.
Excursus: But then, the Pharisees Sadducees did not believe in the Resurrection (unlike the Sadducees of the Temple establishment Pharisees, who had retained that traditional doctrine). So, for them, it was no problem, no added difficulty at all, that all men are doomed to no more than dust.
Compare this notion then to the modern materialist fantasy that human life is just a bunch of dust particles jostling about for no reason.
If you don’t believe in the Resurrection, that’s where you must remain stuck, forever. In that respect, the Pharisees Sadducees were in exactly the same ontological position as our latter day atheist materialists.*
The influence of the Pharisees over the people of 1st Century Palestine was in many ways like that of the Social Justice Warriors of today, so rampant on the internet, in the bureaucracies, in the academy most of all, and in the courts, alas. It consisted in the power to ostracize, extrajudicially (as with the woman caught in adultery. John 8:1-11).
As then, so now, and indeed, so ever: Jesus and his cousin John stand in adamant opposition to the vipers of the Cult of Now.
If the proper cult of the Eternal One ever fail of its proper ostension – if, i.e., the social order ever anywise controvert its ancient inheritance, derived in the first instance from the cult of Adam, as adapted to local circumstances – there can be no other than the Cult of Now.
Whatever the Thing of Today is? Yeah, that’s the purblind stupid thing of the Prince of this World, against whom John and his cousin Jesus are arrayed.
Reject it.
++++++++++++++++++++
* Thanks to several commenters for catching this egregious error, which I have made repeatedly over the years when writing too fast. See my reply below to commenter Hoyos, who was the first to catch it.
The Orthosphere 
But the Pharisees did believe in the resurrection, Acts 23:8.
Oh yes, and that will be a resurrection to damnation.
Rats! I’ve made this mistake repeatedly, even though I know perfectly well that it was the Sadducees who did not believe in the resurrection. But this is the first time I’ve made the mistake in public; every other time its been in my Journal. I’ll rattle off an entry and in my haste make the error, then go back to it the next day and say, “Wait a minute, no; the Pharisees did believe in the resurrection.” I have to think about it consciously in order to see the error.
Last night I rattled off the post without consciously thinking about whether the Pharisees believed in the resurrection. Sure enough, I erred again.
It is almost as though the error has engraved a rut in my brain …
I should put a post it on my monitor: Sadducees: No Resurrection; Pharisees; No Priests.
Thanks for your correction. I’ll edit the post.
Ha! No worries, I’ve done that before, getting something exactly backwards.
It’s funny how the mind works — rut, indeed. Some years ago, I had two students of Indian (dot, not feather) ancestry named Seema and Sabrina. They neither looked nor behaved anyway alike, but I worried of calling one the other’s name (I was young and still worried about wayciss!). The anxious thought was enough that I couldn’t help but Basil Fawlty myself, and I frequently mixed their names. It was still a sane age, though, and they were kind girls. So, it became a joke for them. Then, in subsequent semesters, I almost invariably called any Sabrina I met — even blonde, blue-eyed, Christian lassies descended from Albion’s fairest children — Seema. I never bothered to explain, of course. The association — the rut — was there, and I never could patch it.
1) It wasn’t called Palestine, it was Samaria in the north and Judea in the south.
2) Not all Pharisees and Sadducees were Jews. Some were Israelites e.g. Nicodemus and Saul (later Paul).
3) The word ‘generation’ is a misnomer or, better, a translators agenda driven corruption, for it means ‘offspring’ or ‘race’
From Strong’s Concordance:
GENERATION – G1081 – gennema ghen’-nay-mah – from G1080; *OFFSPRING;* by analogy produce (literally or figuratively): – fruit, generation.
Vipers = The Serpent Seed Jews from The Garden.
Correction: the Pharisees did believe in the resurrection, the Sadducees did not (cf. Mark 12:18).
Neither here or nor there, for both satanic groups will be in the resurrection, only their’s will be to damnation.
Thanks for this correction, yes: d’oh! See my reply to Hoyos.
To have made such an error! – Sadducees and Pharisees – I hope you will explain how you did so.
Yeah, I know. Sheesh. See my reply to Hoyos.
The vipers are indeed in charge. Given the historical trends, that does not look good for what we used to know as America. Either the vipers are going to finish destroying it, or God will bring about their destruction, which probably takes us pretty far into destruction ourselves.
I can imagine no deus ex machina where the old American nation as it existed ever resurrects. But I will not miss the vipers when they are gone.
Here is their end: The Jews are The Tares, Fit Only For Burning:
https://isthefathercallingyoutohisson.wordpress.com/2018/05/19/the-jews-are-the-tares/
This is what Wikipedia says of the Pharisees and their literal, as opposed to metaphorical, heirs:
The Pharisees were a Jewish social movement and a school of thought in the Levant during the time of Second Temple Judaism. After the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, Pharisaic beliefs became the foundational, liturgical, and ritualistic basis for Rabbinic Judaism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharisees
Rabbinic Judaism, also called Rabbinism, Rabbinicism, or Judaism espoused by the Rabbanites, has been the mainstream form of Judaism since the 6th century CE, after the codification of the Babylonian Talmud. Rabbinic Judaism has its roots in Pharisaic Judaism and is based on the belief that Moses at Mount Sinai received both the Written Torah (Torah she-be-Khetav) and the Oral Torah (Torah she-be-al Peh) from God.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbinic_Judaism
When one looks at the ethnic composition of the Biden administration, this history doesn’t come as much of a surprise. And when one looks at the ethnic composition of those who created Marxism, Critical Race Theory, transgenderism, the porn industry, the anti-Christian and anti-white modern mainstream media, etc, it’s even less of a surprise. It seems as though the literal and metaphorical heirs of the Pharisees are pretty much the same people.
Good piece, someone at last who can call a spade, a spade. Cowardice runs rampant in this wretched modern world.