2. The Preaching of John the Baptist(Mt. 3:7-10; Lk. 3:7-14)Mt. 3:7 " But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism, he said to them, “Youbrood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?"Lk. 3:7 "He said therefore to the multitudes that came out to be baptized by him, “You brood of vipers! Whowarned you to flee from the wrath to come?"This moderate attitude displeased the Pharisees and Sadducees, who had come along with the people and thusbrought upon themselves a well-deserved reprimand. They, in turn, would take revenge by questioning andeven openly denying the legitimacy of His mission (Lk. 7:29f.; 10:1-8). They represented the two poles ofJudaism. The Sadducees reduced religion to a minimum of respectability, whereas the Pharisees carriedobservances and legalism to the extreme. The Sadducees were a party that held important positions in thecountry: many priests of high rank belonged to their party. They had little interest in the extraordinary vocationof the Hebrew people and its messianic expectations. They denied divine providence, the existence of angels,and the immortality of the soul, and did not believe in the resurrection. They recognised only the books ofMoses and rejected later tradition.The Pharisees exercised considerable moral influence over the people. The scribes belonged mainly to theirgroup. Their chief fault was that they made holiness consist in external observances without concerningthemselves with inner dispositions. They considered it more important to appear holy than to be holy. Thesetwo groups kept their distance from the people because of their ignorance of the law, their poverty, and theirlow social origin. Their formalism is the opposite of virtue; for them, the outward observance of the law issufficient. They despised the am-ha-aretz, who did not understand the subtleties of the Torah. In spite of this, orperhaps because of it, the people admired them, dazzled as they were by their apparent orth...