A few of Jesus's friends, like Nicodemus, were Pharisees, but he was not a fan of Pharisaism. Some aspects of his teaching, for example about the afterlife, reflected Pharisaic positions, but his general line seems to have been "do what they say, not what they do". Many of his least meek and mild words were reserved for the pharisaic "brood of vipers".

With painful accuracy, Jesus deconstructed their viper proclivities – hypocritical scouring of land and sea for converts, laying burdens on strangers they would never bear themselves, erecting verbal minutiae into absolutes that compromised the primary purpose of the law, crashing down on weaker but measurably less worthy sinners like Monty Python's foot. Many Pharisees saw themselves as God's minders, leading to a general flattening of the subtleties of the law. Defensive zeal and wooden literalism produced hard sticks with which to beat the vulnerable when they were down. Lesser precepts were pushed to a point where they began to compromise the basics – loving God and neighbour. Jesus called this absurdity "straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel".

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