Christ and the Pharisees

The whole life of Jesus of Nazareth as a man can be summed up in one standard expression: "He was the Messiah and he fought the Pharisees"—or perhaps even more briefly: "He fought the Pharisees".That was the work Christ personally assigned to himself: his campaign.All the lives of Christ that we know of follow other formulae: "He was the Son of God, he preached the Kingdom of God and confirmed his preaching with miracles and prophecies...". Very well, but what about his death? These biographies cut out his death, his single most important deed. They are lives written in a more apologetics like vein, and less so in a biographical one: Louis Veuillot, Grandmaison, Ricciotti, Lebreton, Papini, Mauriac...In this manner, the tragedy of Christ's life remains hidden. The life of Christ was no idyll, it is not a romantic story nor an elegy, but one that played out dramatically: there is no tragedy without an antagonist. Christ's antagonist, and to all appearences a victorious one, was Pharisaism.Without Pharisaism Christ's life would have been entirely different, not to mention the history of the whole world. His Church would not have been what it is today, and the universe would have followed another track, one entirely unimaginable for us, with Israel heading the People of God instead of what really happened to those who killed God and are now scattered all over the world.