If there was on the part of the Pharisees a complete inability to comprehend the religious position of Jesus, there was also on his part an inability[9] to comprehend the religious position of the Pharisees. If he had realised what Torah meant to the Pharisees, he might, and doubtless would, have desired to show them a "more excellent way," but he would not have taken the line which he did of denunciation and invective, since to do so would defeat his purpose.
[9] I have been asked how I can reconcile this alleged inability on the part of Jesus to understand the Pharisees with the power he showed elsewhere of reading the character and comprehending the thoughts of those with whom he came into contact. My answer is that I do not admit John ii. 25 as true of the historical Jesus; and that, while I do not deny that he had deep insight into human character and thought, such insight depends on sympathy. That there was finally a complete absence of sympathy between Jesus and the Pharisees is plainly to be seen, and admits of no dispute. And, that being so, I submit even he did not escape the effects of that limitation, in making him unable to comprehend the position of the Pharisees. The inability was on both sides, and for the same reason.
This I believe to be the real truth about the inability of both the Pharisees and Jesus to understand each other, or, in other words, the impossibility of harmony between the religion of Torah and the religion of the individual soul, if I may so describe it. That incompatibility is fundamental. Christianity, in all its forms, is a religion founded on personality, one in which the central feature is a Person. And Judaism, at all events since the days of the Pharisees, is a religion in which the central feature is not a person, at all events not a human person, but the Torah. It is near the truth to say that what Christ is to the Christian, Torah is to the Jew. And alike to Christian and to Jew it is almost impossible to comprehend the religion of the other. Even Jesus could not do it. And if he could not do it, what wonder that his greatest disciple, Paul, in passing from the one conception of religion to the other, should have failed to carry with him into his new faith the remembrance of what the old faith had meant to him while he lived in it?