It will be noticed that I have not included the question of the Messiahship of Jesus. Of course the Pharisees, like everybody else in Israel at that time, speculated whether Jesus was "he that should come," or whether they were to "look for another." But they did not directly challenge him on that point, as they challenged him on the points I have already named. Their challenge about the Messiahship was indirect. Their position would be that a man who set himself against the Torah could not be the Messiah. Conceivably the Messiah might in some respects supersede the Torah, but he could never oppose it. And when Jesus was driven to declare that in certain points the Torah did not represent divine truth, it was from that moment impossible that the Pharisees should recognise him as the Messiah, and inevitable that they should regard him as a dangerous heretic. This may explain why the Pharisees did not ask him, in so many words, whether he was the Messiah or not, and also did not offer objections to any supposed claim to that position made by him or on his behalf. The question was only put to him directly by the High Priest at the trial, and therefore not by the Pharisees at all. And it is scarcely likely to have been put then as a challenge to argument; it was much more an attempt to get evidence on which to convict him out of his own mouth. Jesus was condemned and executed on a more or less political charge, for which the question of Messiahship provided a useful basis; but he was really rejected, so far at all events as the Pharisees were concerned, because he undermined the authority of the Torah, and endangered the religion founded upon it. That Jesus really did so is beyond dispute. His final position was one which could not be reconciled with recognition of Torah as the Pharisees regarded it. But it may well have been, and I think it was, the case that he was only gradually driven to this position, and that when he began his ministry he was not conscious of any discrepancy between what he was teaching and what the Torah implied. That is presumably what he meant when he said: "Think not that I came to destroy the Torah and the prophets; I came not to destroy but to fulfil" (Matt. v. 17). His quarrel, at that time, was not with the Torah itself, but with the Scribes and Pharisees, as being unsatisfactory exponents of it. "For I say unto you, That except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no wise enter the Kingdom of Heaven" (Matt. v. 17, 20).