I want you to help me, and help all of us as Christians, to learn to read the text of today's story a little more carefully. In fact, I don't know that this text is written as carefully as it might be, because by the time this book was produced, conditions within Judaism and between Judaism and the emergent Christianity had changed. The law doctors were a professional class who took formal and exacting training in the interpretation of the 600 or so specific laws in the Law of Moses. They taught and sat as justices in law courts to give rulings on law and conduct. Among Jews, the Mosaic law had both civil and religious standing, and these law doctors, though not paid for their work, assumed great influence.
Historians say they had pretty well displaced the landed aristocracy.
The trouble was that they were not bound to live personally by their own interpretations and pronouncements. Because of their prominence they were easy targets for the charge of hypocrisy. The Pharisees, on the other hand, held no position of authority. Their influence came not only because they were learned, but because they voluntarily banded together in fellowships to demonstrate what a life wholly observant of every detail of the law would look like. Both groups revered the law, and so did Jesus.