Everybody knew the ancient beliefs about the Kingdom of God and how the throne of David was going to have to be restored. Conventional religion, correct doctrine. Jesus set off to hear other voices, ones that speak from deeper places of things we always knew but have forgotten - not the popular dogma that nobody question, no, I don't mean that. I mean another kind of knowing, a first-hand kind of knowing. Now let me make a distinction.
Traditional religion is about beliefs.
Skepticism is about questioning things, not assuming and believing. Gnosticism first arose a full century or so before Jesus. It arose among Hellenistic Jews, in Alexandrian Egypt and in Syria and Palestine. The Gnostic Jews were trying to revive a very ancient, archaic Jewish religion that had been lost with the rise of the Temple cult. And what was so different about that very ancient form of Judaism was that the demarcation between God and humans was not a fixed barrier.