Deceptive appearances?

According to the Gospels, the Pharisees had a remarkable ability to look like what they were not.

The crowds around them might have feared them, but they seemed convinced of their orthodoxy and piety. And yet, while the Pharisees looked like pre-eminent people of Scripture, in reality they trampled on it and ignored its truth. While they appeared devout, they did not believe in their own need for redemption. They trusted in themselves more than God. To these faults they added a third, which was both crucial and almost imperceptible: they did not believe in their own need for a new birth.

The issue surfaces in Matthew 15. The complaint of the scribes and Pharisees was not that Jesus’s disciples were proud, immoral, or faithless: it was that “they do not wash their hands when they eat” (v2).