Yes
When he saw many of the Pharisees ... come to his baptism he said unto them ... Ye generation of vipers ... I [John the Baptist] indeed baptize you with water.... Matthew 3:7-11
Cited passages
But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming for his baptism, he said to them, “You offspring of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Therefore produce fruit worthy of repentance! Don’t think to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham for our father,’ for I tell you that God is able to raise up children to Abraham from these stones. “Even now the ax lies at the root of the trees. Therefore every tree that doesn’t produce good fruit is cut down, and cast into the fire. I indeed baptize you in water for repentance, but he who comes after me is mightier than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you in the Holy Spirit.
Examining the tension
What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.
How critical scholarship weighs this: Leans toward a genuine contradiction
This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.
The tension turns on a real difference in what the two Gospels assert and on the precise force of two Greek constructions. Matthew 3:7 reads *idōn de pollous tōn Pharisaiōn kai Saddoukaiōn erchomenous epi to baptisma autou* — "seeing many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to/for his baptism." The construction *erchomenous epi to baptisma* (present participle of *erchomai* plus *epi*) is genuinely open: *epi* with the accusative can mark purpose ("coming for baptism," i.e., to be baptized) or simply destination ("coming to the baptism," i.e., to where it was happening). Matthew does not use a verb that would settle the matter — he does not write that they *were* baptized (*ebaptisthēsan*). Luke 7:30, by contrast, is grammatically unambiguous: *hoi de Pharisaioi kai hoi nomikoi tēn boulēn tou theou ēthetēsan eis heautous, mē baptisthentes hyp' autou* — "but the Pharisees and the lawyers rejected God's purpose for themselves, not having been baptized by him." The aorist passive participle *baptisthentes* negated by *mē* flatly denies that they received John's baptism.
The strongest harmonization, advanced by Carson and Blomberg, exploits precisely the ambiguity of Matthew's phrase: Matthew reports only that Pharisees and Sadducees *came to the site* of the baptizing — perhaps to observe, evaluate, or oppose — without claiming they submitted to it, which leaves Luke's denial intact. As a matter of grammar this is defensible; *erchomenous epi to baptisma autou* does not entail that any of them was immersed. So construed, Matthew describes presence at the scene and Luke denies actual baptism, and the two need not collide.
The difficulty is that Matthew's rhetorical framing pulls against reading the Pharisees as mere bystanders. The Baptist immediately turns on them with the same demand he makes of those entering the water: he calls them *gennēmata echidnōn* ("brood of vipers"), warns them to flee "the coming wrath," and orders them to *poiēsate karpon axion tēs metanoias* ("produce fruit worthy of repentance"). That diatribe presupposes people presenting themselves for a baptism of repentance, not spectators on the bank; the rebuke loses much of its point if its targets had no intention of being baptized. Matthew's pericope thus reads most naturally as casting the Pharisees among the baptismal candidates, even though its grammar stops just short of saying so.
The cleaner critical account is redactional. The two evangelists are pursuing different agendas regarding the Pharisees. Matthew is markedly anti-Pharisaic throughout (cf. the woes of ch. 23) and tends to portray the Pharisees as confronted and condemned at every turn, including by John. Luke, as Nolland and Fitzmyer note, is interested in social stratification: he contrasts "all the people and the tax collectors" who accepted John's baptism (Luke 7:29) with the Pharisees and the legal experts who did not, marking the religious-legal elite off from the populace. Meier, treating John historically, judges that the broad tradition — that the Pharisaic establishment ultimately did not align itself with John — underlies both, and that each evangelist has shaped it to his own ends. The accounts are therefore in real tension at the level of what they imply, even if Matthew's wording can be parsed to avoid formal self-contradiction with Luke.
Where the critical reading lands: partially harmonizable but strained — Matthew's grammar permits the Pharisees to be mere onlookers, but his rhetoric casts them as baptismal candidates, and the smoothest explanation of the difference is the evangelists' divergent redactional aims rather than a single underlying fact.
Sources for this reading