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Matthew 23:1-3 has Jesus tell the crowds that because the scribes and Pharisees 'sit in Moses' seat,' the listeners should 'observe and do' whatever the Pharisees tell them — just don't imitate their behavior. Matthew 16:12, by contrast, has the disciples finally understand Jesus' warning that they should beware 'the doctrine of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees.' Same gospel, two opposite instructions about whether to follow Pharisaic teaching.
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Cited passages
Then Jesus spoke to the multitudes and to his disciples, saying, “The scribes and the Pharisees sat on Moses’ seat. All things therefore whatever they tell you to observe, observe and do, but don’t do their works; for they say, and don’t do.
Cited passages
Then they understood that he didn’t tell them to beware of the yeast of bread, but of the teaching of the Pharisees and Sadducees.
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: Genuinely disputed among scholars
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.
Few passages expose the seams of Matthew's redactional work as plainly as the collision between 23:2-3 and 16:12. In 23:1-3 Jesus tells the crowds and disciples that because the scribes and Pharisees 'sit on Moses' seat' (epi tes Mouseos kathedras ekathisan), they should do and observe (poiesate kai tereite) whatever the Pharisees tell them, while refusing to imitate their conduct. In 16:12 the disciples are finally said to grasp that Jesus had warned them to beware 'the teaching (didache) of the Pharisees and Sadducees.' The same evangelist thus records both an injunction to obey Pharisaic instruction and a warning against it.
The Matt 23:2-3 logion is unique to Matthew, with no Markan or Lukan parallel, and it stands as a jarring preface to the most savage anti-Pharisaic polemic in the canon, the sevenfold 'woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites' that follows. Davies and Allison devote several pages of the ICC to the problem and conclude that 23:2-3 is most plausibly inherited tradition the evangelist did not fully assimilate to his own viewpoint, a fossil from an earlier stratum in which Jesus' Jewish-Christian followers still functioned within Pharisaic juridical structures. Anthony Saldarini developed this into a full thesis: Matthew's community remained legally Jewish, still subject to Pharisaic authority in matters of Torah observance, even while locked in bitter polemical rivalry with Pharisaic leadership. J. Andrew Overman and David Sim situate the same Gospel within 'formative Judaism,' a sectarian movement competing for the same constituency, which accounts for how a single text can both defer to and denounce its rivals. On this reading the contradiction is not a logical lapse so much as a sedimentary record of two phases of community life lying side by side.
The principal harmonization, defended in conservative commentaries such as Hagner's WBC and Blomberg's NAC, distinguishes the *content* of legitimate Torah teaching from the Pharisees' additional rulings. On this view, when the Pharisees correctly expound Moses from the 'seat,' they are to be obeyed; 16:12's 'teaching' refers to their supplementary halakhah, the 'tradition of the elders' that 15:1-9 has Jesus reject for nullifying the commandment of God. This is a coherent reconciliation and deserves its hearing, but it works only by importing a limiting clause the text never states. Matt 23:3 says 'all things whatsoever' (panta hosa) they tell you, not 'all things they rightly derive from Moses.' Mark Allan Powell offered a different route, arguing that the 'seat of Moses' was a literal synagogue chair from which Torah was read aloud, so that 'whatever they tell you' means 'whatever Moses, through their reading, commands' rather than the Pharisees' own rulings; he even proposes that 'observe and do' be read as 'watch and do as they observe.' The reading is grammatically conceivable and archaeologically suggestive, but most translators and commentators reject the strained sense it requires of poiesate kai tereite. Ulrich Luz in Hermeneia simply treats the verse as an unresolved tension Matthew left standing.
A further steel-manning move distinguishes positional from personal authority: readers are to respect the office (the seat) while disregarding the unworthy officeholders, much as Christian tradition later distinguished the validity of an office from the sanctity of its holder. As institutional theology this is intelligible, but as a halakhic instruction it founders, because 16:12 warns precisely against the *teaching*, not merely the behavior, of the Pharisees, and 23:3 already separates teaching from behavior by telling hearers to obey the words while shunning the deeds. The two texts cannot be made to speak with one voice without an interpretive supplement neither supplies.
Where the critical reading lands: partially harmonizable, but most economically explained as an unintegrated layer in Matthew's Christian-Jewish tradition.
Sources for this reading