The gospel writers were writing what today would be called fanfiction.
And stories need conflict.
And conflict needs a villain.
They needed a reason for all the things Jesus promised would happen and didn’t happen.
The Jews fit the role perfectly. 99% of them rejected the messianic claims of Jesus and his followers.
So they MUST be evil.
Then, since the Jews were mostly wiped out by the time the Gospels were written, not a lot of people in Judea had much contact with them.
And what they heard about Jews and Judaism was distorted and twisted by Roman propaganda.
You would never know it from reading the "New Testament", but in the early first century there were two main kinds of Pharisees: the school of Shammai and the school of Hillel.
Broadly speaking, the school of Shammai was punctilious about observing the fine points of Jewish law; they were strict and unforgiving. The school of Hillel was more laid back, more lenient, more accommodating to human weakness.
Modern Rabbinical Judaism is largely descended from Pharasaism, and from the school of Hillel in particular, the Sadducees having largely disappeared with the Temple in the wake of the Jewish War of 66–73.
In the xtians bible Mark, the Pharisees don’t just represent Pharisees. They represent a Jewish faction within Christianity. Evidently James in particular insisted that Gentiles become Jews as part of the process of becoming Christians, and that they should comply with the Jewish laws.
The requirement of circumcision especially was a real deal-killer for potential converts among the Gentiles targeted by Paul’s marketing. Paul sought to eliminate this requirement, along with others, at least within his ministry.
By the time Mark was being written in the 70’s, James and Paul were both long gone, but there remained a schism between the Gentile-friendly Christianity of Paul’s churches and the Judaized Christianity among the spiritual descendants of the Jerusalem church. The author of Mark belonged to the Pauline faction, and slanted his narrative accordingly.
