NOTES for Luk 20:5-6
There was a significant difference between the leaders of the Pharisaic religious brotherhood and those who could conditionally be called "ordinary people," in particular in how they perceived certain people and events. Of course, when speaking of "ordinary people," one must still remember that they were not entirely ordinary. An illiterate Jew in Gospel times was a great rarity, as was a Jew who did not read or even study the Torah and the Prophets, what today we would call Sacred Scripture.
Every synagogue necessarily had a religious school where all local boys, and sometimes girls as well, were taught not only literacy but also elementary work with the sacred books, including a special practice of prayerful, or meditative, reading. The culture of working with the sacred books was quite widespread in Jewish society, and among the teachers of the Torah, whom the Gospel usually calls scribes, the majority were occupied precisely with teaching this work to children and adults, often for free or for a very modest fee.
On the other hand, there were also academies in the Jewish world where the Torah and other sacred books were studied in the greatest detail. This was a special world of experts, educated theologians, sophisticated commentators on sacred texts, sometimes entering such subtleties and reaching such depths that ordinary readers of the Torah did not even suspect them. Unfortunately, this rather closed little world of academic theologians had, as often happens in such cases, a considerable measure of learned snobbery, which made them look on the ordinary readers mentioned above as ignorant of the Torah.
And this same learned snobbery made them treat, if not with contempt, then at least with suspicion, those who might be called popular spiritual authorities, among whom, incidentally, John the Baptist belonged. Of course, such restraint was often justified: mass religious consciousness is not very discerning in choosing its religious leaders. But prior distrust sometimes prevented both academic scribes and educated leaders of religious brotherhoods from recognizing genuine people of God, as happened in the case of John the Baptist.
And then the leaders of the Pharisaic movement had only to maneuver between their own distrustfulness and even a certain spiritual fastidiousness on the one hand, and popular sympathies on the other, for open expression of their position could have ended badly for them. Yet such maneuvering does not promote either spiritual integrity or full spiritual life, and the Savior's question should have made His interlocutors think about this simple but non-obvious truth.