I comment on the text.  Pages 2-6. Comments on the text will appear in square brackets.

[The scribes and Pharisees rightly concluded that God made a covenant with the tribes of Israel:  Obey my laws and I will bless you. Disobey my laws and I will no longer protect you.

So they focused on the law.

A think^group₃ emerged along with an intricate web, a symbolic order, that trapped the imagination – and the conscience – of all who belonged.  A bureaucracy, promulgating multitudinous and conflicting regulations, left the believer paralyzed, unable to cope, dependent on the experts to tell her what to do.  Everyone broke the ritual constraints one way or another.

The locus of responsibility shifted from the free person to the bureaucratic accuser.  The scribe and Pharisee implicitly accused the believer of holding an unlawful worldview and a lawless conscience; that is, a think^unlawful₃ and a conscience^unlawful₁.  They thought that they were better people; that is think^lawfilled₃ and conscience^lawfilled₁.

Jesus pointed this out.

In doing so, he sounds strangely relevant to our times.  His critique grounds one feature that defines my category-based definition of the word “religion”.  “Religion” is precisely structured as “a relation between think^group and think^divine “ (even though it may not contain these elements explicitly) within the structure of the intersecting nested forms.]