The pharisees peddled a fake Torah, along with Talmud and Mishna rubbish; they peddled a 'secret oral Torah' on top of the real one, the written one attributed to Moses, which was complete as written, and then added the invented Temple rubbish from the Babylonians and a lot of 'racial purity' crap re Ezra, all stuff that became enshrined in the 'rabbinical Judaism' of the 2nd Century A.D. The Christians were mostly about returning to the original Torah, when the Tabernacle was kept in tents and Jews were a semi-democratic tribal confederacy, and considered a universal theology.
The cult Jesus called a nest of vipers were indeed just a cabal of crooks, fleecing their own people with a ridiculous Temple scam.
it's immediately obvious which Jewish sect devolved into babbling rubbish and which one went on to generate a long term social revolution of a much larger scale, and it wasn't the weird cult that alienated the majority of its own people and became dependent on Muslims and Christians for its survival.