In many passages, the New Testament excoriates the Pharisees (a Second Temple-era Jewish sect) as “hypocrites,” a charge that numerous later Christian authors leveled against Jews, and that early Protestants like Martin Luther leveled against the Catholic Church. Shlomo Zuckier suggests that a talmudic anecdote in Tractate Sotah is intended as rebuttal against the accusation:
While the rabbis do not often betray a direct knowledge of Christian sources, and do not utilize the Greek word hypokritai, [this] talmudic passage seems to represent a rabbinic response to this New Testament trope; . . . it describes certain impious dissemblers as ts’vu’in, literally “colored” one of the terms that roughly stands in for the term “hypocrite.”
[The term] points to someone who in truth is a sinner, but who represents himself as a saint, and moreover seeks reward for his purported good deeds. The inconsistency between integral behavior and public comportment, the “painting over” of a sullied soul, as well as the focus on public recognition and honor, fit the Gospel writers’ description of the Pharisaic hypocrites.
This teaching in some ways validates the . . . Gospels’ critique, arguing that there are those who present themselves as righteous Pharisees but in truth are sinners. At the same time, however, this teaching asserts that those performative Jews are no true Pharisees, but are actually ts’vu’in, hypocrites dressing themselves up as righteous and hijacking the Pharisees’ deserved good reputation.
Read more on Coproduced Religions: https://coproduced-religions.org/resources/sources/debating-hypocrisy-a-rabbinic-response-to-the-new-testament-s-dissembler-diatribe