Good counterargument. Granted, not all of them were utterly self serving pricks, some were even honorable enough to want to question their own convictions like Nicodemus, but by and large they had taken the noble roots of being arbiters of the law of the Temple and twisted it into a legalistic parody where they structured the rules to make themselves look good while throwing in tons of loopholes to let themselves cheat on whatever rules they pleased whenever it suited them.