Just ran across this, and it seems to me to be N.T. Wright’s central mistake, one that generates a host of lesser mistakes.
“We have got over the old idea that law-keeping was an early form of Pelagianism, by which Pharisees and others sought to earn their justification or salvation by moral effort” (N.T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, p. 388).
This, according to Wright, is “thoroughly false to first-century sources” and “must be resisted” (p. 388).
It is not that Wright believes that the Pharisees were blameless. On the next page, he allows that the Pharisees “rigorous application of the law” as a “defence against Gentiles” had become, in the eyes of Jesus, “a symptom of the problem rather than part of the solution” (p. 399).
But notice how muted this language is when compared to the language of certain biblical “first century sources.” For Wright (and Sanders), it appears that the Pharisees were kind of underfoot, rather than being evil, dogs, mutilators of the flesh, unjustified, and far, far worse than the inhabitants of the cities of the plain.