The Jews of Jesus' day found it hard to wean themselves off their legalistic, Old Testament understanding of morality and holiness centred on the immutability of the Mosaic law.  Few could see that Jesus was not doing violence to the Torah, but bringing it to spiritual maturity through the supreme law of love of God and neighbour, elevated to perfection through faith.  Many wanted to hold on to what they had - it was safe, comfortable and convenient.  It was a view which stressed the fatherhood of God, justice, sacrifice and retribution.  It placed great stress on outward observance of the law.  

Yet, Jesus lived in an Israel  which had been subject to twelve hundred years of history since the Exodus -  he was somewhat like a person today looking back to the time of King Arthur in Anglo- Saxon England.  Israel had had a lot of time to reflect on the Torah:  prophets, wars, famines, exiles and cultural interaction - all left their mark on the evolving Israel.

 Temple worship had become the centre of Jewish public life following the establishment of a theocratic state after the Babylonian exile;  the practice of keeping multiple wives and or concubines, typical of Solomon's day, had been abandoned in favour of monogamy; the land tenure system and social security code of early Israel, found in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, had in many respects changed with the times or ceased to operate.   The Pharisees shared a belief in the resurrection and the existence of angels, and the chronicler of Maccabees II had hinted at the existence of purgatory.  Israel had evolved greatly in terms of culture and theological understanding.  Judaism was a living tradition, and not the static Mosaic tradition that many envision.
It is natural that people in any group will look for a key set of values or ideas as a foundation for unity.  The Sadducees, who were friendly towards Hellenism and were cosmopolitan in taste, tried to isolate the Pentateuch from other literary or oral sources as their foundation.  The Pharisees, who were scrupulous and very nationalistic, wanted to use a wider platform incorporating the prophets and more recent theological insights.  The Essenes  withdrew into isolated communities with a mystical orientation to await the Messiah.  By contrast, the Zealots tried to take matters into their own hands and create a messianic theocratic state.

Although many believed in the reality of the Messiah, most saw him as an earthly king who would raise up Israel as a mighty nation in a secular, political sense.  Moral theology, in its popular setting, had a lot to do with this: its emphasis on civic moral precepts,  external purity and worldly blessing for conformity to these, helped promote limited, earthy, here-and-now, ethical-exegetical schools. These prided themselves on reducing the Torah to a list of  precepts
numerated into various permutations.

Whilst the teachers of the Law argued among themselves, other ideas were being put under the spotlight.  The gospels themselves provide us with a window into this other world.  Terms such as “the son of man”, “son of David” and the other messianic prophesies of Israel’s prophetic tradition were leading believers towards a deeper consideration as to the true meaning of the Sinai covenant itself.  Interestingly it is Paul, the Romanized ex-Pharisee, who in his extant letters, is the great exegetical theologian of this tradition.  However, it also receives full and systematic expression in the gospel and letters of John and in more veiled form in other New Testament writings.