Something close to that was an All in the Family episode, where Archie takes his new grandson and gets him baptized against the wishes of his parents. I don’t remember if it actually happened or if the priest stopped it.
And more generally, I’m just a Jewish atheist, but I swear I read somewhere that one of the things Jesus was upset about was the priestly class being too nitpicky about the laws. Is that the same person who is going to toss people into hell because of a grammatical error? Even an intentional one?
Jesus definitely pushed the idea that intent matters, arguing that following the letter of the law with bad intent was still bad.
But I’d say Paul was the one who really harped on legalism. He constantly contrasts “under the law” and “under grace.”
The one thing that always bugged me about all these slight differences of opinion being declared heresies is when Paul says in Romans 14 that we should not pass judgement on disputable matters. Paul’s model in that situation (in his case, whether you could eat food that had been dedicated to idols) was to let people believe what they believe, as long as they get the essentials right.
To me, it seems that all of the heresy stuff was more about consolidating power, which is why so much was made of so little, when none of it was part of what Jesus had established as essential to salvation. Remember, even the Trinity isn’t mentioned in the Bible, let alone the exact form that Trinity must take.
A major driver of the concept of the Trinity was to satisfy a very reasonable pagan objection:
‘You make a big deal about only worshipping one God, yet you pray to Jesus separately, and you talk about the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit as three different entities. So in fact you’re worshipping three gods.’
One answer to that objection was the concept of the Trinity. An alternative answer, simpler and more straightforward, was that of the Arians. ‘Jesus is not God. Jesus is like a kind of superior angel, created by God, but closer to him than the angels. And the Holy Spirit is another separate being created by God.’
That was a significant minority view for a number of centuries, but the Nicean version won out in the end.