Sadducee

“ Jesus answered: 'Beware, Peter, lest thou become a Sadducee; for the Sadducees say that the flesh shall not rise again, and that there be no angels. Wherefore their body and soul are deprived of entrance into paradise, and they are deprived of all ministry of angels in this world. Bast thou perchance forgotten Job, prophet and friend of God, how he saith: "I know that my God liveth ”

“ Hence at Jerusalem, at least, the Sadducees were ever the chief persecutors of the Apostles, while the Pharisees were favourable to Christianity, or at least neutral. At the meeting of the Sanhedrin of which we read in the fifth chapter, Gamaliel, a Pharisee, proposes the discharge of the imprisoned Apostles. In the twenty-third chapter, when St. Paul is placed before the same Sanhedrin the Pharisees take his side, while the Sadducees are his bitter opponents. We never read of a Sadducee embracing Christianity ”

“ And so it was, that when He had silenced the examination of the hierarchy, and baffled their craft, the Sadducees were tempted to assail Him. Like the rationalists of every age, they stood coldly aloof from popular movements, and we seldom find them interfering with Christ or His followers, until their energies were roused by the preaching of His Resurrection, so directly opposed to their fundamental doctrines. ”

“ Nothing but the wisdom and power of Omnipotence definitively applied, can accomplish so extraordinary a result. The Sadducees utterly denied that such a thing was either probable or possible; but, as Jesus said, "they erred, not knowing the Scriptures, nor the power of the Deity." If they had understood Moses and the Prophets, and had had any appreciation of the power by which all things had been created, and were sustained, they would have been preserved from the fatal error of denying a resurrection. ”

“ But the Sadducees are those that compose the second order, and take away fate entirely, and suppose that God is not concerned in our doing or not doing what is evil; and they say, that to act what is good, or what is evil, is at men's own choice, and that the one or the other belongs so to every one, that they may act as they please. They also take away the belief of the immortal duration of the soul, and the punishments and rewards in Hades. ”

“ But although they cared little for the churches in the different towns, they cared greatly for the Temple in Jerusalem, for most of the priests in the Temple were Sadducees, as also were many of the rulers in the great council of the Jews.
The Sadducees did not believe that there was any soul in man, nor any life after this life, nor any angels, nor any rising from the dead hereafter, nor any heaven or hell. They believed that when a man died and was buried, that was his end forever. ”

“ THE SADDUCEES AND THE RESURRECTION Before Jesus could get started with his teaching, another group came forward to question him, this time a company of the learned and crafty Sadducees. Their spokesman, drawing near to him, said: "Master, Moses said that if a married man should die, leaving no children, his brother should take the wife and raise up seed for the deceased brother. Now there occurred a case where a certain man who had six brothers died childless ”

“ Instantly, all the violent party feeling between these two sects broke out in full force, and the whole council was divided and confused,――the scribes who belonged to the Pharisaic order, arising, and declaring, “We find no occasion of evil in this man. But if a spirit or an angel has spoken to him, let us not fight against God.” This last remark, of course, was throwing down the gauntlet at the opposite sect; for the Sadducees, denying absolutely the existence of either angel or spirit, could of course believe no part of Paul’s story about his vision and spiritual summons. ”

“ From this charge and calumny he commends himself. “For the Sadducees indeed,” etc. The Sadducees have no knowledge of anything incorporeal, perhaps not even God; so gross (παχεἵς) are they: whence neither do they choose to believe that there is a Resurrection. “And the scribes,” etc. Look; the tribune also hears that the Pharisees have acquitted him of the charges, and have given sentence (mss. and Edd. ἐψηφίσατο, “he gave sentence”) in his favor, and with greater confidence carries him off by force. Moreover all that was spoken (by Paul) was full of right-mindedness (φιλοσοφίας) . ”

“ The Sadducees. The next great party was that of the Sadducees, who aimed to restore the original Mosaic religion in its purity, and expunge every thing which had been added by tradition. But they were deficient in a profound sense of religion, denied the doctrine of immortality, and hence all punishment in a future life. They made up for their denial of the future by a rigid punishment of all crimes. They inculcated a belief of Divine Providence by whom all crime was supposed to be avenged in this world. The party was not so popular as that of their rivals, but embraced men of high rank. ”

“ They insisted not only on a high standard of duty, but on the most minute observance of every precept, Mosaic and traditional. Many persons believed that the Pharisees overdid it a little, over-armour-plated the ship, and were in a degree responsible for some ugly barnacles that came in time to cling about and clog the keel. Those who thought thus formed the body of the Sadducees. The Sadducees took it all much more lightly. They were content to conform to the main rites of Judaism without troubling much about every detail. ”

“ The Pharisees were the ritualists and formalists of their day, who would wrangle about the breadth of a phylactery, and decide to an inch how far a man might walk on the Sabbath day; but the mere externals of religion will never permanently satisfy the soul made in the likeness of God. Ultimately it will turn from them with a great nausea and an insatiable desire for the living God. As for the Sadducees, they were the materialists of their time. The reaction of superstition, it has been said, is to infidelity ”

“ They attempted no more questions that day; they retired to take further counsel among themselves. But the people were not slow to discern the dishonesty and insincerity in these questions asked by the Jewish rulers. Even the common folk could not fail to distinguish between the moral majesty of the Master and the designing hypocrisy of his enemies. But the cleansing of the temple had brought the Sadducees over to the side of the Pharisees in perfecting the plan to destroy Jesus. And the Sadducees now represented a majority of the Sanhedrin. ”

“ Confining all their hopes to this present world, enjoying its riches, and devoting themselves to its pleasures, they might well be particularly anxious that their lot of life should be cast in the splendid reign of this expected temporal king, with the hope of sharing in his conquests and glory; but this expectation was so contrary to the lowly appearance of our Saviour, that they joined their inveterate enemies, the Pharisees, in persecuting him and his religion. Josephus says, that the Sadducees were able to draw over to them the rich only, the people not following them ”

“ The Sadducees must always have been pleasanter people to live with. In the early fighting days, the ‘zealous’ Chasidim had been a very satisfactory court circle of soldiers for the warlike Maccabees, and the first two priest-kings were well content to find their mainstay in the Pharisaic faction. But as things grew more settled and peaceful the Pharisees grew exacting and somewhat irksome companions. The numerous restrictions which traditional law enforces on the will and desires of man made princes and courtiers look on the Pharisees as uncomfortable people, as obstacles. ”

“ Here he would meet, not simple rustics who cared little about ritual and politics,79 but legalists and nationalists prompt to condemn him as irreligious and unpatriotic. The credulity of his country disciples would be challenged and his Messianic claims subjected to a hostile scrutiny. The tendency to dwell on the supernatural inseparable from such a character as his would be in sharp contrast to the spirit of worldliness he would encounter. Some Sadducees even would be likely to confront him, requiring proof of the postulates of his teaching, and infecting others with their scepticism. ”

“ The men who reject all spiritual existence, and hold a Sadducean creed, fear the power of Christian enthusiasm and Christian love, and had they only the [181] power would crush it as sternly and remorselessly as the Sadducees desired to do in apostolic times, or as the Roman emperors did from the days of Nero to those of Diocletian. ”

“ Pompey's destruction of Jewish independence gave the final advantage to the Pharisees, but the Sadducees, through their wealth and position, still remained a strong element, although small and divorced from popular sympathy. It is a mistake to regard them as diametrically opposed to the Pharisees. The latter were the party of keen religious development: the Sadducees were those who hung back from religious advance through motives of conservatism, caste and culture. ”

“ The Sadducees stood for the sanctity of the law as written and preserved, while they rejected the whole mass of rabbinical precept both as orally transmitted and as collated and codified in the records of the scribes. The Pharisees formed the more popular party; the Sadducees figured as the aristocratic minority. At the time of Christ's birth the Pharisees existed as an organized body numbering over six thousand men, with Jewish women very generally on their side in sympathy and effort ”