Wednesday Bible Study: S is for Sadducees

So many times, it seems, you hear the apparently connected terms 'Pharisees and Sadducees.'  Well, believe me when I say the ONLY thing that connected them was the hatred they had for Jesus, who threatened both their ways of life.  So today, I thought it wise to explain the way of life of the lesser-known of the groups.

According to speculation, the term Sadducee springs from the name of the High Priest Zadok.  The big word here is 'apparently'; everything we actually know about the Sadducees came from sources that hated them.  And, even as bad as I bashed him not long ago, one of those three main sources is Flavius Josephus.

There are a handful of indisputable facts about them.  They did not believe in either the resurrection or the afterlife, which is very odd, because they were all-but-synonymous with the Priestly cast of late-BC Jerusalem.  But even the term 'priestly' had been corrupted by then, and they were by Jesus' day a club for the ultra-rich.  How did this come to be?

One story of how they came to prominence was set in the Hasmonean era.  For those not up on Jewish history, the political descendants of Alexander the Great- especially one Antiochus Epiphanes- had made themselves abhorrent to their Jewish subjects, and in the last couple centuries before Christ, the Hasmonean family- we know them better by their nickname, the Maccabees- had driven them out and set up a rule of their own in Israel.  At any rate, the rabbinical text 'Avot de Rabbi Nathan describes their origin thusly:

[The Pharisee teacher] Antigonus of Sokho had two disciples who used to study his words. They taught them to their disciples, and their disciples to their disciples. These proceeded to examine the words closely and demanded, 'Why did our ancestors see fit to say this thing? Is it possible that a laborer should do his work all day and not take his reward in the evening? If our ancestors, forsooth, had known that there is no other world and that there will be a resurrection of the dead, they would not have spoken in this manner.'

So they arose and withdrew from the [study of the oral] Torah, and split into two sects, the Sadducees and the Boethusians: Sadducees named after Zadok, Boethusians after Boethus


The 'gotcha' part of this story is that the words Antigonus of Sokho was trying to teach them were, according to Bible.org, "his teaching stressed that they should serve God with no thought of reward".

But see, they didn't get the idea of 'THOUGHT' of no reward; they leapt right to NO reward.  This originally confused me- I would have thought that if your argument was based on 'the laborer getting no reward in the evening' should have clued them in that there WAS an afterlife.  This led them down the path of two misconceptions.  First, they decided that if there WAS no reward and whatever resurrection there was would be as bad as the life they lived, what was the point.  They began to look at the 'oral Torah' as the flawed teaching of rabbis trying to extrapolate from thin air (which it was), and became Epicureans- the "Eat drink and be merry" crowd, which fit in well with their ultra-richness.

When I tell you about the other misconception, you might say, "Well, how could they believe in both?"  So to head that off, I want to give you some understanding from the mouth, er, pen of Josephus:

The Pharisees are those who are esteemed most skillful in the exact explication of their laws. [...] They ascribe all to Fate and to God, and yet allow that to act what is right, or the contrary, is principally in the power of men, although Fate does co-operate in every action. They say that all souls are incorruptible, but that the souls of good men only are removed into other bodies and that the souls of bad men are subject to eternal punishment.

But the Sadducees [...] 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 the Underworld.


"...so they may act as they please..."  But being priests INO, they had to have an authority based on the Word of a God they didn't really believe in.  So what they did, they took the Torah- our first five books of the Bible- and said that they were ALL you could judge a case on.  In other words, where a Pharisee would apply the 'and if one can't afford a bull, substitute a goat' principle in the Law to things such as 'an eye for an eye', and let someone off with a cash payment, the Sadducees demanded the actual eye.  Here, I bring in the Jewish Encyclopedia, who tells us that while they based everything on the Written Torah, they also would extrapolate from there, creating a "Book of Decrees"- which there is no extant copy of- that they "were so rigorous that the day on which their code was abolished by the Pharisaic Sanhedrin under Simeon b. Shetaḥ's leadership, during the reign of Salome Alexandra (76-67 BC), was celebrated as a festival". And it was these debates, and others, that divided the Sadducees from the Pharisees.  Both misapplied the Word; one added their own thoughts, the other subtracted the deeper meaning.


At first, this divide was purely philosophical; but as Hasmonean Israel became increasingly secular, money spoke more, and the Pharisees, "who represented the common people", lost power to the money of the Sadducees/priests.  So why the prominence of the Pharisees in Jesus's story?  For one, Jesus was reaching the 'common people', and exposing the Pharisees and their hypocrisy.  The Sadducees were few in number and basically ignored the religious end of things.    So how did they come to a belief, as Josephus says, that neither angel nor demon existed, when both are clearly expressed in the Pentateuch/Torah?  Well, some speculate that they- at least at first- weren't so concerned with the revealed angels in the Torah as the eastern mythological concepts that got attached TO them during the Jews' time in Babylon- things like angels with halos and two birds' wings, and demons with red skin, bat wings, and pitchforks.   (Sound familiar?)  And that their denial of the rest grew from the split between the idea of God as an active force and their preference for the Epicurean lifestyle.

And that split becomes apparent in the one story told in the Gospels about them:

Mat 22:23  The same day Sadducees came to him, who say that there is no resurrection, and they asked him a question, 
Mat 22:24  saying, "Teacher, Moses said, 'If a man dies having no children, his brother must marry the widow and raise up children for his brother.' 
Mat 22:25  Now there were seven brothers among us. The first married and died, and having no children left his wife to his brother. 
Mat 22:26  So too the second and third, down to the seventh. 
Mat 22:27  After them all, the woman died. 
Mat 22:28  In the resurrection, therefore, of the seven, whose wife will she be? For they all had her." 


Now what you need to see here is, they really didn't care about what Jesus truly thought- this was a question designed to make Pharisee teaching on the afterlife look ridiculous.  They were concerned in winning the philosophical battle. Not to mention, more than a little bit of it was connected to their battle with the Pharisees over how to interpret patriarchal property rights. But Jesus tried to show them theirs was a deeper failure:


Mat 22:29  But Jesus answered them, "You are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God. 
Mat 22:30  For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven. 
Mat 22:31  And as for the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was said to you by God: 
Mat 22:32  'I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob'? He is not God of the dead, but of the living." 

Jesus did three things here that utterly destroyed the pillars of the Sadducees: first, He told them that their supposed 'knowledge' of the Torah was a sham; second, He pointed out the Power of God that they denied; and third, He used that same style of 'logic' they tried to use on Him to prove to them that there IS a resurrection.  There was no more need to debate these discredited priests, and the people knew it:

Mat 22:33  And when the crowd heard it, they were astonished at his teaching. 

And the Sadducees knew it as well- witness the next verse:

Mat 22:34  But when the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together. 

"...He had silenced the Sadducees..."  This literally means 'to put a muzzle on them'.  Never again would they be able to face Him in open debate, and that drove them into the arms of their enemies to destroy him.  Paul would use this same tack against the Sadducees in the Great Sanhedrin in Acts to win his freedom:

Act 23:6  Now when Paul perceived that one part were Sadducees and the other Pharisees, he cried out in the council, "Brothers, I am a Pharisee, a son of Pharisees. It is with respect to the hope and the resurrection of the dead that I am on trial." 

Act 23:7  And when he had said this, a dissension arose between the Pharisees and the Sadducees, and the assembly was divided. 

Act 23:8  For the Sadducees say that there is no resurrection, nor angel, nor spirit, but the Pharisees acknowledge them all. 

Act 23:9  Then a great clamor arose, and some of the scribes of the Pharisees' party stood up and contended sharply, "We find nothing wrong in this man. What if a spirit or an angel spoke to him?" 

And thus Paul was freed because, thanks to Jesus, the Pharisees had already won this point against the fading Sadducees.  And the end of their "Epicurean Judaism" came when Jerusalem was destroyed in 70 AD, which finished their extinction.