122 A History of Judaism
Alexander caroused with his mistresses. Later rabbinic reminiscences
about the same episode, involving the sage Simeon b. Shetah, are rather
milder: ‘King Jannai and his queen were taking a meal together. Now
after he had put the Rabbis to death, there was no one to say grace for
them.’^17
Although the rabbis never described themselves as Pharisees, and
never asserted that their movement had arisen out of Pharisaism, they
had a natural affinity to the Pharisaic interpretation of the Torah because
they, like the Pharisees, accepted the validity of ancestral traditions.
Many of those traditions were to continue, with rabbinic endorsement,
down to the modern day – but because they were traditional, not
because they were Pharisaic. Thus when Christian authors in late
antiquity referred to the Jewish leaders of their time as Pharisees, reflect-
ing the usage of the Gospels, any rabbis of their acquaintance may have
been puzzled but they will not have been upset.^18
Sadducees
Josephus had also been a Sadducee, so he wrote, but by the time he was
composing his histories and autobiography he had lost sympathy with
them. To an extent remarkable for an author who wished to include this
type of Judaism in the category of the legitimate, in contrast to the Fourth
Philosophy, he presented the Sadducees in deeply unflattering terms: they
are boorish and rude in their behaviour, accomplishing almost nothing,
noted for savagery in judgement, with no following among the masses.
No Sadducee literature survives to counter this picture – the Gospels
and Acts and early rabbis express similar hostility – or indeed to fill in
the gaps in Sadducee doctrine. These are less easy to establish from the
ancient evidence than might be surmised from the confident statements
of scholars, both Jewish and Christian, who have asserted since the
nineteenth century that Sadducees were secular, Hellenistic, wealthy
aristocrats of priestly origin, with links to the High Priests and the
Roman administration and a conservative attitude to the interpretation
of the Torah. Almost all this traditional image proves on examination to
be either untrue or unprovable, although the real Sadducees that emerge
from closer investigation are no less interesting.^19
The name ‘Sadducee’ gives little away: the Greek Saddoukaios must
have an Aramaic origin like Pharisaios, and the rabbinic Hebrew
equivalent tsedukim cannot be assumed to be a literal translation. A