126 A History of Judaism
This insistence on human responsibility for everything is reiterated
by Josephus elsewhere as a characteristic of the Sadducees – ‘all things
lie within our own power, so that we ourselves are responsible for our
well- being, while we suffer misfortune through our own thoughtless-
ness.’ It is hard to see how this view could be reconciled with any reading
of the narrative of divine interventions in the Bible, or how Josephus
could include, as he did, Sadducees with such beliefs in the category of
respectable Jewish philosophies. The doctrine he ascribed to the Sad-
ducees was not far distant from the belief that he attacked as both
Epicurean and profoundly mistaken in his description of the accuracy
of the prophecies of Daniel, where he noted that the Epicureans:
cast aside providence from life and do not think that God administers its
affairs, and hold that it is not steered by the blessed and incorruptible
Being towards perseverance of the whole; but they say that the world is
borne along automatically without a driver and without a care. If it was
without a protector in this way, then when the world was crushed by an
unforeseen misfortune it would have been destroyed and ruined, in just the
same way that we also see ships without helmsmen being sunk by winds
or chariots being turned around when they have no one holding the reins.
Therefore, on the basis of the things predicted by Daniel, it seems to me
that they go very much astray from the true opinion who hold the view
that God exercises no providence at all over human affairs; for we would
not be seeing all things coming about according to his prophecy if the
world went along by some automatic process.^27
Rejection of ancestral tradition might suffice to explain why the Sad-
ducees lacked a popular following: ‘This doctrine has come only to few
men’ and ‘there is achieved by them nothing, so to speak.’ Crucially,
they are unable to enforce their views, for ‘whenever they assume some
office, though they submit unwillingly and perforce, yet submit they do
to the formulas of the Pharisees, since otherwise the masses would not
tolerate them.’ Josephus may appear here to be a fairly hostile witness,
but it is worth recalling that he wished his readers to accept the Sad-
ducaic philosophy as a valid form of Judaism in contrast to the Fourth
Philosophy. Josephus does not specify in this passage on which matters
the views of the Pharisees dominate, but it is a fair guess that he had in
mind the ‘prayers and sacrifices’ – that is, the ritual of the Jerusalem
Temple – on which, as we have seen, Josephus asserted that the teach-
ings of the Pharisees prevailed.^28
What kind of person became a Sadducee? The philosophy was one it