Early Judaism- A Comprehensive Overview

Pharisees are identified as the members of the Sanhedrin who accept the

belief that a resurrection would occur. It adds that they also believed there

were angels and spirits.

The next group in Josephus’s list, the Sadducees, he describes generally

in contrast to the Pharisees. Their view of fate, for example, was not the

moderate or balanced approach of the Pharisees: the Sadducees are sup-

posed to have denied there was any thing such as fate that influenced hu-

man behavior, explaining rather that people are responsible for what they

do. As noted above, the Sadducees rejected the validity of the tradition

adopted by the Pharisees and insisted that the scriptural law alone was

valid. It is difficult to imagine that the Sadducees had no tradition of how

to interpret or apply scriptural law; whatever their way of interpreting may

have been, it must have been different from the Pharisaic one. Acts 23:8

summarizes some of their theological disagreements with Pharisees in this

way: “The Sadducees say that there is no resurrection, or angel, or spirit;

but the Pharisees acknowledge all three.” In his appearance before the San-

hedrin, Paul, who identifies himself as a Pharisee, exploits the difference by

appealing to the resurrection.

Josephus adds that, while the Pharisees were influential among the

masses of the people, the Sadducees, whose number he does not estimate

(although he says there were few of them), appealed to the wealthy. In the

episode in which John Hyrcanus broke with the Pharisees, he is said to

have gone over to the Sadducean side. As a result, the Sadducees were not

dominant in the period before this time in his reign, but they retained

their position of influence throughout the rest of Hyrcanus’s reign and ap-

parently through that of Aristobulus I (104-103b.c.e.) and of Alexander

Jannaeus (103-76), before the Pharisees returned to their previous status.

Josephus presents, for later times, a strange situation: the few Sadducees

were people of the highest rank, but when they assumed an office, they

were compelled to follow the dictates of the Pharisees because the people

otherwise would refuse to tolerate them (Ant.18.17). The point is related to

the question whether the high priests — people who enjoyed the very

highest rank — were Sadducees. The name Sadducee may be related to

Zadok, the leading priest in the time of David and Solomon, and an ances-

tor of the Second Temple high priests. John Hyrcanus, a high priest, be-

came a devotee of the Sadducees, and his sons Aristobulus I and Alexander

Jannaeus may have been as well. But here the evidence grows very thin. In

fact, the only other high priest who is identified as a Sadducee is Ananus

ben Ananus who briefly held the office in 62c.e.Josephus says that

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james c. vanderkam

EERDMANS -- Early Judaism (Collins and Harlow) final text
Tuesday, October 09, 2012 12:03:54 PM