Ancient Jewish Sects: Pharisees and Sadducees

written by Dr. Bart D Ehrman

I was about to launch into a discussion of the different views of the afterlife among various Jewish sects (those that held to the idea of the resurrection and those that apparently did not), but then realized that first I need to give some information about what the groups themselves were all about.  So I’ll devote two posts to the question, lifting the discussion from my textbook The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings.

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THE FORMATION OF JEWISH SECTS

It was during the rule of the Hasmoneans, and evidently in large measure in reaction to it, that various Jewish sects emerged. As we have seen, the Jewish historian Josephus mentions four of these groups; the New Testament refers to three. In one way or another, all of them play a significant role in our understanding of the life of the historical Jesus.

I should emphasize at the outset that most Jews in Palestine did not belong to any of these groups. We know this much from Josephus, who indicates that the largest sect, the Pharisees, claimed 6,000 members and that the Essenes claimed 4,000. The Sadducees probably had far fewer. These numbers should be considered in light of the overall Jewish population in the world at the time; the best estimates put the number at something like 4 million.

What matters for our purposes here, however, is not the size of these groups, for they were influential despite their small numbers, but the ways in which they understood what it meant to be Jewish, especially in light of the political crises that they had to face. Members of all of the sects, of course …

Members of all of the sects, of course, would have subscribed to the basic principles of the religion, as sketched earlier in the chapter: each believed in the one true God, the creator of all things, who was revealed in the Hebrew Scriptures, who had chosen the people of Israel, and who had promised to protect and defend them in exchange for their committed devotion to him through following his laws. The groups differed in significant ways, however, in their understanding of what obedience to God’s laws required and in how they responded to the rule of a foreign power and to the presence of a high priest from a line other than Zadok’s.

Pharisees

The Pharisees represent probably the best-known and least-understood Jewish sect. Because of the way they are attacked in parts of the New Testament, especially in Matthew, Christians through the ages have wrongly considered the Pharisees’ chief attribute to be hypocrisy.

It appears that this sect began during the Maccabean period as a group of devout Jews intent above all else on keeping the entire will of God. Rather than accepting the culture and religion of the Greeks, these Jews insisted on knowing and obeying the Law of their own God to the fullest extent possible. One of the difficulties with the Law of Moses, however, is that in many places it is ambiguous. For example, Jews are told in the Ten Commandments to keep the Sabbath day holy, but nowhere does the Torah indicate precisely how this is to be done. Pharisees devised rules and regulations to assist them in keeping this and all the other laws of Moses. These rules eventually formed a body of tradition, which, to stay with our example, indicated what a person could and could not do on the Sabbath day in order to keep it holy, or set apart from all other days. Thus, for example, when it was eventually determined that a faithful Jew should not go on a long journey on the Sabbath, it had to be decided what a “long” journey was, and consequently what distance a Jew could travel on this day without violating its holiness. Likewise, a worker who believed that he or she should not labor on the Sabbath had to know what constituted “work” and what therefore could and could not be done.

Or a second example: the Law of Moses commands Jewish farmers to give one-tenth of their crops, that is, a tithe, to the priests and Levites (e.g., Num 18:20–21). Priests performed sacrifices in the temple, and Levites were their assistants. Since they themselves were not allowed to farm, the tithes they received represented their financial support for serving God. What should a person do, however, who purchased food from a farmer, not knowing whether the food had been properly tithed? To be on the safe side, some Pharisees maintained that they should tithe the food they purchased, as well as the food they grew. This way they could be certain that God’s law was being followed. And if it got followed twice in this case, so much the better—especially for God’s priests and Levites!

The rules and regulations that developed among the Pharisees came to have a status of their own and were known in some circles as the “oral” Law, which was set alongside the “written” Law of Moses. It appears that Pharisees generally believed that anyone who kept the oral Law would be almost certain to keep the written Law as a consequence. The intent was not to be legalistic but to be obedient to what God had commanded.

The Pharisees may have been a relatively closed society in Jesus’ day, to the extent that they stayed together as a group, eating meals and having fellowship only with one another, that is, with those who were like-minded in seeing the need to maintain a high level of obedience before God. They did not have close ties with those who were less stringent in maintaining purity before God, and avoided, therefore, eating meals with common people.

It is important to recognize that the Pharisees were not the “power players” in Palestine in Jesus’ day. That is to say, they appear to have had some popular appeal but no real political clout. In some ways they are best seen as a kind of separatist group; they wanted to maintain their own purity and did so in relative (not complete) isolation from other Jews. Many scholars think that the term “Pharisee” itself originally came from a Persian word that means “separated ones.” Eventually, however, some decades after Jesus’ execution, the Pharisees did become powerful in the political sense. This was after the Jewish War (which I will describe more fully later in Chapter 17), which culminated in the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in the year 70 C.E. With this calamity the other groups passed from the scene for a variety of reasons, and the descendants of the Pharisees were given greater authority by the Roman overlords. The oral tradition continued to grow and to be invested with greater authority. It was eventually written down around the year 200 C.E. and is today known as the Mishnah, the heart of the Jewish sacred collection of texts, the Talmud.

Sadducees

It is difficult to reconstruct exactly what the Sadducees stood for because not a single literary work survives from the pen of a Sadducee, in contrast to the Pharisees, who are represented to some extent by the later traditions of the Talmud; by Josephus, who was a Pharisee; and by the one Pharisee who left us writings before the destruction of the Temple (after he had converted to Christianity), the apostle Paul. To understand the Sadducees, however, we must turn to what is said about them in other sources, such as Josephus and the New Testament.

During Jesus’ own day, the Sadducees were evidently the real power players in Palestine. They appear to have been, by and large, members of the Jewish aristocracy in Jerusalem who were closely connected with the Jewish priesthood in charge of the Temple cult. Most of the Sadducees were themselves priests (although not all priests were Sadducees). As members of the aristocracy, granted some limited power by their Roman overlords, Sadducees appear to have been conciliatory toward the civil authorities, that is, cooperative with the Roman governor. The local Jewish council, commonly called the Sanhedrin, which was occasionally called together to decide local affairs, was evidently made up principally of Sadducees. With their close connection with the Temple, Sadducees emphasized the need for Jews to be properly involved in the cultic worship of God as prescribed in the Torah. Indeed, it appears that the Torah itself, that is, the five books of Moses, was the only authoritative text that the Sadducees accepted. In any event, we know that they did not accept the oral traditions formulated by the Pharisees. Less concerned with the regulation of daily affairs such as eating, travel, and work, the Sadducees focused their religious attention on the sacrifices in the Temple and expended their political energy on working out their relations with the Romans so that these sacrifices could continue.

It may have been their rejection of all written authority outside of the five books of Moses that led the Sadducees to reject several doctrines that later became characteristic of other groups of Jews. They denied, for example, the existence of angels and disavowed the notion of the future resurrection of the dead. Their views of the afterlife may well have conformed, essentially, with those of most non-Jews throughout the empire: either the “soul” perishes with the body, or it continues on in a kind of shadowy netherworld, regardless of the quality of its life here on earth.