The Sadducees believed in complete human free will, so no intervention
at all by God; there is complete human free will. The Pharisees, on the
other hand, emphasized both divine omnipotence-God is all knowing
and all powerful-alongside human freedom and responsibility.
In our last lecture, we saw that Alexander Jannaeus’s failure to obseve
Jewish law aroused the opposition of certain groups in Jewish society, and
we mentioned the Pharisees and the community at Qumran associated
with the Dead Sea Scrolls, which we will identify as the Essenes.
Historical sources indicate a third major group, the Sadducees. In this lecture,
we will focus on the Pharisees and Sadducees.
All three groups had separated themselves from the rest of Jewish society
because they believed that the traditional values had been corrupted and that
only they were practicing the law correctly. Events of the 2nd century B.C.,
including the revolt against Antiochus IV Epiphanes and the establishment
of the Hasmonean kingdom, seem to have contributed largely to the formation
of these groups.
The Sadducees originally were a branch of a large family called the Zadokites.
Solomon had appointed a man named Zadok to officiate as high priest in the
temple, and from his time, all of the high priests who officiated in the Jerusalem
temple traced their ancestry back to Zadok. In the early 2nd century B.C., right
before the Maccabean revolt, the Zadokite family lost control of the temple
priesthood. This extended broke into three branches: One branch established a
temple in Egypt at Leontopolis, eventually closed by the Roman emperor
Vespasian in 73 A.D; another branch helped found and at least initially led the
community that settled at Qumran; and a third branch stayed in Jerusalem,
accommodated with the ruling powers, and became part of the Jerusalem elite
by the late 1st century B.C. This last branch was what we know as the Sadducees,
but eventually, the term applied to anyone belonging to the upper class and
connoted a political and religious conservatism.
The Pharisees included some of the lower ranks of priests, craftsmen, small
farmers, and merchants. They were known for their recognition of oral
tradition in addition to written law. Because many of the laws in the Hebrew
Bible applied to situations that no longer existed, these men, who were learned
in Jewish law (rabbis), interpreted it for their time and passed down their
interpretations to disciples.
These two groups differ on some important theological issues. For
example, the Sadducees did not believe in life after death because it was
nowhere explicitly mentioned in the Five Books of Moses. The Pharisees,
in contrast, developed a tradition that some sort of afterlife follows death.
Again, the Sadducees believed in complete human free will, without divine
intervention, whereas the Pharisees believed in human free will but also
in the foreknowledge of God. (We will see that the Essenes believed that
everything is preordained by God.)
In the next lecture, we will visit the community that lived at Qumran and
deposited the Dead Sea Scrolls in caves there.
Terms to Remember
Qumran: Ancient settlement by the northwest shore of the Dead Sea,
surrounded by caves in which the Dead Sea Scrolls were found.
rabbi (“my master”): Originally, a Hebrew term of respect for someone
learned in biblical Jewish law.
Zadokites; Descendants of Zadok, high priest in the time of Solomon.
Questions to Consider
1. What is a sect?
2. What sorts of issues divided the various sects of the Late Second
Temple period?
Lecture 13-Transcript
Pharisees and Sadducees
In our last lecture, we talked about the Hasmonean kingdom, and the fact that
the failure of Alexander Jaimaeus to properly observe Jewish law aroused
the opposition of certain groups in Jewish society. Specifically we mentioned
the Pharisees, and we also referred to the community at Qumran associated
with the Dead Sea scrolls. What I would like to do now is talk about some
of these Jewish groups that emerged during the Hasmonean period, and
specifically in this lecture focus on what we know about the Sadducees and
the Pharisees.
First of all, where does our information come from about these groups? Our
major sources of information are Josephus, the Jewish historian of the lst
century A.D., the books of 1 and 2 Maccabees which are apocryphal books,
that is that they are included in the Catholic canon of Sacred Scripture but
not in the Jewish or Protestant canons, the Dead Sea scrolls from Qumran,
the New Testament, and rabbinic literature. These are our major sources of
information about the Pharisees and the Sadducees.
Josephus, who was a very important source of information, calls these groups
haireseis which is a Greek word, singular hairesis. The Latin equivalent of
the Greek word hairesis would be the Latin secta. Automatically, you can
see that our word heresy comes from the Greek word haireseis, and you
can see that our word sect comes from the Latin word secta. So when we
read Josephus in translation and we read that he refers to these groups as
heresies or sects, it automatically raises certain associations for us today, and
the reason is that today heresy and sect or sectarian are words that have a
negative connotation.
Why do these words have a negative conotation today? Because today we
refer to groups that do things that are illegitimate or that we disapprove of as
sects, and we refer to illegitimate practices or unrecognized practices which
we do not approve of heresies. The fact that these words today have negative
connotations is actually a very Christian concept. Originally in Greek and
in Latin, that is in the time of Josephus, haireseis/heresy and secta/sect had
no negative connotations at all. It is only later in the early church that the
church fathers begin to use these terms in order to denigrate their opponents,
but originally they were neutral terms.
We can contrast these terms today, heresy, sect/sectarian with the word
denomination. If we refer to a group that we approve of that is recognized as
a legitimate group within let’s say a larger church, we would refer to that as
a denomination, but if we refer to a sect, we refer to a practice as sectarian
or as a heresy, then clearly it is something that we disapprove of. We go into
this in order to point out that when we read about haireseis or about secta in
Josephus, we must then remove the modern negative connotations that these
words have today and instead understand that they are simply neutral words
that in Greek and in Latin referred to schools of thought or philosophical
schools or different groups or movements without any of the disapproving
connotations that we might read into it from a modern point of view.
What were the major Jewish sects of the Second Temple period, the late
Second Temple period, and what do we know about them? First of all when
we refer to these groups, we must describe them as groups that separated
themselves from other groups largely because they felt alienated, and they
felt alienated because these groups believed that the traditional values
had been corrupted. One of the characteristics then of Jewish sects of the
late Second Temple period of these various groups is that they separated
themselves from the rest of Jewish society and believed that the traditional
values had been corrupted, and they believed that only they were practicing
Judaism in the right way. So one of the characteristics then of these groups,
of these sects of the late Second Temple period, is that each one of them
believed that they were doing things the right way and the others were not
doing things the right way.
Josephus refers specifically to three sects in the late Second Temple period,
and he says as follows, “Indeed there exist among the Jews three schools of
philosophy,” three haireseis in Greek, “the Pharisees belong to the first, the
Sadducees to the second, and to the third belong men who have a reputation
for cultivating a particularly saintly life, called Essenes.” In this lecture we
are going to be focusing on the first two, the Pharisees and Sadducees, and
we will talk about the Essenes in the lectures after this.
When Josephus says that there are three philosophical schools or three
haireseis or three of these groups in Judaism in the late Second Temple
period, he is undoubtedly simplifying a more complex situation. That is,
undoubtedly there were other groups and movements that existed in late
Second Temple period Judaea beginning in the Hasmonean period, but
Josephus does not mentions them. He mentions only Pharisees, Sadducees
and Essenes. Why do I say this? I say this because there is a debate among
scholars as to how many different groups existed in the late Second Temple
period Judaism, and what the major groups were. Some scholars think that
although there may have been other groups, there were really only three
main groups: Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes, because these are the ones
that we hear of repeatedly in our sources.
Whereas other scholars argue that our sources are only partial in terms of the
information that they provide, and that there must have been a wide range of
groups that existed in Jewish society and indeed in some sources, different
sources, we get hints of other groups because occasionally other groups are
referred to. So there is a question about how complex the picture was. How
many different groups and movements and sects there were in late Second
Temple period Judaea, but for our purposes we are going to focus on the
ones that appear to be the major ones. The ones that we have at least the
most information on and those are for now the Pharisees, Sadducees, and
then later we will also talk about the Essenes.
These sects, Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes, seemed to have originated
and crystallized by the middle of the 2““ century B.C., and in fact, it is the
events that lead up to the formation of the Hasmonean kingdom, the outbreak
of the revolt against Antiochus IV of Epiphanies culminating with the
establishment of the Hasmonean kingdom that seemed to have contributed
largely to the formation and crystallization of these groups. Remember
that there were some sectors of the Jewish population that opposed some
of the practices of the Hasmoneans, including the fact that they serve not
only as kings but also as high priests, and these sorts of divisions of opinion
apparently contributed to the formation of these different groups, of these
different sects.
What do we know then about the Sadducees? The Sadducees are a group
that on the one hand is well known in the sense that most people have heard
of Sadducees, but on the other hand we have a problem in terms of our
information about them. Our major sources of information on the Sadducees
are all hostile to them, and in fact, our sources of information about the
Sadducees are all external sources. That is, we have no sources of information
about the Sadducees that come from the Sadducees themselves. They come
from people or sources that were not part of the Sadducees movement and
that were hostile to the Sadducees and so present them in a negative light.
What are these sources? Josephus talks about the Sadducees, and he describes
himself as a Pharisee, so he is not a Sadducees but a member of another
group, the New Testament, which is also hostile to Sadducees, and rabbinic
literature, the literature of the later rabbis, which is allied with the Pharisaic
movement or grows out of the Pharisaic movement. So in other words, all of
our sources of information on the Sadducees are external to the Sadducees
and are hostile to the Sadducees, and therefore present them in a biased light
and generally tend to present the Sadducees in a negative light.
What then do we actually know about the Sadducees and about their origins?
The Sadducees were a branch of a larger family called the Zadokites. Who
exactly were the Zadokites? Way back, centuries before the late Second
Temple period, when Solomon had built the first temple on the Temple
Mount in Jerusalem, he had appointed a man named Zadok, Hebrew Zadoq,
to officiate as high priest in the temple. From that point on, all of the high
priests who officiated in the Jerusalem temple traced their ancestry back to
Zadok and became known as the Zadokite family.
By the 2““ century B.C. this Zadokite priestly family was a very extended
family. Through a series of complicated events right before the outbreak
of the Maccabean revolt, the Zadokite family lost control of the priesthood
in the Jerusalem temple and the priesthood was taken over, usurped by
other priestly families that were not Zadokites, and from that point on, the
Zadokites never again regained control of the priesthood in the Jerusalem
temple. This Zadokite priestly family, which at this point is very extended,
branches off Different branches ofthe family go and do different things.
One branch of the family, called the Gniads, establish a temple at a place
in Egypt called Leontopolis, and they and their descendents of liciated at
this temple in Egypt until it was closed by Vespasian in the year 73 A.D.
Another branch of the Zadokite family was instrumental in founding and at
least initially leading the community that evidentially settled at Qumran and
deposited the Dead Sea scrolls in the nearby caves. Yet another branch of this
Zadokite family stayed in Jerusalem, accommodated with the ruling powers,
and eventually morphed into group that becomes known as the Sadducees.
So in other words the Sadducees are one branch of the Zadokite family, and
in fact the word Sadducees and Zadokite in Hebrew are basically the same
word, and they then become part of the Jerusalem elite in the late ls* century
B.C. and 1st century A.D.
Who were these people then, these Sadducees, of the late Second Temple
period? They are therefore members of the elite, which means that they
are priestly families by definition, and other members of the Aristocracy.
Although originally the Sadducees are a branch of the Zadokite family,
eventually the term comes to refer to the members of the upper class in
Judaea and especially in Jerusalem in the late Second Temple period. So they
are the high priests, they are the Aristocracy, and therefore not surprisingly,
both politically and religiously, they were conservatives because they were
the elite. They were the upper classes. They had it good. Anybody who has it
good is going to want to preserve the status quo, and therefore is going to be
a conservative. So both politically and religiously they were conservatives.
What does it mean when I say they were religious conservatives? Political
conservatives is clear. They like to keep the status quo, things as they are,
but what does it mean religious conservatives? It means that they were
opposed to religious innovations. Their opposition to religious innovations,
to introducing new things in religious practice, is going to be diametrically
opposite to what we will see among the Pharisees.
Who are the Pharisees? This is another group where it is a little bit difficult
to define them at first. The word Pharisees is a word that actually we do
not know where it originally comes from. In Hebrew, the Pharisees are the
proscheme. The name Pharisee in Hebrew therefore comes from a Hebrew
word, apparently Parash, which means to separate. Actually we are not
positive that is the root of the name but it likely is. So the word Parash,
the root of this name Pharisees, means to separate. What does it mean, the
separate ones, the ones who separated themselves? \Vhy were they called
that? What did the separate themselves from? We do not actually know why
they were called that. Did they separate themselves from the Sadducees,
from the high priests and the elite? Did they separate themselves from
the Hasmoneans to whom they were largely opposed? Did they separate
themselves from the rest of the population considering that the rest of the
population to be too lax in the observance of Jewish law? We do not know;
all of those are possible; we just do not know for sure.
What is interesting is that they did not actually call themselves Pharisees,
they referred to themselves by other names. When they called each other by
a name, they did not say hey over there you Pharisee. They said hey, haver,
friend, or they would call each other scribes or sages, and sometimes they
called each other by the term rabbi. This term rabbi, which is today a loaded
term, means something very different from a modern rabbi. When we say
modem rabbi today, it is somebody who has undergone an politcial process
of ordination and generally leads or officiates in a synagogue, but originally
the term rabbi is a title which literally means my teacher or my master, and
it is a title of respect that you would give to somebody who is an authority in
Jewish law, who is learned in Jewish law, so they would often call each other
by the term rabbi, my master, my teacher.
If the Sadducees were the elite, the upper classes, who were the Pharisees?
The Pharisees came from very diverse backgrounds. They came from both
rural areas and from urban areas. They included some of the lower ranks of
priests, not the high priests, but some of the other kinds of priestly families,
craftsman, small farmers, and merchants. Basically what we have here, and
I hate to use this term because it is so anachronistic, but it is what would
be analogous to kind of middle-class or maybe an upper middle-class, that
is group that is not among the very poor but also not among the wealthiest
classes, but fairly comfortably off.
At this point, I want to actually caution and say that I presented a very sort of
black and white picture of Pharisees and Sadducees, but we have to remember
that the picture was much more complicated than this. Not necessarily every
person who was a high priest or a member of the Jerusalem elite would
of considered themselves the Sadducees, and not everyone who was from
this sort of upper middle-class background would of consider themselves a
Pharisees. The picture is more complex than this, but generally speaking, the
groups do roughly correspond with these kind of socioeconomic groups.
What are the Pharisees known for? One of the major things that they are
known for is their recognition of oral tradition in addition to written law,
and what do I mean there? The core of the Hebrew bible is the Pentateuch,
the Five Books of Moses, or what Jews call the Torah. The Five Books of
Moses contain the laws that the god of Israel gave to his people and which
they were expected to live their lives according to. By definition, if you were
a Jew, a Judean, in antiquity, you then worshiped the god of Israel as your
national deity, as your patron god, and lived your life according to the laws
that he gave his people in those Five Books of Moses; fair enough, that is a
pretty basic element.
What is new about the Pharisees? In addition to the observance of this written
law, the Pharisees added an element of oral tradition, and why is this? The
Hebrew bible, the Five Books of Moses in particular, had been compiled and
edited now centuries before the late Second Temple period, and already by
this time, and it is even more of the case today, many of those laws applied to
situations which no longer existed because times change and there is human
progress and technology changes. Over the course of time, if you want to
continue to live your life according to the laws in the Five Books of Moses,
you are going to need to do a certain degree of interpretation and adaptation
of those laws in order to make them fit the current situation.
To give you a very anachronistic example from today, nowhere in the Five
Books of Moses does it say that you may not flip a light switch on the Jewish
Sabbath, on Saturday. What the Hebrew bible says, what the Pentateuch says
is that you may not light a fire on the Sabbath. Once electricity was invented,
Judaism had a problem; nowhere in the bible does it refer to electricity. So
modern rabbis went back and interpreted the biblical passage that says that
you may not light a fire on the Sabbath to refer also to electricity, and thereby
Jews who observe Jewish law, biblical law, will not flip a light switch on the
Sabbath because that turns on the electricity.
What do the Pharisees do? They develop an oral tradition where these
rabbis, that is these men who are learned in Jewish law, study the biblical
passages, study the biblical laws, and interpret them and begin to pass down
their interpretations to generation of disciples or students. This body of
oral tradition or oral interpretation becomes the characteristic feature of the
Pharisees and distinguishes them from some of the other groups of the late
Second Temple period.
Let us now take a look at some examples of the differences between these
groups as reported by our various sources. Let us see first of all what Josephus
says here about the Sadducees. He says, “But the doctrine of the Sadducees
is this: that souls die with the bodies, nor do they regard the observation of
anything besides what the law enjoins them.” So notice Josephus says that
the Sadducees simply will not accept anything except what is written exactly
in the law, in the torah, in the Five Books of Moses, and as part of this they
believe that souls die with the body, which means that there is no life after
death. Why do they believe that there is no life after death? They believe that
because the Sadducees said nowhere in the Pentateuch is there an explicit
doctrine of the resurrection of the dead after death, so therefore they believe
that souls die with the bodies because there is no reference to anything but
that in the Hebrew bible.
Josephus says about the Pharisees on the other hand, “They also believe
that souls have an immortal vigour in them, and that under the earth there
will be rewards or punishments, accordingly as they have lived virtuously
or vicious in this life.” The Pharisees according to Josephus believe exactly
the opposite. They developed a tradition that after death there is in fact some
sort of an afterlife, and this is diametrically opposed to what the Sadducees
believed, and the Sadducees rejected this because there is no explicit doctrine
of such in the bible.
Very interesting, we actually see this also reflected in Acts of the Apostles
where it says, “For the Sadducees hold that there is no resurrection and that
there are no angels or spirits, while the Pharisees believe in all three.” So
notice that according to Acts also that the Sadducees do not believe in a
resurrection, the Pharisees do, and by the way, here it says the Sadducees
also believe that there no angels or spirits and the Pharisees believe that there
are angels or spirits.
Another one of the differences between these groups is the doctrine of free
will. To what extent is there human free will? The Sadducees believed in
complete human free will, so no intervention at all, by god there is complete
human free will. The Pharisees, on the other hand, emphasized both divine
omnipotence, God is all knowing and all powerful, alongside human freedom
and responsibility. Josephus says for example, “And when they determine
that all things are done by fate,” this is the Pharisees, “and they do not take
the freedom from men of acting as they see fit; since their notion is, that it
has pleased God to make a temperament, whereby what he wills is done, but
so that the will of men can act virtuously or viciously.”
That is actually a little bit confusing so it is a little hard to understand here
what Josephus is saying. We actually have an early rabbi, Rabbi Akiba, who
puts in much more simply. The is what the Pharisees believe: All is foreseen
but free will is given. In other words, people have free will to choose what
they are going to do but because God is all knowing, he knows what you are
going to choose to do before you even do it. So this is the Pharisees doctrine,
which is that there is human free will but there is also an element here of
God knowing what is going to happen.
When we get to talk about the Essenes, we will see that they actually believe
that there is no human free will at all. They believe that everything is
preordained by God, so we have three points of a spectrum here: Sadducees
at one end believing in complete human free will; Essenes at the other end,
no human free will; and the Pharisees somewhere in the middle in this case.
With which sect did Jesus usually engage in debate? If you go through the
gospels you will see that the group that is mentioned over and over again
are the Pharisees, and this then if we take at its most literal reading would
suggest that Jesus engaged most in debate with the Pharisees. However, this
is debated by scholars. Why is it a subject of contention among scholars?
The canonical gospels as we have them today were written down pretty
much after the destruction of the temple in 70 A.D. Mark which is the
earliest maybe 60 to 70 A.D., but pretty much what we have dates to after
70 A.D. Where is the problem? The problem is that these groups apparently
disappear or cease to exist after 70, so by the time the gospel accounts are
written, these groups pretty much have disappeared.
I actually have to qualify this a minute and say that in recent years some
scholars have suggested that although we do not hear about these groups
after 70, maybe actually they did continue to exist for a while after 7 0, and so
maybe the gospel accounts are not completely anachronistic in that regard;
this is a little bit problematic. It is also problematic because we cannot define
precisely the relationship between the Pharisees and the rabbis after 70. After
70 the dominant group, the dominant religious authority in Judaism become
the rabbis and there is clearly some sort of a relationship between the rabbis
after 70 and the Pharisees before 70 because they have a same sort of view of
the practice of Jewish law, which is that is it is okay to use this body of oral
tradition in order to interpret the written law and to practice Judaism.
Somehow the rabbis after 70 seemed to grow out of the Pharisaic movement
before 70, and it may be in fact that some of the other movements also
continue to exist in some form after 70. There is a Whole problem here
with how long these groups continued to exist after 70, in what form
they continued to exist, and this is the problem in trying to then relate the
groups that we know about with the gospel accounts. If we take the gospel
accounts at face value, it looks like Jesus is usually engaging in debate with
the Pharisees, so there could be two logical explanations for this. Number
l either Jesus really does debate the Pharisees more than any other group,
and the gospels are therefore more or less accurate, or the other possibility
is-and this is what some scholars think-that Jesus is portrayed as debating
the Pharisees because by the time the gospels are being written after 70, the
only major group that really is continuing to exist is the Pharisaic movement,
which is morphing into the rabbis.
This is kind of a conundrum actually. There is actually no solution to this
question. It is an ongoing debate among scholars. I will actually say that
I think that without saying that the gospels are completely historically
accurate, but to my mind it is most likely that Jesus really was debating
mostly with the Pharisees because the Sadducees are the upper classes there
in Jerusalem and they would not have been debating with Jesus when he
is up in Galilee, and the Essenes, well they are a marginal group that we
will see that probably was not debating with Jesus’ movement. So of the
movements that we know about actually, most logically it would have been
the Pharisees who Jesus was engaging in debate with. Anyway, this is what
the gospels portray; usually Jesus is engaged in debate with the Pharisees.
Let us take a look at an example of a passage of where is Jesus is engaged
in a debate. “The Pharisees gathered about him, Jesus, with some scribes,”
and there is whole other question, who are these scribes right? Are they a
different group, are they part of the Pharisaic movement, are they Sadducees,
a whole other question.
The Pharisees gather about him with some scribes who had comeAnd this of course from Mark. This is actually very interesting, Jesus of
from Jerusalem. They had noticed that some of his disciples ate their
food without first giving their hands a ceremonial washing to purify
them. For the Pharisees and all the Jews observe the rules handed
down from their ancestors, and will not eat until they have washed
their hands in a particular way, and they will not eat anything from
the market without first purifying it by sprinkling it.
And the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, “Why do your
disciples not observe the rules handed down by our ancestors, but
eat food without purifying their hands?” [And this what Jesus says
to them] But he said to them, “It was about you hypocrites that
Isaiah prophesied so finely in the words, ‘This people honors me
with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they
worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines,” [that is a quote
from Isaiah]. “You abandon the commandment of God and hold to
human tradition.”
course, his response is you are hypocrites because you observe the law with
your lips by words but not with your hearts, but then he goes on and he
says that they are worshiping God by teach human precepts as doctrines
and holding to human tradition. What is this reflecting? This is actually
very interesting. It is a criticism of the Pharisaic observance of oral tradition
versus written law. So what Jesus is saying is yoLu° criticism of us, that we
are not washing hand before eating, is based on a tradition that has no basis
in the written law, it is one of your oral traditions; therefore, it is a human
doctrine that has nothing to do with the laws of God, and that is how Jesus
responds to the criticism of the Pharisees, according to this passage in Mark.
With this we are going to wrap up our discussion of Pharisees and Sadducees,
and we will now continue next time with the community that lived at Qumran
and deposited the Dead Sea scrolls in the nearby caves.
