Sadducees

Biblical References

The Sadducees appear in the Synoptic Gospels and in Acts, but not in the Gospel of John.

• Rebuke by John the Baptist: John the Baptist calls the Pharisees and Sadducees who come to his baptism a "generation of vipers" (Matthew 3:7).
• Demand for a sign: Together with the Pharisees, the Sadducees ask Jesus for a sign from heaven. Jesus warns his disciples to beware of the "leaven" of the two groups, that is, their doctrine (Matthew 16:1-12).
• Debate over the resurrection: The Sadducees hold that there is no resurrection. Appealing to the law requiring a man to marry his brother's widow if the brother dies childless (Deuteronomy 25:5-6), they ask whose wife a woman who had married seven brothers in turn will be in the resurrection (Matthew 22:23-33; Mark 12:18-27; Luke 20:27-40). Jesus replies that in the resurrection people neither marry nor are given in marriage. He then cites Exodus 3:6 and declares that God is not the God of the dead but of the living.
• Conflict with the apostles: When the apostles proclaim the resurrection of Jesus, the Sadducees, together with the priests, imprison Peter and John (Acts 4:1-3). Acts 5:17 describes the high priest's party as "the sect of the Sadducees."
• Paul's hearing: When Paul speaks of the hope of the resurrection before the council, the Pharisees and Sadducees are divided. Acts 23:8 explains, "For the Sadducees say that there is no resurrection, neither angel, nor spirit."

Background

The Sadducees were a sect of Second Temple Judaism. Composed chiefly of high-priestly families and the Jerusalem aristocracy, they exercised considerable influence over the sacrificial worship of the Jerusalem temple and in the Sanhedrin. They are generally thought to have emerged around the time of the Hasmonean dynasty in the second century BC.

The first-century Jewish historian Josephus presents them, along with the Pharisees and the Essenes, as one of the three Jewish sects. According to Josephus, the Sadducees denied that the soul survives death and rejected rewards and punishments after death. They also refused to accept ancestral traditions outside the written law. After the destruction of the temple in AD 70, they disappeared from history.

Their name is commonly explained as deriving from Zadok, the high priest in the time of Solomon (1 Kings 2:35), but this derivation is uncertain.

Significance in the Whole of Scripture

Because the Sadducees emerged only in or after the intertestamental period, they do not appear in the Old Testament. In the debate over the resurrection, Jesus bore witness to the resurrection from the writings of Moses, which the Sadducees recognized as authoritative. In Acts, the proclamation of the resurrection appears as the central cause of conflict with the Sadducees. This shows that the resurrection stood at the heart of the faith of the early church.

Interpretations and Debates

• Acceptance of the Pentateuch alone: It is widely stated that the Sadducees accepted only the Pentateuch as Scripture. This claim derives from the writings of certain church fathers. Some scholars hold that it is a distorted report of the Sadducees' rejection of oral tradition, so the matter cannot be settled with certainty.
• Limits of the sources: The Sadducees left no writings of their own. They are known only through sources that are largely critical of them, such as Josephus, the New Testament, and later rabbinic literature.
• Popular embellishments: The Sadducees are often portrayed as secular opportunists who collaborated with Rome. This portrait is largely an inference from their position as a temple aristocracy and is not something Scripture states directly. Many also hold that Caiaphas, the high priest at the trial of Jesus, was a Sadducee, but the Gospels do not say so.

In the Korean Church

In preaching, the Sadducees are frequently mentioned alongside the Pharisees as religious leaders who opposed Jesus. The two groups are commonly contrasted: the Pharisees as an example of legalism and hypocrisy, and the Sadducees as an example of a secular rationalism that denies the resurrection and the spiritual world. The passages on the resurrection debate are often used as sermon texts around Easter.