The Sect of the Sadducees – Acts 23:1-9

We all know that Christendom is divided into hundreds and hundreds of denominations, sects and cults.

This is one of the problems that true believers have to face:

The diversity of opinion within Christendom is one of the excuses that the lost man throws at us when we try to share the gospel with him.

But something which is not readily recognized is that there are similar divisions in every major religion.

The Muslims have their Sunnis, Shiites and Sufis.

The divisions within Hinduism make Christianity look like a homogenous unity.

And just as Baptists have hundreds of divisions, even Catholics, Mormons and Methodists do too.

The Jews have, and almost always have had, their sects as well.

Today there are the Reconstructionists, the Reformed, the Orthodox, Conservatives and more.

And in the days of the Lord Jesus there were at least as many divisions:

For example, there were the Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes and the revolutionary zealots.

The only two which had much bearing on the Lord Jesus and the early church, however, were the Pharisees and the Sadducees.

Most of us probably know more about the Pharisees than the Sadducees,

so let’s try to correct that as best we can this evening.

The Sadducees originated in obscurity; operated in obstinacy; and were eventually overcome by oblivion.

The Sadducees ORIGINATED IN OBSCURITY.

There is very little early information about this sect available to us today.

This is probably due to the fact that the name was used only for a short period of time.

It doesn’t mean that they weren’t around much earlier, but they may have been called by a different name.

The two primary sources of information about the Sadducees are the Bible and the history of Josephus.

Josephus, however, was a Pharisee, and as a result, his opinions about the Sadducees may have been a little tainted.

The Bible, of course, is completely trustworthy, but it doesn’t shed a great deal of light on these people, focusing for the most part on the Pharisees, and I’ll explain why that was true in just a moment.

Since neither the Holy Spirit nor Josephus tell us about the origins of Sadducaism, the experts are forced to make some educated guesses.

Some scholars say that the word “Sadducee” is derived from the verb “to be righteous,”

however that is a minority opinion, and isn’t all too logical, because they were far from righteous.

The majority opinion is that the word came from the name “Zadok,” which means “righteous.”

In the days of King David, two brothers, Zadok and Abiathar acted as the leading priests of the nation.

But as David lay dying, his son Adonijah tried to take the throne, and Abiathar went with him.

When Solomon eventually became king, Abiathar was removed from his exalted position.

And Zadok, remaining faithful to the wishes of David, became High Priest alone.

With some exceptions, from that point on all the High Priests came from the lineage of Zadok.

With the passage of time, there was a gradual metamorphosis of the priesthood into Israel’s ruling class.

After the return of the Jews from Babylon, there were no more kings,

and the High Priest began to be seen as the ruler of the nation,

particularly by Israel’s oppressors: the Greeks and the Romans.

So by the time of the incarnation, the office of the High Priest had become more political than spiritual.

The Sadducees originated in obscurity and they OPERATED IN OBSTRUCTION.

I can’t tell you the cause, but the Bible tells us the Sadducees became very liberal in their Bible interpretation.

Verse 8 – “The Sadducees say that there is no resurrection, neither angel, nor spirit.”

Some people say that by the time of Christ, the Sadducees only accepted the writings of Moses, the Pentateuch, as scripture.

As priests, they laid great stress on the maintenance of the law,

but their religion became nothing more than hollow ceremonies.

And they also abused their office and used it for personal gain.

Generally speaking, the Sadducees were a very wealthy group of people.

Somewhere along the line some of the earlier priests decided that the soul was not necessarily immortal.

When that idea infected one of the High Priests, it took root

and the Sadducees eventually stopped believing in either the resurrection of the body or life after death.

Again someone decided that all the appearances of angels in the Old Testament were actually theophanies.

He believed that the special appearances of Heavenly beings were actually God Himself.

That eventually developed into the idea that there were no angels.

So slowly over time some of the doctrines which set religion of Israel apart from the nations evaporated.

Sure, they maintained some of their rites and ceremonies, but they lost their substance.

The Sadducees had plenty of religion, if not actually too much religion, but the Lord was being left out.

They seemed to make the sons of Eli, Hophni and Phineas their models. (I Samuel 2:11-17.)

I have no proof of this, but I think that if we had all the facts, we’d learn that Hellenization was cause of the fall of the priesthood.

To “Hellenize” is to adopt the culture of the Greeks.

Since the office of the High Priest was recognized as the leadership of Israel,

the man in that office was forced to deal more and more with the Greeks and then the Romans,

And in the process more and more of the world crept into the thinking, culture and theology of the men in that office.

The Book of Malachi was written in about 400 BC.

With nearly half a millennium for the corruption of man to do its destructive work,

by the time of Acts, the Priesthood had crumbled into a poor imitation of the rest of human religion.

And the same thing has happened and is continuing to happen to Christianity.

If it were not for the grace of God, there would be nothing left of the Truth for the people of the 21^st century.

Another thing for which I have no proof is this:

I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Pharisaism began as a reaction to the corruption of the Sadducees.

As Paul shows us here in this chapter, the doctrinal differences between the two groups were just about as opposite and antagonistic to each other as possible.

The Pharisees had their own peculiar problems, but they were far closer to the truth than the Sadducees.

But that raises the question: why didn’t the Lord Jesus spend more time condemning and correcting the Sadducees?

The answer is pretty easy:

What is more dangerous: the arsenic that is clearly marked as poison, or the arsenic that is stored in the pop bottle?

The Sadducees were so far out into theological left-field that they were actually playing in the alley.

But the Pharisees had the minds and ears of the people, because they quoted the scripture and they made it make sense.

The Pharisees had enough of the truth to confuse the masses and to condemn them all to hell.

“Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in.

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye devour widows’ houses, and for a pretence make long prayer: therefore ye shall receive the greater damnation.

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves.

Woe unto you, ye blind guides…”

Not only did the Lord Jesus for the most part leave the Sadducees alone, they left Him alone.

Sure he was a thorn in their flesh, like a little sliver.

He attacked their lucrative temple businesses of money-exchange and sacrifice-selling.

But since Jesus was spending most of His time sparing with the Pharisees, they didn’t care that much.

The day following Jesus’ attack on the money changers tables, it was business as usual.

But then Jesus began to make it clear that He considered Himself to be the Messiah.

While he was arguing against their arch enemies, the Pharisees, the priests had little problem with that rube from Galilee,

but as soon as He made Himself a King and an enemy of Rome, they were forced to step in.

Not only to protect his own priestly position, but to keep the Romans from having to bring more troops into Israel, the High Priest had to do something about this professed Christ.

And that eventually meant doing something about His disciples too.

So eventually, the Sadducees became the chief persecutors of Christ and His church.

But their reasons were more political than theological.

They joined forces with the Pharisees as far as it became necessary, and they hired men like Saul of Tarsus to do their dirty work for them.

The Pharisees and the Sadducees had a powerful common enemy, so those who had been quarreling for decades, temporarily made a truce and joined forces.

I think that you can summarize the Sadducees as obstructionists.

But their history ends in OBLIVION.

Sometime after the crucifixion, the Sadducees and Ananias gained complete control of the Sanhedrin.

This Ananias was called Ananus by Josephus, and sometimes he was called Annas.

Some scholars equate this man with the Annas and Caiaphas who crucified the Saviour, but it’s more likely that this was a successor.

This Ananias was the High Priest who encouraged Herod to kill James, the Lord’s brother.

Josephus says that the Pharisees were against the murder of James, but they were powerless to do anything about it.

They even approached the Roman governor to have Ananias removed from office.

This was one of the reasons that he had been sent to Rome.

But Ananias was acquitted of all charges and returned to Jerusalem feeling more powerful than ever.

But the end of the nation of Israel was at hand.

As the condition of the nation deteriorated, revolution began to fester.

The Jewish war which culminated in the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD also brought about the death of two High Priests: Ananias and Joshua.

They weren’t executed by the Romans but murdered by revolutionary zealots.

And then with the fall of the city and the destruction of the nation, Sadducaism evaporated.

It’s spirit lives on, and will do so until the return of the Saviour, but the name exists only in the pages of the Word of God and a few history books.