Pharisees and Sadducees

In the New Testament times of Christ, there were two prominent sects of religious thought. There were the Pharisees and the Sadducees. We are very familiar with the groups; we watch them stir up feelings against the Messiah of God, and we watch them eventually succeed in taking Christ to the cross.

But what was the difference? Pretty much the doctrinal differences were like the difference between night and day. The Pharisees believed in zealous good works, sort of fitting the philosophy of overdoing everything in their zeal for God. They were very concerned about rules and were even confronted over some of their rules about hand washing by Jesus himself. Jesus pointed out that they were more concerned with ritual washing of hands than they were concerned with the insides of men themselves.

Sadducees pretty much believed that there was no resurrection from the dead. There were no angels and no after life. Of course, they could not believe in a Messiah raised from the dead; neither could they believe that such a one had the power to grant others victory over death through the forgiveness of sins.

Saul was a Pharisee, trained under the famous Gamaliel, and a devout hardened Pharisee who took great pride in persecuting the new Christians. When Jesus called Saul, Saul left that life behind, and became the great defender and explainer of Christian doctrine.  Many Pharisees took the Christian viewpoint and believed in the Christ, which became somewhat problematic to the church.

Some of the Pharisees were unable to leave Judaism, and tried to embrace a keeping of the Law along with receiving grace. We see part of this group in the faction of Acts Fifteen, where a group of Pharisees insisted that the new Gentiles coming to faith had also to adopt Jewish customs and law. The church council ruled that there was a new age, an age of grace, and the law was forever left behind.

But the problem persisted, evidently throughout the lives of the apostles, for the heresy of keeping the law was time and again referred to, and the false teachers had to be continually reprimanded. 

On the other hand we have the Sadducees. Interestingly, there is not one record of a single Sadducee ever repenting and coming to the faith. If you believed in what the Sadducees did, how could they possibly have faith in a resurrected Messiah when they did not even believe in the resurrection? So, one can search the New Testament in vain for a single record of anyone who came to faith.

As has been said many times before, that is quite “sad you see”.