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Historical context

The Sadducees

The power of the Temple

A priestly elite tied to the Temple and to Rome, who denied the resurrection.

Heirs of Zadok?

The Sadducees appear in the sources alongside the Pharisees in the second century BC and vanish with the Temple in AD 70. The name probably comes from Zadok, the priest who anointed Solomon (1 Kings 1:39) and whose family led worship for centuries; Ezekiel calls the faithful priests the sons of Zadok (Ezekiel 44:15). The link is likely but not certain, and not every Sadducee was a priest. There is a bigger problem: we have no text written by a Sadducee. Everything we know comes from people who disagreed with them, namely Josephus, who sympathized with the Pharisees, the New Testament and later rabbinic literature. That calls for caution. The picture that emerges is of a small group, conservative in doctrine and strong in politics, which saw itself as guardian of the Temple and of the written Law.

Few, wealthy and powerful

Josephus says the Sadducees’ teaching reached only a few, but those few were of the highest rank (Jewish Antiquities 18). The group brought together elite priestly families and lay aristocrats of Jerusalem, owners of land and influence. They held the main posts in the Temple, managed its treasuries and negotiated with whoever ruled, whether Herod or the Roman prefect. That position demanded pragmatism: keeping order, avoiding revolts and preserving worship was, in their eyes, protecting the nation. The reasoning shows up in John, when the council fears the Romans will come and take away both the holy place and the nation (John 11:48). Josephus adds a curious detail: lacking popular support, the Sadducees in office ended up following, reluctantly, what the Pharisees taught, because otherwise the people would not tolerate them.

Only what is written

Sadducean theology was conservative. They rejected the traditions of the fathers that the Pharisees added to the Law and accepted as binding only what was written (Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 13). Some early Christian writers claimed they accepted only the five books of Moses; many historians today doubt this and think they rejected oral traditions, not necessarily the Prophets. They denied the resurrection of the dead and rewards and punishments after death: for them the soul perished with the body (Jewish War 2). Acts adds that they did not believe in angel or spirit (Acts 23:8), a phrase still debated, since angels appear in the Torah itself. They gave great weight to free will and denied fate. Josephus notes that they thought it a virtue to argue with their own teachers and that they were harsh in judgment. Theirs was a faith centered on the Temple and on this life.

Annas, Caiaphas and the family that ran the Temple

Annas was appointed high priest by the Roman governor Quirinius in AD 6 and removed in 15, but he remained the dominant figure for decades. According to Josephus, five of his sons became high priest (Jewish Antiquities 20), and his son-in-law, Joseph Caiaphas, held the office from about 18 to 36, the longest tenure under the Roman governors, a span that includes Pontius Pilate’s ten years. That longevity suggests political skill and good relations with Rome. This is why Luke speaks of the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas together (Luke 3:2), and John says Jesus was taken first to Annas (John 18:13). Acts links the high priest and his circle to the party of the Sadducees (Acts 5:17), and Josephus says Ananus, son of Annas, was a Sadducee. A later rabbinic tradition still lamented the house of Annas and its whisperings (Babylonian Talmud, Pesachim 57a).

An ossuary in Jerusalem (1990)

In November 1990, workers building a park in Jerusalem’s Peace Forest, south of the Old City, accidentally broke through the roof of a first-century burial chamber. Inside were twelve ossuaries, limestone boxes where bones were gathered about a year after burial. The most ornate, with finely carved rosettes, bore two Aramaic inscriptions with the name Yehosef bar Qayafa, Joseph son of, or of the family of, Caiaphas, one of them spelled slightly differently. It held the bones of six people, including a man of about sixty. Many archaeologists link the tomb to the family of the high priest in the Gospels, whose full name, according to Josephus, was Joseph Caiaphas; some specialists debate the reading and the identification. The find shows a wealthy priestly family and puts a historical face on a character of the Passion.

Before Jesus and the apostles, and the end

In the Gospels the Sadducees take the stage almost only once, but the scene is memorable. To ridicule the resurrection, they tell of a woman who marries seven brothers in turn, under the law of levirate marriage (Deuteronomy 25:5-6). Jesus answers on their own ground: he quotes the Torah, the episode of the burning bush, where God presents himself as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and concludes that he is the God of the living (Mark 12:18-27). In Acts the Sadducees are annoyed precisely because the apostles proclaim in Jesus the resurrection of the dead (Acts 4:1-2). When the Temple fell in AD 70, the group lost its power base and disappeared from history. The heirs of the Pharisees carried on in the synagogues; the church carried on proclaiming exactly what the Sadducees denied: an empty tomb.

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