Sadducees 

Around the time of Christ, the Sadducees were the high priests of the Jewish people. They were wealthy and aristocratic men and members of the Sanhedrin, the supreme Jewish council of religious regulators, enforcers, and judges. The Sadducees’ responsibilities included presiding over the animal sacrifices at the Jerusalem temple. Sacrificial rites, administered by priests, were the primary method of worship in ancient Israel.

Sadducees held their positions as priest-judges for about 220 years, from the mid-2nd century BCE until 70 CE. Then, the Roman army demolished the temple while putting down a Jewish rebellion. The Sadducees faded into obscurity after that as a new form of Judaism emerged from Jerusalem’s ashes.

During Jesus’ public life, from 26 to 30 CE, the Sadducees became his enemies because his teachings did not follow certain aspects of Jewish tradition, such as blood sacrifice and the need for priests. After the Master began his public ministry, the Sadducees sent spies and harassers to follow and entrap him as a lawbreaker. He became very popular among the common people, and that helped him evade capture for over three years.

But, when Jesus rode into Jerusalem and publicly denounced the Sadducees and other members of the Sanhedrin for their many abuses of power and authority, they conspired to have him arrested and killed by the Romans. This occurred during the Passover festival at Jerusalem in April of 30 CE. When word spread that Jesus had survived death and that he had appeared to more than a thousand people, the Sadducees arrested the believers, but they failed to stop the movement about Jesus; it only expanded and became Christianity, the world’s largest religion.

The Sadducees and the Pharisees were the Jews religious and moral authorities before and after Jesus’ life, while the Romans were the civil rulers over all Palestine. The two groups had different roles: Sadducees were priests who watched over the temples and regulated sacrificial rites, while the Pharisees were teachers and scribes. Together, they ruled from their seat of power at the Jerusalem temple.

One of the distinguishing beliefs of the Sadducees was their denial of the resurrection of the dead. They did not believe in life after death or in the existence of angels or spirits. They focused more on their literal interpretation of the Torah, the first five books of the Bible’s Old Testament.

The Sadducees were tradition-bound aristocrats concerned primarily with maintaining the authority of the Jewish priesthood. They held positions of power and influence within the Jewish community, particularly among the wealthy. They presided over temple rituals and greedily took in the income from selling sacrificial animals and money exchanges. However, they faded from history after a Jewish rebellion against Roman rule failed. The Romans destroyed the Jerusalem temple in 70 CE and, with it, the Sadducean priesthood.

The Master did not align himself with any particular religious group or sect. His teachings were meant to transcend the divisions between different religious groups and bring people in direct contact with God through love, compassion, and spiritual progress regardless of national origin, religious belief, gender, or race. He had many interactions with the Sadducees, most of which were questions they posed to him about theological matters, rigid rules of living prescribed by Jewish religious law based in olden ideas and unbending tradition.

Jesus did not seek conflict or promote rebellion against Jewish leaders and their beliefs. He even “broke bread” with Sadducees on more than one occasion. He wished only to update them with a better concept of God, one more in line with the reality he knew from personal acquaintance with God. His mission was to reveal to humanity the loving Father of all without the need for priests or other intermediaries. That inevitably clashed with the Sadducees and their outworn, erroneous concept of a national God and their claim to be God’s only agents.

Jesus made every effort to persuade his enemies to recognize the truths in what he taught without resorting to violence or employing force of any kind. Three days before they killed him, he denounced their errors and evil ways in a final attempt to save them from themselves. But their hearts were hardened; they were blinded by pride and afraid of losing their power, influence, and wealth. The day before the denunciation, Jesus and his followers had "cleansed the temple" by driving out the animals and moneychangers. This affected the Sadducees' income and sealed Jesus’ fate as it finalized their determination to kill him.

The Sadducees wielded a great deal of control and authority. Because Jesus’ teachings did not align with theirs, they joined forces with the Pharisees in a united effort to stop his teachings and doings. They were determined to challenge him and find ways to discredit his teachings. The Sadducees persistently tried to stir up public opinion against him, but the common folk could see through their deceit and recognized the spiritual majesty of the Master’s teachings. They marveled at his wisdom and were not swayed by the Sadducees' attempts to undermine him.

There were three main reasons for wanting to do away with Jesus:

1. The Sadducees feared that the increased popular favor with which the multitude regarded him threatened to endanger the existence of the Jewish nation by possible involvement with the Roman authorities.
2. His zeal for temple reform struck directly at their revenues; the cleansing of the temple affected their pocketbooks.
3. They felt themselves responsible for the preservation of social order, and they feared the consequences of the further spread of Jesus’ strange and new doctrine of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man.

The Sadducees eventually gained control and dominated the Sanhedrin that was composed of Sadducees, Pharisees, and others, the religious and judicial body of the Hebrews. But it should be noted that some of the Sanhedrin members became believers and followers of Jesus. Losing members became yet another reason to arrest and kill him.

Eventually, the groups who opposed him, despite their disagreements with each other, joined forces in a united effort to stop him. But the popularity of his teachings among the people stood in their way. The people marveled at his ability to handle adversaries with composure and dignity, and that made the Sadducees afraid. They were particularly threatened by the idea that their religious traditions could be overthrown. They were bent on upholding the strict observance of the stifling religious laws and meaningless rituals that dominated the daily lives of the Jewish people.

The Sadducees and Pharisees saw Jesus as a blasphemer and heretic, but above all, he challenged their authority and their hold over the people. Jesus taught that everyone was a child of God. He claimed to know God and that priests were not needed to speak with God. Perhaps the overriding reason for hating the Master was that he shunned the sacrificial system that kept the Sadducees rich and comfortable.

After Jesus’ bold public denunciation at the Jerusalem temple on Tuesday, April 4, 30 CE, where he made one last and merciful appeal to his enemies, they met in private to decide what to do with him. At this meeting of the Sanhedrin, which was controlled by the Sadducees, there was a vote on a motion to arrest and kill Jesus. It passed unanimously. A small group of the Sadducees proposed to dispose of Jesus by assassination, but the Pharisees adamantly refused to agree to it.

The following Thursday night, on a request from the Sadducees and with the help of Judas Iscariot (whose parents were Sadducees), Jesus was arrested by the Romans. But they could not pronounce death without permission from Roman authorities. The next morning, at his so-called trial before Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea, the Sadducees demanded that Jesus be crucified. Pilate feared an uprising and reluctantly agreed.

When the resurrected Jesus appeared to nearly a thousand people after he was killed, and word spread, the Sadducees were faced with a new problem: Jesus’ growing popularity. All the short-sighted Sadducees could think to do was put the leaders of the growing Jesus following in jail. But, amazingly, one of the leading rabbis, Gamaliel, advised them: “Refrain from these men and let them alone, for if this counsel or this work is of men, it will be overthrown; but if it is of God, you will not be able to overthrow them, lest you be found even to be fighting against God.” The Sadducees decided to follow Gamaliel’s counsel, and there followed a time of peace and quiet in Jerusalem, during which the new gospel about Jesus spread rapidly.

The unsuccessful Jewish rebellion against their Roman overlords in 70 CE terminated the rule of the Sadducees. While in power, they had utterly failed to stop Jesus’ influence and Christianity today is the largest of the world’s religions. The resistance to Jesus’ teachings by the Sadducees and other Hebrew religious rulers only caused their downfall. The spiritual torch that had been entrusted to them by the covenant with Abraham fell from their hands and was picked up by the gentiles. A few hundred years after Jerusalem fell, the Romans embraced Christianity and it eventually spread to the entire western hemisphere.