Scribes, Sadducees, and Pharisees



Scribes, Sadducees, and Pharisees

Scribes were a professional class rather than a specific religious party. They were educated people who made their living off of their literacy and education. They would have had a range of functions. The one we are most familiar with today is the job of producing copies of scriptures. Any scroll of the Torah would be produced by a trained scribe. Some scribes would have been school teachers. Many were legal experts who could be consulted on matters of Torah. Luke sometimes calls them lawyers. In the gospels they tend to ask Jesus for his opinion on legal matters. Scribes also functioned as notaries, that is, as people who drew up legal documents such as contracts. Probably village scribes kept local records of business transactions.

Scribes likely composed much of the Jewish religious literature. We know that the scribe Baruch wrote the book Jeremiah. Some scholars suspect that Q was produced by village scribes.

The Pharisees and the Sadducees were Jewish schools of thought; Josephus calls them philosophies, but ideologies might be more appropriate. They were social interest parties with religious ideologies and a vision for the nation of Israel. They competed for political influence and the respect of the people.

We know almost nothing about the Sadducees. They seem to have been the party of choice for the rich upper class in Jerusalem. Most priests appear to have been Sadducees, including most of the high priests. The authors of the gospels are preoccupied with one aspect of Sadducean belief, namely, their rejection of the notion of the resurrection of the dead. In Jesus’ time, the idea that the dead never live again was a minority position among Jews, but in terms of the history of Jewish thought, belief in the resurrection was a relatively recent idea, which first appears in Jewish writings in the Book of Daniel (written ca. 164 bce). Scholars assume that the Sadducees’ rejection of the notion of a future resurrection entails a complete rejection of eschatological thinking. Sadducees would not have believed in a day of judgment and any sort of afterlife as a reward or punishment for one’s deeds. We know from Josephus that the Sadducees viewed God as very transcendent and unlikely to intervene on Israel’s behalf in the course of history. Hence the Sadducees did what they could to ensure that Israel got along with the nations and avoided destruction. Perhaps this was a lesson they drew from Israel’s long history of being under foreign domination.

Most likely, the Sadducees did not consider any books of the Hebrew Bible to be authoritative except the five books of Moses. Eschatological thinking appears in the prophets and Daniel, but not in the Torah, which envisions life continuing as usual forever. Jews would follow the prescriptions concerning the temple and the feasts throughout their generations. Israel will prosper whenever its people are faithful to the covenant by keeping the law, and it will fall on hard times whenever its people break the covenant. But God will not intervene decisively at some point to make everything right. It would not be surprising if the wealthy upper class in Jerusalem did not view the writings of the prophets as scripture because it was the wealthy upper class in Jerusalem who were the usual targets of the prophets’ condemnation of social injustices. Likewise, we would not expect the wealthy upper class members to find eschatological thinking appealing, because it implies a complete reordering of the structure of society, that is, the raising up of the meek and a lowering of the rich. If you are at the top of society and life is good for you, you are not likely to buy into eschatological thinking, which is the hope of the disenfranchised.

In addition to rejecting theological beliefs that do not appear in the Torah, the Sadducees rejected the “traditions of the fathers,” that is, the Pharisaic traditions about how the Torah is to be interpreted. Scholars sometimes call the Pharisaic tradition the Oral Torah, but the idea that God gave Moses an oral Torah as well as a written Torah appears to have developed later than Jesus’ time. In Jesus’ day, the Pharisees were not attributing their own legal opinions to Moses.

In the synoptic gospels, the Sadducees play no role until Jesus is in Jerusalem and ticks off the ruling class by clearing the temple. Members of the Sadducees were probably involved in Jesus’ arrest, and they were involved in persecuting the Jerusalem church in the early decades after Jesus’ death. In fact, one Sadducee, Ananias, a high priest, was responsible for killing Jesus’ brother James—an act which greatly upset the Pharisees, who admired James.

The Pharisees were the most popular social interest party in Palestine in Jesus’ time. Pharisees were a voluntary association of like-minded, fairly well-educated laymen who had a vision for Israel and definite ideas about the role of Israel among the nations based on an intellectual and scholastic tradition of scriptural interpretation. In this respect they are different from, say, North American political parties, “which have no intellectual tradition nor consistent platform and are more like coalitions of powerful and influential people seeking power.”[1]

As far as we can tell, the Pharisees were especially interested in questions of tithing, ritual purity, and sabbath observance and less interested in civil laws and regulations for temple worship. They had no political power in Galilee and did not patrol like religious policemen on the look out for infractions of their traditions. They may have singled out Jesus for criticism the way political pundits single out for criticism people who threaten to undermine their political and social agendas. But they could not get Jesus in trouble because he did not behave as a Pharisee. The Pharisees were, after all, a relatively small group of people. They sought to influence people by winning them over to their social program.

In the gospels, the Pharisees are the quintessential villains. They are forever pestering Jesus because he does not observe their traditions. To some extent this picture is unhistorical. Pharisees might have criticized Jesus’ followers for not following their practices of ritual purity, such as hand washing, but they would not have been in Jesus’ house watching him eat: Pharisees only ate with other Pharisees. Most likely, the Pharisees were not a significant problem for Jesus, but became one for the early church situated in Jerusalem—at least until James became the leader. James was exceptionally fastidious in keeping the Torah and was admired by the Pharisees.

There is good evidence that the Pharisees were not Jesus’ main opponents and that many of the controversy stories in the gospels originally involved scribes rather than Pharisees. Morton Smith pointed out that many of the references to the Pharisees in the gospels appear in special Matthew and special Luke and that those references are generally more hostile than the references that appear in Mark and Q.[2] This increased interest in and polemic against Pharisees likely reflects the situation in the period after the destruction of the temple. Prior to the war with the Romans, the Pharisees were but one religious movement in Palestine and were not politically powerful. After the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple, the Sadducees and priests became irrelevant because they lost everything, and the Essenes were mostly wiped out by the Romans. So the Pharisees, who had a social program oriented to everyday life, became the obvious choice for religious leadership in Palestine and in the Diaspora. Hence they became the main competitors for Christians who were interested in evangelizing among Jews. Matthew in particular was especially hostile to the Pharisees and habitually wrote them into his versions of double- and triple-tradition stories. For instance, Matthew added eight references to Pharisees to the triple tradition, and all of them are hostile. Matthew’s references to the Pharisees in the double tradition frequently do not have parallels in Luke although Luke, too, added references to the Pharisees to his Q material. There are only two or three references to the Pharisees in the original Q material. In some places, the original opponents appear to have been the scribes. Apparently, then, the relevance of the scribes to Christians decreased in the course of the first century and that of Pharisees increased, resulting in the gospels’ picture of the Pharisees as Jesus’ primary opponents in Galilee. This underscores the importance of distinguishing between tradition and redaction in the study of the historical Jesus. One must start with the earliest versions of traditions and take account of redactional themes in the gospels.

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[1] Anthony J. Saldarini, Pharisees, Scribes and Sadducees in Palestinian Society: A Sociological Approach (Wilmington, Del.: M. Glazier, 1988), 287.

[2] Morton Smith, Jesus the Magician (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1978), 153–57.

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