Tuesday, October 13, 2009

The Pharisees & Sadducees

In the New Testament, we read quite a bit of Jesus' confrontation with the Pharisees & the Sadduccees. In Matthew 3:7, John the Baptist refers to the Pharisees & Sadducees as a "brood of vipers." Paul himself also comments in Phillipians 3:5 that he himself was a Pharisee. However, I think that a lot of people don't really know the beliefs of the Pharisees and the Sadducees, and I was delighted to see that my Bible had a chart highlighting the beliefs of the Pharisees and Sadducees, along with the Zealots and Essenes. So, I'm using this chart to list the beliefs of the Pharisees and Sadduccees.

The Pharisees
They apparently were rooted in the Hasidim in the 2nd Century BC
The Pharisees accepted the inspiration of the Oral Tradition, as well as the TOrah.

They held a mediating view that didn't allow for God's sovereignty or free will to cancel each other out

They held to a developed hierarchy of angels & demons

They believed in a future for the dead, the immortality of the soul and reward & punishment for a soul after death

They championed human equality

Their teachings moreso focused on ethics as opposed to theology

The Sadducees
They apparenlty probably begun during the Hasmonean Period (166-63 BC) & their demise occured with the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD
They denied the authoritative and binding nature of the oral law

They were more literalistic in interpreting the Mosaic Law

They were exacting in Levitcal puirty

They believed into free-will & attributed all to it

They didn't believe in an afterlife, a ressurection of the dead, or an afterlife (hence their question to Jesus in Matthew 22:23-28)

They didn't believe in angels & demons, nor a spiritual world

They believed that only the books of Moses were canonical Scripture

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