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3. PHARISEES AND SADDUCEES

All Jewish theology in the first century was inherently political. Judaism was a state religion with the Torah as its constitution and Moses as the supreme legal authority; devout Jews were constantly getting into trouble with their conviction that God was their only proper head of state. In that respect the Jewish sects were political parties. To fully understand Jesus in the context of his time, we must now consider how intertestamental theology translated into political activity and, ultimately, violent activism.

The first-century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus provides a remarkably thorough and detailed view of this process; however, like the gospels, his history is hardly without inaccuracies or self-serving distortions. Fortunately we have a very good understanding of Josephus' prejudices, because he wrote a book about himself called The Life. Born (37 A.D.) into the priestly aristocracy, he claimed royal Hasmonean descent on his mother's side; his father "was in great reputation in Jerusalem." Without even a pretense of modesty, Josephus describes himself as a scholarly prodigy who at the age of fourteen was frequently consulted by the high priests on difficult questions of the law. At sixteen Josephus embarked on an investigation of what he identified as the three major sects of Judaism at his time -- the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes. He then went to live in the wilderness for three years with a hermit named Bannus, wearing no other clothing than that which could be made from bark and leaves, and bathing frequently in cold water. At age nineteen he returned to Jerusalem, a confirmed Pharisee.

At the outbreak of the revolt of 66 A.D., which Josephus says he tried to discourage, he was sent to Galilee to try to take control of the dissident forces there. Despite his intention to rein in the rebels, Josephus soon found himself commanding their army against the Romans. After a number of battles he was captured and brought before Vespasian, commander of the Roman army. Josephus, employing his self-professed skill as a prophet, promptly declared that Vespasian was destined to become Emperor. Vespasian seems to have been bemused at first, but when the prophecy became true within two years, he brought Josephus to one of his villas in Rome, gave him a pension, and made him a Roman citizen; Josephus took the name "Flavius" from Vespasian's family name.

While living in Rome, Josephus first wrote The Jewish War, dealing with the period from 170 B.C. to end of Jewish resistance at Masada in 74 A.D. In 93 A.D., twelve years after finishing The Jewish War, Josephus began his second great history, Jewish Antiquities, covering the period from the Biblical creation to the outbreak of the revolt. The two books often treat their overlapping periods and events with subtly different or even contradictory emphasis and details, but the common features of all of Josephus' writing are his pro-Roman apologetics and his utter contempt for the revolutionary masses and their popular leaders; in War 5.444 he calls the rebel leaders "slaves, the scum, the bastard aborted offspring of our nation."

Josephus offers parallel accounts of the sectarian divisions of first century Judea in War 2.119-166 and Antiquities 18.11-23. In War, written in Vespasian's villa, Josephus distinguishes the three principal sects he investigated in his youth: Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes. In the later book, Antiquities, with more distance between himself and the politics of a war in which perhaps half the population of Judea was killed, he adds an otherwise unnamed and somewhat mysterious "fourth sect of Jewish philosophy."

Josephus describes the Sadducees as philosophically quite similar to contemporary Roman Epicureans: They believe that the soul perishes with the body; that God has no concern with the actions of men and fate no role in their lives -- it is each man's choice to be good or evil. The Sadducees adhere strictly to law of Moses as presented in the Torah, and are eager to object to the halakah, the body of oral law and moral speculation that had grown up to supplement the Torah.

The Pharisees, by contrast, are the keepers of the halakah; they instruct the people in the practical applications of religious law. God, they believe, both enforces fate and permits the limited exercise of free will; He determines a man's temperament, but a man's own will determines whether that temperament will turn to good or evil. Most importantly, the Pharisees believe in the immortality of the soul; the souls of the virtuous live again, while the evil are condemned to "everlasting prison." Because these Pharisaic doctrines were so popular, even the Sadducees in public office were forced to observe them, or risk the wrath of the crowd.

Writing in Greek for a sophisticated Greco-Roman audience, Josephus described these doctrines in somewhat rarified hellenistic terms. For most first-century Pharisees, the doctrine of resurrection was a literal truth, as evidenced by the rapidly growing practice, found in many tombs of the era, of ossilegium, or bone-gathering. The bodies of the dead were laid out in narrow stone shafts called loculi (Hebrew kokhim) and allowed to decompose for perhaps a year; the bones were then gathered and reburied in a stone casket called an ossuary, to await the last day, when God would raise them up and put flesh upon them again.

Until recently, most scholars have assumed that the Pharisees were not as powerful as Josephus suggests. They were the party of the tradesmen, artisans, students, and lawyers who awaited their redemption in the last days. The Sadducees were the economic and administrative elite, dominating the high priestly offices and the Sanhedrin, the seventy-one member Jewish governing council; their comfort in this life left them little yearning for redress in the next.

But the Dead Sea Scrolls are now prompting an entirely new calculation of the Pharisee-Sadducee equation. Lawrence Schiffman, a Judaic scholar at New York University and an editor of some of the Qumran texts, offers evidence that the original Qumranites were Sadducees who split, around the time of the founding of the Hasmonean dynasty (mid-second-century B.C.), with a powerful Pharisee-dominated priesthood over the issue of the halakah. Later, the Pharisees fell out with the Hasmoneans -- who were themselves Sadducees -- over the increasing hellenization of the Temple cult (exactly the abuse which had, in a much severe form, prompted the Hasmonean revolt against the Seleucids); the Sadducees, much more prone to the worldly, hellenistic life-style, then became the ruling party. However, as Josephus suggests, the Sadducees continued to pay public obeisance to Pharisaic rulings on the halakah.

Robert Eisenman also believes that the Qumranites were Sadducees, but he proposes a split among the Sadducees themselves, around the time of the first Roman incursion into Judea in 63 B.C. In that year the Roman general Pompey was invited to bring his army into Jerusalem by the Hasmonean heir Hycranus II, who was fighting his brother Aristobulus for the Hasmonean throne. Aristobulus' supporters were defeated after fiercely resisting the Romans, whereupon Pompey set up Hycranus as king of a rump Jewish state under de facto Roman authority. Hycranus' authority was soon compromised internally as well, by his advisor Antipater, who was appointed a virtual co-regent in 47 B.C. by Julius Caesar, a position inherited by his son Herod the Great. When Rome's historic enemy in the region, Parthia, invaded Judea and deposed Hycranus II in 40 B.C., Herod solicited Roman support to restore him as sole ruler of Jews; in 37 B.C. he became King of Jews. Throughout his long reign, which ended shortly after Jesus' birth in 6 B.C. (Jesus was born before his time due to a miscalculation by a 6th century monk named Dionysius Exiguus, who miscalculated the date of Herod's death and thus the date of Jesus' birth.), Herod was careful to observe his status as vassal of the Roman emperor.

According to Eisenman, the Qumranites had their origins among the supporters of the defeated Hasmonean scion Aristobulus. At that point the Sadducees divided into nationalist and collaborationist camps, the former evolving into the militant and perhaps even messianic opponents of the Roman overlords, the latter supporting Herod and then his Roman successors.

A more conservative Qumran scholar, Frank Moore Cross of Harvard University and the original Qumran editing team, also agrees that "the Sadducees whom we have pictured as religious conservatives and worldly bureaucrats now prove to have spawned a radical apocalyptic wing at Qumran." Just as importantly, Cross proposes that the party of the Pharisees, although composed of a moderate majority, had a radical element that eventually gravitated toward the violent anti-Roman opposition, as well as a conservative wing that eventually led the rabbinic reconstruction of a much more conservative Judaism after the failure of the 66 A.D. revolt. The radical Pharisees may well have supported Jesus, despite the gospels' post-revolt casting of all Pharisees in the conservative mold.

While these factions appear to paint a hopelessly muddied picture of the Judean political scene, they actually lead to a resolution of startling simplicity. There were two major political inclinations in first century Judea: The nationalists and the collaborators. No doubt a silent majority (perhaps just barely a majority at the time of Jesus, and shrinking to a minority throughout the Roman occupation) grudgingly paid Caesar's taxes and tried to live as Moses had commanded. But the political debate was shaped at the extremes, by a powerful elite that found collaboration profitable, and a significant minority that found Roman rule economically oppressive and theologically abhorrent. This nationalist sentiment was for long periods inchoate and unfocused, yet it provided a common medium for activists ranging from an almost mandarin literati to peasant highwaymen. And it was somewhere within this broadly-based and variegated political activism that we must locate the historical Jesus.

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