Pharisees vs Sadducees: What Was the Difference? Resurrection, Tradition and the Temple

The Pharisees were a popular movement of teachers who kept the written Law of Moses with the “tradition of the elders” and believed in the resurrection and in angels. The Sadducees, the priestly and wealthy party of the Temple, held to the written Law alone and said, as Acts records, “that there is no resurrection, neither angel, nor spirit.”

Their deepest quarrel was over the grave. The Sadducees taught that the soul dies with the body. The Pharisees hoped that God would raise the dead, and when Jesus took up the question, he sided with that hope and answered from the burning bush: God “is not the God of the dead, but of the living.”

The two groups lived side by side in Jerusalem in the time of Jesus, and both sat in the council that heard Paul. Josephus, the first-century Jewish historian, counted them as two of three schools of thought among the Jews; the third was the Essenes. After the Romans destroyed the Temple in AD 70, the Sadducees vanished, and the Pharisees’ way of teaching carried on into rabbinic Judaism.

Pharisees and Sadducees side by side

Keep one thing in mind as you read it. The Sadducees left no writings of their own that survive. Nothing definite is known about their views, the Jewish Encyclopedia of 1906 observed, “except what is recorded by their opponents in the works of Josephus, in the Talmudic literature, and in the New Testament writings.” We still see the Sadducees through other people’s eyes.

Who were the Sadducees?

They were the party of the leading priests and of the rich families joined to them by marriage. Their name probably comes from Zadok, the priest King Solomon set over the priesthood: “Zadok the priest did the king put in the room of Abiathar” (1 Kings 2:35). In Ezekiel’s vision of the Temple, “the priests the Levites, the sons of Zadok” are the ones chosen to serve at the altar (Ezekiel 44:15). The Greek name means, in that encyclopedia’s words, “an adherent of the Bene Ẓadoḳ,” the descendants of Zadok who held the high priesthood. Scholars have long accepted this explanation, but it remains probable rather than certain.

The Temple was their strength. The high priest who arrested the apostles was one of them: “the high priest rose up, and all they that were with him, (which is the sect of the Sadducees,) and were filled with indignation” (Acts 5:17). Their teaching, Josephus says, “is received but by a few, yet by those still of the greatest dignity,” and they could “persuade none but the rich.”

Who were the Pharisees, and what does “Pharisee” mean?

“Pharisee” comes from the Hebrew perushim, “one who separates himself” from what is impure, as the same encyclopedia explains it. The Pharisees were teachers of the Law whose standing came from learning, not from birth.

Did the Sadducees believe in the resurrection?

No. Of all their differences, this is the one the New Testament states most plainly: “For the Sadducees say that there is no resurrection, neither angel, nor spirit: but the Pharisees confess both” (Acts 23:8). Josephus agrees and goes further: the Sadducees taught “that souls die with the bodies,” and they rejected “the punishments and rewards in Hades.”

The Pharisees believed that God would raise the dead and judge each person by the life he had lived. Josephus, writing for Greek and Roman readers, put their hope in the language of the philosophers: souls are “incorruptible,” and the good “shall have power to revive and live again.” The Mishnah, the rabbis’ written record of their oral teaching, shows how central the hope became. Among those who have no share in the world to come it names “One who says: There is no resurrection of the dead derived from the Torah.”

The Sadducees once tested Jesus on this very point. They told of a woman who married seven brothers in turn, each dying childless, and asked: “in the resurrection whose wife shall she be of the seven? for they all had her” (Matthew 22:28). Jesus answered, “Ye do err, not knowing the scriptures, nor the power of God. For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven” (Matthew 22:29-30). Then he met them on their own ground, the book of Moses, the Law they accepted, and quoted God’s words at the burning bush: “I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? God is not the God of the dead, but of the living” (Matthew 22:32). Mark tells the same story and names the passage: “have ye not read in the book of Moses, how in the bush God spake unto him” (Mark 12:26). The patriarchs had died long before Moses stood at that bush, and God still named himself their God. He does not lose his own.

Why did the Pharisees keep the tradition of the elders?

They believed that God had given Israel, along with the written Law, a way of living it that the elders had handed down. Josephus describes the dispute: “the Pharisees have delivered to the people a great many observances by succession from their fathers, which are not written in the laws of Moses; and for that reason it is that the Sadducees reject them.” Mark gives one such custom, washing the hands before meals: the Pharisees “eat not, holding the tradition of the elders” (Mark 7:3).

The rabbis traced this teaching back to Sinai. The Mishnah opens its sayings of the fathers with a chain of teachers: “Moses received the Torah at Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua, Joshua to the elders, and the elders to the prophets, and the prophets to the Men of the Great Assembly.” The historian Lee I. Levine, writing for My Jewish Learning, adds a fair correction: the Sadducees interpreted Scripture too and kept their own rulings, even a “Book of Decrees,” but they did not give those rulings the authority of the Law itself.

Some Church Fathers wrote that the Sadducees accepted only the five books of Moses and rejected the Prophets. Yet the same writers often identified the Sadducees with the Samaritans, the encyclopedia notes, and Josephus, who knew the Sadducees, says only that they kept what the Law enjoined. The claim is uncertain.

The difference showed in the courts. The Pharisees, Josephus says, “are not apt to be severe in punishments,” while the Sadducees were “very rigid in judging offenders, above all the rest of the Jews.” The Pharisees read “an eye for an eye” as fair compensation in money, the encyclopedia says, while the Sadducees held to the letter of the words.

Did the Pharisees and Sadducees believe in fate?

Josephus, who compared the Pharisees with the Greek Stoics, says the two parties disagreed about how far God directs human lives. The Pharisees “say that some actions, but not all, are the work of fate, and some of them are in our own power.” The Sadducees “take away fate,” holding that “all our actions are in our own power, so that we are ourselves the causes of what is good, and receive what is evil from our own folly.” In his longer account he says the Sadducees supposed “that God is not concerned in our doing or not doing what is evil.” The word “fate” is Josephus’s own, chosen for Greek readers. In Jewish terms the question was how God’s providence and human choice work together.

Where did each group’s power lie?

The Sadducees ruled the Temple, and the Pharisees had the people. The Sadducees had “not the populace obsequious to them,” Josephus writes, “but the Pharisees have the multitude on their side.” Even Sadducees who became magistrates, he says, followed “the notions of the Pharisees, because the multitude would not otherwise bear them.”

Rome pressed on both. Its governors could appoint and remove the high priest: Valerius Gratus, Pontius Pilate’s predecessor, removed four high priests in turn, and then “Joseph Caiaphas was made his successor.” Under King Herod, when the people swore loyalty to Caesar and the king, more than six thousand Pharisees “did not swear.” And when Jesus raised Lazarus, both groups feared the same thing: “If we let him thus alone, all men will believe on him: and the Romans shall come and take away both our place and nation” (John 11:48).

Levine warns that the evidence may flatter the Pharisees. Josephus joined them as a young man, and the rabbis “regarded themselves as the Pharisees’ successors,” so both may have made the Pharisees look stronger than they were.

How did Jesus deal with the Pharisees and the Sadducees?

He challenged both, and the Gospels sometimes name them together. When many of them came to John’s baptism, John called them a “generation of vipers” (Matthew 3:7). They came together again asking Jesus for “a sign from heaven” (Matthew 16:1), and he warned his disciples, “Take heed and beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees” (Matthew 16:6). The disciples then understood that he meant “the doctrine of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees” (Matthew 16:12), the teaching of each, though the two taught very differently.

His sharpest words to the Pharisees are in Matthew 23, spoken “to the multitude, and to his disciples” (Matthew 23:1), and they begin with respect for their teaching: “The scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat: All therefore whatsoever they bid you observe, that observe and do; but do not ye after their works: for they say, and do not” (Matthew 23:2-3). The charge is hypocrisy. They tithed garden herbs and “omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone” (Matthew 23:23). Even here Jesus tells them to keep the tithe. He wants the herbs and the mercy both.

The Gospels’ picture of the Pharisees needs the same care as the picture of the Sadducees. The 1906 encyclopedia warned that no true estimate of the Pharisees can be had from the New Testament writings, “which take a polemical attitude toward them,” nor from Josephus. Levine adds that the Gospels give the Pharisees “a distinctly secondary and peripheral role in the Jerusalem episodes” of Jesus’ life.

And the Gospels show friendlier meetings too. Jesus ate in Pharisees’ homes more than once (Luke 7:36; 11:37; 14:1). Some Pharisees warned him, “Get thee out, and depart hence: for Herod will kill thee” (Luke 13:31). Nicodemus, “a man of the Pharisees” and “a ruler of the Jews,” came to him by night and called him a “teacher come from God” (John 3:1-2). Later he spoke up for Jesus among his fellow Pharisees, asking, “Doth our law judge any man, before it hear him, and know what he doeth?” (John 7:51), and he brought “a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about an hundred pound weight” for Jesus’ burial (John 19:39).

The Catechism of the Catholic Church sums up this side of the record: “Christ’s relations with the Pharisees were not exclusively polemical.” Jesus shared some of their teaching, it notes, among it “the resurrection of the dead,” “almsgiving, fasting and prayer,” and “the custom of addressing God as Father.”

Is the Gospels’ criticism of the Pharisees a judgment on the Jewish people?

No. Jesus, the apostles and Paul were Jews, and the Gospels record arguments among Jews about how to keep God’s Law. The Catholic Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America both say plainly that those arguments are no charge against the Jewish people. The Catholic Catechism, quoting the Second Vatican Council, teaches that “the Jews should not be spoken of as rejected or accursed as if this followed from holy Scripture.” The ELCA’s guide for preachers and teachers warns against the idea that, because “Jesus argued with Pharisees and scribes and the Jewish priests,” everything they taught has been set aside, and it calls contrasts of that kind unfair to the side cast as wrong. Judaism and Christianity parted later, over who Jesus is.

What happened between the Sadducees, the Pharisees and the apostles?

After Pentecost the Sadducees led the opposition. They arrested Peter and John, “Being grieved that they taught the people, and preached through Jesus the resurrection from the dead” (Acts 4:2). It was the old quarrel over the grave, now with a risen man at the centre of it. The Sadducean high priest put the apostles “in the common prison” (Acts 5:18). Years later, Josephus records, a Sadducean high priest, Ananus, had James, “the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ,” stoned; those citizens who were “the most uneasy at the breach of the laws” protested to the king.

A Pharisee spoke up for the apostles. Gamaliel, “a doctor of the law, had in reputation among all the people,” told the council: “if this counsel or this work be of men, it will come to nought: But if it be of God, ye cannot overthrow it” (Acts 5:34, 38-39). Paul had studied “at the feet of Gamaliel” (Acts 22:3) and called himself, “as touching the law, a Pharisee” (Philippians 3:5). On trial before the council, he saw both parties in the room and cried out, “I am a Pharisee, the son of a Pharisee: of the hope and resurrection of the dead I am called in question” (Acts 23:6). The council split at once, and the Pharisees’ scribes said, “We find no evil in this man” (Acts 23:9). Some Pharisees became believers themselves: Acts speaks of “certain of the sect of the Pharisees which believed” (Acts 15:5).

What happened to the Pharisees and Sadducees after AD 70?

The Sadducees disappeared with the Temple. Once the Temple and the Jewish state were gone, the old encyclopedia says, they had no reason left to exist as a party: “They disappear from history.” The party that denied the resurrection did not outlive the building that gave it power.

The Pharisees’ way of life did not depend on the Temple. The Talmud tells how Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai, a student of Hillel, escaped the siege of Jerusalem and was allowed to found a house of study at Yavneh. My Jewish Learning calls the tale’s historical truth “questionable,” but says the story “represents the birth of rabbinic Judaism, a way of life focused on Torah and Jewish law, rather than Temple worship or political sovereignty.”

At the end of the second century Rabbi Judah the Patriarch edited the Mishnah, the written record of that oral teaching. With the later commentary on it, the Gemara, it forms the Talmud, which still guides Jewish life, and Judaism today grew from this line of teachers. To the Pharisees the encyclopedia traces the synagogue as a place of common prayer and study, and the daily reciting of the Shema, the “Hear, O Israel” that Jesus called the first of all the commandments (Mark 12:29).

Related reading

• Who were the Pharisees?
• Judaism vs Christianity: shared Scripture, different answers about Jesus
• Torah vs Bible: what is the difference?
• How big was Jerusalem in Jesus’s time?
• Who was Nicodemus, and what was his role?
• When and why was Saul’s name changed to Paul?