Sadducees

The Sadducees were a Jewish party in Second Temple Jerusalem, closely associated with the temple priesthood and the ruling elite, and they appear in the Gospels and Acts as a distinct group alongside the Pharisees (Matthew 3:7).

The text says John the Baptist met “many of the Pharisees and Sadducees” with the charge “You offspring of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” and the call “Therefore produce fruit worthy of repentance!” (Matthew 3:7–8), warning them, “Don’t think to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham for our father,’ for I tell you that God is able to raise up children to Abraham from these stones” (Matthew 3:9). In controversy with Jesus they are told, “You are mistaken, not knowing the Scriptures, nor the power of God” (Matthew 22:29); Mark 12:24 repeats, “Isn’t this because you are mistaken, not knowing the Scriptures nor the power of God?” The exchange presses the claim that God is “not the God of the dead, but of the living” (Matthew 22:32).

Historically, the Sadducees are identified as the party that denied resurrection and angelic or spiritual beings; Acts 23:8 says, “For the Sadducees say that there is no resurrection, nor angel, nor spirit; but the Pharisees confess all of these.” They are also associated with a Torah-centered authority that did not treat Pharisaic oral tradition as binding.

The text says that in Acts the apostolic preaching of the resurrection meets official opposition; after “an angel of the Lord opened the prison doors by night” (Acts 5:19), Peter and the apostles answer, “We must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29). They proclaim, “The God of our fathers raised up Jesus, whom you killed, hanging him on a tree” (Acts 5:30); “God exalted him with his right hand to be a Prince and a Savior, to give repentance to Israel, and remission of sins” (Acts 5:31); and “We are his witnesses of these things; and so also is the Holy Spirit, whom God has given to those who obey him” (Acts 5:32).

In Christian interpretation, the Sadducees are often read as a warning against denying resurrection and limiting God’s power to the present order. Some Catholic and Orthodox readers use their rejection of oral tradition as a mirror for later debates about Scripture and Tradition; many Protestant readers more often cite them as a caution against rationalism or merely external religion; critical historians stress that the party’s beliefs are known chiefly through sources that opposed them. These are interpretive and historiographical differences, not a single settled reading.

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.