Acts 23 - Introduction

Excursus.

The Pharisees and Sadducees.

These two parties made up the Sanhedrim during the lifetime of the Lord, and later during the thirty-eight years which elapsed between the resurrection morning and the fail of Jerusalem and breaking up of the Jewish polity. The name of Pharisee, though not the party itself, we first meet with in the Gospels, where these rigid though, it seems, at times hypocritical professors of a strict Judaism meet as in opposition to the broader and more universal teachings of Jesus Christ. Our information respecting them, however, comes mainly from the Jewish writer Josephus, who composed his annals and memoirs at a time a little, but only a very little, later than the presumed date of the three synoptical Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke). The term Pharisees is a Hebrew (Aramaic) term, and signifies ‘the separated ones.' They appeared first as the champions of the old Jewish life and worship which were threatened by the desire of Antiochus Epiphanes to graft on the old life and worship, Greek customs and even worship. We find them later, in the time of the Asmonean John Hyrcanus, a powerful and popular party, in deadly opposition to the spirit which under foreign rule was gradually undermining the ancient life and traditions then growing more and more dear to the majority of the Jewish people, as they lost all hope of political independence. These earnest men busied themselves in collecting the traditions of the older rabbis, and in drawing a more and ever mote rigid line between the Jewish and Gentile nations. They taught the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead and of rewards and punishments in another life, and here was the point of contact between them and the disciples of Jesus of Nazareth. In this last age of Israel in Jerusalem, the Pharisees were divided into two schools the followers of Shammai ‘the Binder,' as he was termed, and of Hillel ‘the Looser.' The former were rigid in their observance of the Sabbath, hard and even bitter in spirit towards all who disagreed with them. The latter were men of a broader and more universal culture; their moral training was of a more general and gentle spirit, more adapted to the needs and ordinary life of men and women. It was from Jews of the school of Shammai that the persecutors of Christianity were chiefly drawn.

The strange fact connected with these ‘separated ones' was that they were utterly unconnected with the priesthood, and often in bitter opposition to it. The higher offices of the Jewish hierarchy were held during the life of our Lord and the period treated of in the ‘Acts' by men who belonged to the other party in the Sanhedrim, the Sadducees. The word ‘Sadducee' is connected with the Hebrew word signifying ‘righteous,' but it is not clear whether the sect derived their name from this word, that is, from some pretensions originally made by its members to a true or perhaps exclusive righteousness, or from one Zadok, the disciple of Antigonus, who taught that ‘men should not be servants who do their master's will for a reward;' and the scholar and his cheerless school, it is said, developed this teaching into a denial of the resurrection which formed the reward for the righteous. In the time of Jesus Christ and His followers, most of the leading members of the priesthood, including the varied distinguished men who held the office of high priest during the last forty years of Jerusalem, were Sadducees, and with them were associated many of the wealthiest and most influential of the Jews. Admitting the authority of the written law, they declined to receive the mass of traditions which had grown up about it. They denied the existence of angels and spirits, and taught there was no resurrection, no such thing as immortality. On every point they were at issue with the Lord and His disciples. Every fresh convert to Christianity was an additional hater of Sadduceeism. No wonder, then, that Caiaphas and Annas watched for the moment when they could crucify the Lord, or that their successor in the high-priestly office, Ananias, thirsted to destroy the Lord's disciple, the brilliant and successful Paul of Tarsus. The irreconcilable differences in religious belief between these two parties in the state and great council was one of the principal causes of the weakness of Israel during those last sad years. We can scarcely estimate now what the effect upon the people must have been of the dreary unbelief of the great priestly order. To Sadduceeism and its cold and passionless teaching must be ascribed in no small degree the rapid spread of such wild enthusiastic societies as the zealots and the Sicarii (assassins). The mass of the nation revolted from the polished unbelief of their national leaders. The avowed disbelief of the hierarchy of Israel in the glorious hopes of an hereafter, repelled and alienated the hearts of that strange people, which through such varied fortune and misfortune ever clung with a passionate love to the old promises made to their fathers, and thousands were thus induced to welcome the fanaticism and wild enthusiasm of those sects who contributed in so large a degree to the final catastrophe.