updated August 2026
The ancient historian Flavius Josephus describes four rival philosophies among the Jews at the time of Jesus: Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, and a fourth group he traces to Judas the Galilean. We usually call that fourth group the Zealots.
The Sadducees are the ones most modern readers skip past. We know the Pharisees because Jesus argued with them constantly. The Sadducees appear rarely and briefly, and then they vanish from history altogether in AD 70. But they ran the temple, they controlled the high priesthood, and they are the men who arranged the death of Jesus. It's worth knowing who they were.
Where the Name comes from
The Hebrew is Tsedûqîm. The most likely explanation is that it derives from Zadok, the high priest under Solomon (1 Kings 2:35), whose descendants Ezekiel identifies as the legitimate priestly line (Ezekiel 40:46; 44:15).
A second suggestion connects the name to tsaddiq, the word for righteous, but that one has less to commend it.
Either way, the name points where the party actually stood: with the priesthood and the temple.
Sadducees
- The Sadducees were drawn from the priestly and landowning aristocracy. They held the high priesthood and dominated the Sanhedrin.
- The party took shape during the Hasmonean period, in the second century BC, and formed an alliance with the Hasmonean rulers.
- They rejected the oral law developed by the Pharisees and relied on the written law alone. They saw themselves as upholding the law of Moses as properly understood, while the Pharisees were innovators adding to it.
- You will often read that they accepted only the five books of Moses and rejected the rest of the Old Testament. That claim comes from later Christian writers rather than from Josephus or the New Testament, and it may overstate the case. What the sources do establish is their rejection of oral tradition.
- They insisted on human freedom of choice to determine the course of affairs. Josephus says they denied fate entirely, in sharp contrast to the Pharisees.
- They denied the immortality of the soul, the resurrection of the dead, rewards and punishments in an afterlife, and the existence of angels and spirits. They regarded these ideas as later corruptions of Scripture.
- They appear to have had no messianic expectation. That is an inference from what they denied rather than something any source states directly, but it fits everything else we know about them.
- They were politically powerful and wealthy. They wanted to get along with Rome in order to keep their grip on the temple and their place in it.
- The people saw the priesthood and the Sadducees as corrupt. Josephus adds a revealing detail: when Sadducees took public office, they conformed to Pharisaic practice, because the ordinary people would not have tolerated anything else.
- The party died out after the destruction of the temple in AD 70. That is not a coincidence. Their power ran through the temple, and when the temple went, so did they.
Sadducees in the New Testament
Acts 23:8.
Luke stops the narrative to explain them: the Sadducees say there is no resurrection, and no angel, and no spirit, while the Pharisees affirm all of it. This is the clearest statement of Sadducee doctrine anywhere in the New Testament, and Paul exploits it two verses earlier by announcing he is on trial over the hope of the resurrection. The council splits and the hearing collapses.
Mark 12:18-27 and Matthew 22:23-33.
The only extended exchange between Jesus and the Sadducees in the Gospels. They bring him a puzzle about a woman married in turn to seven brothers, and ask whose wife she is in the resurrection. It is not a sincere question. It is a trap designed to make resurrection look absurd.
Watch how Jesus answers. He quotes Exodus 3:6, God at the burning bush saying I am the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Present tense, spoken centuries after the three men died. He argues from the Pentateuch, from a book they accept, on a point of Hebrew grammar. He doesn't cite Daniel 12 or Isaiah 26, which they would have waved off. He meets them on their own ground and beats them there.
Acts 4:1-2 and 5:17.
The priests, the captain of the temple guard, and the Sadducees arrest Peter and John, greatly annoyed that they were teaching in Jesus the resurrection from the dead. Luke names the party explicitly and names the grievance explicitly.
John 11:47-50.
Caiaphas, the high priest and a Sadducee, tells the council that if they let Jesus continue, the Romans will come and take away both their place and their nation. Then he says it is better for one man to die for the people. That is the entire Sadducee position in two sentences: protect the arrangement at any cost.
Matthew 3:7 and 16:1-12.
John the Baptist calls Pharisees and Sadducees together a brood of vipers, and Jesus warns his disciples about the leaven of both. Two parties who agreed on very little, grouped together in judgment.
Why this Matters
Suppose your job, your income, your family's standing, and your religious authority all rest on one institution. Not a belief. An institution, with a building and a budget and a delicate working relationship with people who could shut it down tomorrow. You didn't build the arrangement. You inherited it. But you are the one holding it together, and you are quite sure that if it falls, everyone suffers.
Now a teacher shows up who says the building is coming down, who calls the arrangement corrupt, and who draws crowds.
What do you do?
Caiaphas gave the answer out loud, and it is chillingly reasonable. One man dies, the nation survives. He wasn't a cartoon villain. He was a competent administrator protecting an institution, and protecting the institution required killing Jesus.
Two things follow from this.
- Popular preaching tends to cast the Pharisees as the men who killed Jesus. The Pharisees were the theological opponents. The men who arranged the arrest, ran the night trial, and delivered Jesus to Pilate were the temple establishment, which means largely Sadducees. If you have absorbed the idea that Jesus died at the hands of people who cared too much about the Bible, the historical picture is closer to the opposite. He died at the hands of people who cared about keeping their position.
- Notice the irony sitting in Matthew 28:11-15. The party that denied the resurrection is the party that had to explain the empty tomb. The chief priests pay the guards to say the disciples stole the body. They had to invent an alternative explanation, which tells you something about what they were dealing with.
Within forty years the temple was ash and the party was gone. The resurrection they denied is the reason anyone still reads about them.
Common Questions
What did the Sadducees believe? They accepted the written law and rejected the oral traditions of the Pharisees. They denied the resurrection, the immortality of the soul, an afterlife of rewards and punishments, and the existence of angels and spirits. They insisted on human free will and denied fate.
What is the difference between the Pharisees and the Sadducees? The Pharisees were a lay movement built on oral tradition, popular with ordinary people, and they affirmed the resurrection. The Sadducees were the priestly and landowning aristocracy, rejected oral tradition, denied the resurrection, and held actual political power through the temple and the Sanhedrin.
Did the Sadducees accept only the first five books of the Bible? This is commonly asserted but not well established. Later Christian writers say so; Josephus and the New Testament do not. What is clear is that they rejected the oral law.
Why did the Sadducees oppose Jesus? Their authority depended on the temple and on a working relationship with Rome. Jesus threatened both. Caiaphas states the reasoning plainly in John 11:48-50.
What happened to the Sadducees? The party disappeared after Rome destroyed the temple in AD 70, because the temple was the source of their wealth, their office, and their influence.
Reference
Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 13.10.6, 18.1.4, 20.9.1 Josephus, The Jewish War 2.8.14
Baker’s Evangelical Dictionary: Sadducees
Bridgeway Bible Dictionary: Sadducees
Easton’s Bible Dictionary: Sadducees
Fausset Bible Dictionary: Sadducees
Holman Bible Dictionary: Jewish Parties in the New Testament
Hastings’ Dictionary of the Bible: Sadducees
Kitto’s Popular Cyclopedia of Biblical Literature: Sadducees
Morrish Bible Dictionary: Sadducees
International Standard Bible Encyclopedia: Sadducees
McClintock and Strong: Sadducee
The Nuttall Encyclopedia: Sadducees
The Jewish Encyclopedia: Sadducees
Alfred Edersheim: Chapter 15 Relation of the Pharisees to the Sadducees and Essenes, and to the Gospel of Christ
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