JESUS, JEWS, AND HISTORY. It was the Sadducees not the Pharisees who opposed Jesus.

May 25, 2023

By: Joseph Puder

When Cyrus the Great of Persia, released the captive Jews in Babylonia, to return to their ancestral Judean home in 538 BCE, many of the Jewish captives no longer remembered their original Hebrew language and required translators. These translators were used primarily to read the holy Torah written in Hebrew. Those translators became the teachers that formed that basis of the Pharisaic movement.

It is important to remember that in the Babylonian Exile, with Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem destroyed in 586 BCE, a new form of Jewish worship evolved: the little temple or synagogue. Judaism itself changed in Babylonia. Inspired by the universal messages of the Jewish prophets Jeremiah, Isaiah, and Ezekiel, Judaism was no longer confined to the Land of Israel, and God was no longer an active participant in activities of the Israelites.  In Babylonia, modern Judaism was forged.

With the advent of the synagogue, the One Holy Temple had a competing institution: the synagogue. Along with the Synagogue evolved a movement of teachers that stood in contrast and in competition  with the Temple bureaucracy, led by the Sadducees, named after the High Priest Zadok.  The Sadducees interpretation of the Torah was literal while the Pharisees understood it to be inspired by God.

Ezra and Nehemiah led the returnees from Babylonia, with a mandate from Cyrus to rebuild the Holy Temple in Jerusalem.  They returned to a homeland that was denuded by the forced departure of a vast number of Jews, and now the country (Judea, Samaria, and Galilee) was inundated with foreigners from neighboring nations. To strengthen the identity of the revived Jewish nation, they carried out decrees against mixed marriages and idol worshipping.  Ezra and Nehemiah set out soon after their arrival to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem.

Construction of the Second Temple began in 521 BCE and was completed and dedicated in 515 BCE.  Once the Temple began to operate, the high priest from the Zadok lineage became the most powerful figure in the nation.  Alexander the Great swept through the land of Israel and captured Jerusalem in 332 BCE on his way to Egypt.  Following the early death of Alexander, his empire was split by his successor generals in three ways: one took Macedonia (Alexander’s native land), another took Egypt (Ptolemy), and the third Syria (Seleucids).  The land of Israel switched hands between Egypt and Syria.  Culturally, however, the entire Mediterranean world became imbued with Hellenism.

To curry favor with the rulers of both Egypt and Syria, the Sadducee High Priest adopted the Hellenistic culture.  The coveted office of High Priest was given to the highest bidder by the occupying (Greek) Syrian or (Greek) Egyptian rulers.  The elite Jerusalem families competed for the high office.  And it was this sort of corruption that led to the Maccabean revolt in 168 BCE.  This gave rise to the Hasmonean dynasty until Herod murdered the last of the Hasmonean princesses Mariamne and became, in 37 BCE, the Edomite King of the Jews under Roman tutelage. (The Edomites were converted to Judaism by the Hasmonean king/high priest Alexander Yannaeus 103-46 BCE).  In 63 BCE, the Roman general Pompeius intervened in a civil war among competing Hasmonean contenders and Jewish independence began to lapse.

It was during the reign of Herod that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, in Judea, the birthplace of King David. According to Matthew’s gospel, following Jesus’ birth, Joseph, and Mary (Miriam), Jesus’ parents, fled to Egypt (Matthew 2:13-15) and lived there until the death of Herod.  Herod’s oppressive rule was deeply resented by the Jews of the land. When the family returned from Egypt, they moved to Nazareth in the Galilee (Matthew 2:19-23).

One can imagine the antipathy Jesus’ family felt towards the Herodian rule and the cruel execution of Jesus’ cousin John (Yohanan) the Baptist.  One can also figure that they held little sympathy for the corrupt Sadducee establishment.  They most likely supported the Pharisee (people’s) party.  The two parties, the Sadducees, and Pharisees, competed for power and allegiance of the people.  While the Sadducees power base was in the Temple, the Pharisees were teaching in synagogues, and it is there where their power base rested. It is conceivable that Jesus’ early education in the Torah took place in a Nazareth synagogue, and the family allegiance was with the Pharisees.

When Jesus began his ministry in the Galilee, the legacy of the famous sages’ schools of Hillel and Shammai were well known.  Matthew gospel 12:1 describes the following: “At that time Jesus went on the sabbath day through the corn; and his disciples were hungered, and began to pluck the ears of corn, and to eat. 2 But when the Pharisees saw it, they said unto him, Behold, thy disciples do that which is not lawful to do upon the sabbath day. 3 But he said unto them, have ye not read what David did, when he was hungered, and they that were with him; 4 How he entered into the house of God, and did eat the shewbread, which was not lawful for him to eat, neither for them which were with him, but only for the priests?”

It seems apparent that Jesus belonged to the liberal Pharisaic school of the House of Hillel that wouldn’t have made an issue over the above-described circumstances. But vilifying the Pharisees by the Matthew author decades later was more likely a personal vendetta against the rabbis of Yavneh, who were direct descendants of the Pharisees. It's important to note that after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE by the Romans, Yohanan Ben Zakkai established a Jewish learning center in Yavneh seeking to resolidify the remnants of Jewish life and Torah as a guide. They finalized the canon of the Hebrew Bible in Yavneh, and in the process decided to issue a decree that excluded believers in Jesus as the Messiah from Synagogue attendance. Thus, the Matthew author juxtaposed his anger at the rabbis in the 80’s CE, in his hometown of Antioch, with Jesus’ alleged disputes with the Pharisees. In Matthew 23:33, he lashed out at the Pharisees and Scribes saying: “You snakes! You blood of vipers! How will you escape the sentence of hell?”

But the writings of the author of Matthew, living in Antioch, Syria, two generations after Jesus’ crucifixion, are not consistent with the political map in Jerusalem in Jesus’ time. In Jesus time it's the Sadducees who resented Jesus overturning the money changers stalls outside the Temple. The Sadducee priests were in business with the money changers. They considered Jesus a troublemaker.  After the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, they disappeared as a party/movement. The Pharisee House of Hillel, however, had no quarrel with Jesus. Matthew on the other hand had trouble with the rabbis in Yavneh, and hence, his unfair denunciation of the Pharisees.

Let’s be clear, the occupying Roman governor alone had the power to impose capital punishment. Whereas Barnabas was a mere criminal, the Jesus movement appeared to be a “political” threat to the Romans. 

For more than 15 centuries, the Church spread the deicide calumny.  The notion that the Jews allegedly killed Jesus, cost the lives of untold Jews.  It wasn’t until the Second Vatican Council in the 1960’s, that the Church rescinded that unjust and untrue charge.  Now it is time to absolve the Pharisees from the undeserved characterization in the gospels.