All: Between the Testaments

Between the Testaments

The rise of the parties: Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes

It is in exactly these Hasmonean years that the religious parties of the Gospels take shape. The ISBE dates the open break to John Hyrcanus, who abandoned the Pharisees for their rivals the Sadducees, "and as the years rolled on, the chasm between the two great parties in Israel grew ever wider" (ISBE, "Asmoneans"). The Gospels assume that chasm everywhere; one verse sums up the deepest of their disagreements: "the Sadducees say that there is no resurrection, neither angel, nor spirit; but the Pharisees confess both" (Acts 23:8).

In the sources' terms: the Pharisees were the party of the "traditions of the fathers", the oral law alongside the written, popular, devout, and (the ISBE says) "hagiocratic," wanting the nation governed as a holy community; the Sadducees were the priestly-aristocratic party who held to "only the written testimony" and were "very liberal in their views in general," and who tended to hold the high priesthood and to make peace with the ruling power (ISBE, "Asmoneans"; Schürer, History of the Jewish People, Div. II, "The Pharisees and Sadducees"). Mark catches the Pharisees exactly when it explains that they and "all the Jews" hold "the tradition of the elders" (Mark 7:3), and the two parties stand side by side when John the Baptist rebukes "many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to his baptism" (Matthew 3:7).

A third group, the Essenes, never appears by name in the Bible but fills out the picture: an ascetic, communal, intensely pure movement described by Schürer and the Jewish Encyclopedia (Schürer, Div. II, "The Essenes"). Here a caution matters most: every source in this file was written before the 1947 Dead Sea Scrolls, the discovery that transformed the study of the Essenes and is widely (though not unanimously) connected with them. So read these older descriptions of the parties as solid on the Pharisees and Sadducees and provisional on the Essenes, the evidence that would reshape the question had not yet come out of the ground.

Sources, trace every one

Every cited verse, in full. Tap any reference to open it in the reader.

  • Acts 23:8bsb

    For the Sadducees say that there is neither a resurrection nor angels nor spirits, but the Pharisees acknowledge them all.

  • Mark 7:3bsb

    Now in holding to the tradition of the elders, the Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat until they wash their hands ceremonially.

  • Matthew 3:7bsb

    But when John saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to his place of baptism, he said to them, “You brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the coming wrath?

On contested questions we show every major view, attributed and cited, and pick no winner. Answers are synthesized from primary sources, truth you can trace, not opinion.

The rise of the parties: Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes · Bubble Bible