Topic 10 of 33 - Your Place in the Learning Journey
Jewish Groups in the First Century
First-century Judaism was not monolithic. The Gospels and Acts introduce a range of Jewish groups - Pharisees, Sadducees, scribes, Herodians, Zealots, chief priests - and understanding what these groups believed and why they were in conflict with each other is essential for understanding the arguments Jesus engaged in and the tensions that led to his execution. These were not simply religious categories. They were competing visions of what it meant to be faithful to God in a world under Roman occupation.
The Pharisees are the group the Gospels portray most frequently and most critically. They were a lay movement, not a priestly one, committed to extending the holiness requirements of the Temple priesthood to all of Jewish life. They developed an "oral Torah" - a body of interpretation and application of the written law - that they regarded as equally authoritative with scripture itself. They believed in the resurrection of the dead, in angels and spirits, and in God's providential direction of history. After the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE, the Pharisaic tradition became the foundation of rabbinic Judaism. The Pharisees of the Gospels should not be caricatured as simply hypocrites - many were devout, serious, and well-intentioned people with whom Jesus shared significant common ground even as he sharply disagreed with them on certain points.
The Sadducees were the priestly aristocracy, closely associated with the Temple and its operation. They accepted only the written Torah as authoritative, rejected the oral law, and did not believe in resurrection, angels, or spirits - a position Paul exploits brilliantly in Acts 23 when he divides the Sanhedrin by raising the resurrection question. The Sadducees effectively disappeared after 70 CE when the Temple was destroyed, since their entire social and religious world depended on it. The Essenes, discussed in the Dead Sea Scrolls entry, were a third major group - separatist, apocalyptic, and intensely priestly in orientation.
Beyond these organized groups were the ordinary people Jesus spent most of his time with - the am ha-aretz, the people of the land, who were often regarded by the Pharisees as insufficiently observant. Their concerns were practical: taxes, drought, debt, illness, Roman soldiers. Jesus's ministry addressed them directly, and the Gospels' portrait of his engagement with the poor, the sick, and the socially marginalized reflects the social reality of Galilee and Judea under Roman rule. Understanding the social world of 1st-century Judaism makes the Gospels three-dimensional rather than flat.