The Pharasees & Sadducees Corrupted Judaism

In the complex tapestry of Jewish history, the Pharisees and the Sadducees are responsible for corrupting Judaism and the functioning of the Second Temple.

The Sadducees’ Loved Money

The Sadducee Sect of Judaism were the religious leaders of the Temple and had a major hand in government and society. Individuals were usually wealthy. They were strict about keeping the Torah.

Their major responsibility was to operate the Temple, doing two required sacrifices daily, and collecting taxes. They were also part of the Sanhedrin, which was the authority on Jewish law at the time and a type of court.

Jesus called the Sadducees and Pharisees snakes. Wealth, money, taxes, power, corruption – go figure.

Now the Pharisees, who were lovers of money, were listening to all these things and were ridiculing Him. And He said to them, “You are the ones who justify yourselves in the sight of people, but God knows your hearts; because that which is highly esteemed among people is detestable in the sight of God.

The Pharisee Loved Tradition

Most people who are not Jewish are not aware of the “Oral Torah,” which is the oral traditions of the fathers. There was nothing essentially wrong with it. It was simply additional instruction for living. But like many traditions we have, it became more important in the minds of some than the Hebrew written Bible (Torah). It also placed additional daily burdens on the people. They already had 618 laws to live with from the written Torah.

The Pharisees together with the Scribes interpreted the Law (Torah) for the people. If there was a conflict within the law or a new situation arose that the Torah didn’t strictly cover, the Pharisees fixed it for the people. Also if the description or statement in the book was just too foul tasting, The Scribes and Pharisees rewrote it. It’s like today using the title “lord” – we just don’t do that, don’t understand it, so we find other terms. Biblical text has to be understandable and relatable or its useless.

Jesus spoke harshly against the Pharisees

The Pharisees were regarded as teachers and acquired the name “Rabbi,” starting in Jesus’ time. Jesus spoke against the Pharisees saying, “The scribes and the Pharisees have seated themselves in the chair of Moses; therefore all that they tell you, do and observe, but do not do according to their deeds; for they say things and do not do them. They tie up heavy burdens and lay them on men’s shoulders, but they themselves are unwilling to move them with so much as a finger.” In this passage, Jesus brought eight charges against the Pharisees in Matthew 23:1–39 (NASB)

Like we sometimes do the Pharisees made long prayers while shorting the money widows received for their homes. They put heavy burdens of traditions on people who were already heavily burdened. They made a great show of giving to the Temple, but neglected those around them who needed help and they killed the prophets who called them out for their failure.

Jesus told them that their generation of Pharisees would suffer for it. In AD 80 the Romans destroyed the Temple just as Jesus said would happen. By AD 128 people were hiding in the hills (Masada) to flee the wrath of the Romans who killed all Jews they could find. The fleeing Jews were scattered to the wind.

False religion

Among the Sadducees, Pharisees, and Scribes there were no doubt many who honored God in the right ways, not just putting God first in their lives but caring for the needy. Many of them recognized the light of the divine in Jesus and followed him.

But just as today there were many who did religious activity simply for show – that is to look good in the eyes of those from whom they could gain something. Hypocrites and snakes. Many were wealthy and powerful and used religion to gain and protect their wealth, but had no appetite for helping others.

Many were steeped in comforting traditions that were simply religious mumbo jumbo, expecting favorable treatment from God, but had no real reflection of the essence of their teaching of loving others.

Religion isn’t about saying the right things and impressing other people with power and wealth. Religion mostly boils down to how we treat other people.

The Sadducees, Pharisees, and Scribes of Jesus time often had a false notion of what religion was about. The distortion placed a heavy load of nonsense on people and sometimes warped their thinking of what Judaism was about.

Tradition isn’t religion and it can’t take first place.

Wealth and power aren’t religion and they can’t take first place.

Worshiping In Vain

The Pharisees had a more inclusive interpretation than the Sadducees, but even their broader understanding still left some excluded and outcast. Most of all, their interpretation used the needs of the working class as leverage in their power competition with the Sadducees. In Mark’s stories, Jesus sees through this. Though the Pharisees were relevatively more inclusive, they still benefitted from a classist system that left others on the margins.

Jesus emerges in the story as the prophet of the outcasts, whether they are outcast by Sadducees or by Pharisees.

This is the dynamic we are bumping into in this week’s passage. Handwashing was another tradition used to determine who was in and who was out, who was centered and who was pushed to the margins, who was closer to the top of their society and who was closer to the bottom.

But it was classist and elitist. To put it in terms used by Karl Marx, handwashing was bourgeois. Remember this was way before the discovery of germ theory: it was not about cleanliness as we now understand it. Handwashing in this week’s passage was about one’s dedication to Torah observance or rather their interpretations of and adherence to society’s definition of purity.

And Jesus cuts straight to the heart of the matter.

It is not unwashed hands that are harmful in a society, he says, but “sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly.”

Today, in certain sectors of Christianity, we could apply these same principles. It’s not church attendance, offering size, worship music tastes, watching Fox News as your news media of choice, wearing the political label of “pro-life” or the claim of being a “Bible-believing, born-again Christian” that makes you an insider.

Jesus could just as accurately say to us: “They worship me in vain; their teachings are merely human rules.’ You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to human traditions.”

What truly threatens a person’s, a community’s, or a society’s wellbeing are greed, classism, scapegoating immigrants, a distrust of science, bigotry, racism, homophobia, transphobia, misogyny, nationalism, exceptionalism, and supremacist ways of thinking and viewing the world. These are all things that come from within and are intrinsically harmful and destructive of our human communities—our life together. Jesus’ teaching could be broadened here to parallel contemporary analysis of systemic-isms or kyriarchy.

Racism isn’t only internal to individuals, for example; it’s embedded in social policy and custom and culture as well as internal bias and socialization. I’m not saying that we can retrospectively make Jesus a critical race theorist because he was not that, and he wasn’t even really talking about that. But we today can build on his individualist critique and ask if there is something here that can also be applied to our social systems today.

Lastly, I don’t interpret Jesus here as simply giving his followers a new list of rules that allowed them to go on practicing the ways of marginalizing others, just with a more internalized standard. I see him doing something much different. By naming the things in his new list, I see him calling the very ones who are marginalizing others based on something as silly as washing their hands to do a little introspection and see if there were things within themselves, practices that they themselves engaged in that harmed others or themselves.

• What are the things that matter?

• Why do they matter?

• What are the things that are genuinely, intrinsically harmful?

Christians today often worship Jesus in vain, holding up elements of Christian culture as the test of who is in and who is out in the midst of our political culture-war, all the while engaging in practices that quite literally in this time of pandemic harm people around us.