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52 Is JUDAISM the Religion of Moses?

"THEIR INTERESTS WERE ENTIRELY IN THIS WORLD, AND THEY HAD NO
SUCH INTENSIVELY RELIGIOUS INTEREST AS THE PHARISEES" (Schurer, The
Jewish People in the Time of Jesus Christ, sec. ii, vol. ii, p. 39).

They had no desire to practice real religion, neither did they think it necessary to teach the
people the Laws of God. Even though the majority of Sadducees were priests, and were ordained of
God to instruct the people in righteousness, they totally renounced their responsibility.

"Such as they were, the Sadducees had little or no direct influence upon the mass of the peo-
ple, nor did they seek to have. They made no effort to teach the people, presumably because
THE THOUGHT OF DOING SO NEVER ENTERED THEIR MINDS" (Herford, Juda-
ism in the New Testament Period, p. 122).

"We shall perhaps be not far wrong if we represent the Sadducees as holding the ancestral
religion MAINLY AS AN INHERITANCE and NOT AS A LIVING REALITY ... It is in
accordance with this view that THEY DID NOTHING TO ENLARGE THE MEANING
OR INCREASE THE INFLUENCE OF THE TORAH as the Pharisees did" (ibid., p. 121).

The Sadducees made no attempt whatever, that we have record of, to make the Scriptures
known to the people or to carry out their God-given function of instructing the people in the Law.
They did not see the importance of it! In fact, they were even willing to sacrifice the Laws of Scrip-
ture if they could gain politically from it.

"They were the LESS RESTRAINED BY ANY RELIGIOUS SCRUPLES from engaging
in public affairs WHICH INVOLVED SOME AMOUNT OF COMPROMISE WITH
GENTILES" (ibid., p. 122).

Thus, Schurer adequately describes the Sadducees as pre-eminently having "A
RECESSION OF THE RELIGIOUS MOTIVE" rather than a zealousness for the Scriptures (The
Jewish People in the Time of Jesus Christ, sec. ii, vol. ii, p. 39).

What You Should Remember About the Sects

It becomes quite obvious, when the truth is known, that the sects of Judaism were not really
teaching the Law of Moses. What all of them had done, in one degree or another, was to blend many
pagan customs and beliefs, along with various man-made opinions, with the Law of Moses and then
endeavored to teach their contradictory doctrines as the truth of God.

The Pharisees had accepted many customs of the heathen as so-called traditional laws from
Moses. They had also enacted many of their own commandments which by-passed the commands
of the Scripture and in fact, the Pharisaic commands even annulled, in many cases, the plain com-
mandments of God.

The Sadducees were disinterested in religion! The only reason, in reality, that they had any
connection with religion at all was because most of them were priests who had the hereditary right
to minister in the Temple and to have an association with the religious life of the people. They

The Berean Voice March-April 2003