OT of the Sadducees

[Shaolen]

I had always heard that the Sadducees only held the Torah as sacred scripture and not the Prophets etc. I recently read a refutation of this from a protestant that said this was a misunderstanding of Origen who was referring to Josephus but apparently Josephus was saying that the Sadducees only believed in written tradition and not oral tradition. Has anyone else ran into this?

 

[steve53]

Google Josephus and Sadducees and you will get your answer.

And it will be the definitive answer, as Josephus was a Priest in the Second Temple.

The Sadducees strictly followed the Torah- as all Jews had to- but little else.

 

[Shaolen]

I found an article displaying this idea.

thewordmp3.com/BLBCD/BLB/faq/nbi/396.html

 

[patrick457]

I had always heard that the Sadducees only held the Torah as sacred scripture and not the Prophets etc. I recently read a refutation of this from a protestant that said this was a misunderstanding of Origen who was referring to Josephus but apparently Josephus was saying that the Sadducees only believed in written tradition and not oral tradition. Has anyone else ran into this?

The guy is correct. From a past post of mine:

While it is an often-parroted idea that the Sadducees accepted only the Torah, this view is in reality far from certain. Some Church Fathers like Hippolytus, (Refutation of all Heresies 9.24), Origen (Contra Celsum 1.49), and St. Jerome, (Commentary on Matthew 22:31f.) claimed that the Sadducees accepted only the Torah as scriptural, though they are too late to be reliable in this regard: their statements might just as well indicate a later confusion of the Sadducees with Samaritans. A passage in Josephus’ Antiquities (13.297 [10.6]) is sometimes read as evidence for this, but in context what he was actually talking about was the Sadducean rejection of Pharisaic traditions, without any indication of Scriptural canon:

What I would now explain is this, that the Pharisees have delivered to the people a great many observances by succession from their fathers, which are not written in the laws of Moses; and for that reason it is that the Sadducees reject them, and say that we are to esteem those observances to be obligatory which are in the written word, but are not to observe what are derived from the tradition of our forefathers.

Of course, when Josephus says that the Sadducees reject ‘tradition’, he just means the ‘tradition’ of the Pharisees. The Sadducees have their own special traditions, of course.

What makes it difficult to study the Sadducees is the fact that many of our sources are biased against them. The later Mishnah and Talmud were codified by the Pharisees’ spiritual descendants, and Josephus chooses to repeat public opinion (which preferred the lay-oriented Pharisees more to the aristocratic Sadducees).

 

[steve53]

Josephus writes about them in “Wars” as well.

Remember that they were essentially outlawed after the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70.

You have to be on VERY solid grounds to challenge or downplay Josephus.