At first the Pharisees were undoubtedly inspired by very high motives and an exalted and unselfish patriotism,based upon an invincible faith in the power of their God.
But as time went by,they developed more and more into a meddlesome sect which would tolerate no dissension from the old-fashioned prejudices and superstitions.
Deliberately they turned their backs upon the future and fastened their eyes firmly upon the bygone glory of the Mosaic era.
They hated everything that was foreign.
They detested all innovations and decried all reformers as enemies of the state.
And when the greatest of all prophets spoke to them of a kindly and loving God and preached the common brotherhood of all men,the Pharisees hurled themselves against their enemy with such violence that they upset and wrecked the very nation which they had helped to found only a short time before.
Next to the Pharisees in power,but not quite so numerous,were the Sadducees.
The Sadducees (who probably derived their name from a priest called Zadok)were much more tolerant than the Pharisees.Their tolerance,however,was not based upon conviction but upon indifference.
They belonged to the small class of well-educated Jews.They had travelled.They had seen other lands and other people,and while they were faithful in their worship of Jehovah,they acknowledged that much might be said for the noble doctrines of life and death which were preached by an increasing number of Greek philosophers.
They were not much interested in the world of the Pharisees,which was being increasingly populated with devils and angels and other queer imaginary creatures,brought to Palestine by travellers from the east.
They accepted life as they found it and tried to live an honourable existence without placing too much faith in the promise of a future reward.
Indeed,when the Pharisees tried to argue with them on this point,they were apt to ask for some corroborating testimony in one of the ancient books,and none was forthcoming,as none was given in those venerable scrolls.
In short,the Sadducees,much more than the Pharisees,were in daily contact with the age in which they happened to live.
Consciously or unconsciously they had absorbed the wisdom of their great Greek neighbours.
They recognised the importance of one God,be he called Jehovah or Zeus.
But they did not feel that so great a power could be interested in the petty details of human existence.Hence,all the purely legalistic considerations of the Pharisees appeared to them to be a sheer waste of time and energy.
They held it to be more important to live bravely and nobly than to flee from life and concentrate upon the salvation of one's own soul behind the safely sheltering walls of a scholastic study.
They looked forward,rather than backward,and expressed scant regrets at the illusory virtues of the past ages.
Gradually they lost all interest in purely religions matters and in a very practical fashion devoted themselves to politics.
Years afterwards,when the Pharisees insisted upon the death of Jesus on account of his religious heresies,the Sadducees made common cause with them and denounced the Nazarene prophet because he seemed to be a menace to the established law and order.
They were not interested in the doctrines of Jesus.
But they feared the political consequences of his ideas and therefore were in favour of his execution.
They arrived at their conclusions in a different way from the Pharisees.
But their tolerance was as sterile and as narrow-minded as the avowed intolerance of their opponents and they bore an equal share in the final drama of Golgotha which will be told in one of the last Chapters of this book.
There remains one other party which we must mention for the sake of historical accuracy.It plays,however,no great rle in our story.
Many of the Jews lived in endless fear of what we might call unconscious sin.
Their laws were so complicated that no one could ever hope to obey every jot and title of the ancient books.
But such disobedience (however involuntary)was a terrible sin in the eyes of Jehovah,who himself was the incarnation of the law,and would be punished almost as severely as a breach of one of the Ten Commandments.
To escape this difficulty,the Essenes,or Holy Men,deliberately abstained from what we might call all “acts of living.”
They did nothing at all.
They fled into the wilderness,far away from all strife,and held themselves aloof from their fellow men.
For the sake of greater protection,however,they often lived in small colonies.
They did not believe in private property.What belonged to one,belonged to all.With the exception of his clothes and his bed and the bowl in which he carried his food from the common kitchen,no Essene had anything that he could call his own.
Part of each day the members of those pious settlements were expected to give to the tilling of the few poor corn fields that provided them with food.
The rest of the time they could spend perusing the holy ures and torturing their unworthy souls with the study of dark and dismal points in the books of long-forgotten prophets.
It was not a very attractive programme to most people and the number of the Essenes remained small compared to that of the Pharisees and Sadducees.
They were never seen in the streets of the cities.
They did not engage in business,and they avoided all contact with political life.
They were happy because they knew that they were saving their own souls,but they did remarkably little for their neighbours and exercised no direct influence upon the life of their nation.
Indirectly,however,they played a great rle.
For when their austere asceticism was combined with the practical eagerness of the Pharisees (as it was in the case of John the Baptist)they could influence large numbers of people and had to be reckoned with very seriously as a power in the state.
