This week of the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast is sponsored by the beautifully put together Dwell Audio Bible app. It's a great thing to make a part of your daily routine. They're offering huge discounts on an annual membership right now for yourself or to give away. You can click on the link in the show notes below to check that out. All right, let's get after it. Hey, do you guys remember a couple episodes ago when I was like, hey, the two things you don't want to talk about if you want to avoid a social meltdown would be religion and politics. And then I went on to talk about religion a whole bunch. Well, guess what? Now I'm going to talk about politics a whole bunch, but I'm not going to advocate for anything. It just suits us really well for this conversation as an example. So thick skin, here we go. Have you ever thought about how hard it's going to be a thousand years from now for our descendants to sort out what our different political tribes meant and believed in the right now and maybe like the 150 years previous to right now? It's going to be stinking impossible because these two groups are all over the map. And look, I know a lot of people listen in other countries. I understand that this is the number five rated podcast in all of Algeria. And I want to say thank you again to the listener there. But I get that this example is very American, and hey, we're just gonna have to roll with it. So you got your Democrats and your Republicans, right? And depending on what little sliver of time you look at, the people of the future could say, well, Republicans were small government pro-war and expansionism, and for conservative traditional social values. And Democrats were for big government and lots of spending and super against war and for very liberal social values. But if you just look a few years in either direction, you can see those things flipping because what position the political parties hold does have a lot to do with who's in power at any given time. And if you look back a little bit further into like the 1950s and back into the 1930s and back even to the 1800s, you see almost a complete flipping of who thinks what at what time. So nailing down a set of political parties in the ancient Near East 2,000 plus years ago with very limited sources is going to be tricky. Yet, when we pick up the New Testament, we see these two parties all over it, the Pharisees and the Sadducees. And apparently we need to know what we're talking about there in order to understand the narrative because of how much they come up, especially the Pharisees. And of course, we need to know who these people are in order to understand the text in a similar manner to how the original audience would have understood it, because they definitely knew who these guys were. So I'm gonna do my best in this episode to explain who these characters are because they come up right here in Matthew chapter 3 and verse 7. We're hearing about John the Baptist and how he's baptizing people, and there's this great big religious movement spontaneously happening out in the middle of the desert in a very inconvenient place to get to. And then we read this. But when he saw he being John, many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to where he was baptizing, he said to them, You brood of vipers who warned you to flee from the coming wrath, produce fruit in keeping with repentance. And don't think that you can say to yourselves, we have Abraham as our father. I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham. The axe is already at the root of the tree, and every tree that doesn't produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire. Okay, set aside that whole angry rebuke part. We're gonna break that down next time around. But first, let's figure out who's being rebuked and what this would have meant to the original audience: Pharisees and Sadducees. So these are two groups. These are historical, religious, social, philosophical, political parties. Now, the Sadducees go way, way, way back, and the Pharisees go way back. Now, I did a video on this over on the YouTube channel a couple years ago, I suppose. And there were a lot of people who were like, hey, that's that makes perfect sense what you did there, because you kind of likened the Pharisees to the more conservative-minded crowd and the Sadducees to the more liberal-minded crowd. And other people watch that video and they're like, you screwed up the whole thing, you big idiot. It's the other way around. But like I was saying a minute ago, it kind of depends on when you ask, and it kind of depends on what particular platform positions you evaluate to figure out which is more like our conservatives of this era and which was more like the liberals of this era. Here's what I mean: your Pharisees came about during the Hasmonean dynasty. They correspond pretty closely to the Maccabean rebellion, and their job in society was to interpret the written law of Moses and to call people toward an expectation of a Messiah and toward personal holiness. They were not as concerned with the affairs of the temple and the public religious activity at the national level. They were more interested in the personal behavioral level and this kind of fraternity of lawyer priest, congressmen, supreme court justice hybrids that they guarded the boundaries of very, very closely. It was hard to become a Pharisee, took a lot of work and a lot of study. But the Pharisees believed that the literal written law of the land, that would be like our constitution, that that was not the only thing that God had communicated to people, and that to really properly lead the people, they would need to expand their understanding of what God had revealed beyond what was written in the Torah or what we would call the first five books of the Old Testament, and out to this oral tradition that they believed that God had handed on to Moses. So the idea was that the written stuff, you know, anybody could look at that and kind of wrestle with it, but that there was this other layer of understanding about what God meant that had been spelled out for Moses and handed down through certain oral traditions. When you weighed the tradition along with the written stuff and you reasoned it through and listened to all the great minds from the past, then you could get to how things ought to be. And they were very concerned with how things ought to be. The Sadducees, on the other hand, traced their lineage all the way back to the first temple era, the one that was built by Solomon and a certain high priest named Zadok, who worked around that time. And so they believed that they held this priestly baton that had been passed on one group to the next down through history, and that they knew how to do the temple ritual stuff the right way. And like, if you're an outsider to Judaism, which I very much am, that might sound ridiculous. Like, how hard is it to just do your temple stuff? You show up, and I don't know, you've stabbed like a sheep or something, you probably got some blood that you dump on a thing or you sprinkle or whatever. I don't know. The Old Testament's a big, complicated document. Maybe there are a few things you'd have to study up on, but really how hard can it be to just do church every week? But there is a ton, as you look more closely at this, of controversy around how exactly you carried out these duties, who got what things, who had what duties, what made you ready to carry these things out, what made you impure or unprepared to carry these things out. And they believed that they were the torchbearers and the gatekeepers of all of the temple stuff, and that they did this on behalf of the people. However, as you know, because we've talked about it a lot, Alexander the Great came along, and a ton of Hellenizing or Greekifying influence came with him in the late 300s and then 200s and 100s BC. And the Sadducees, uh, they kind of came around to a place where they got really rich and they kind of sidled up alongside the cultural invaders and took advantage of certain opportunities to create this priestly ruling class. Now, this priestly ruling class of Sadducees did not believe in the oral tradition that the Pharisees believed in. They believed that what was written down is the only thing that counts. And since what's written down in what they would consider to be the scriptures does not include any reference to an afterlife or resurrection, they didn't believe in any of that business. But the Pharisees did believe in all of that business, and they believed that their exceptional righteousness and personal standards of conduct was kind of the key to that. Whereas the Sadducees would believe that proper execution of priestly rituals would be the key to getting things right with God. Again, not that they believe that there was some payoff at the end. So it kind of breaks down very naturally if you think about it. The Sadducees don't think there's an afterlife, so they're gonna get theirs in the this life. The Pharisees think there's an afterlife, so they're going to reject some privilege in the interest of getting something way better in the afterlife. Now, what's interesting here is that the political spectrum that we try to inflict on this situation is gonna be incomplete no matter what, because we could go with the political spectrum I went with in my video a couple years ago, which is to say the Sadducees lived it up a little bit more, they sidled up alongside the Greek influence and kind of liberalized themselves, while the Pharisees dug in and were very conservative and wanted to return to Jewish roots in terms of personal behavior. And then you got, you know, your Sadducees equals the left, Pharisees equals the right comparison. That's what I went with. But we could also flip that around and do it the exact opposite way if we instead frame it in terms of founding document and law. The Sadducees then would be the conservatives who are for the strict literalist interpretation of their quote-unquote constitution, the written law, whereas the more liberal Pharisees are the ones who like the case law, all of the tradition and argumentation that really expands on that original written law to allow a whole lot more flexibility and support for their expanded ideas. Or we could torture the spectrum even further and compare these two groups to Catholics and Protestants, because the Sadducees believed that there needed to be a priest. I mean, that was their job, it was their identity, it was their role, it was their meal ticket. And so they were the go-between between God and man, but the more Protestant-like Pharisees believed that everybody was a priest and could have access to God to some degree. Okay, I'm stretching all of this. My point is not to say that Sadducees are Catholics or that Catholics are bad or that Pharisees are Protestants or that Protestants are bad. My point is to say that these two groups are really very much so a moving target, and our sources on this stuff are it's frankly sketchy. I think the first historical reference to the Pharisees is actually in the New Testament. And Phariseeism goes on to be the foundation for rabbinical Judaism. So these are the good guys in the minds of my Jewish friends, and the Sadducees kind of get lost to history because in 70 A.D., you know, the invasion with Titus and Vespasian from Rome, that ends up with the temple being destroyed. I remember what we just said the Sadducees did for a living? I mean, their entire identity and reason for existence is attached to the statehood of their people and the life of everything that's going on around the temple. The temple gets torn down. These people don't really serve a role in society anymore, whereas the Pharisees continue to serve a role in societies as the interpreter of law and the arbiter of what is and isn't good behavior, and at least initially the watchdogs for this vague idea that there might still be a Messiah hanging out there somewhere. So, in the interest of fairness, I think a lot of Jewish people today would take great exception to the characterization of the Pharisees in the New Testament as the bad guys, but wow, it sure makes sense from a Christian perspective that the Pharisees are the bad guys, in part because they freaked out and participated in the execution of Jesus, and the church was very insistent on not letting them slide for that. I mean, Peter goes right in there and is like, no, don't you try and slide out of this thing. Jesus Christ, who you crucified, he says that in the book of Acts. So from a Christian perspective, look, the Pharisees are the bad guys. And part of the reason they're the bad guys is because everything that theoretically was their job, that is to bring the life of the priesthood to the individual, to connect people to God and to point people toward the Messiah, they weren't getting it done. The funny thing is, remember, we're in Matthew chapter three, and in this passage, we're reading about the person who is doing their job for them, that is pointing people toward the Messiah. It's John the Baptist. And then these two groups show up together, hand in hand, la di-da, getting along great as though nothing is the problem. They function together sort of in a governing body called the Sanhedrin, but these guys cannibalize each other hardcore. But now all of a sudden everything's great because we're curious and upset about this John thing. They come out to scrutinize it in a rare show of solidarity, and John is going to have nothing of it. Okay, I know I went a little bit long this time, but I wanted to get all of this Pharisee-Sadduce stuff into one conversation, and uh we'll get into the scathing part next. I like you guys, and this is fun. Can't wait to do it again tomorrow. All right, I'm Matt, this is 10 minute Bible Hour Podcast. Catch you soon.