solemnity and weight, to that employed by our Lord, St. Matt. xxii. 32, from which it is
evidently taken. (See book v. ch. iv., the remarks on that passage.)
56. It is a curious circumstance in connection with the question of the Sadducees, that it
raised another point in controversy between the Pharisees and the 'Samaritans,' or, as I
would read it, the Sadducees, since 'the Samaritans' (Sadducees?) only allowed marriage
with the betrothed, not the actually wedded wife of a deceased childless brother (Jer
Yebam. i. 6, p. 3 a). The Sadducees in the Gospel argue on the Pharisaic theory,
apparently for the twofold object of casting ridicule on the doctrine of the Resurrection,
and on the Pharisaic practice of marriage with the espoused wife of a deceased brother.
Connected with this was the equally Rationalistic opposition to belief in Angels and
Spirits. It is only mentioned in the New Testament,57 but seems almost to follow as a
corollary. Remembering what the Jewish Angelology was, one can scarcely wonder that
in controversy the Sadducees should have been led to the opposite extreme.
57. Acts xxiii.
The last dogmatic difference between the two 'sects' concerned that problem which has at
all times engaged religious thinkers: man's free will and God's pre-ordination, or rather
their compatibility. Josephus - or the reviser whom he employed - indeed, uses the purely
heathen expression 'fate' (ειµαρµενη)58 to designate the Jewish idea of the pre-ordination
of God. But, properly understood, the real difference between the Pharisees and
Sadducees seems to have amounted to this: that the former accentuated God's
preordination, the latter man's free will; and that, while the Pharisees admitted only a
partial influence of the human element on what happened, or the co-operation of the
human with the Divine, the Sadducees denied all absolute pre-ordination, and made
man's choice of evil or good, with its consequences of misery or happiness, to depend
entirely on the exercise of free will and self-determination. And in this, like many
opponents of 'Predestinarianism,' they seem to have started from the principle, that it was
impossible for God 'either to commit or to foresee [in the sense of fore-ordaining]
anything evil.' The mutual misunderstanding here was that common in all such
controversies. Although59 Josephus writes as if, according to the Pharisees, the chief part
in every good action depended upo n fate [pre-ordination] rather than on man's doing, yet
in another place60 he disclaims for them the notion that the will of man was destitute of
spontaneous activity, and speaks somewhat confusedly - for he is by no means a good
reasoner - of 'a mixture' of the Divine and human elements, in which the human will, with
its sequence of virtue or wickedness, is subject to the will of fate. A yet further
modification of this statement occurs in another place,61 where we are told that, according
to the Pharisees, some things depended upon fate, and more on man himself. Manifestly,
there is not a very wide difference between this and the fundamental principle of the
Sadducees in what we may suppose its primitive form.
58. The expression is used in the heathen (philosophical) sense of fate by Philo , De
Incorrupt. Mundi. section 10. ed. Mangey, vol. ii. p. 496 (ed. Fref. p. 947).
59. In Jewish War ii. 8. 14.
60. Ant. xviii. 1. 3.
61. Ant. xiii. 5. 9.