Christians who rely on the New Testament alone in drawing
conclusions about the Sadducees and Pharisees end up with a warped picture. The
reason is that the New Testament texts were not intended by their writers to be
historical accounts or biographies of Jesus. The words of Christian gospel were a combination of
catechesis and polemics, designed to educate, proselytize, and propagandize all
at once.
The Gospels were composed in their present form after the
Roman war and the destruction of the Second Temple. This event left all the Jewish
religious movements in a predicament (including the early Christians who saw themselves as Jews also), and this was not so much because the Temple itself had
fallen.
Under Roman law, the only religion besides the state’s
paganism that was allowed in the empire was the worship of the Jews. All other
forms of worship were outlawed. You either worshiped the Roman gods or because
you were a Jew (or favored their religion) worshiped the God of Abraham. Worshipping
a foreign deity from a different kingdom independent of Rome’s jurisdiction was
tantamount to treason.
The Romans never intended to destroy the Temple during the
wars. As Judaism was an approved religion practiced by many Roman citizens, the
Temple of Jerusalem was a landmark of Roman civilization. The Temple fell due
to a mistake carried out by the soldiers under Titus, a mistake Rome tried to
undo when Emperor Julian, in 363 as part of his plan to revive Roman religion
(which included Judaism) in his attempt to squash out Christianity, ordered it
rebuilt. Though the order never came to fruition, the fact demonstrates the
favored (and most especially legal) position Jewish worship held in ancient
Rome.
You see when the Temple fell, a competition in the Jewish
community arose. Vying for validity in the eyes of the empire, Christians
competed with the Pharisees over who were the true and rightful Jews. It was
during this period that the written Gospels, especially Matthew’s, took shape.
The negative description of the Pharisees in the Gospels was glossed over in
rhetoric as Christianity was striving for what it believed was its rightful
place as a legal religion. Much like Watchtower publications draws pictures of crazy-eyed clergymen appearing pompous and radical, the written Gospels did similar things with the competing Jewish groups in an attempt to say: We are the one true Jewish religion.
Without the Temple, the priestly sects of the Essenes and
the Sadducees disappeared. Since the Pharisees centered on obedience to and
study of Torah, they survived. You read nothing about the Essenes in Christian writ, only a little about the Sadducees, but a lot about the Pharisees because of this. The battle for the right to be recognized the authentic "Jews" led to the Pharisees as
described in the New Testament to be written as polemic caricatures. Early Jewish
descriptions of Christians were likewise colored with negative rhetoric, meaning that the
truth about both groups (Jews and Christians) is actually somewhere in between.
Eventually Christianity was legalized in Rome, becoming the
state religion. The persecuted became the persecutors because as soon as they
realized they no longer needed to fight for the recognition of the worship as
Jewish, they began a systematic oppression of the Jews that led to pogroms, the
Spanish Inquisition and expelling of the Jews in 1492 from Spain, and
eventually laid the groundwork for the ideology of Adolf Hitler’s “solution”
regarding the Jews. Today Christians are making formal apologies for these mistakes, even rewriting their theology and admitting that these descriptions in the New Testament are colored with anti-Semitism. Groups like the Roman Catholic Church, some Lutherans, and even a few Evangelicals are coming to grips with the fact that they were virtually the inventors of anti-Semitism that laid the groundwork for the ideologies that inspired the Holocaust, though some more conservative members among them still disagree with and/or debate this.
It would be incorrect to claim that the JWs were therefore like the Pharisees and Sadducees of the first century as described in the Gospels. In fact, the Witnesses are closer to the Gospel writers who gave us some not-so-accurate caricatures that have led to 2000 years of hate crimes.
