Atheist Age

Jesus: ‘Virtual Pharisee’

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In Who are the real Sadducees and Pharisees, Dick Gross writes;

Easter has been and gone and I imagine that the Sadducees and Pharisees are still a bit of a mystery.

We think we know that they are the evil Christ Killers of the bible and are deserving of our detestation.  We don’t really know what the differences between them are but that somehow they are shadowy and malevolent.  In Mel Gibson’s movie, the leaders of the two groups look like psychopaths in stupid hats.  They might have had a weakness for funny hats, but they were far from wicked.

Indeed, I consider my godless self to be a modern inheritor of the Sadducees’ mantle.  And so I regard these two enigmatic groups of the Passion story with much affection.

In the time of Jesus, it was a crowded scene of Jewish parties, groups and movements which included Pharisees, Sadducees, Zealots, Essenes and many leaders, false Messiahs, prophets and pseudo prophets.  Thus, the only hope for the Jesus cult was to define itself as different.

Whilst ostensibly every Jew believed the same things about the same God, if one tried to map the geography of belief of a community, one would find it a very complex terrain. For even in the most spiritual and mystical society, there can be found a sceptical minority.  These sceptics inevitably are to be found no matter how credulous the world in which they live.  In the Hellenistic world, the sceptics included the atheistic Epicureans who were materialists, dubious of divinities.

The Sadducees were such a group of Jewish priests.  They diluted their beliefs to something that was not too demanding.  They rejected the existence of angels and spirits and had no belief in the afterlife and immortality of the soul.  They rejected divine intervention.  Their creed was very human centred.  They were not atheists.  They were not even agnostic.  They knew there was a God.  But they did not test their God by believing that He could do too much.  The Sadducees mixed their religion with reason and doubt.  They were the party of the sceptics.  Thus, I feel a sense of communion with this mob even though they were theists.

If I can digress for a while, but thinking about my sense of communion with the Sadducees got me thinking that tolerant atheists can have communion with progressive religious congregations who have a complicated sense of what God is and a healthy scepticism of some of the bigger claims of faith like the afterlife.  There are modern believers with views like the Sadducees’ and I reckon we atheists should have a dialogue with them other than name calling.  Sorry for the ecumenical digression.

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Tags: Christianity, Cults, Easter, Miracle, Myth