Sadducees, a Jewish school or party in New Testament times, the name most probably derived from one Zadok, founder of an aristocratic party, or from the race of the Zadokites, a family of priests at Jerusalem since the time of Solomon. The chief characteristics of the Sadducees were that they were an aristocratic party, and further that they acknowledged only the written Torah as binding, rejecting the entire traditional interpretation and further development of the law during the course of centuries by the scribes. They thus rejected the whole body of Pharisaic tradition, representing at once an older legal, and an older religious, standpoint. Accordingly they refused to believe in a resurrection of the body, or any personal continuity of the individual, or retribution in a future life—a survival of original Old Testament theology; they denied angels and spirits; and they held that man enjoys freedom of will to do good or evil, and that his happiness or unhappiness is the work of his own hands alone. They obviously lacked the religious energy of the Pharisees, whose interests were centred in another world, and, partly also from their superior social position, became marked by superior culture, by worldliness, and by merely political aims. Thus Sadduceism is denounced by Jesus as 'the leaven of Herod,' while he only inveighs, as does the Talmud, against the hypocrites amongst the Pharisees. The Sadducees disappear with the fall of the Jewish state. We still find mention of them in the Mishna, but the notices in the Talmud are far from being clear.
See Schürer's History of the Jewish People in the Time of Jesus Christ (Eng. trans. div. ii. vol. ii. 1890); Wellhausen, Die Pharisäer und die Sadducäer (1874); Montet, Essai sur les origines des partis Saducéen et Pharisien (1884); and the articles JEWS and PHARISEES.