Sadducees
Article
Sadducees is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between October 10, 2022 and August 08, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “grey deity of the Pharisees and the Sadducees”; “9: In Matthew 22, the Sadducees (a sect of anti-afterlife Jews) gave Jesus a puzzle”; “Pharisees and Sadducees hold themselves as superior because they’re better at following the social rules of the time”. It most often appears alongside Jesus, US, Bentham’s Bulldog.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 3
- Issue count: 3
- First seen: October 10, 2022
- Last seen: August 08, 2024
Appears In
- Highlights From The Comments On Columbus Day
- Links for May 2024
- Highlights From The Comments On Nietzsche
Related Pages
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- Jesus (3 shared issues)
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- US (3 shared issues)
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- Bentham’s Bulldog (2 shared issues)
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- Christianity (2 shared issues)
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- Europe (2 shared issues)
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- God (2 shared issues)
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- Israel (2 shared issues)
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- Jewish (2 shared issues)
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- Jews (2 shared issues)
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- Latin America (2 shared issues)
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- Moses (2 shared issues)
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- Pharisees (2 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
But there was something that did not end. There had arisen in that hour of history, defiant above the democratic tumult of the Councils of the Church, Athanasius against the world. We may pause upon the point at issue; because it is relevant to the whole of this religious history, and the modern world seems to miss the whole point of it. We might put it this way. If there is one question which the enlightened and liberal have the habit of deriding and holding up as a dreadful example of barren dogma and senseless sectarian strife, it is this Athanasian question of the Co-Eternity of the Divine Son. On the other hand, if there is one thing that the same liberals always offer us as a piece of pure and simple Christianity, untroubled by doctrinal disputes, it is the single sentence, 'God is Love.' Yet the two statements are almost identical; at least one is very nearly nonsense without the other. The barren dogma is only the logical way of stating the beautiful sentiment. For if there be a being without beginning, existing before all things, was He loving when there was nothing to be loved? If through that unthinkable eternity He is lonely, what is the meaning of saying He is love? The only justification of such a mystery is the mystical conception that in His own nature there was something analogous to self-expression; something of what begets and beholds what it has begotten. Without some such idea, it is really illogical to complicate the ultimate essence of deity with an idea like love. If the moderns really want a simple religion of love, they must look for it in the Athanasian Creed. The truth is that the trumpet of true Christianity, the challenge of the charities and simplicities of Bethlehem or Christmas Day never rang out more arrestingly and unmistakably than in the defiance of Athanasius to the cold compromise of the Arians. It was emphatically he who really was fighting for a God of Love against a God of colourless and remote cosmic control; the God of the stoics and the agnostics. It was emphatically he who was fighting for the Holy Child against the grey deity of the Pharisees and the Sadducees. He was fighting for that very balance of beautiful interdependence and intimacy, in the very Trinity of the Divine Nature, that draws our hearts to the Trinity of the Holy Family. His dogma, if the phrase be not misunderstood, turns even God into a Holy Family.
9: In Matthew 22, the Sadducees (a sect of anti-afterlife Jews) gave Jesus a puzzle. If a woman’s husband dies and she remarries, then who will she be married to after the Resurrection - the first husband or the second? Jesus responded by saying that people will not be married in Heaven (though see also the Mormon interpretion). Anyway, I was interested to learn there’s now an atheist version of this conundrum. Robert Ettinger, considered “the founder of cryonics”, had his body frozen after his death in hopes of being resurrected in the far future. His first wife died, he remarried, and both his first and second wives are also cryopreserved. There’s no evidence Ettinger was anything other than monogamous during life, so what happens in the far future? His second wife was an “author, feminist, and marriage counselor”, so I bet she’ll have strong opinions on this.
Inline links: the Mormon interpretion, Robert Ettinger
The Gospels do feature some stories that could be seen as pro-slave morality, where Pharisees and Sadducees hold themselves as superior because they're better at following the social rules of the time. But Jesus' criticism of them isn't that trying to find rules on how to be good and follow them better is bad - it's that they've become so fixated on the literal rules that they've lost sight of the actual purpose of the rules: loving and caring for the people around them.