Sadducee

Member of the ancient Hebrew political party and sect of Judaism that formed in pre-Roman Palestine in the 1st century BC. They were the group of priestly aristocrats in Jerusalem until the final destruction of the Temple in AD 70.

They opposed the Pharisees and favoured Hellenization. They stood for the hereditary high priesthood, the Temple, and sacrifice. Sadducees denied the immortality of the soul and the existence of angels, and maintained the religious law in all its strictness. Many of their ideas and practices resurfaced in medieval Jewish sects after Pharisee ideas dominated the dispersed Jews of the western Roman empire.