Pharisees, and lawyers were all denounced as bands of hypocrites, who strained at a gnat and swallowed a camel; who made void the law and substituted the tradition of men for the word of God; who turned the temple into a den of thieves, and neglected mercy and judgment; who were of their father the devil, and the works of their father they would do; who were full of ravening and wickedness; made prayer for a pretence, and compassed sea and land to make a proselyte, whom they made twofold more a child of hell than themselves. In short, they were a wicked and an adulterous generation; a generation of serpents and vipers, of whom it was asked, how they could escape the damnation of hell. And of the Sadducees, it is said that they did not believe in the resurrection, nor in angels, or spirits.[1] This awful picture of Jewish profligacy, drawn by One who knoweth what is in man, is corroborated by Josephus, an historian of their own time. He says, "Such was the impudence and boldness that had seized on the high-priests, that they had the hardness to send their servants into the threshing floors to take away those tithes that were due to the priests; insomuch that it so fell out that the poorest sort of the priests died for want."[2] During the reign of Alexandra, "the Pharisees artfully insinuated themselves into her favour by little and little, and became themselves the real administrators of the public affairs; they banished and reduced whom they pleased; they bound and loosed (men) at their pleasure; and to say all at once, they had the enjoyment of royal authority, whilst the expenses and difiiculties of it belonged to Alexandra."[3] "The behaviour of the Sadducees one towards another is in some degree wild, and their conversation with those of
- ↑ Matt. xxii. 23; Acts xxiii. 8.
- ↑ Antiquities, book xx., chap, viii., sec. 8.
- ↑ Wars of the Jews, chap. v., sec. 2.
