Acts 23:8

Acts 23:8. For the Sadducees say that there is no resurrection, neither angel, nor spirit; but the Pharisees confess both. The strict accuracy of this description of the author of the ‘Acts' is borne witness to by Josephus, who tells us, in his Wars of the Jews, that ‘the Sadducees reject the permanence or existence of the soul after death, and the rewards and punishments of an invisible world;' and in his Antiquities, that ‘the Sadducees hold that the souls of men perish with their bodies.' The same Jewish writer speaks, on the other hand, of the Pharisees' opinions in his Antiquities in the following terms: ‘Souls [of men] have an immortal strength, and are destined to be rewarded or punished in another state according to the life here, as it has been one of virtue or vice.' It has been asked how the alleged unbelief of the Sadducees in angels and spirits can be reconciled with their acknowledgment of the Divine authorship of the Pentateuch, which contains so many accounts of the appearance of angels, which holds so many distinct references to the life of the soul in another state (see, for instance, the words of the Eternal speaking from the burning bush, when He declares Himself to Moses to be the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, though when He thus spoke these patriarchs had been long dead and buried, and we know the Eternal of Hosts was no God of the dead, only of the living; therefore these supposed dead ones must have been, when Moses listened to the voice from the flaming fire, still living, though not among men). Plumptre suggests the following able solution of this surface difficulty: ‘The great body of the higher priestly class were, we know, mere Sadducees (chap. Acts 5:17); and what on these principles was the meaning of the temple ritual? They were, in fact, carried along by one of the great waves of thought which were then passing over the ancient world, and were Epicureans and Materialists without knowing it.... For them the angels of the Pentateuch were not distinct beings, but evanescent manifestations of the Divine glory' like clouds.