The Party of Resurrection: The Pharisees and the Afterlife That Won
A standalone piece By the first century BCE, the afterlife was contested ground inside Judaism. One party held that the dead would rise, be judged, and meet reward or punishment; another denied it flatly and insisted the soul did not survive. The party that affirmed resurrection — the Pharisees — is the one whose descendants wrote Rabbinic Judaism. The party that denied it — the Sadducees — vanished after 70 CE.
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A standalone piece By the first century BCE, the afterlife was contested ground inside Judaism. One party held that the dead would rise, be judged, and meet reward or punishment; another denied it flatly and insisted the soul did not survive. The party that affirmed resurrection — the Pharisees — is the one whose descendants wrote Rabbinic Judaism. The party that denied it — the Sadducees — vanished after 70 CE. The doctrines that had entered Judaism in the post-exilic centuries did not win by argument in the abstract; they won because the faction carrying them outlasted the faction that rejected them. This is the story of how the new eschatology became normative. First, the name — and a correction It is worth settling the etymology at the outset, because a false version circulates that the word "Pharisee" derives from "Persian" (as though Pharisee and Farsi shared a root).
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Talmud