Connected with this was the equally Rationalistic opposition to belief in Angels and Spirits. It is only mentioned in the New Testament, [1536] but seems almost to follow as a corollary. Remembering what the Jewish Angelology was, one can scarcely wonder that in controversy the Sadducees should have been led to the opposite extreme.
The last dogmatic difference between the two sects' concerned that problem which has at all times engaged religious thinkers: man's free will and God's pre-ordination, or rather their compatibility. Josephus - or the reviser whom he employed - indeed, uses the purely heathen expression fate' (emarmne) [1537] to designate the Jewish idea of the pre-ordination of God. But, properly understood, the real difference between the Pharisees and Sadducees seems to have amounted to this: that the former accentuated God's preordination, the latter man's free will; and that, while the Pharisees admitted only a partial influence of the human element on what happened, or the co-operation of the human with the Divine, the Sadducees denied all absolute pre-ordination, and made man's choice of evil or good, with its consequences of misery or happiness, to depend entirely on the exercise of free will and self-determination. And in this, like many opponents of Predestinarianism,' they seem to have started from the principle, that it was impossible for God either to commit or to foresee [in the sense of fore-ordaining] anything evil.' The mutual misunderstanding here was that common in all such controversies. Although [1538] Josephus writes as if, according to the Pharisees, the chief part in every good action depended upon fate [pre-ordination] rather than on man's doing, yet in another place [1539] he disclaims for them the notion that the will of man was destitute of spontaneous activity, and speaks somewhat confusedly - for he is by no means a good reasoner - of a mixture' of the Divine and human elements, in which the human will, with its sequence of virtue or wickedness, is subject to the will of fate. A yet further modification of this statement occurs in another place, [1540] where we are told that, according to the Pharisees, some things depended upon fate, and more on man himself. Manifestly, there is not a very wide difference between this and the fundamental principle of the Sadducees in what we may suppose its primitive form.
But something more will have to be said as illustrative of Pharisaic teaching on this subject. No one who has entered into the spirit of the Old Testament can doubt that its outcome was faith, in its twofold aspect of acknowledgment of the absolute Rule, and simple submission to the Will, of God. What distinguished this so widely from fatalism was what may be termed Jehovahism - that is, the moral element in its thoughts of God, and that He was ever presented as in paternal relationship to men. But the Pharisees carried their accentuation of the Divine to the verge of fatalism. Even the idea that God had created man with two impulses, the one to good, the other to evil; and that the latter was absolutely necessary for the continuance of this world, would in some measure trace the causation of moral evil to the Divine Being. The absolute and unalterable pre-ordination of every event, to its minutest details, is frequently insisted upon. Adam had been shown all the generations that were to spring from him. Every incident in the history of Israel had been foreordained, and the actors in it - for good or for evil - were only instruments for carrying out the Divine Will. What were ever Moses and Aaron? God would have delivered Israel out of Egypt, and given them the Law, had there been no such persons. Similarly was it in regard to Solomon, to Esther, to Nebuchadnezzar, and others. Nay, it was because man was predestined to die that the serpent came to seduce our first parents. And as regarded the history of each individual: all that concerned his mental and physical capacity, or that would betide him, was prearranged. His name, place, position, circumstances, the very name of her whom he was to wed, were proclaimed in heaven, just as the hour of his death was foreordered. There might be seven years of pestilence in the land, and yet no one died before his time. [1541] Even if a man inflicted a cut on his finger, he might be sure that this also had been preordered. [1542] Nay, wheresoever a man was destined to die, thither would his feet carry him.' [1543] We can well understand how the Sadducees would oppose notions like these, and all such coarse expressions of fatalism. And it is significant of the exaggeration of Josephus, [1544] that neither the New Testament, nor Rabbinic writings, bring the charge of the denial of God's prevision against the Sadducees.