Who Were The Sadducees? - Ancient Israel 101 

Had no idea the Sadducees were the elite. This helps in understanding some of the Apostle Paul's encounter with them. Thank you for educating us, brother Jerry.

Sadducees were part of a priestly class, not just a political party. Effectively, they controlled the Temple and Jesus' challenging the importance of the Temple sealed His fate.

The Sect of the Sadducees was the religious backbone of the Pro Hellenist (pro Greek culture) Temple-Centric commercial and political elite of Jerusalem and it's environs connected to commercial interests that depended heavily on foreign trade. Even before the surrender of Judah to Alexander the Great in 332 BCE, the wealthy and political elite of Jerusalem had already taken a keen interest in Greek culture. By the time of the Seleucid hegemony of Judea, more than a few of the Jewish priestly class were quite OK with compromising their duties to Yahweh to pay homage to the gods of Mt. Olympus, ultimately resulting in the sacrifice of a pig to Zeus in Jewish Temple in 156 BCE, resulting in the Maccabean Revolt. Over time, the Pro Hellenist Jews began to integrate their ancient beliefs about the Afterlife with Greek Mythology. For example, the former, ancient, Israelite belief, that the souls of the properly buried dead "sleep" with their corpses in the upper part of an underground cave they called Sheol, morphed into a more Hellenist view--that the fully-conscious souls of the dead separate from their bodies once-and-for-all at death, and travel to a permanent spirit world where the pagan god Hades (brother of Zeus) ruled, by re-naming Upper Sheol "Abraham's Bosom." Further, they changed the former belief of the Israelites that improperly buried souls, having no corpse to anchor to, are doomed to descend and disappear into nothingness into the lower, darker part of the Sheol Cave--the Pit, imagining the conscious souls of the unrighteous are punished, at least for a time, in a lower part of Hades' realm, separated from Abraham's Bosom, only by a chasm. Consequently, like the pagan, Hellenist Greeks, and later Romans, they did not believe the bodies of the dead would ever rise again, as there would be no need for them to! Upon death, one's fully conscious soul travels directly to its deserved destiny, though they also imagined some of the unrighteous could, in time, pay for their sins and, upon completing their sentences, be ferried over the chasm of Lower Hades to Abraham's Bosom. If that sounds familiar, it should, because it was their belief in some form of limited post death retribution that became the basis for the later Catholic belief in Purgatory! Sadly, so many Neo Evangelicals continue to make it seem as if the Sadducees believed only in the existence of this life simply because they denied the need for a bodily resurrection and, of course, for their deep political and financial connections to whatever earthly power was extending its hegemony over Judea, had no interest in an Independent Judea or a Messiah King to come and establish it! For this reason, they joined with the elite representatives of the Pharisees to have Jesus condemned to death, because both sects felt threatened by his followers who believed him to be the Expected Messiah, even though the Pharisees did believe and teach a Messiah was to come, just not someone from the outback of Galilee who repeatedly called them out for their hypocrisies! Rick Lannoye, author of www.amazon.com/Real-Life-Jesus-Nazareth-Really-Stood/dp/B09TPHRY41

So, I would say Ben-Hur has been a Saducee... Am I right?

It’s Sadducee israel doing the same with London & USA

Can we said the Sadducees were traitors?