a Sadducee: a member of the wealthy, priest-led Jewish party that controlled the Jerusalem temple and denied any resurrection of the dead
The Sadducees were one of the main religious parties in Judaism during Jesus' lifetime. They were a small group drawn from the wealthy priestly families who ran the temple in Jerusalem, and they held real political power through the high priest. The New Testament always uses the name for this same group, so a reader needs only one English word, Sadducees, throughout. What changes from passage to passage is which side of the group is in view.
The one belief the New Testament repeatedly attaches to them is that there is no resurrection of the dead. The Gospels introduce them mainly to set up the dispute over whether the dead rise, and Acts names this denial again at Paul's trial. This is the most certain thing we know about what they taught, and it sets them apart from the Pharisees, who did expect a resurrection.
The other side the New Testament shows is their place at the top of temple society. In Acts they appear next to the priests and the temple guard, and the high priest's own faction is simply called the party of the Sadducees. Matthew, writing for readers after the temple was destroyed and the group had effectively vanished, often names them in the same breath as the Pharisees, using the pair as a shorthand for the religious leaders who opposed Jesus.
The name itself is almost certainly an echo of Zadok, the priestly family line that traced back to King David's chief priest, though scholars have never been able to derive the Greek spelling from any one Hebrew word without leaving something unexplained.
Nuances
What it means that the Sadducees "say there is neither angel nor spirit" in Acts 23:8, given that angels appear repeatedly in the five books of Moses that the Sadducees accepted, that no other ancient source reports this denial, and that the verse then says the Pharisees confess "both" though three items were named.
- contestedThe Sadducees did not reject angels as such but the heavily developed angel-and-spirit speculation of the late Second Temple period (the named archangels and heavenly hierarchies of works such as 1 Enoch and the Qumran texts), an angelology bound up with the resurrection belief they rejected.; Bernard J. Bamberger, 'The Sadducees and the Belief in Angels', JBL 82 (1963) 433-35; Floyd Parker, 'The Terms "Angel" and "Spirit" in Acts 23,8', Biblica 84 (2003) 344-65
- contested"Angel" and "spirit" here name not separate beings but the way the righteous dead exist between death and resurrection, so the "both" the Pharisees confess is two states (an in-between existence and a final bodily rising), not three items.; David Daube, 'On Acts 23: Sadducees and Angels', JBL 109 (1990) 493-97; Benedict Viviano and Justin Taylor, 'Sadducees, Angels, and Resurrection', JBL 111 (1992) 496-98; N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (2003) 415-29