What Happened To The Pharisees and Sadducees From The Bible?

And which group ultimately won out?

(By David Roberts — http://jerusalem.nottingham.ac.uk/items/show/62, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3267412)

In the Bible, Jesus of Nazareth had a number of famous and acrimonious exchanges with a group known as the Pharisees. He called them hypocrites, vipers, and whitewashed tombs (beautiful on the outside and dead on the inside.) Later, the Apostle Paul deftly wiggles out of a sticky situation by pitting these same Pharisees against their hated rivals, the Sadducees. The Pharisees and Sadducees were the two most influential groups in Judaism and dominated Jerusalem. In fact, everything in First Century Palestine was characterized by the influences, rivalries, and beliefs of these two groups.

So what happened to them? There are no Pharisees today, and few people remember the Sadducees. Who won their ultimate rivalry? Did Jesus’s public and vehement criticisms of the Pharisees dampen their appeal to the average Jew? Who exactly were the Sadducees and Pharisees?

The Sadducees and Pharisees represented two groups of Jewish thought during the First Century. The Sadducees were conservatives in their view of the Jewish faith. They dismissed ideas about an afterlife, the resurrection of the dead, and the existence of supernatural beings such as angels and demons. They were dedicated to the Temple and were tasked with overseeing its day-to-day…