Simple opinion which you've stated twice as an ad hominem attempt to dismiss what is scholarly. One expects more from you Kosta.
My ideas are sound and based in fact. Continually dissembling in an attempt to preserve an untenable position isn't thoughtful. One cannot argue all sides and then pretend to be right.
You state that we cannot "know" what the Sadducees believed and I refuted that more than once using simple logic and inductive reasoning. You are playing word games, which is not unusual.
As it stands the vast majority of modern Judaism practice a belief system (including worshiping Jesus Christ)well below the Pharisaic minimum as understood in the Scriptures and Jewish history. We have three choices then in defining them; 1) as Pharisees; and 2) as not-Pharisees, namely Sadducees or Essenes. Essene is eliminated by definition: modern Jews are not ascetics. The essential differences between Pharisees and Sadducees can be known by historical reference, the Scriptures, and by simple logic and inductive reasoning (already demonstrated). That 65%-85% of Jews reject the oral tradition and ignore most Pharisaic teachings makes them Sadducean (or not-Pharisaic(?)).
Jewish in the way Kennedy's are Catholics. Ambivalent, but still trying, sometimes and maybe as convenient.
It's not an ad hominem; there was no personal attack on you. It is simply my opinion of your opinion, because your opinion does not seem very scholarly to me at all.
My ideas are sound and based in fact
But they appear to be unsoundly synthesized.
You state that we cannot "know" what the Sadducees believed and I refuted that more than once using simple logic and inductive reasoning. You are playing word games, which is not unusual
Do I detect "ad hominism" in this? I am sorry, TenTen, we cannot know for sure what the Sadducees believed because we don't have their rebuttals. All we have are one-sided sources of their bitter adversaries who are not known for objectivity, but rather for hypocrisy, if we can trust the Gospels, that is. :)
And what we do know about the Sadducees seems to prove your comparison of modern Judaism to them completely off the target, even though it may be a popular opinion in come circles.
They were allegedly biblical literlaists, they didn't' castigate their women as much as the holier-than-though Pharisees, and they differed on minor points (which was apparently a big deal) regarding the Temple practice.
Please augment your sound thinking and factual presentations with a scholarly synthesis, using scholarly sources, such as the The Jewish Encyclopedia, and then kindly present your case by drawing parallels to modern Judaism.
It's night and day. The only thing modern Judaism and Sadduceesim (as presented by its rivals) share in common is pragmatism, materialism, and worldliness. That does not make modern day Jews into Sadducees, nor are modern observant Jews necessarily even remotely close to what the Sadducees allegedly believed. They are simply put secularized, even corrupted if you wish, Pharisees.
The Kennedys and the Pelosis, etc. are not Sadducee-like, but hypocrites. That's exaclty what the NT calls the Pharisees.
But you will insist that modern Judaism is Sadducee-like no matter what. That's your right, but don't get offended when someone likens it to popular college cafetria rather than to something scholarly.
As for your insistence that Jews worship Christ, some do, no doubt, but the Jewish community at large says (quite correctly) that they are not Jews but Christans. In that sense, they are even worse than the Sadducees. Except for a small number of Protestants pretending to be Jews, no Jew will accept Christ as God.
You say that "65%-85% of Jews [today] reject the oral tradition"
This is just one of those "shooting from the hip and hoping to hit something " sweeping generalizations that are total nonsense. How can that be when modern Judaism is based on Talmud, that is, Mishnah as its integral part?!
Modern Judaism would be Sadducee-like if it inisisted only on the written Pentateuch and discard the rest. No Jewish sect today does that. But that doesn't stop you from insisting that they are.
Jewish in the way Kennedy's are Catholics. Ambivalent, but still trying, sometimes and maybe as convenient.
The Kennedys (Pelosis, Bidens, Kerrys, etc.) are not ambivalent about their Catholicism; they just interpret it privately obviously indifferent to the Church prohibition of it.
There is nothing ambivalent about the Kennedy's and their Catholicism. It's more like dishonesty. They insist on being Catholic even though they don't believe what the Catholic Church teaches. That's being hypocritial, which is much more akin to the Pharisees then to the Sadducees.