Wednesday, February 8, 2017

The Merchant of Arimathea: A Sadducee’s Gospel?



      It turns out there wasn’t such thing as a Jewish agnostic or atheist in the first century, CE as far as I could determine.  There was a smattering of Greeks in the 6th century BCE that talked about it, but as it was a crime punishable by death to not believe in deities, no one talked much about it.
   Joseph of Arimathea could not have been an atheist or agnostic. The concept today pertains mostly to not believing the God of Christianity, so it’s difficult to define the term before there was Christianity.
   Joseph was most probably a Sadducee. This sect The Sadducees denied many of the doctrines held by the Pharisees and Essenes, including the resurrection of the dead, the existence of angels and spirits, life after death, the meting out of rewards and punishment after death and the coming of a messiah who would herald an era of world peace The Sadducees thought these beliefs to be Zoroastrian corruptions of the authentic faith of Israel. 

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