> From what is below, again from Rabbi Ken Spiro, one can see that
> Einstein for instance was a Sadducee. The long running conflict about
> St. Paul is settled by realizing that Paul leaned toward the
> Hellenized Sadducees, as well. His Ascended Master name, Hilarion, is
> a Greek name. Spiro is against Hellenization, but there is a real
> problem for Jews with that position, because the Greek Gods and Heroes
> are parts and parcels of the body of God, i.e. the Kingdom of God.
> For instance, both Apollo and Hercules are Elohim. There are seven of
> those just as there are seven Archangels. A Jew who is alienated from
> the spirits of these Elohim will have severe imbalances in his soul.
> That is why the traditional Jews seem to me to be so mentally
> defective that one cannot fruitfully debate or discuss anything with
> them.
>
> JEW VS. JEW
>
> The Chanukah story is often portrayed as a struggle for national
> liberation -- the Jewish revolt against the Greek occupation of
> Israel. In reality it is much complicated that that. The real conflict
> was not physical but intellectual. Chanukah was ultimately an
> ideological-spiritual war between paganism and Judaism. It was also
> not a struggle purely between Greeks and Jews. It was first a foremost
> a civil war of Jew against Jew. The initial impetus for the Greek
> attack against Judaism came from a certain splinter group of the
> Jewish people -- the Hellenized Jews.
>
> These were Jews who were sucked into Greek culture. And it is no
> wonder why; Greek culture was the major culture milieu of the ancient
> world.
>
> We see this as a pattern in Jewish history. A world culture comes
> along which is enlightened and progressive and is changing the world,
> and some of the upper class Jews always get into it. Why? Because they
> are rich, sophisticated, and have lot of spare time. Then they say to
> the rest of the Jewish people: "Let's get modern. Forget this ancient
> Jewish stuff." (We will see this pattern repeated in Spain, and in
> Germany, and even today in America and Israel.)
>
> At this time, we have a small but very vocal and powerful group of
> Jews, who align with the Greek authorities and who become Hellenized.
> They do everything the Greeks do.
>
> They send their children to the gymnasium, and they reverse their
> circumcisions -- a very painful operation -- since so much of Greek
> stuff is done naked and the Greeks would consider them mutilated
> otherwise.
>
> To make matters worse, the schism between the Hellenized Jews and
> mainstream Jews is paralleled by another schism -- between two
> factions of religious Jews.
>
> It begins in the third century BCE when two students named -- Zadok
> and Bysos -- begin preaching a new form of Judaism, devoid of belief
> in the Divinity of the Oral Torah. There is little doubt that Greek
> thought played a significant role in creating this early break with
> mainstream Judaism. Their followers are called the Sadducees and
> Bysosim, though it is the Sadducees that go down in history. The
> mainstream observant Jews, who follow the Rabbis and keep Jewish law
> as it has always been practiced, are called ironically "Pharisees,"
> meaning "separatists," to distinguish them from the others.
>
> Since the Sadducees do not believe that the Oral Torah comes from God,
> they maintain that they are only obligated to keep the laws of the
> Written Torah, which they read literally. (This denial of the Oral Law
> will occur later in Jewish history with the Karaite schism in
> Babylon.) But so many of the laws of the Written Torah are
> incomprehensible without the Oral Torah. Their answer? Each man for
> himself; anyone can decide what it means and act accordingly.
>
> The Sadducees find natural allies among the Hellenized Jews, as Rabbi
> Berel Wein explains:
>
>
> The Sadducees were always more acceptable in the eyes of the Hellenist
> Jews than their rabbinic foes. The alliance of the Hellenists and the
> Sadducees against traditional Judaism guaranteed constant turmoil in
> Jewish life throughout the time of the Second Temple and even
> thereafter. (Echoes of Glory, p. 38)
>
> (We shall discuss the Sadducees in greater detail in future segments
> when we come to the Roman Empire and its domination of the Jews.)
>
> This is how the ancient historian Josephus explains the beliefs of the
> Jews at this time:
>
>
> The Pharisees [who are considered most skillful in the exact
> explication of their laws and are the leading school] ascribe all to
> fate and to God and yet allow that to do what is right or to the
> contrary is principally the power of men, although fate does cooperate
> in every action. They say that all souls are imperishable but that the
> souls of good men only pass into other bodies while the souls of evil
> men are subject to eternal punishment.
>
> But the Sadducees are those that compose the second order and exclude
> fate entirely and suppose that God is not concerned with our doing or
> not doing what is evil. They say that to do what is good or what is
> evil is man's own choice and that the choice of one or the other
> belongs to each person who may act as he pleases. They also exclude
> the belief in immortality of the soul and the punishment and rewards
> of the afterworld.
>
> Moreover, the Pharisees are friendly to one another and cultivate
> harmonious relations with the community, but the behavior of the
> Sadducees towards one another is to some degree boorish, and their
> conversation with those that of their own party is barbarous as if
> they were strangers to them.(5)
>
>
> You can see how the Sadducees were influenced by Greek thought. They
> are part of the reason that the High Priesthood and the Temple service
> became so corrupt (as many of the priestly class, an upper class at
> that time, became Sadducees). And this is why the Talmud says that so
> many High Priests died during the service of Yom Kippur.