WHEN SADDUCEE CHRISTIANS POINT AT "PHARISEE" CHRISTIANS
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Liberal and progressive Christians rather freely like to accuse scripture minded Christians as being Pharisees.
Their own position is often that of the Sadducees! Sadducees poked fun at the Pharisees all day long with stories and questions like this, and about things they themselves don't even believe in. Like here in Mark 12:18-27
Yes, we have modern day Sadducees within the Christian community. There are Sadducee congregations, with similar doctrines.
Jesus said they are in "Error:" (Greek word Used is πλανάω planaō, v. to be deceived, deluded, going astray, in error, wandered off, lead astray, misled, mistaken) for two reasons.
1. Don't know the scriptures - even the five books of Moses, the only books they say they accept.
2. Don't know the power of God.
God doesn't do much of anything according to a Sadducee. They are for being good, strict in their levitical observance, but accept very little as reliable revelation from God, and doubted most everything that is within, or about, the Power of God. [Resurrection from the dead back to life, and into a real living afterlife]
They easily accommodated with Rome for power and influence because they hold little as "Truth" worth believing, think most scripture of the OT shouldn't be read as authoritative. They loved using scripture against scripture, to try and discredit, show possible contradictions. That is the way progressives are, its not always a huge contrary truth they present, (well not always anyway) they set up straw man arguments just like we see in this text. They loved to see them selves as witty, by. Like the Sadducees, they often have influence in running the physical temple and its affairs, logistics.... but they had no heart to serve the people. They were too smart, rich, elite, to be pastoring the normal follower of Yahweh
If there is a revelation from God , inspired, unfolded, and revealed by the Holy Spirit, every word of it is important.
As the Post-it Note Theology says, they were the ultimate compromisers.
They were graceless also. In practice, the Law of Moses is not always very clear and the Sadducees had interpretative traditions of their own, which were written down in a book of jurisprudence known as the Book of Decrees. The existence of this penal code is known from a rabbinical source, the Megilla Ta'anit, a calendar like text that states that the Book of Decrees was revoked on the fourth of Tammuz (no year is given). The code is described as very harsh: the author of the Megilla Ta'anit states that the Sadducees had taken the famous line Exodus 21.24, 'an eye for an eye', literally. The Pharisees allowed the person who had blinded another, to pay damages.
They have been described as hedonistic and as having a "contempt for sholarship." And Josephus said they were boorish, and rude. A new hedonism almost always goes hand in hand with a deep deconstruction of faith.
History
The origin of the Sadducees remains a mystery. An important and controversial clue is the etymology of the name 'Sadducees' (sedûqîm). This word may be derived from the word Tsaddîq ('righteous') or the name Zadok, who was either high priest in the age of king Solomon or the name of the founder of the sect (see above). It is not possible to choose between the alternatives: the name 'righteous ones' may have been adopted as a retort to the Hasidim - probably the early Pharisees), who claimed that they were the only pious ones; the name 'sons of Zadok', on the other hand, may refer to the fact that only the descendants of Zadok were -according to an ancient tradition- entitled to perform the priestly service in the Temple.
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