The educated and responsible classes were chiefly conservative. No sect was so entirely, for no sect comprised all of these classes; but some sects were naturally more conservative than others. The Sadducees were, on the whole, the most so; not by reason of their creed particularly, but through the influence of their historical antecedents. After the capture of Jerusalem by Ptolemy, 320 B. C., some hundred thousand Jews went to Egypt and attained consequence there; had their own religious rites and temple. Contact with Greek thought and life there enlarged their minds. Their old-fashioned Hebraism seemed strait and prim by the side of the splendid exuberance of Gentile life in Alexandria. Jerusalem looked, in the distance, like a provincial town; the wealth of pagan literature dwarfed their Scriptures to the dimensions of a single deep but narrow tradition. They were Jews still, but bigoted Jews no longer. How unreasonable seemed now the prejudices of exclusive race! how unwise the attempts to maintain peculiarities of custom! how fanatical the efforts to impose them upon others! The world was large and various: the order of the world followed the track of no one law-giver, prophet or saint. The sect of Sadducees is supposed to have risen from this pagan soil. It was a sect of rationalists, free-thinkers, skeptics, eclectics; Jews, but not dogmatists of any school. They believed in culture and general progress, and had the characteristic traits of men so believing. They were cool, unimpassioned, scientific; sentimentalism they abjured; enthusiasm to them was folly. They were glad to graft Greek culture on Hebrew thought, and would not have been sorry to see the small Hebrew state absorbed by some world-wide civilization. Moses they revered, and his law; but the aftergrowth, priestly and prophetic, they discarded. No doubt they thought the priests superstitious, the prophets mad, the restorationists a set of fools, the vision of Israel's future supremacy the mischievous nightmare of distempered minds. As a literary class the Sadducees were few and select; aristocratic in taste, supercilious in manners. They were in favor with the governors placed over the people by Roman authority, on account of their cultured moderation; and in return for social and political support, received offices in the State, and even in the Church. Caiaphas, the high priest in the time of Jesus, was a Sadducee, and was raised to that dignity by Valerius Gratus, Pilate's predecessor in office.