Next among the influences affecting mental cultivation in the native country of Jesus, must be reckoned the three sects under which the spiritual life of his fellow-countrymen may be classified. Among these, the Pharisees, whom Jesus at a later period so strenuously combated, can apparently have had only a negative influence over him; yet along with their fondness for tradition and legal pedantry, their sanctimoniousness and hypocrisy, by which Jesus was repelled from them, we must remember their belief in angels and in immortality, and their constant admission of a progressive development of the Jewish religion after Moses, which were so many points of union between them and Jesus. Still as these tenets were only peculiar to the Pharisees in contradistinction to the Sadducees, and, for the rest, were common to all orthodox Jews, we abide by the opinion that the influence of the Pharisaic sect on the development of Jesus was essentially negative. In the discourses of Jesus Sadduceeism is less controverted, nay, he agrees with it in rejecting the Pharisaic traditions and hypocrisy; hence a few of the learned have wished to find him a school in this sect. [507] But the merely negative agreement against the errors of the Pharisees,—an agreement which, moreover, proceeded from quite another principle in Jesus than in the Sadducees,—is more than counterbalanced by the contrast which their religious indifference, their unbelief in immortality and in spiritual existences, formed with the disposition of Jesus, and his manner of viewing the world. That the controversy with the Sadducees is not prominent in the Gospels, may be very simply explained by the fact that their sect had very slight influence on the circle with which Jesus was immediately connected, the adherents of Sadduceeism belonging to the higher ranks alone. [508]