The Boethusians (Hebrew: בַיְּתּוֹסִים, romanized: Ḇayyətōsīm) were a Jewish sect closely related to, if not a development of, the Sadducees.
[1] The post-Talmudic work Avot of Rabbi Natan gives the following origin of the schism between the Pharisees and Sadducees/Boethusians: Antigonus of Sokho having taught the maxim, "Be not like the servants who serve their masters for the sake of the wages, but be rather like those who serve without thought of receiving wages",[2] his two pupils, Zadok and Boethus, repeated this maxim to their pupils.
In the course of time, either the two teachers or their pupils understood this to express the stance that there was neither an afterlife nor a resurrection of the dead, and founded the sects of the Sadducees and the Boethusians.
The Talmud mentions a Boethusian in a dispute with a pupil of Rabbi Akiva,[7] yet it is likely that the word here means simply a sectarian, a heretic, just as the term "Sadducee" was used in a much wider sense later on.
A Boethus, son of Zonim, and nearly contemporaneous with Rabbi Akiva[8] is mentioned in the Mishnah;[9] he was not, however, a Boethusian, but a pious merchant.