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2. Movements of Revolt

To begin our consideration of groupings within first-century Judaism by looking at movements of revolt is to start on solid historical ground. If we were to sketch a map of events in first-century Palestine for which we have good evidence (mostly of course known from Josephus), many of those events would involve revolutionary activity.

Once again the story starts with the Maccabees. They set the context, and provided the model, for a tradition of movements which sought to overthrow oppression and bring about the divinely intended kingdom for Israel. Fidelity to Torah, readiness for martyrdom, resistance to compromise, and resolute military or para-military action: that was the combination that would win the day. But in the first period of relevance for us, between the Maccabees’ victory (164 BC) and the arrival of Rome on the scene (63 BC), this precipitated an irony. The successful revolution created new conditions of oppression, real or perceived. The next movements of revolt after the Maccabaean uprising were launched not against an outsider, but against those who, on the strength of their victory, presumed to establish a dynasty of priest-kings as though they were the rightful heirs of both the Davidic and the Aaronic houses. There therefore arose movements in whose eyes Jerusalem was the centre of a corrupt and illicit regime. The Essenes, claiming (most likely) to be the real heirs of the Zadokite priestly line, refused to have anything to do with the ‘cleansed’ Temple, and established their own community elsewhere. The Pharisees worked within the system, but constantly reminded those in official power of the ancestral traditions which they were in danger of flouting, and reinforced their reminders with the threat implicit in their popular backing. At least twice (see below) they stood up to pressure and refused to swear allegiance to rulers of whom they disapproved. There are dark rumblings of discontent which come through to us from surviving tracts, denouncing the Hasmonean regime in stern apocalyptic language and imagery.¹⁰ Although much later generations would look back on the Hasmonean period as a rare moment of Jewish independence, it is clear that at the time many Jews were deeply suspicious of the new dynasty.

Things could only deteriorate when the Romans took over in 63 BC. Economic pressure created a new class of brigands, desperate bands of Jews who found no way forward from their poverty except by living outside normal society and sustaining themselves through raids on those who still had property that could be stolen. As we shall see, such brigands were not simply anarchists. A fierce belief in the justice of their cause, and in divine backing for it, sustained them in their desperate lifestyle.¹¹ By the middle of the first century BC the problem of brigandage had become so acute, helped no doubt by the power vacuum while Rome was occupied with civil war and the threat from Parthia, that it was a major achievement to bring it under some sort of control, albeit temporary. Credit for this was given to Herod the Great, whose rise to power in the 40s BC was marked by his putting down of serious brigandage, notably killing the archilestes (‘chief brigand’) Hezekiah, whose family (arguably) continued the struggle in later generations.¹² This in turn provoked a reaction from the Pharisee Samaias, who objected to Herod’s fierce treatment of those whom many Jews seem to have regarded as fighting their cause.¹³ Herod himself, perhaps as a result, incurred the same apocalyptic denunciation as had his Maccabaean predecessors.¹⁴ Throughout the first century BC the hardship of many Jews increased, as the existing economic constraints were overlaid with the problems and perils of living in a country beset with internal dissent and civil strife. This hardship, coupled with Herod’s wanton flouting of many Jewish conventions, explains the consistent opposition to him on the part of the Pharisees, which we will study presently.

But it was between the death of Herod the Great and the destruction of Jerusalem (4 BC to AD 70) that movements of revolt came to a head, creating problems for governments at the time and headaches for scholars two millennia later. That there was widespread disaffection and readiness to revolt in this period is not in question. Exactly which groups were involved, however, has provoked considerable controversy. Disentangling different factions, parties and leaders sometimes seems almost impossible. In what follows I shall try to keep the main lines clear despite the virtually limitless possibilities for debate.

We begin with our main source, Josephus. As is well known, he tries hard to shift the blame for the eventual catastrophe of AD 70 on to one particular rebel faction, exonerating the rest of the Jewish people. The Romans formed a major part of his intended audience, and Josephus hoped that they would look with clemency on the post-destruction Jews as the innocent victims of the violence of the few. Despite this clear agenda, however, Josephus continually reveals that resistance to Rome was far more widespread than just one rebel faction. The famous line in Tacitus, ‘under Tiberius things were quiet’, simply means that there was no major uprising or war, such as eventually engulfed the region; there was, for instance, no border struggle with Parthia, as there had been in the previous century.¹⁵ However, not only under Tiberius but also under Augustus, Gaius, Claudius and Nero there was a continual stream of events which foreshadowed the eventual result. It may be useful to list them briefly before analysing them in more detail. Even so short an account as this may serve to evoke the turbulent flavour of the period, without which contemporary scholarship all too easily lapses into anachronistic assumptions that treat first-century Jews as though they were twentieth-(or even sixteenth-) century theologians.

We begin with the swift sequence of events that took place in 4 BC. As Herod lay dying, a group of hotheads pulled down the ornamental eagle he had caused to be placed over the Temple gate. They were egged on by two respected teachers of the law (Judas ben Sariphaeus and Matthias ben Margalothus), with the suspected collusion of the high priest.¹⁶ This incident was punished severely by Herod in one of his last acts. Then, immediately after Herod’s death, a fuller revolt took place in Jerusalem at Passover, taking its origin from protests over the treatment of the ringleaders in the previous incident. It was suppressed brutally by Herod’s son Archelaus.¹⁷ Archelaus and his brother Antipas then went to Rome to argue their respective right to the succession before the emperor, being followed by a Jewish embassy pleading for autonomy because of the brutality of Archelaus and his father.¹⁸ In the absence of the would-be rulers a new revolt took place, which was crushed by Varus, the Roman general in charge of the province of Syria. Varus left in place an interim procurator, Sabinus, whose actions in turn provoked fresh serious riots during the feast of Pentecost, which he was unable to quell, although in the attempt the Roman soldiers looted the Temple, thus further angering the Jews.¹⁹

These events in Jerusalem were paralleled by a revolt among Herod’s veterans,²⁰ and a serious revolutionary movement in Galilee, where Judas ben Hezekiah, the brigand chief killed by Herod in the 40s BC, led a revolt which Josephus describes as the most serious incident of its kind between Pompey’s conquest of Palestine (63 BC) and Titus’ destruction of the Temple (AD 70).²¹ Varus returned from Syria, settled the Galilean rebellion brutally, relieved Sabinus in Jerusalem, and crucified some two thousand insurgents.²²

At the same time as these events there were two would-be messianic movements. These involved respectively one Simon, an ex-slave of Herod who was proclaimed king before being killed by the Romans, and a shepherd called Athronges, who gave himself royal airs and organized his followers into brigand bands before being captured by Archelaus.²³

This flurry of rebellions in 4 BC was clearly occasioned by the proximity, and then the fact, of Herod’s death, which allowed the persistent hope for a new order of things to come to the surface. This illustrates one main principle of Jewish revolt: the seething unrest which was normally held down tightly by repressive government and brute force could boil over when a power vacuum appeared. It is, in addition, significant for the whole story that several such movements often took place specifically at times of festival, when Jews were thronging Jerusalem to celebrate their god-given status as free people.²⁴ Other regular elements in the pattern include the frequency with which such movements were led by messianic or quasi-messianic figures, and the repression of revolts in general by means of crucifixion.²⁵

Another main principle, which of course overlaps with this, was that under certain circumstances provocation by those in power could become so acute that revolt would follow, whether or not it appeared to have a chance of success.²⁶ This was illustrated by the events a decade after Herod’s death, i.e. in AD 6. To begin with, the Jews appealed to Rome against Archelaus, who had succeeded his father Herod in Judaea, Samaria, and Idumaea. His subjects went over his head to Rome and had him removed.²⁷ The second, more serious, incident was occasioned by the imposition of a Roman census, whose implications were not merely economic but, to a Jew, theological: enrolling in Rome’s system meant admitting that the land and people were not after all sacred to Israel’s god. Judas ‘the Galilean’, whom we will consider further presently, led the revolt which, according to Josephus, was the founding act of the sect that became responsible for the major war two generations later.²⁸

Most of the revolutionary activity during the next sixty years was of the latter type, i.e. response to perceived provocation. The removal of Archelaus meant that Judaea became a Roman province in its own right rather than a client kingdom overseen from neighbouring Syria. Successive ‘procurators’ acted in more or less crass and heavy-handed style, which naturally had the effect of inciting Jews towards revolt. We know of at least seven such incidents in the ten years of Pontius Pilate’s procuratorship (AD 26–36):

(i) Pilate tried to bring Roman standards into Jerusalem, but backed down after a mass protest.²⁹

(ii) He used money from the Temple treasury to build an aqueduct, and crushed the resistance that this action provoked.³⁰

(iii) He sent troops to kill some Galileans while they were offering sacrifices in the Temple, presumably because he feared a riot.³¹

(iv) He captured and condemned to death the leader of an uprising that had taken place in Jerusalem, involving murder; he then released the man as a gesture of goodwill during the Passover feast.³²

(v) At the same Passover, he faced a quasi-messianic movement, having some association with resistance movements; he crucified its leader along with two ordinary revolutionaries.³³

(vi) He provoked public opinion by placing Roman votive shields, albeit without images, in the palace at Jerusalem, which according to Philo annoyed Tiberius almost as much as it did the Jews.³⁴

(vii) Finally, he suppressed with particular brutality a popular (and apparently non-revolutionary) prophetic movement in Samaria. For this he was accused before the Roman legate in Syria, who had him sent back to Rome.³⁵

Worse was to follow. The megalomaniac emperor Gaius, incensed by an anti-Roman incident at Jamnia, tried to insist on a huge statue of himself being placed in the Temple in Jerusalem, in deliberate contravention of Jewish law and scruple. It was this move that drew the long and reasoned protest from the philosopher Philo.³⁶ Gaius was adamant, however, and only his early death forestalled the blasphemous act and its horrendous possible consequences.³⁷

A brief respite from continual provocation occurred during the reign of Herod Agrippa, a grandson of Herod the Great, whom the Romans allowed to rule in place of the procurators from 41 until his early death in 44. His apparent piety, and his care to avoid offending Jewish scruples, held revolutionary tendencies at bay.³⁸ But with the resumption of procuratorial rule we hear of renewed insurgent movements. Tholomaeus, a ‘brigand chief’ (archilestes), was executed by Cuspius Fadus in the mid-40s, during the course of a large operation against brigandage in general.³⁹ Around the same time a leader named Theudas, claiming to be a prophet, led a movement which aroused enough popular support to gain mention in Acts as well as Josephus. It too was put down by the Romans, and Theudas himself was executed.⁴⁰ We then hear of the two sons of Judas the Galilean, Jacob and Simon, being crucified under the procuratorship of Tiberius Alexander (46–8),⁴¹ and of subsequent revolts under his successor Cumanus (48–52), including a riot at Passover in which perhaps 20,000 Jews were killed, attacks by brigands on Romans, and further looting of the Temple by Roman troops.⁴² Cumanus over-reacted to a subsequent incident, whose complexity nicely illustrates the problems of the time. Some Galileans were murdered on their way through Samaria to Jerusalem for a festival. The Jews took violent revenge on Samaria. Cumanus responded with even more violence, out of all proportion to the original incidents. The Jews then successfully accused Cumanus before Claudius, the emperor, of having favoured the Samaritans.⁴³ The ringleaders of the Jewish fighters, Eleazar ben Deinaeus and Alexander, were finally captured by Cumanus’ successor Felix (52–60), who proceeded, as Fadus had done in 44–6, to purge the country of lestai, crucifying a considerable number.⁴⁴

The purge was only short-lived. Josephus says that around this time (the late 50s and early 60s) there arose the group he called Sicarii, the ‘dagger-men’.⁴⁵ In addition, groups to whom Josephus refers as ‘false prophets’ were operating in the Judaean desert.⁴⁶ An Egyptian Jew led a mass movement which assembled on the Mount of Olives, and promised them that the city walls would fall down and allow them to enter in triumph. His followers, numbering thousands (precisely how many differs widely in our sources) were cut down by the Romans, while he himself escaped and was not heard of again.⁴⁷ There were also riots over Jewish social status at Caesarea, and plenty of further evidence of brigand activity.⁴⁸ Among the first acts of Felix’s successor as procurator, Porcius Festus (60–2), was to execute an ‘imposter’ who had promised his followers ‘salvation and rest from troubles’,⁴⁹ and to deal with a strange itinerant Jew who had been arraigned before Felix on a charge of inciting riots by offending Jewish scruples.⁵⁰ Despite further executions of lestai,⁵¹ movements of revolt spread faster, fanned by the insensitive actions of Festus’ two successors, Lucceius Albinus (62–5) and the notorious Gessius Florus (65–6), who, being unable to control the brigands, actually gave them support and, according to Josephus, shared their plunder.⁵²

This brief list of movements of revolt in the years preceding the war gives, I think, sufficient indication of the mood of the country as a whole. It supports the fairly obvious conclusion: Josephus has thoroughly falsified his own suggestion that one single party, begun by Judas the Galilean, was responsible for the entire drift towards the war with Rome which broke out in AD 66. Revolution of one sort or another was in the air, and often present on the ground, both in Galilee and (particularly) in Jerusalem, throughout the period of Roman rule. It was not confined to one group, whether the Zealots properly so called, the Sicarii, or any other. Whenever it was suppressed in one place it sprang up in another.⁵³ The same seems to have been true even after the devastation of the war. Certainly when bar-Kochba was proclaimed Messiah large numbers from the whole country were ready to rise and attempt once more to throw off the Roman yoke.

This broad base of revolutionary activity is particularly the case in the main Jewish War itself (AD 66–73). The history of this war is bewilderingly complex, not least because it was as much a civil war as a war of resistance against Rome. Groups and factions formed, fought one another, regrouped, held different bits of Jerusalem at different times, called themselves and one another by different names, and generally made life as difficult for the historian as they made it miserable for their contemporaries. Three figures especially stand out. John of Gischala came to Jerusalem from Galilee and led the Zealots, properly so called, in the revolt. He was eventually captured at the end of the war and condemned to life imprisonment.⁵⁴ Menahem, a descendant of Judas the Galilean, was the would-be Messianic figure from the Sicarii who came to Jerusalem from Masada. After a brief appearance dressed in royal robes, he was murdered by a rival group.⁵⁵ Simon ben Giora was a rebel leader who seems to have been regarded both by his followers and by the Romans as the most serious would-be ‘king of the Jews’. His royal career ended in humiliation and death in Vespasian’s triumph in Rome.⁵⁶ Even looking no further, we again find that Josephus’ own overall statements, blaming the ‘lower orders’ for the entire conflict, are extremely misleading and inadequate.

But who, then, constituted these movements? Here there is no agreement in sight. We may distinguish three broad strands of interpretation that have been taken in recent scholarship. These are (a) a pan-Zealot theory; (b) a theory that blames the aristocrats for being the real trouble-makers; (c) a theory that sees several quite diverse groups.⁵⁷

First, there is the case for an overall unity of movement and ideology, a broad stream of resistance which, begun (as Josephus says) by Judas the Galilean, continued among his family and related groups until it reached its nemesis in the war. This position, massively argued by Martin Hengel, has a great deal to be said for it.⁵⁸ True, we must grant that the title ‘Zealot’ itself was used, as its own self-designation, by one particular group during the factional fighting in the war itself. This group, moreover, appears to have come into existence only at that stage. But it is also clear that the noun ‘zeal’ and the adjective ‘zealous’ were used widely to refer to more general anti-Roman attitudes and activities. From this it appears that the group in question were, in so naming themselves, hijacking a word to which many others would have laid claim, rather than initiating a new idea altogether.⁵⁹ Even the usage of Josephus himself, whose writing is the basis for the claim that the Zealots were a small party newly formed in the 60s, allows for some whom he calls ‘zealots’ who are not part of this small group.⁶⁰ And there seems no reasonable doubt that the general aim of resistance to Rome, in one way or another, summed up a good deal of the national mood which, looking back to the Maccabees, looked to the great day when the prophecies would be fulfilled and their god would rule his people without the aid of pagan overlords.⁶¹

Second, a parallel case has been made out by Martin Goodman, who agrees with Hengel that there was widespread resistance to Rome, but claims that the initiative and leadership in such movements came almost entirely, not from the lower orders of society as is usually supposed, but from the ruling class of the Jews.⁶² They, according to Goodman, constituted a puppet oligarchy put in place by the Romans after the decline of the Herodian dynasty, against the wishes and greatly to the dislike of the people as a whole. It was they, he suggests, who provoked the war in the first place and gave it its vital leadership, contributing to the general chaos by factional rivalry between themselves, for which there is earlier evidence as well.⁶³ This case conflicts with the normal view, that the aristocracy would resist rebellion, since they had the most to lose. Goodman argues cogently that, once it became clear that war was likely, the aristocracy threw in their lot with it, seeing a better chance of retaining power if they were regarded by the Jews as their national leaders than if they were seen to side with the Romans. Even if the Romans won, a local oligarchy that had failed to prevent revolt would not be regarded with much favour.

It seems to me, however, that Goodman goes further than the evidence allows when he suggests that all the major leaders during the war itself were actually part of the aristocracy. His arguments about the background of Simon ben Giora, for instance, prove at the most that we may not know as much about Simon as is usually thought, not that he was an aristocrat.⁶⁴ Conversely, Goodman consistently minimizes the ‘bandit’ or ‘brigand’ involvement in insurrection, and hypothesizes aristocratic involvement where there is little or no actual proof.⁶⁵ It seems to me unlikely that all of Josephus’ references to brigandage, to lestai, are simply a fictitious cover-up for the rebellion of his own class. Goodman provides, in short, the mirror-image of Josephus’ own picture; if Josephus has blamed rabble-rousers in order to exonerate his own class, Goodman has turned incidents of revolt into aristocratic plots, and has turned known aristocrats into revolutionaries, to inculpate those Josephus had defended.

Third, a case has been made for a much more diverse account. Richard Horsley, in a string of articles and two books, has argued for the distinctiveness of several groups, with different social backgrounds and agendas.⁶⁶ He distances ordinary brigands (the lestai) from ‘Zealots’ proper, the distinct group who came into being at the start of the war in 66, and both of these from the ‘Sicarii’, who were a group of terrorists with a different agenda, whose origins are found in a more learned and scribal background. He argues that Hengel has subsumed all these groups too readily under one broad generalized account, and attempts not only to distinguish them but also to rehabilitate one of them (the ‘Zealots’, strictly so called) as responding commendably or at least comprehensibly to their social and cultural plight.⁶⁷

It is important to give Horsley his due. The great majority of references to ‘zealots’ do indeed refer to one particular group, that which Josephus describes in War 4.130–61, to whom John of Gischala joined himself after a trick (4.208–23). And it is a different group, the Sicarii, based on Masada during the war, that has a clear dynastic link with Judas the Galilean at the beginning of the century.⁶⁸ Horsley succeeds, I think, in showing that the start of the war was not due to the work of a single organized and long-standing Jewish resistance movement, but rather came about through the confluence of many streams. But this scarcely warrants his remarks about ‘the demise of “the Zealots” concept’⁶⁹ or his frequent suggestion that the real impetus for revolution came from social rather than theological factors.⁷⁰ Such an antithesis is, as we saw in Part II, quite dangerous in historical work in general, and never more so than when we are dealing with a culture like that of first-century Judaism. And there is no doubt, as Horsley himself admits, that revolution was far more widespread than simply the ‘Zealot’ party properly so called;⁷¹ or that the words ‘zeal’ and ‘zealous’ were regularly used in connection with all sorts of Jews who were zealous for God and the Torah, and some of whom carried that ‘zeal’ to the lengths of violence.⁷² Such groups or individuals may not have been connected with the ‘zealot’ party as we know it from Josephus, but it is risky to drive a strong ideological wedge between them. In any case, Horsley’s case is at risk methodologically. He tries to isolate ‘the Zealots’ as a group by basing himself on a close reading of Josephus. At the same time he is rightly critical of Josephus—precisely because he isolates one party as the group solely responsible for the war.

It seems to me, in conclusion, overwhelmingly historically likely that there were, throughout the first century, many movements which laid claim to the tradition of active ‘zeal’, a tradition that went back, through the Maccabees, to the memory of Phineas and Elijah. (Though these figures, in their own contexts, undoubtedly represent different strands of Jewish life, they were brought together within the folk-memory as people who, in various ways, had acted out of ‘zeal’ for their god.⁷³) One of these groups, the Sicarii, seems to have sustained some kind of a dynasty from the middle of the first century BC to the fall of Masada, beginning with the archilestes Hezekiah, killed by Herod, and continuing with his son Judas, the leader of a revolt after the death of Herod, and quite possibly the same person as the leader of the anti-census riots in AD 6.⁷⁴ As we saw, the sons of Judas the Galilean were crucified under Tiberius Alexander in the mid-40s, and another descendant, Menahem, became the would-be messianic leader of the Sicarii on Masada during the war, was then killed in Jerusalem, and was succeeded by his nephew Eleazar the son of Jairus. There is no reason to think that members of this group were regarded by any other as the natural leaders of revolt, but nor is there good reason to drive a sharp ideological wedge between them and any other party or band.⁷⁵ These groups, no doubt with considerable social and organizational diversity, shared to a lesser or greater extent a background of socio-economic deprivation, and, most importantly, a common stock of theological symbols and ideas. We shall explore these areas more fully in subsequent chapters.⁷⁶

If revolution was in the air throughout this period, how did that fit in with the agendas of the other groups of whose existence we know? The most important of these groups for our purposes is undoubtedly the Pharisees, and we must turn to them now.

(iii) The Agenda and Influence of the Pharisees

The major questions about the Pharisees in current debate concern two closely related areas: what was their agenda, and how widespread was their influence? Obviously, a group concerned simply with the internal operation of a private club for the maintenance of its own members’ ritual purity is unlikely to be particularly concerned with major questions of public policy. At the same time, it is quite feasible that the Pharisees held grandiose ambitions about influencing the course of political events, but could not implement them due to their lack of real power. Or we might hold that they combined various different ambitions: just as the Sicarii on Masada maintained strict ritual purity as part of their holy resistance against Rome, so the Pharisees may well, looked at simply from an a priori standpoint, have held together a deep concern for purity with a radical longing for political change. Where in all this does the truth lie?

Josephus, as we noted above, emphasizes in his later writings that the Pharisees hold considerable de facto power in the early part of the first century BC. When it comes to the first century AD, things are not so clear. At one extreme (now normally abandoned) they have been held to be virtually the ruling party in Judaism, obeying strictly all the Mishnaic rules for haberim and enforcing them on as many Jews as they were able to.¹⁰³ Another possibility is the view that, though the Pharisees may still have been quite numerous in the first century AD, their focus of interest had shifted, in Neusner’s phrase, ‘from politics to piety’, so that Josephus’ picture of the Pharisees intervening in major social and political events is anachronistic if applied to the generation before the destruction of the Temple.¹⁰⁴ Sanders’ current position is defined, in a complex way, by his disagreements with both of these. Over against Jeremias’ view of the Pharisees’ widespread authority, he suggests that, in the first century AD, the Pharisees were a small group, based only in Jerusalem, with little political significance, following their own limited agendas and without taking much interest, at least qua Pharisees, in the major movements of the day.¹⁰⁵ Over against Neusner, however, he contends that the Pharisees continued to concern themselves with matters other than merely the maintenance of private priest-like purity.¹⁰⁶

I wish to suggest a different combination of elements within a historical account of the Pharisees and their agenda. Briefly, I shall argue (i) (with Sanders) that the Pharisees, though never a Jewish ‘thought-police’ in the first or any other century, did concern themselves with matters wider than private or ritual purity; (ii) (against Sanders) that these concerns often embraced political and revolutionary action, such that the idea of a self-contained Jerusalem-based group with little influence, and not much interest in who was doing what elsewhere, is out of the question; (iii) (between Neusner and Sanders) that the purity codes were a vital part of pre-70 Pharisaism, functioning in close symbolic relationship to the wider political agenda. I shall set out this position in relation to the four key periods, i.e. the Hasmonean period (164–63 BC), the Roman period to the destruction of the Temple (63 BC–AD 70), the period between the two revolts (AD 70–135) and, for completeness, the period after AD 135.

1. It is beyond a doubt that for quite some time before 63 BC there existed a pressure-group, known at least by its enemies as ‘Pharisees’. This group, not necessarily numerous, seems to have arisen around or after the time of the Maccabaean revolt, though its connections (if any) with that event are impossible to trace with any accuracy. These Pharisees exercised considerable influence over some of the subsequent Hasmonean rulers, not least Salome (76–67 BC), the widow of Alexander Jannaeus. Even if Josephus exaggerates when he says that the Pharisees ruled Salome as she ruled Israel,¹⁰⁷ or that they incurred protests by their virtual ruling of Jerusalem,¹⁰⁸ it remains clear that they were a de facto power in the land. And the power they wielded, though in modern terms ‘religious’ in origin and intent, was emphatically ‘political’ in effect. Whatever the disputes about details, it is clear that the great issues of the day had to do with the proper stance for a Jew to take up when faced with (what seemed to them to be) the encroachments of non-Jewish ways of life. The Pharisees saw themselves as standing firm for the old ways, the traditions of Israel, against paganism from without and assimilation from within. Their extreme focus on Torah makes perfect sense within this setting; and so does the increasing concentration, in this and the subsequent periods, on issues of purity.

For an overall view of the Pharisees, both in this period and subsequently, it is not absolutely vital that we discover precisely which purity laws they obeyed and which they felt able to circumvent at which period.¹⁰⁹ What matters is the ideology that motivated them to focus so strongly on purity and to relate it in any way to the purity demanded in the Temple. Here the most attractive thesis seems to me the following: faced with social, political and cultural ‘pollution’ at the level of national life as a whole, one natural reaction (with a strong sense of ‘natural’) was to concentrate on personal cleanness, to cleanse and purify an area over which one did have control as a compensation for the impossibility of cleansing or purifying an area—the outward and visible political one—over which one had none. The intensifying of the biblical purity regulations within Pharisaism may well therefore invite the explanation that they are the individual analogue of the national fear of, and/or resistance to, contamination from, or oppression by, Gentiles.¹¹⁰ Ceremonial purity functions almost as a displacement activity when faced with the apparent impossibility of national purity. Just as, for the Maccabaean martyrs, refusing to eat pork and refusing to obey the pagan ruler were one and the same thing, so the concern for purity functioned as a means of symbolically enacting that resistance to pagan rule which was nursed secretly and maintained in readiness for revolutionary opportunities, whenever they might be afforded. At the same time, this concern could lead, and after 135 certainly did lead, to the setting up of an alternative world, the world (broadly speaking) of the Mishnah, in which the concern for private purity dominated, and the hope for national restoration took the form of mourning for the disasters suffered and a long-range hope that Israel’s god would one day restore the fortunes of his people. It is interesting that Josephus does not attempt to describe the purity regulations of the Pharisees, though his mention of their ‘avoiding luxury’¹¹¹ is perhaps a coded and Hellenized reference to this feature.

It is this socially and even psychologically complex situation that enables the ‘translation’ of what later generations would classify as a ‘political’ issue into a ‘purely religious’ one, even though the distinction would have been, I suggest, meaningless to most people for most of the time between the Maccabees and (at least) AD 70. The Mishnah itself, of course, belongs to a time when the possibility of a real change in political fortune had receded from view altogether. As we noted in a previous section, even the out-and-out revolutionaries saved their main efforts for times when it seemed as though they might have a real chance of success.

During the Hasmonean period, therefore, we may take it as read that the Pharisees existed both as a political pressure-group and as a group concerned for the maintenance of a purity which reflected in some degree, even if it did not imitate exactly, that purity proper to priests serving in the Temple. The first of these features is witnessed to by various incidents, including their standing up to what they saw as the illegitimate government of John Hyrcanus (134–104 BC). Josephus tells this story as if it were a matter of one recalcitrant Pharisee, Eleazar, but his description of the incident as a stasis, i.e. a civil disturbance or revolt, suggests that it was on a larger scale.¹¹² We might cite, again, the Pharisees who advised the people to open the gates to Herod when he marched on Jerusalem: this is not to be seen as a pro-Herodian stance, as their subsequent behaviour indicated, but as an anti-Hasmonean act, aimed at getting rid of Antigonus.¹¹³ The second feature—their concern for piety—is an inference from both the rabbinic literature and the New Testament, each of which bodies of literature envisages the Pharisees as concerned with questions of purity and sabbath, which, as we shall see in chapter 8, functioned as powerful symbols of national identity.

It is vital, however, that even in this period, at the height of their influence, we do not imagine the Pharisees acting, or even thinking of themselves, as a kind of secret thought-police. They were not an official body. They were not even the official teachers of Torah: that was one of the functions of the priesthood, both in Jerusalem and in the local community.¹¹⁴ They only obtained power if they colluded with or influenced another group who already possessed it. Two examples from the New Testament, in the Roman period, make the point. In the gospels, the Pharisees plot with the Herodians against a perceived common threat; thus, too, the Pharisee Saul of Tarsus sought and obtained authority from the chief priest to persecute the young church. Without that, he could legally have done nothing.¹¹⁵ It is unlikely that these examples present a picture any different from what would have been the case under the Hasmoneans. The Pharisees sought to bring moral pressure to bear upon those who had actual power; to influence the masses; and to maintain their own purity as best they could. Their aim, so far as we can tell, was never simply that of private piety for its own sake. Nor (one need scarcely add) was it the system of self-salvation so often anachronistically ascribed to them by Christians who knew little about the first century but a lot about the Pelagian controversy. Their goals were the honour of Israel’s god, the following of his covenant charter, and the pursuit of the full promised redemption of Israel.

2. The arrival of Roman rule in 63 BC, and the rise of Herod in the late 40s and early 30s, curtailed the possibilities of the Pharisees exerting actual power either in any official capacity or through exerting influence on those with de jure power. The Hasmonean rulers had endeavoured to maintain at least some appearance of ruling in accordance with Israel’s heritage, and had therefore been susceptible to pressure from a group claiming to speak for that heritage. Neither the Romans nor Herod were particularly interested in following the ancestral traditions, and hence were in no need of advice or support from the Pharisees. There is no evidence, though, that the group either died out or changed its ambitions. On the contrary, we hear of the Pharisees’ refusal to swear allegiance to the new rulers—hardly the action of a group which had given up politics and turned to an inner piety.¹¹⁶

The Pharisaic agenda remained, at this point, what it had always been: to purify Israel by summoning her to return to the true ancestral traditions; to restore Israel to her independent theocratic status; and to be, as a pressure-group, in the vanguard of such movements by the study and practice of Torah. This means that we must understand the Pharisees, during the Roman period, even if not, or not to the same extent, under the Hasmoneans, as moving towards an identity which can be called ‘sectarian’.¹¹⁷ Claiming to speak for Israel and her genuine tradition, they maintained a polemic against the ruling élite in Jerusalem and, though continuing to worship at the Temple, regarded its present officials and guardians as dangerously corrupt. Increasingly, like other Jewish sects of the period (including the Essenes and the early Christians) they regarded themselves and their own groups as in some sense or other the replacements or the equivalents of the Temple.¹¹⁸ They also appear to have regarded themselves in some sense as prophets, whose traditional role always included speaking out on ‘political’ issues.¹¹⁹

As a result, their agenda always pushed in one of two related and parallel directions. Either they would make common cause with the out-and-out rebels, continuing the tradition of ‘zeal’ which we examined earlier. Or they would withdraw into the deeper private study and practice of Torah, creating an alternative mode of Judaism which achieved its liberation from Rome, and from corrupt Judaism, by living in its own world where neither pagan nor renegade could corrupt it. It seems to me highly likely that these two options, the sword and the ghetto, were among the real points at issue between the Pharisees of different schools in the Roman and Herodian periods, even though later memory depoliticized the controversy and, in a period when revolt had been abandoned as having twice led to disaster, translated it into the less threatening debate between stricter and more lenient understandings of the Torah’s code of purity.¹²⁰

Thus it appears that at least one strand of Pharisaic opinion and activity maintained a political role, and often an active revolutionary one, during the Roman period. This is by no means as widely recognized as it should be, and the evidence must be amassed step by step, as follows.

(i) Two Pharisaic leaders, Pollio and Samaias, stood out against the oath of loyalty to Herod, and won their point.¹²¹ A larger number apparently refused to take the oath of loyalty to Caesar, carrying some others with them and incurring punishment.¹²²

(ii) Around the same time (though the incidents are hard to separate out and date properly), some Pharisees predicted that Herod’s power would pass to his brother Pheroras. Such a treasonable statement was not the action of a group devoted to private piety: Herod killed many of his own family on lesser grounds.¹²³

(iii) The incident of the removal from the Temple of the golden eagle in 4 BC definitely involved some Pharisaic teachers.¹²⁴ Josephus’ description of the leaders, Judas and Matthias, as ‘most learned’ and ‘unrivalled interpreters of the ancestral laws’,¹²⁵ as well as the designation sophistai, ‘sages’,¹²⁶ indicates clearly enough that they were Pharisees, as does a comparison between this passage and those relating to the refusal of the oath to Caesar.

(iv) The rebellion of AD 6 is again to be associated with Pharisaic activity.¹²⁷ Comparison between Josephus’ two accounts of this incident is instructive. In the earlier passage (War 2.118), he is very anxious to blame what he calls the ‘Fourth Philosophy’ for all Israel’s troubles, and attributes the revolt to Judas the ‘Galilean’, describing him as a sophistes who ‘founded a sect of his own, having nothing in common with the others’ (i.e. the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes). In the later account (Antiquities 18.23), he is more relaxed about this propaganda, and openly admits that Judas acted in close collaboration with Saddok, a Pharisee (18.4f.). The word sophistes itself, as we saw, may well link Judas with at least a broad stream of Pharisaic piety and aims.¹²⁸ The generalized account of revolutionary activities that follows in Josephus’ longer version (Antiquities 18.6–10) is scarcely to be confined either to the revolt of AD 6 or to the war of 66–70. Granted the ever-fresh memory of the Maccabees, the continuing restlessness under the procurators, and the other factors to be discussed in chapters 8–10 below, it seems clear that revolt against Rome, when opportunity or incitement was offered, was a not unimportant part of the Pharisaic agenda.

(v) As we have just noted in passing, Josephus himself, when writing perhaps less guardedly, links the Fourth Philosophy closely with the Pharisees. The difference, it appears, was not one of underlying ideology or long-term aims, but of the lengths to which one was willing to go to propagate them. If we agree with the majority of scholars that Josephus had a general desire to screen the Pharisees from criticism, this comment is extremely revealing. If we agree with Mason that he was trying to blacken their character, this still does not mean that he was making it up.¹²⁹ Josephus may have been quite well aware of the range of views within the Pharisaic movement.

(vi) At this point belongs the testimony of an ex-Pharisee, Saul of Tarsus. By his own account he had himself persecuted the church, ‘being extremely zealous for the traditions of my fathers’.¹³⁰ Here we have exactly the mixture of elements which, I suggest, characterized one branch at least of Pharisaism in this period: study of the ancestral traditions, ‘zeal’, and physical violence directed against a deviant group. If, as we shall see later, this marks Saul of Tarsus out against some other Pharisees from the 30s and 40s, this indicates a division within the movement rather than an inaccuracy within the sources.¹³¹

(vii) Josephus records a strange incident during the reign of Herod Agrippa (AD 37–44). A devout Pharisee, one Simon, denounced Agrippa (in his absence) as being unclean and hence not worthy to enter the Temple.¹³² Agrippa showed him extraordinary kindness and forbearance. Josephus has probably exaggerated this element, but has again included, against the grain of his normal agenda, this story about a Pharisee who, ‘with a reputation for religious scrupulousness’, acted on this basis in what could well, in other circumstances, have turned into some kind of revolt.

(viii) Another odd incident relates to the time of the procurator Felix (AD 52–60).¹³³ Josephus, having described the activities of the Sicarii or ‘daggermen’, then mentions another group of ‘evil men’ (poneroi), who have ‘purer hands but more evil thoughts’ (cheiri men katharoteron, tais gnomais de asebesteron). It is impossible to be sure who this group were, who with revolutionary intent and prophetic fervour led a group into the wilderness in the hopes of there receiving ‘signs of freedom’ (semeia eleutherias), and who were cut down by Felix’s soldiers. But the description of their ‘clean hands’ cannot but raise suspicions that they were Pharisees.¹³⁴

(ix) It seems likely that those who complained to Agrippa II about the killing of James at the instigation of Ananus the high priest, during the interregnum between the procurators Festus and Albinus (i.e. AD 62), were also Pharisees.¹³⁵ Josephus describes them as ‘those of the city who were considered the fairest-minded, and who were strict concerning the law’, the latter phrase echoing other descriptions of Pharisees. While this incident does not of itself link the Pharisees with revolution, it certainly stands against any attempt to claim that by this stage the party had long since become concerned only with private piety and devout table-fellowship. They were capable of making their voices heard on a sensitive political issue.

(x) When we reach Josephus’ account of the war itself, we find one leading Pharisee, Simon ben Gamaliel, who turns out to be a close associate of one of the key popular leaders, John of Gischala.¹³⁶ Although he is mentioned as opposing the ‘Zealots’, this relates to the party that assumed that name rather than to the anti-Roman movement itself, in which of course John was one of the leaders. Clearly Simon’s Pharisaism was no bar to his taking part in revolutionary activities.

(xi) Further direct evidence of Pharisaic involvement in the war comes with the mention of Ananias ben Sadok.¹³⁷ Hengel sees his agenda as an example of the synergism of the Pharisees (the compromise position between determinism and free will: see below) being ‘transferred to the plane of eschatological hope’.¹³⁸ It seems to me more likely that Josephus’ description of ‘synergism’ as a philosophical doctrine held by the Pharisees is his own transferring of an essentially political doctrine (that humans must work for freedom as well as waiting for it, even though it comes ultimately from above) into the ‘safe’ sphere of philosophical discussion.

(xii) One small piece of evidence from the period of the war indicates that Pharisaic piety and revolutionary fervour did indeed continue to go hand in hand. Excavations on Masada have revealed that the ritual bathing-pools, the mikvaot, were built to Pharisaic specifications; and other signs of Pharisaic piety are visible as well. Hengel’s conclusion is quite justified: ‘at least some parts of the Pharisaical party were closer to the fourth sect in its hostility towards the Romans than the later rabbinic tradition [and, we might add, Josephus] would have us believe’.¹³⁹

(xiii) We shall presently examine evidence in two final areas which conclude this argument about the political stance of the Pharisees in the main Roman period: I refer (a) to the continuing revolutionary tendencies of some at least of the Pharisees’ would-be successors after AD 70, and (b) to the significance of the Pharisaic prayers, beliefs and practices.

We may sum up the position so far as follows. We have found that in the period between the arrival of the Romans in 63 BC and the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70 there is a good deal of evidence for continuing political and revolutionary activity on the part of the Pharisees—evidence which Josephus has included in his account despite his clear wish to exonerate the party as a whole. Equally, it is clear from the broad drift of the post-70 accounts of pre-70 Pharisees that there were major divisions within the movement, and it is highly likely that one of the key issues concerned precisely the extent to which involvement in practical politics in general, and in revolution in particular, was appropriate for members of the movement. We may hypothesize that the arrival of Roman power, and the rise of Herod and his house, projected the Pharisees into a new situation, different from that which they had faced under the Hasmoneans, and one which produced a wide range of responses.

We may safely assume that, though some Pharisaic opinion may have been polarized, there will have been something of a continuum of Pharisaic response to the new situation. At one point on this continuum we find Hillel, with his successors being Gamaliel in the 40s AD and Johanan ben Zakkai after 70. Each, it seems, was prepared to argue against revolution and in favour of retreating from the political sphere into the world of Torah study. (This too, of course, is a ‘political’ stance.) Let the Romans rule the world, as long as we can study and practise Torah. Here, if anywhere, we find a move towards the position of the later (i.e. post-135) sages. We also find, interestingly, a pointer in the direction of Josephus’ own position, that Israel’s god has gone over to the the Romans. Evidence for this more open Pharisaic stance may also be provided by the Pharisees mentioned in Luke 7:36ff., 11:37ff. and 13:31f.

At quite another point on the continuum we find Shammai and his house, advocating some kind of revolutionary ‘zeal’.¹⁴⁰ Although the discussions at Jamnia moved rabbinic Judaism firmly towards Hillelite rulings, we have every reason to think that up until 70 it was the Shammaites who dominated, and that they may have continued to be a vocal and sometimes victorious presence in the period between 70 and 135.¹⁴¹ The Pharisaic movement as a whole was dominated in this period by those at this point on the spectrum of opinion, whose inclinations brought them near to, and quite possibly right within, the revolutionary movements which, though coming to fullest expression in 4 BC, AD 6, 66–70 and 132–5, smouldered ceaselessly throughout the period. If we recall, as we saw at the start of the present chapter, the basic difference between the wealthier city-dwellers and the poorer folk in the countryside, it should come as no surprise to find hints that the Hillelites tended to be city-dwellers while the Shammaites enjoyed support from rural areas.¹⁴²

When did this split within Pharisaism arise? Alon suggests ¹⁴³ that the two strains, one pro-zealotry, the other ready to accept Roman rule, arose in the time after the reign of Agrippa I and before the war (i.e. between 44 and 66). He also suggests the existence of a third party in the middle, represented by Simeon ben Gamaliel, who took what Alon regards as the classical Pharisaic position, only joining the armed struggle when there was good opportunity for success and no other alternative. I am not sure that we have enough evidence to say precisely when the split(s) occurred, except that it was at some stage between 63 BC and AD 66; I think it most likely happened when Herod took over from the Hasmoneans. This fits perfectly with the likely date for Hillel and Shammai as the founders of two new ‘schools’ within Pharisaism.

We have every reason, further, to suppose that with these political concerns went a concern for the maintenance, within and perhaps beyond the group, of certain purity codes. Sanders has shown just how difficult it is to be absolutely sure precisely which bits of later purity laws were observed by Pharisees in this period. But that they tried to maintain purity at a degree higher than that prescribed in the Hebrew Bible for ordinary Jews under ordinary conditions is not in question. And it seems most likely that, whether in great detail or in symbolic gestures, their purity codes bore some familial relationship to the purity codes required for priests when on duty in the Temple. As we shall see later, the Temple functioned as the controlling symbol for Pharisees no less than for other Jews; and the purity codes functioned as a key means of granting to ordinary domestic life, and in particular the private study of Torah, the status that would normally only accrue to those who were serving in the presence of Israel’s god within his Temple.

How much influence did the Pharisees seek, and how much did they actually wield, during this period? The question needs to be approached from both ends. (a) Josephus (and/or his sources) may have exaggerated the extent to which they had influence with the masses and the government under the Hasmoneans, but the arguments in favour of this look considerably weaker since the publication of Mason’s recent book, and there is no reason to think that the Pharisees had no influence at all in that period. (b) It is clear that some at least of the Pharisees’ successors came to hold positions of authority, both de facto and de jure, in the post-70 period. Therefore, (c) it is probably easier to postulate a continuum once more, in which the Pharisees still held influence in the period 63 BC to AD 70, albeit of a modified sort, rather than to assert, as has been popular recently, that they neither sought nor wielded any influence beyond their own ranks. The level of such influence is impossible to gauge accurately, but the fact that some Pharisees at least were clearly respected political figures (Gamaliel, Simon ben Gamaliel, and others during the war) should incline us to think that they were not without a voice in the official councils of state; and, a fortiori, it is highly likely that their influence as de facto teachers of the masses (even though the priests remained the de jure teachers) will have remained considerable. Certainly the burden of proof now rests, I suggest, on any who wish to argue the opposite.¹⁴⁴

As to their geographical spread and numerical strength: it has recently been asserted that in the time of Jesus the Pharisees were a small group, numbering a few thousand at most, and based almost entirely in Jerusalem.¹⁴⁵ The arguments advanced in support of this turn out to be extremely slender. On the matter of their location, that their base was in Jerusalem is not surprising (John 4:1–3 indicates as much); that they had representatives in most areas, Galilee included, is highly likely.¹⁴⁶ We have already seen that the revolution of Judas the Galilean was in all probability closely bound up with the Shammaite wing of the Pharisees. The story of Johanan ben Zakkai, who represented the other extreme of the movement, denouncing the Galileans as Torah-haters ¹⁴⁷ may well show that the Galileans as a whole did not follow the Pharisees, but if anything it proves (not least in view of the parallel with Matthew 11:20–4) that there had been considerable Pharisaic activity there; and in any case the story may be a reflection of Hillel/Shammai polemic rather than the denunciation of non-Pharisees by Pharisees.¹⁴⁸ It is not without interest that among the mentions of Pharisees in this period (apart from those in the gospels) there are four occasions when they are sent, with higher authority, from Jerusalem (or, in the last case, Jamnia) on missions to the north, to sort out trouble in Galilee or further afield.¹⁴⁹ The question we might ask is not, whether Pharisees became involved in such missions; the question is, what sort of issues might call them forth. Discussion of that must be postponed for the moment.

As to their numbers, the only figure we have is the ‘over 6,000’ mentioned in Antiquities 17.42 as refusing to take the oath to Caesar. But this figure, coming most likely to Josephus from Nicolas of Damascus, and referring to an event which took place in Jerusalem in the latter years of Herod’s reign (roughly 10 BC), can scarcely be used to give an accurate assessment of the number of Pharisees in Jerusalem, let alone in the country as a whole, let alone spread across Judaism in the Diaspora, half a century later—especially when that half-century had contained at least two major revolts which might well have encouraged others to join the movement.¹⁵⁰ To be sure, this does not mean that we must go back to the former days of imagining the Pharisees to be a large, ubiquitous and all-powerful group. But it does mean that they were, in this period, in all probability reasonably numerous, reasonably widespread, and reasonably influential.

3. We now turn to the period from AD 70 to 135. It might be thought that the events of AD 70 would have brought about that great change from political involvement to pious devotion that has been postulated to explain the difference between Josephus’ Pharisees and those of the Mishnah.¹⁵¹ But there is evidence of continuing Pharisaic involvement in revolution in the next period too, up to the events of 132–5. First, Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, one of the great rabbis of the so-called Jamnia period, is reported to have spoken of the destruction of Rome as the precondition of the kingdom of Israel’s god, as predicted in Zechariah.¹⁵² Eliezer’s excommunication by the more moderate Gamaliel II ¹⁵³ may well have had more to do with major differences on matters of political stance than with detailed debates about Torah; in such matters, it is clear that considerable debates could rage without one side ever excommunicating the other. It looks as though the different strands in pre-70 Pharisaism, witnessed to in the debates between Hillel and Shammai and their respective followers, continued to be a feature of the post-70 reconstruction period. It has even been speculated that the revolt in 132 was itself one result of the achievement of Jamnia: the Jews felt sufficiently united and consolidated to risk a further engagement with Rome.¹⁵⁴

The second, most obvious, example of a post-70 sage who clearly stood in continuity with the Pharisaic tradition, and equally clearly supported active anti-Roman revolution, is of course Akiba himself, the best-known of the generation who grew up under the Jamnia regime.¹⁵⁵ His hailing of Simeon ben Kosiba as Messiah was opposed by some of his contemporaries, but the reasons given have to do with chronology rather than ideology: Akiba has got his arithmetic wrong, and he will be dead and buried long before the Messiah comes.¹⁵⁶ No-one dared to suggest that the expectation of a warlike Messiah who would liberate Israel from Rome ran counter to received wisdom. Akiba, regarded in some later traditions as the ‘father of the Mishnah’, remains both in his enthusiasm for bar-Kochba and in his noble martyrdom a clear example of the continuing marriage of politics and piety which had been evident, so far as we can tell, from the very beginning of the Pharisaic movement.

Between 70 and 135, then, the two strands we have already observed remained, but no longer as ‘Pharisees’. It is important to note the full complexity of the situation. (a) The two ‘houses’ are both regarded by the rabbinic sages as their spiritual ancestors, even though after 135 the political aspect was firmly submerged and the pious agenda exalted. The sages of Jamnia and afterwards were not coterminous with the Pharisees before 70, nor were they the descendants of one party within Pharisaism. They represented a variety of positions, many of which could trace some roots in the variety of pre-70 Judaism.¹⁵⁷ (b) It is not simply the case that Hillel and his house represent ‘piety’, and Shammai and his house ‘politics’. It is only when the revolutionary option has finally and visibly been excluded—i.e. after 135—that an actual split between ‘politics’ and ‘piety’ begins to make some sense (despite the anachronisms of those who try to push such a split back not only before 70 but into the Hasmonean period).¹⁵⁸

Rather, those who were happy to focus their whole attention on the scribal interpretation of Torah were able to do so, under the leadership of Johanan ben Zakkai and subsequently Gamaliel II. Those who followed the stricter old Pharisaic agenda, and clung to the hope of revolution, included Eliezer ben Hyrcanus and, a little later, Akiba. But there remained debate and flexibility within and between the two positions, so that, just as Saul of Tarsus was able to take a very different line to that of his teacher Gamaliel, Nehunya (see below) was able to promulgate the opposite view to that of his teacher Akiba.

Whether we follow Neusner and see Johanan’s tradition as ‘scribal’ and Eliezer’s as strictly ‘Pharisaic’, or whether we speculate that the debate between Johanan and Eliezer was the sharp focal point of the long-running debate between the houses of Hillel (Johanan) and Shammai (Eliezer), is therefore probably a matter of words rather than substance. A great transition had been effected, and the new groupings reflected different reactions to the new situation as much as continuity with different pre-70 strands of Jewish piety and tradition. In any case, we may assume that between 70 and 135 the situation remained far more fluid than the later rabbinic traditions admit. Had the house of Hillel prevailed as thoroughly as those writings suggest, there would have been no support for bar-Kochba’s rebellion. As it was, it was supported by Akiba himself, who in retrospect is perhaps the greatest transitional figure of them all: clearly standing in the line of the politically active and revolutionary-minded Pharisees from the days of the Hasmoneans and Herod, he is then looked back to and reverenced as a great Torah-teacher by those who, in a drastically changed situation, highlighted concerns of which he would undoubtedly have approved but which he would have set in a completely different context.

4. After the second revolt there began the period which marked the real beginning of what we know as rabbinic Judaism. From then on revolutionary talk was taboo. It was rabbi Nehunya ben ha-Kanah, a disciple of Akiba, who gave voice to the changed mood: ‘He that takes upon himself the yoke of the Law, from him shall be taken away the yoke of the kingdom and the yoke of worldly care,’ and vice versa. In other words, study of Torah means that one need not be concerned about political power.¹⁵⁹ Here Nehunya is closer to Johanan ben Zakkai than to Eliezer or his (Nehunya’s) teacher Akiba. Those who study Torah in that mood will not need a Temple: Torah will do instead, as is said in the very next Mishnah saying, ascribed to rabbi Halafta ben Dosa, a sage of the second half of the second century: ‘If ten men sit together and occupy themselves in the Law, the Divine Presence rests among them’: in other words, study of Torah has the same effect as worship in the Temple. In either case one is in the presence of the Shekinah, the localized dwelling-place of Israel’s god.¹⁶⁰ From this point of view anything that might be gained by revolution—and the chief thing to be gained by Jewish revolution was always the proper and divinely sanctioned rebuilding of the Temple—was pushed into the distant future. Energy which had previously been directed into revolutionary politics was now to be channelled into revisionist scholarship. Modern Judaism had come to birth.

We may now stand back from this chronological sequence and observe two vital features which we have not yet discussed. I refer to prayer and theology.

First, if we know anything about the Pharisees we know that they prayed, and we know more or less what they prayed for. They prayed the Shema; they prayed the Shemoneh Esreh, the Eighteen Benedictions. But these prayers, in their origin, are very far from being the articulation of an escapist piety. The Shema, in claiming Israel’s god as the one god of all the earth, sustains the belief that this god will vindicate his people. It is no accident that Akiba was reciting the Shema as the Romans tortured him to death.¹⁶¹ The Eighteen Benedictions include such ideas as the bringing of a redeemer to Israel, the resurrection of the dead, the proclamation of liberation with a great trumpet, and the gathering of the dispersed Israelites, the destruction of Israel’s enemies, the restoration of Jerusalem and the Temple, and the coming of the Messiah.¹⁶² It would be a bold historian who, faced with the actual events of the period between the Maccabees and bar-Kochba, undertook to argue that those who prayed these prayers day and night never understood them in a literal sense, and never sought to act as the agents of Israel’s god in bringing to pass, through political and revolutionary action, the blessings for which they were asking. These prayers, of course, continued to be prayed after 135. But from then on, as the saying from R. Nehunya demonstrates, they were systematically reread in relation to the new world order which was experienced by those who gave themselves to study of Torah. And in this world order, as one of its most notable modern exponents has insisted, theology and history have nothing to say to each other.¹⁶³

The second more general consideration concerns the Pharisaic belief-system. Josephus’ account of this gives prominence to the idea of resurrection.¹⁶⁴ This belief, however, is not merely to do with speculation about a future life after death. As we can see from some of the early texts which articulate it, it is bound up with the desire for a reconstituted and restored Israel.¹⁶⁵ This, as we shall see later, is probably the real reason why the Sadducees rejected it.¹⁶⁶ The last thing they wanted was a major upheaval which might well snatch away their precarious power.

The other Pharisaic belief to which Josephus draws attention is the idea of providence or fate.¹⁶⁷ The doctrine of the Essenes, he says, ‘is wont to leave everything in the hands of God’;¹⁶⁸ the Sadducees, on the other hand, believe that everything comes down to the exercise of human free will.¹⁶⁹ The Pharisees take a middle position, believing that, though everything is brought about by providence, humans still possess free will.¹⁷⁰ Josephus in these passages is once more clearly ‘translating’ the actual points at issue into Hellenistic philosophical language, using standard phrases to give his Roman audience the impression of the Jewish sects as Greek-style philosophical schools, sitting around debating abstract issues. It is not difficult to see through this disguise to the socio-political reality behind it. The Essenes proclaimed by their very mode of existence that, though they longed for the liberation of Israel, they were simply going to wait and allow Israel’s god to bring it to pass in his own time. The Sadducees proclaimed by their very existence that they believed in seizing and maintaining political power for themselves. This much is clear from what we know of the Essenes and Sadducees. Reasoning in parallel, we may take it that the Pharisees’ belief was as follows: Israel’s god will act; but loyal Jews may well be required as the agents and instruments of that divine action. This fits completely with all the other evidence we have studied, and indeed hints at the further debate within Pharisaism itself, with Hillel (and Gamaliel, as in Acts 5:33–9) inclining more in the direction of leaving the issue to Israel’s god, and Shammai (and Saul of Tarsus) wanting to act as the means of that divine intervention. Behind Josephus’ unthreatening depiction of philosophical debate there stands the turbulent world of first-century political and revolutionary struggle.¹⁷¹

We may therefore sum up this discussion of the Pharisees as follows. Having begun as a religious/political pressure-group at the time of the Maccabees, the Pharisees attained their greatest de facto power under the later Hasmoneans. The rise of the Herodian dynasty, and the rule of the procurators, did not in principle dampen their ardour for Israel’s freedom from pagan practices and pagan rule, and many of them continued to be active in movements for revolt right up to 135.¹⁷² At the same time, we cannot simply agree with the idea that a shift from politics to piety took place, as described by Neusner and his followers in relation to the time of Hillel, and then transfer such a shift from this period to the time after 135. It is likely that the two ‘houses’ of Hillel and Shammai already represented two alternative ways of being Pharisees. Both were concerned with Israel’s liberation, and with the maintenance of purity on the part of those committed to this cause. But the former was happier to leave the issue to Israel’s god, and the latter eager to become the zealous agent of the divine action. Both were devout; both were, in the senses already described, ‘political’; they simply had different ways of putting the two things together.

Two final notes. Disputes between the different Pharisaic schools are the stuff of which the Mishnah is made up. These debates were conducted over several generations, at various levels. The detailed debates about purity almost certainly carried, for the debaters, echoes of the larger issues, much as a small debating point in contemporary politics will generate heat because all sides know the larger issues which remain unmentioned but powerfully symbolized. There is a vital difference between debates like this, with all parties regarding one another as fellow-Pharisees,¹⁷³ and disputes between Pharisees in general and non-Pharisees, such as Sadducees, Christians, or Essenes. We have, in fact, some reason to think that even the intra-Pharisaic debates were not carried on simply in the later Mishnaic mood of tolerance and banter, but sometimes involved, in the pre-70 period, violence and threats.¹⁷⁴ Contemporary analogies suggest that when a nation or group is in a tight corner, small issues acquire huge symbolic significance and evoke passion. Even after 70, one side was capable of excommunicating a leading member of the opposition, as in the case of Eliezer ben Hyrcanus.¹⁷⁵ When even sharper issues were involved, in which the entire Pharisaic programme was called into question, we have evidence quite apart from the New Testament to suggest that the Pharisees (or some of them at least) were not slow to respond.

Second, and finally, this account of the Pharisees enables us to understand the way in which our various sources have come to be what they are. (1) Josephus is concerned in the War to minimize the Pharisees’ involvement in revolution, and to present them as a Hellenistic philosophical school. In the Antiquities he allows a different view to come into sight.¹⁷⁶ Reading him critically, he remains of the greatest value. (2) The cryptic references in the Scrolls tell us enough to satisfy us that the Pharisees were regarded as a rival sect by the writers of the Scrolls in the first century BC. (3) Paul reflects the ‘zeal’ of the Shammaite, despite attempts to make him into a Hillelite;¹⁷⁷ that after his conversion he changed in several notable respects, becoming in some ways apparently closer to Hillel, is scarcely surprising. His prime concern now was the admission of Gentiles into the one covenant people of Israel’s god, and his argument was not that paganism was after all to be validated, but that Gentile converts to Christianity were no longer pagans. Paul saw himself as remaining true to Israel’s covenant heritage in the light of the new situation: Israel’s god had finally acted to liberate his people.¹⁷⁸ (4) & (5) The blocks of evidence from the gospels and from the rabbinic literature are both slanted, but in different directions. The gospels read the debates between Jesus and the Pharisees as foreshadowings both of the ‘trial’ of Jesus himself and of the missionary concerns of the early church; as we shall see later, the synoptic disputes concerning sabbath and food have to do not with an inner-Pharisaic problem but with the mutual self-definition of two (in some respects) sectarian movements. The rabbis of the Mishnah and afterwards understood the Pharisees as forerunners of their concern for purity, a concern that had turned in on itself and created its own shut-in world after the crushing defeats of 70 and 135. They therefore translated the political debates of their putative predecessors into the language of purity, just as Josephus had translated them into the language of philosophy.

At no point in these sources are we able to read a picture of the Pharisees straight off the text. But at no point are we forced, as some reconstructions have been, to eliminate altogether, or for that matter to elevate to a position of infallible ‘objectivity’, any one strand of the evidence. The Pharisees remain a complex and elusive group. But this has not prevented us from sketching in some basic historical probabilities about them, which will enable us in subsequent chapters to show how their worldview and belief-system formed an important variation within the broad spectrum of options open to first-century Jews. These are, as we shall see, of considerable interest and value as part of the whole picture of Judaism and Christianity in the first century of the Common Era.

4. The Essenes: Spotlight on a Sect

Scholars will, no doubt, continue to debate whether or not the Pharisees were a ‘sect’. There can be no such debate about the group that lived at Qumran, by the north-west shore of the Dead Sea. If ever there was a sect, this was it: isolated from the rest of Israel geographically and theologically, claiming to be the true heir of all the promises and the scriptures, regarding even devout Jews of other persuasions as dangerous deceivers. They were the Sons of Light, so they thought, and all others, not just the pagans, were the Sons of Darkness. This group is, in fact, one of the clearest examples known to us of what a sect looks like.¹⁷⁹

But if there is no debate about that, there is plenty about almost everything else to do with Qumran. The first wave of Scrolls studies, between their discovery (1947) and the publication of the section on the Scrolls in the revised Schürer (1979), seemed to have arrived at a solid conclusion about the origin and history of the community: they were the Essenes, of whose existence we had known from Philo, Josephus and Pliny.¹⁸⁰ But the last decade or so has seen this consensus under increasingly heavy fire. The double equation ‘Qumran community = Essenes = writers of the Scrolls’ is no longer held across the board. Many now argue that those who lived at Qumran were a subgroup, perhaps a splinter-group, of a much wider Essene movement, or perhaps the original group from which that wider movement grew. Detailed study of the Scrolls themselves indicates that they come from subtly but significantly different communities: the Damascus Document, in particular, represents a different community and organization from the Community Rule.¹⁸¹ It has even been argued, though most would still regard this as unlikely, that the Scrolls themselves were not written at Qumran at all, but were simply taken there for safe keeping with the approach of war in the mid-60s AD.¹⁸² Like the Delphic oracle, the caves, in revealing their secrets, have created more questions.

Fortunately for our present purpose, which is to examine the Judaisms which form the matrix of early Christianity, these questions do not need to be settled. However many groups or individuals may have written this or that scroll, or part of a scroll, what is interesting for our purposes is how some Jews thought, lived and prayed in the period, that is, what options were open, under certain circumstances, in terms of new ways of reading scripture, organizing community, expressing faith and hope. Whereas with the Pharisees we are dealing with a movement which early Christianity regarded as a rival, and which Paul in particular knew as his own background, with the Essenes and/or the Qumran community and/or the writers of the Scrolls we have no good evidence, despite the occasional flurry of journalistic activity, to connect any or all of them directly with either Jesus, Paul, or the early church. Anticipating our later conclusion, we may suggest that they can be seen as a cousin of early Christianity: sharing the same ancestor (pre-Maccabaean Judaism), exhibiting some family similarities, but without direct derivation or even visible links.

We may therefore embark on a brief general account of the Scrolls, designed to highlight certain features which will be particularly interesting for various aspects of our later study. They are arguably the work of (some part or parts of) a multiform Jewish sectarian group, the Essenes, which seems to have come into existence some time in the second century BC, or possibly somewhat later, and who, according to Philo and Josephus, numbered over 4,000.¹⁸³ Through all the recent debates, it still remains moderately likely that the issue which brought the movement into existence was the Maccabaean crisis and its aftermath, in which the older high-priestly group were ousted in favour of the new Hasmonean priest-kings. The subsequent development of the movement, including its possible split or change of direction, can probably be traced in relation to the continuing story of the Hasmonean house. At each hypothetical stage, those who wrote the Scrolls saw themselves as the true representatives of Judaism over against the group then in power, i.e. the Hasmoneans.¹⁸⁴ It is possible—no more than that—that the movement may have had a similar or even identical ancestor to the Pharisees, namely, the shadowy hasidim of the late third and early second century BC;¹⁸⁵ and it is also possible that some disaffected Pharisees joined the movement around the start of the first century BC.¹⁸⁶ The site at Qumran was then vacated in the last third of the first century BC, reinhabited early in the first century AD, and finally taken over and destroyed by the Romans in about AD 68. If it is true that the Qumran community, and/or those who wrote the Scrolls, were part of a wider Essene movement, we have no evidence for the continuation of such a movement after the fall of the Temple.¹⁸⁷

Using the model we developed in Part II, we may now outline the worldview which the Scrolls reveal to us. In order to avoid begging the questions noted above, I shall refer to those who adhered to the Scrolls (including both the Damascus Document and the Community Rule, except where noted) by the vague terms ‘the group’ or ‘the movement’. It is important to remember that those of whom we thus speak saw this ‘group’ as a tight-knit one, a ‘unity’ (Hebrew yahad), and this ‘movement’ as the spearhead of the divine purpose for the world. Membership was not a dilettante hobby. It was a matter of life and death, for oneself, for Israel, and for the world.

First, the symbolic world of the group was focussed on its own existence as the rightful heir of Judaism. The focal points of its own life, seen as the fulfillment of prophecy and the means whereby the divine purpose would finally be realized, became its central symbols. The council meetings of the community were solemn religious occasions; the mealtimes, sacred festivals. Communal life was governed by strict laws of purity, and the calendar was arranged in such a way as to enable festivals and sabbaths to be kept ‘properly’, i.e. on different days from one another.¹⁸⁸ Not least in symbolic importance were the implements of study and writing. Pen and ink (some of which have been found by archaeologists) were used in the service of Israel’s god. Even the scroll jars themselves acquire, particularly in retrospect, a profound symbolic value: these writings are to be kept safe through the present tribulation, so that when the day of vindication dawns they may again be read. Not for nothing did the modern Israeli government place the Scrolls, discovered within a few months of the founding of the modern State of Israel, in a museum built as a gigantic replica of a scroll jar.

Of the regular praxis of the community, one feature in particular deserves special comment: the community described in the Community Rule (as opposed to that in the Damascus Document) offered no animal sacrifices.¹⁸⁹ Building on this, and piecing together the ideology of the movement from hints and statements, we reach the clear conclusion that at least one branch regarded itself not just as the true Israel but as the true Temple.¹⁹⁰ The existing Temple might have been ‘cleansed’ by the Maccabaean revolt, but it was still polluted as far as this group was concerned.¹⁹¹ Just as the Pharisees and their putative successors developed an alternative to the Temple, offering ‘spiritual sacrifices’ through prayer, fasting and almsgiving, so the group that practised the Community Rule developed a theology in which Israel’s god had called them into being as an alternative Temple. Their devotion was acceptable in the place of that which was still being offered a few miles away, and a few thousand feet higher up, on Mount Zion itself.

It is clear that the praxis of the group did not involve participation in active revolt. The time for fighting would come when Israel’s god sent the Messiah to lead the holy war, and not until. This is the socio-political reality behind Josephus’ description of the Essenes as believing in fate rather than free will.¹⁹² Nevertheless, one tell-tale Essene, clearly not a member of the Qumran group, appears in Josephus’ account of the war, and we must not suppose that positions were completely hardened one way or another.¹⁹³ As to their political involvement, it seems to have been limited to prophetic announcements, such as that which foretold that Herod would become king. According to Josephus, Herod was sufficiently impressed by the Essenes to allow them exemption from the oath of loyalty to himself. One explanation for the site of Qumran being vacated in the latter years of the first century BC is that during Herod’s reign the community lived in Jerusalem itself, in the so-called ‘Essene quarter’, enjoying political favour and (no doubt) hoping for Israel’s redemption.¹⁹⁴

The stories that the group told reveal, as well and as clearly as any community’s stories do, the nature of the worldview they espoused. It was, of course, Israel’s story; but, like all retellings of Israel’s story in this period, it had a twist to its tail. The scriptures were searched, read, prayed over, studied, copied out—all with the focus on the present and immediately future moment. Israel’s history had entered a bottleneck. The return from exile had not yet really happened. This little group was the advance guard through whom it would come about. Thus the prophecies written before the exile, predicting a future return and restoration, were in fact starting to come true in the history of the group itself. The story of Israel had turned into the story of the group.

If we press this group for answers to the basic worldview questions, they are not slow in coming. Who are we? We are the true Israel, the heirs of the promises, ignored at present but with a great future before us. We are the elect ones of Israel’s god, the bearers of Israel’s destiny. Where are we? We are in exile, situated (whether actually, at Qumran, or metaphorically, in one of the other Essene groups) away from the rest of Israel, demonstrating by our wilderness existence the fact that the promises of restoration and redemption are yet to be fulfilled. What is wrong? Clearly, that Israel is still unredeemed; that the wrong people are in power, the wrong high priests are ruling the Temple, and Israel as a whole is blind, without knowledge and insight, deaf to the call of her god. What is the solution? Israel’s god has begun to act. In calling this movement into existence he has prepared the way for the final showdown with his enemies. Soon he will send his anointed ones, a king and a priest, who will be Israel’s true rulers and will lead the Sons of Light in a great war against the Sons of Darkness. Not only the Gentiles, but also all renegade Jews, will be defeated; and the Sons of Light will reign for a thousand generations. Then, and only then, will true worship be restored, as a new Temple is built in place of the present corrupt one, to be the dwelling-place of Israel’s god for all generations. In the mean time we, the advance guard, must stay at our post in prayer and purity.

This outline of the group’s worldview is not, I think, controversial at any point. Detailed discussions of emphasis abound, of course, and there are endless questions as to the meaning of particular texts, especially the many tiny fragments that are now gradually coming to light after their second burial on the desks of scholars. And from this worldview we can read off a clear statement of theology, as clear as anything from the second-temple period.

First, there is one god, the god of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and the prophets. The keen interest in angelology shown in the Scrolls (and reported by Pliny) in no way detracts from this emphasis; nor does the odd suggestion of Josephus that the Essenes worshipped the sun, which more likely reflects two things, their habit of facing east for morning worship and their adoption of a solar rather than a lunar calendar.¹⁹⁵ The purposes of this god, though mysterious, were revealed long ago to his prophets, and are now made known to the group through the inspired teachers, notably the so-called ‘Teacher of Righteousness’.¹⁹⁶

Second, Israel is the chosen people of this god, not simply for her own sake but in order to be his means of furthering his work for the reordering of his world. This election of Israel, of which the covenant is the instrument, has now been focussed on the group, who collectively form the people of the new covenant, the new elect. It should be noted at this point that discussions of ‘predestination’ can throw the emphasis of such a view of ‘election’ in the wrong direction, evoking questions of individual election which are quite foreign to concerns expressed in the Scrolls. The emphasis, rather, is that what was true of Israel as a whole—she was the elect people of the one true god—is now true of the group. This positive identification of the group as the elect carries, of course, a strong negative corollary: those who are not part of the group are not part of the elect, whatever status they may have in contemporary Jewish society. We may strongly suspect a particular target to be the present ruling high-priestly family, and other competing pressure-groups such as the Pharisees.

Third, the badges of membership in the renewed covenant were clearly the piety and purity enjoined by the community’s rules. Acceptance of this discipline was the sign that one belonged; rejection of it would incur penalties, the severest being expulsion (which could have fatal consequences for one who had sworn solemn oaths to eat no food except that of the community). Two points need to be made here. (a) It is quite clear from the content of the group’s devotional literature that this piety and purity were not regarded as ‘earning’ membership, or salvation. They merely expressed it.¹⁹⁷ (b) The purity regulations of the group give several indications that they regarded themselves as in some senses analogous to, or on a par with, priests in the Temple. Obviously they could not, and did not, reproduce all the features of Temple-piety. But what they did is sufficient to show that, just as the Mishnah would argue that studying Torah is the equivalent of being in the Temple in Jerusalem, so those who framed the rules in the Scrolls regarded those who kept them as having similar privileges—and responsibilities.¹⁹⁸

Finally, eschatology. It has long been common to see the Scrolls as representative of ‘apocalyptic’, and in part this is justified. We should not, however, make the mistake of seeing ‘apocalyptic’ as marking out a special type of Judaism.¹⁹⁹ As I shall argue in chapter 10, ‘apocalyptic’ is a type of literature which was both available to all in principle as one way of saying things that might be difficult to say otherwise, and most likely cherished and read, in the case of individual writings, by a comparatively small group. That is, any Jew might read, say, 1 Enoch, and might find there meanings of which he or she could approve; but the chances are that most Jews, including many who cherished wild dreams about the future, did not in fact know most of the works now collected in Charlesworth’s Pseudepigrapha, and that many Jews, if they had come across such literature, would have regarded it with great suspicion. That is why one cannot base an account of Judaism on such writings, but must always start at least with the things we know to have been common to all Jews.

The eschatology of the group who produced the Scrolls, while sharing some common features with other ‘apocalyptic’ writings, must not, then, be read simply as ‘dualistic’, or as expecting ‘the end of the world’. Sanders seems to me exactly right: ‘From the Scrolls, we learn that the sect looked forward to a dramatic change in the future, which modern scholars often call “the eschaton” …, which is slightly misleading, since like other Jews the Essenes did not think that the world would end.’²⁰⁰ Rather, the exalted language about a coming great day was intended to refer to the time when Israel’s god would act within history to redeem his people and re-establish them as his people, within his holy Land and worshipping in a new Temple. The hope, however exalted, retained its essentially this-worldly base. When Israel’s god acted, he would send the true anointed priest, and the true Davidic king, to be the Messiahs of his people. This belief in two Messiahs may be startling to those accustomed to think of Jews as expecting ‘the Messiah’ simply, but it is perfectly consistent with the group’s firmly held belief in a renewed Temple. It would be quite wrong for a Davidic king, descended from Judah, to preside over the true Temple; only a descendent of Levi, Aaron and Zadok would do. The Epistle to the Hebrews faced exactly the same problem, and simply solved it in a different way (Hebrews 5–7).²⁰¹ The royal Messiah would lead the group in their holy war against the enemy, after which Israel’s redemption would be complete, and the true Israel would rule in peace and righteousness for ever. It has been interestingly argued that the group’s chronological calculations may have led it to hope that the Messiahs would appear around the time of the death of Herod the Great.²⁰²

The sect thus held a form of what later scholarship has called ‘inaugurated eschatology’. Most Jews in our period seem to have believed that their god would act in the future to liberate Israel from her continuing exile. The group whose writings were found at Qumran believed that this god had already begun the process, secretly, in and through them. What would happen in the future would be the dramatic unveiling of what had already been started, just as what had already been started was the fulfillment of prophecies hidden from long ago. At the moment, the rest of Israel would look and look, but never see; the day would come when the righteous would shine like the sun in the kingdom of Israel’s god.

5. Priests, Aristocrats, and Sadducees

We could quite easily imagine first-century Judaism without Essenes or Scrolls. The same is emphatically not true of the priests in general and the chief priests in particular. Josephus, writing at the end of the first century AD, says that there were at least twenty thousand priests, far more than the figures given for the party of the Pharisees (6,000) or the sect of the Essenes (4,000).²⁰³ Their role, often overlooked in accounts of first-century Judaism, must be put back where it belongs.²⁰⁴

The great majority of the priests were not aristocrats, or particularly wealthy. They, and the Levites who served as their assistants, were dependent on the tithing practised by the rest of the population. Most of them lived away from Jerusalem, going there in groups, by turn, for the performance of the regular rituals. For the rest of the time, they functioned in a way which has, again, often been ignored: they were the main teachers of the law, and the group to whom ordinary Jews turned for judgment and arbitration in disputes or legal problems.²⁰⁵ It should be no surprise that Jesus tells the cleansed leper to ‘show himself to the priest’ (Matthew 8:4 and parallels). That would have been normal practice. The priests were the local representatives of mainline ‘official’ Judaism, as befits those who had both studied Torah themselves and, from time to time, had the privilege of serving Israel’s god in his Temple.

At the top of the priestly tree, so to speak, we find the chief priests. As far as we can tell from our sources, they formed in the first century a kind of permanent secretariat, based in Jerusalem, wielding considerable power. They belonged to a small group of families, tight-knit and inbred, who seem on several occasions to have engaged in serious factional disputes among themselves.²⁰⁶ They, unlike the ordinary priests, formed the heart of Judaism’s aristocracy; there were undoubtedly lay aristocrats as well, but the chief priests have the highest profile. It was with them, and particularly with the high priest who was chosen from their number, that the Roman governors had to deal in the first instance, holding them responsible for the general conduct of the populace.²⁰⁷

This aristocracy, both clerical and lay, had no solid ancestral claim to its prestige. Goodman has argued convincingly that the Romans chose to elevate, and work with, local landowners, who were thus given a position for which their family status would not have prepared them. Herod, in addition, had carefully disposed of the Hasmonean dynasty, and, since there was no question of becoming high priest himself, he took care that the office should be held by people who posed no threat to him personally, as a dynamic or well-born high priest might easily have done.²⁰⁸ Thus, by the time Judaea became a Roman province in AD 6, the ruling high-priestly family was firmly established, but without any solid claim to antiquity. Their interests thus lay in keeping the peace between Rome and an often discontented people. If this meant pacifying the Romans, they did so. When it became apparent that peace was gone beyond hope, they chose to side with the rebels, intending no doubt to retain their status as leaders, and their property as landowners, after what might have been a successful revolt.²⁰⁹

The central symbol of the priestly worldview was obviously the Temple. It represented, no doubt, different things to different priests. To the country priest, living for most of the time in comparative poverty, teaching in his local village and settling local disputes, the regular visit to the Temple, and the chance to take part in its ritual, was the high point of his year, or even of his life. Everything he did away from Jerusalem gained meaning and depth because of the Temple. As we shall see in the next chapter, it drew together the entire theology and aspiration of Israel. To the Jerusalemite priest, and particularly to the chief priests, the Temple was in principle all of that, but more besides: it was their power-base, the economic and political centre of the country. It was because they controlled the Temple that they were who they were. It gave powerful religious legitimation to the status which they had been granted under the Romans and Herod.

For this reason, our sources are surely right to represent the chief priests as fundamentally conservative. They, and the leading aristocracy, seem mostly to have belonged to the party we know as the Sadducees. Unfortunately, there is not much more that we know about this party, other than their conservatism, and their apparently perpetual dogfight with the Pharisees. What we can trace in more detail may briefly be described as follows.²¹⁰

According to Josephus, the Sadducees believed in free will. Just as I am inclined to think that Josephus’ description of the Pharisaic blend of free will and fate is a depoliticized code for their balance between waiting for Israel’s god to act and being ready to act on his behalf if necessary, so I am inclined to think that the Sadducean belief in free will has little to do with abstract philosophy and a great deal to do with the politics of power: Israel’s god will help those who help themselves.²¹¹ This is a comfortable doctrine for those in power, who maintain themselves there by taking whatever measures seem necessary, just as its mirror image, belief that divine action can only be awaited, not hastened, is a consoling doctrine for those out of power, who see no hope of regaining it by their own efforts (see above, on the Essenes).

Second, the Sadducees had no time for laws other than those in the Bible (or possibly, other than those in the Pentateuch). This viewpoint is set over against those who follow ‘the traditions of the elders’, a pretty clear reference to the Pharisees, who, though their elevation of such traditions to the status of absolute law may be doubted,²¹² certainly maintained, and applied to themselves at least, a large body of such traditions. Here again we see the Sadducees as an essentially conservative body, unwilling to allow (what could be seen as) mere innovation. In the political realm, this is again a useful doctrine for those in power to hold if their innovating opponents are engaged, as we have seen some at least of the Pharisees were, in revolutionary activities.

Third, the Sadducees denied the doctrine of the resurrection.²¹³ It should not need saying, but probably does, that this has nothing to do with the post-enlightenment rationalism or ‘liberalism’ that doubts whether such things are possible. The best explanation for the Sadducees’ view seems to me, again, the holistic one that combines theology, society and political reality. By the first century, ‘resurrection’ had functioned for a long time as a symbol and metaphor for the total reconstitution of Israel, the return from Babylon, and the final redemption. Ezekiel 37 spoke of the return in terms of Israel being awakened out of the grave; the Maccabaean martyrs, as presented in 2 Maccabees (written in the late second or early first century BC),²¹⁴ spoke of their own forthcoming resurrection in the context of claiming that their god would vindicate his people against the tyrant. Although the first-century aristocrats were in one sense the heirs of the Hasmoneans whose vindication 2 Maccabees envisaged, the boot was now on the other foot: resurrection, in its metaphorical sense of the restitution of a theocratic Israel, possibly under a Messiah, would mean the end of their precarious power. At the same time, we should not suppose that the only meaning of Josephus’ statements is to be found at the political level. If the Sadducees concentrated, for reasons of political necessity, on the affairs of the world, they, unlike the poor and marginalized for whom the hope for restitution had to be projected forwards on to the life to come, may have quite genuinely had less concern for doctrines about the afterlife itself.²¹⁵

The influence of the aristocrats in general and the Sadducees in particular has been controversial, for the same underlying reasons as the question of the influence of the Pharisees. Goodman, McLaren and Sanders, in their different ways, have all argued strongly that the aristocracy held considerable de facto as well as de jure power.²¹⁶ This is at first sight out of line with Josephus’ assertion that the Sadducees could accomplish practically nothing, since the masses held the Pharisees in high honour.²¹⁷ Josephus is then thought to have misleadingly presented the Pharisees as the most influential party in order to persuade the Romans to accept the present Jewish regime, which purported to be the inheritor of the Pharisaic tradition, as the one which could offer best hope of influencing the people. In the light of Mason’s arguments, however, I am inclined to accept Josephus’ verdict, with modifications: in terms of party effectiveness, the Pharisees were far more successful in persuading the people of their views than the Sadducees were. That is, the majority of the people believed in resurrection (most probably in both the literal and the metaphorical senses); the majority of people went on believing that their god would intervene in history, that matters did not lie solely in human hands; and the majority of people were prepared to take at least some of the Pharisaic traditions with at least some seriousness. On all these points, if there was a Sadducean agenda, it was not followed.

But was this what Josephus meant? Not entirely, I suspect. His own agenda was probably not the lauding of the Pharisees; if it had been, he went about it in a very odd way.²¹⁸ His agenda, more likely, was the exoneration of the aristocracy, i.e. of his own party. If he made bald statements about Pharisaic domination which make it look as though (in Sanders’ phrase) ‘they ran everything’, the chance is that he did so in order to give the impression of a noble and well-meaning aristocracy whose hands were tied by populist movements beyond their control. Behind this we can trace the more complex reality:

i. a good many aristocrats were in fact involved in anti-Roman sedition, though on their own terms and with motives very different from the Zealots or other groups (Goodman);

ii. the Pharisees continued to enjoy widespread popular support (Mason, and now, cautiously, Sanders);²¹⁹

iii. in many matters of ordinary practice, not least in the Temple cult, the priests may well have followed Pharisaic regulations (Mason), though neither the priests in general nor the chief priests in particular needed the Pharisees to teach them the basics of their craft (Sanders);

iv. in serious politics, what mattered was what the Roman governor and the chief priests did and said. Obviously, it was in their interests to work with rather than against a populace that was disposed to be restive, and to that extent they took the Pharisees, as populist leaders, into consideration; but they were quite prepared, when it was necessary or convenient, to ignore anybody and everybody, Pharisees included (Sanders).

(v) Josephus’ main aim was to exonerate his own party, the aristocracy, and he did so by emphasizing Pharisaic influence and his own annoyance with it.

This, I think, makes sense of the data and gives a coherent historical picture. It remains to state the sequel: the aristocracy were either wiped out in the war (many of them at the hands of Jewish revolutionaries with different motives), or they assimilated, like Josephus himself, in varying degrees, into the general Greco-Roman society around them. We hear nothing of them in the period of Jamnia. Their worldview, whose central symbol was the Temple, and whose central story concerned an Israel with themselves as its rulers, had been destroyed beyond trace.