Jewish Factions at the Time of Jesus*Jewish Factions at the Time of Jesus*Jesus was born about 160 years after the Maccabean revolt, into a world of great religious diversity and conflict. The oppression and resistance of the Maccabees were as real to the Jews of Jesus’s time as the Exodus from slavery. The Roman occupiers of Jesus’s time were one more in a long line of military oppressors, and played a part in the religious diversity and conflicts among the Jewish people.
One Jewish group, the Sadducees, collaborated with the Romans. They encouraged the populace to be tolerant and to make necessary compromises to keep the peace. They rejected the Midrash,* an oral tradition of stories that interpreted the Torah. They also rejected ideas that had entered Judaism during or after the Babylonian Exile, such as the resurrection of the body, or belief in angelic beings.
At the other end of the spectrum were the Hasideans, the "pietists." They determined that the Hellenistic culture of the Greeks was in conflict with the Torah. They resisted, believing that the nation was under the power of wicked forces. Out of this group came the Pharisees, who followed not only the Torah but also the Midrash. They incorporated newer concepts like resurrection of the body and an apocalyptic* future.
Jewish political revolutionaries seeking to expel the Romans by force of arms were called Zealots. They followed in the tradition of the Maccabees, King David, Joshua, and others who fought military battles against oppressors or foreigners in God’s name.
During the second century B.C., a group called the Essenes arose, who sought to bring about reform through purity. The second-century A.D. Roman writer Pliny (PLINN-ee) mentions a community of holy Jewish men who lived near the Dead Sea, probably the Essenes at Qumran, the modern name of the archaeological site of an ancient monastic-style community. The Essenes were similar to the Zealots in their fanaticism, but they believed that God, not human armies, would soon overthrow the forces of evil and vindicate the true Israel. They rejected the ritual offerings at the Jerusalem Temple, moved to Qumran and formed a community that strove to purify Judaism by living the law to perfection.
Some aspects of the Essene writings are strikingly similar to some early Christian writings. Both communities use imagery of light and darkness, such as in John’s Gospel. Their messages of repentance and baptism were also similar. They parted company in their treatment of the law or Torah, however. Christians struggled to define what it meant to fulfill the law, while Essenes wanted to fulfill the written law to perfection. Essenes lived ascetic lives cut off from women and others who were considered unclean. They were purists who felt the need to create a place that had not been defiled.
Some scholars think that John the Baptist may have lived among the Essenes. Possibly the Essene community served as a model for the ascetic tradition some Christians developed in the desert a few centuries later, which grew into monasticism. Asceticism is the effort to resolve the struggle between flesh and spirit by embracing poverty, self-denial, and mortification of the flesh in order to purify the spirit. The desert ascetics were men and women who left the worldliness of imperial city life to live a life of prayer and drastic simplicity in the deserts of Egypt and Syria. Many were revered for their wisdom; the fourth-century St. Anthony of Egypt was the most famous. Other ascetics called stylites lived atop pillars. The movement gained popularity particularly after the church grew wealthy and powerful, when it had become the imperial religion. The ascetic movement itself grew into organized communities or monasteries, whose members took vows of obedience, poverty or community of goods, celibacy, and conversion of life. After some experimentation with mixed-sex communities, separate communities for men and women that followed a rule of life became the monastic norm.
Essene scholars studied and copied the Jewish Scriptures and wrote commentaries in hopes of inciting religious reform. The Dead Sea Scrolls show that their interpretations related the texts directly to the situation at Qumran. Worship and liturgy seems to have occupied a great part of the life of the community. Many texts are collections of hymns and prayers with instructions for observance.
The struggle to interpret the word of God in that time was widespread and intense in these communities. Ongoing debate became the framework within which first-century communities struggled to maintain Judaism and establish Christianity.
Jesus was raised a Jew in the midst of this political and religious turmoil. We can only imagine the education that he received in his local community. If he was literate, he might have read the Hebrew texts we call sacred and many others--some of which are lost to us today. He would have been exposed to many of the books in scroll form. Some of the scrolls available in Palestine would have been in the Aramaic and possibly Greek languages. The style attributed to him of speaking in proverbs and parables and rejecting legalistic rules connect him to the Wisdom tradition. His desert wanderings, retreats, and reversal of expected orders of authority (the last shall be first, the greatest must serve the least) may indicate Essene influences. The oppression Jesus and all Jews experienced under Roman rule linked them to the questions raised by the Zealots.
