Rise of the Jewish Sects

Three major sects shaped the Judaism Jesus and the apostles encountered, and all three emerged in the two centuries before the New Testament. The Pharisees ("separated ones") were a lay movement of intense Torah piety; they accepted not only the written Law but a growing body of oral tradition (the "tradition of the elders"), insisted on ritual purity for ordinary households as well as priests, taught the resurrection of the dead, the existence of angels and spirits, and a real if mysterious providence over human freedom. Their authority lay in the synagogue and in the rabbinic schools; after the destruction of the Temple in AD 70, Pharisaic Judaism became the seedbed of all later rabbinic Judaism. The Sadducees were drawn from the priestly aristocracy and the great Jerusalem families that ran the Temple. They accepted only the written Torah, rejected the resurrection, angels, and oral tradition, and were politically pragmatic, content to work with Rome to keep the sacrificial cult and their own influence intact. When the Temple fell, the Sadducees largely vanished. The Essenes withdrew further still: a covenantal community, organized in priestly purity, with shared property and disciplined daily prayer, the best-known settlement being the one at Qumran on the Dead Sea, whose library — the Dead Sea Scrolls — was discovered in 1947. The Gospels record Jesus debating Pharisees and Sadducees but never naming the Essenes.