The World Jesus Entered: A Social and Cultural Introduction to Christianity in Its First Two Centuries

By Jon Davies

The World Jesus Entered traces the roots of what would become the Christian religion during its first two centuries, from the time of Jesus to the second and third generations of Christian believers. Although Jesus was a Jew among Jews who focused his ministry within a Jewish milieu, the Jewish people were themselves part of a wider world that had heavily impacted their culture and society by the time of Jesus; that world would in turn eventually help shape what would become the religions of both Judaism and Christianity. As different parties fought to control Jewish adaptation to a post-Jerusalem-centered mindset, the teachings of Jesus would become subsumed by ideas and practices quite different from those recorded as belonging to the first generation of his followers.

Four discrete chapters focus on differing influences—Jewish, non-Jewish, alt-Jewish, and Gnostic—as an introduction to the societies and cultures the teachings of Jesus entered. The book closes with two chapters showing how such influences impacted both Christian practice and doctrine, in the form of missionary activity and worship and in teachings regarding the afterlife and the very nature of existence proposed by the new Christian sect. As Jewish elites fought to define their culture and as non-Jewish Christians aimed to distinguish themselves from Jewish rebels fighting the Roman Empire and come to an understanding of the man-God Jesus who had been introduced to them, the faith Jesus founded would transform the world as much as it would be transformed by it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jan 9, 2022
• ISBN: 9781716249112

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A Social and Cultural Introduction to Christianity in Its First Two Centuries

Jon Davies

Copyright © 2022 by Jon Davies

This work is published under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International).

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Library of Congress Number: 2022900264

ISBN: 978-1-716-05322-1 (paperback)

ISBN: 978-1-716-24911-2 (ebook)

Published via Lulu.com in Morrisville, North Carolina

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Preface

This book came into being because I wanted to read something like it. Many books about the history of the first two centuries of Christianity, or some small aspect of it, exist, but few quite get at it from the cultural and social angle that I wanted to read about. Of course, in researching the book, I found a number of works helpful that actually did eventually manage to do almost what I had been looking for, though usually in a way more exhaustive in a small field than in a way that provided the kind of broader-scope history I was seeking. Notable exceptions would be F. F. Bruce's New Testament History (New York: Anchor Books, 1972), which covers much the same territory but ends in the first century, and John E. Stambaugh and David L. Balch's The New Testament in Its Social Environment (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1986), which also focuses on the social and cultural world of the time.

Works with the broader scope, alas, tend to be of three types. One, they assume a standard Catholic or Protestant history, not fully grappling with the early Judaistic origins of the Christian faith and seeing, usually, Paul as the true founder of Christianity insofar as he went to the Gentiles and established a Gentile religion in contradiction to that proffered by others. Much scholarship in recent years has begun to refocus on Paul as a Jew, but it often still sees him as preaching a kind of separate gospel to the Gentiles, a view I don't think is born out in his writings.¹ Or two, such broader works assume that the view of Christ as a deity only came about decades later, in the kind of mythmaking that happens after a person dies. This is the view popularized recently by many of the trendiest secular scholars, such as Bart Ehrman or James Tabor.² Or three, while acknowledging the continued Jewish context of the faith into the second century, they don't go very deeply into their claims or they have an agenda aimed at converting readers to a particular sect. I wanted a book of the third type without that agenda and with a bit more depth to the claims being made, if indeed they could be made. Numerous pamphlets published by churches of the Jewish Christian tradition exist, the perspective from which I write, but most glide over the history rather superficially, presenting two centuries in twenty-something pages and noting that most of what has come down to us is wrong with only small devotion to what it would have been like to live as a Christian during these times. For this reason, this work features an admitted excess of citations. Although much of this information is common knowledge, I want readers to be able to see to where such information can be gleaned. Where possible, I've tried to reference, or even quote, primary documents, but in a work of a general nature such as this, secondary sources are impossible to avoid.

As such, what's here is not something that is terribly unique in terms of the information it covers. Still, the years of research have been very helpful to me, and I hope that by putting all the research together in one spot, the work will prove helpful to others. Originally, I had hoped to cover the evolution of the church in five primary cities or regions (perhaps with others added later) during its first two centuries, a task less often undertaken by scholars and something I still hope to do. What's here, instead, is the introduction to that work, an introduction that grew much larger than the fifty or so pages I had imagined. In trying to set the context, I found there to be much more to be reviewed than could be covered in a single chapter, if I wanted to provide a fair assessment of what would eventually happen to the faith once delivered.

The World Jesus Entered

Chapter 1

The Jewish World Jesus Entered

One of the first accusations hurled at the newly founded Christian church was that its people were drunk. Such seems a natural reaction to what were events, that Pentecost day, as described in Acts 2, beyond human experience: flames above the heads of believers, a rushing mighty wind, people speaking in languages they did not know and everyone understanding.

But there'd been a lot of odd—some would say miraculous—happenings in the previous three and a half years, if we are to believe the writers of the Gospels. Five thousand people had been fed from five loaves of bread and two fishes, and at the end twelve baskets had been gathered (John 6:5–13); another time four thousand were fed from seven loaves (Matt. 15:33–38). The cause of these gatherings had been the reason for the gathering of 120 on the day of Pentecost, a man whom many had come to believe was the Messiah of Israel foretold of in the religious writings of the Jewish people, Jesus of Nazareth. This man, we are told in the Gospels, caused the lame [to] walk, the lepers [to be] cleansed, . . . the deaf [to] hear, [and] the dead [to be] raised up (Matt. 11:5).³ As such, "great multitudes came unto him, having with them those that were lame, blind, dumb, maimed, and many others, and cast them down at Jesus' feet; and he healed them" (Matt. 15:30). One of the most recent among these miracles was the resurrection of a man named Lazarus, who had been in the grave four days (John 11). And then, there was the resurrection of Jesus himself, something attested to by his followers, including his twelve main disciples, and then by five hundred people who had seen him all at once and by, at the least, his brother James (1 Cor. 15:5–7).

The reason this man was put to death has much to do with the early history—the first two centuries of the history—of the religion that bears his apparent identity and what became of it. For the world that he entered was one not unlike the one in which we live in today or that humankind has lived in throughout history. It was a world in which a multitude of stakeholders vied for power, for control of not only peoples but of their minds, and a world in which still others, less fortunate than the rest, strove merely to survive. In the world that Jesus entered, those stakeholders included the Romans, whose empire ruled over the nation into which Jesus was born. Those stakeholders also included the nation of Judea itself, or more specifically, those who attempted to control it. But because Rome was ultimately in charge, those who endeavored to hold sway over the Jewish people ultimately had to do so within the Roman context, by choosing to collude with the Romans; by reacting, in some way, against them; or by finding some kind of middle ground in which Roman authority was tolerated but not endorsed. It was this process around which the Jewish stakeholders each attempted to order the nation.

While a Talmudic source (Y Sanh. 29c) denotes that there were twenty-four sects of the Jewish faith when the temple was destroyed in 70 CE, the ancient historian Josephus focuses his descriptions on three of those that were the most common during the first century—the Essenes, the Sadducees, and the Pharisees.⁴ To these, he adds a fourth group for whom he does not provide a name but who are now commonly known as the Zealots.⁵ Among such groups the war for the Jewish heart and mind was fought, and central to that fight was the Jewish religion, around which the culture of the Jewish people was based and their history written. That culture and history found form in the books of the Old Testament, which recounted God's great works for the nation, as well as his dissatisfaction with its actions. Each group, in essence, strove to explain how to answer for the position into which Judea had fallen in relation to Rome and the outside world and also how best to react to that position. As these groups struggled with each other to determine how best to reconcile their theological views and beliefs to the reality of being a subject people, the conflict between them carried over into the newfound Christian religion, resulting ultimately in a faith much unlike the one adhered to by the first generation of followers of Jesus.

The Essenes

Of the groups mentioned by Josephus, the Essenes, isolationists as they are portrayed as being, were arguably the least influential among the peoples with whom Jesus walked, though that influence on intellectual thinking regarding Jewish and Christian culture has ironically grown substantially in the past one hundred years, long after the sect died out, for it is from the Essenes that we derive the Dead Sea Scrolls, perhaps the greatest biblical archeological find ever. Rescued from a desert cave in 1946, the Dead Sea Scrolls are the preserved writings of a sect of the Essenes at Qumran, a community on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea.⁶ The writings present much of the Old Testament and are used now to verify the accuracy of the received text that has come down to our present day. But also among the writings are various manuscripts unique to the community itself.

What this discovery has resulted in, however, is a reshaping of much of the history of first-century Palestine. Writers looking to primary documents rather than to documents that have been passed down in various iterations through generations of scribes and storytellers often consider the documents contemporary to the peoples of the time as being more accurate and more characteristic of the thinking of the age. As such, as scholars use the few primary documents available to them, Christianity has, for many, become an outgrowth of Essene teachings, with Jesus's precursor—John the Baptist—and even Jesus himself as members of the Essene school. The historian Robert Feather, for example, sees Jesus as one who was placed in the Qumran community at age sixteen for education and who graduated at age thirty, choosing to become an 'urban Essene' with his own group of followers.⁷ Robert Eisenman, in his book James the Brother of Jesus, posits that the Qumran texts are actually those of Jewish Christians (whom he equates with the Ebionites, a Jewish sect that accepted Jesus as a prophet but not as divine) and that early Christianity was primarily a familial order based around the person of Jesus. In Eisenman's view, Paul and a Gentile-based Christianity wiped Jesus's family from history to present Jesus as a divine being (born of a perennial virgin), creating a much different faith than that which Jesus—and his family members—presented.⁸ Placing James within the same camp as the creators of the Dead Sea Scrolls allows Eisenman to quote from the scrolls as if they often represent James's own thinking. Elizabeth McNamer, who posits some similar positions to Eisenman's, sees so many parallels between Christ's early followers and the Essenes—including the proximity of several archeological sites in Jerusalem—that mere coincidence cannot explain them. For her, the devout men mentioned in Luke and Acts are the Essenes—those of the group did not refer to themselves as Essenes—and only the prominence of Jesus's family prevented Essene practices from completely dictating early Jewish Christian ideas.⁹

Such theories tend to revolve around two premises. The first sees Jesus primarily as a physical person whose ideas and influences derived wholly from the Jewish community around him—and quite often from just one sect, such as the Essenes. To be sure, Jesus was of Jewish descent and conducted a ministry primarily aimed at the descendants of Israel, and many of the traditions he followed or commented on related to the various sects then current, but if there is a solid core to Christian belief, it follows that what Jesus introduced was also something new, something not derived largely from a single, already existent set of believers (save perhaps the set the Gospels themselves mention—followers of John the Baptist). Christians would say that that new thing derived from Jesus's tie to the Eternal, to his divinity. Secular scholars, of course, who tend to be the more likely to tie Jesus's teachings to a given preexisting sect, don't accept Christ's divinity as a premise, so their conclusions are of necessity different from that of a believer. But most secular scholars also fall prey to a second premise that most Christian scholars themselves fall prey to. The second premise sees Paul as creating a religion very different from the Jewish one presented not only by Jesus but by Peter, Jesus's brother James, and the other early Jerusalem-based apostles. This idea, as I hope to show, is inaccurate, as Paul's ministry was not one in conflict with Peter and the other apostles but in consort with them. To be sure, the apostles all wrestled with how to incorporate Gentile believers into the Jewish worldview into which they were born, but the most substantial divisions between Jewish practice and Christian practice occurred later, beginning near the end of the first century. Before then, Christianity had a kind of Jewish tinge, one that was largely distasteful to those in power in both the Jewish and Roman worlds, the one for what it lacked in terms of adherence to traditions and the other for what it maintained of those traditions.

All this is not to say that scholars who point to similarities of belief and practice between the Essenes and Jesus are completely off base, and it is possible that Jesus and John the Baptist interacted with the Essenes at some point, though it's doubtful for many reasons that either were an actual member of an Essene community. But the teaching and practices of Jesus and John the Baptist certainly do have elements in common with the Essene sect, as they do with the other sects Josephus mentions. Here is how Josephus describes the Essenes in his Antiquities of the Jews:

They teach the immortality of souls, and esteem that the rewards of righteousness are to be earnestly striven for; and when they send what they have dedicated to God into the temple, they do not offer sacrifices because they have more pure lustrations of their own; on which account they are excluded from the common court of the temple, but offer their sacrifices themselves; yet is their course of life better than that of other men; and they entirely addict themselves to husbandry. It also deserves our admiration, how much they exceed all other men that addict themselves to virtue, and this in righteousness; and indeed to such a degree, that as it hath never appeared among any other men. . . . This is demonstrated by that institution of theirs, which will not suffer any thing to hinder them from having all things in common; so that a rich man enjoys no more of his own wealth than he who hath nothing at all. There are about four thousand men that live in this way, and neither marry wives, nor are desirous to keep servants; as thinking the latter tempts men to be unjust, and the former gives the handle to domestic quarrels; but as they live by themselves, they minister one to another. They also appoint certain stewards to receive the incomes of their revenues, and of the fruits of the ground; such as are good men and priests, who are to get their corn and their food ready for them.¹⁰

In The War of the Jews, Josephus provides an even longer description. In it, he imputes to them various ascetic beliefs, rejecting pleasures as an evil and eschewing passion—or, it seems, almost all emotion, even under torture. Because they do not marry, they adopt children to teach them their ways (though Josephus points out that there is one order that allows marriage—purely for the sake of procreation). Those of the sect believe oil to be a defilement. They do not swear. They do not spit when among others. They wear only white garments. Many are nomads of sorts, traveling from town to town, carrying nothing except, for fear of bandits, weapons. And because they share all things equally among each other, they want for nothing when they arrive at their destination. They do nothing that is not by order of their leaders, save for helping those in need.¹¹

Their daily life in Josephus's description seems almost monkish. They conduct prayer before sunrise, then do the work assigned to them by their leaders; they assemble to bathe, after which they retire to a closed-off area to eat where only those of the sect are allowed to enter. More work follows and then another meal conducted in the same manner. They devote themselves to study. Some are said to be prophets.¹²

As for their philosophical and theological teachings, Josephus notes that they believe in the immortality of the soul and the corruption of the physical body. After death, the good go to a kind of paradise that Josephus compares to Greek teachings, and the evil go to a dark place of never-ceasing punishments.¹³

Entry into the sect is difficult. One who desires to become an Essene has to live in the manner of the sect for a year, though he is not considered part of the community. If he makes it through that year, he undergoes a purification rite, after which he is essentially in a probationary state for another two years before he is granted full admittance. A new adherent takes an oath to be pious toward God and just toward men. He promises to hurt no one, to hate those who are evil, and to help those who are righteous. He is to show respect to all authorities, because they are placed into their positions by God, and if a follower ever comes into authority, he is not to use his position to enrich himself. He will not lie. He will not steal. He will not reveal the sect's teachings to others. Even once a new adherent is admitted to the sect, he enters as part of the lowest of four classes of members. These classes do not mix, and if a junior member happens to touch a more senior member, the latter is said to be defiled and must wash himself.¹⁴

Josephus notes that the Essenes are strict observers of the law of Moses, and he pays special attention to certain laws regarding hygiene and purity and the Sabbath. Josephus finds curious their practices with regard to defecation, practices any good camper today would be well familiar with—burying their business and afterward washing themselves, though the passage also hints at the kind of ritualistic washing common among the sect of the Pharisees, as does his description of their eating habits. Indeed, later in the passage, Josephus explicitly notes that some keep various purification rites. Furthermore, their strictness is evident in the manner in which the Essenes are said to keep the Sabbath, where not only is food prepared the day before (at least in part, so as to avoid lighting a fire) but not even dishes or chairs are allowed to be moved.¹⁵

Those found to have sinned in a serious way are cast out, which can result in death given that a follower is allowed to eat only in the manner prescribed by the sect. Judgments against adherents are made in a court of law with juries of a minimum of one hundred.¹⁶

Josephus's descriptions agree in large part with those given by Pliny the Elder and Philo, though there are seemingly some minor differences and additions. Pliny the Elder, for instance, focuses on a single community, placing them along the west shore of the Dead Sea, near where the Qumran scrolls were found.¹⁷ Philo claims, in one location, that they live only in villages, never in the city.¹⁸ He also claims that they do not engage in the making of any kind of weapons, and to their occupations as farmers, he in addition notes that they can be craftsmen.¹⁹

The manner in which the Essenes reacted to Roman rule, in other words, was to devote themselves so fully to religion that they separated themselves from the society around. This was the reason for withdrawing from urban areas and setting up almost monk-like communities, in great contrast to such groups as the Sadducees, who, as will be shown, were quite involved in politics, being the chief constituents of the upper priestly caste, which was itself controlled by Rome. The Essenes, by contrast, largely withdrew from the Jewish temple, offering their own set of sacrifices that were, in their view, unscathed by the polluting influences of Rome or not offering sacrifices at all, in favor of devoting themselves more fully to living righteously.²⁰ In addition, the Essenes looked to a Messiah—or rather, two Messiahs, one priestly, one kingly—who would deliver Israel from their Roman overseers.²¹

Certainly the Essene way of life parallels the way of life conducted by Jesus and John the Baptist in some forms, as do some things they taught. John the Baptist lived in the wilderness (Matt. 3:1), as many reckon the Essenes did. Jesus lived a nomadic way of life (Luke 9:58), as did many Essenes. The Essenes looked to a Messiah-like figure (or figures), as did John the Baptist and the followers of Jesus. The Essenes were critical of the temple authorities as were John the Baptist and Jesus, as evidenced in the manner they spoke about the Pharisees and Sadducees (e.g., Matt. 3:6; Matt. 23) and by Jesus's attack on the temple's moneychangers shortly before his death (Matt. 21:12–13). But the elaborate and difficult conversion process, the overwhelming devotion to purity, and the extremely strict adherence to Sabbath rules do not find parallels among Jesus's teaching, nor likely in John the Baptist's.²² And the fact that the Essenes aren't explicitly mentioned in the New Testament, if at all, combined with their insularity, suggests that they did not have an especially strong influence or effect on the Jewish people as a whole or the Christianity that derived from the Jewish religion. John J. Collins sums up the proper place for the study of the Essenes in relation to Christianity nicely:

The area of scholarship that has suffered most from wild speculation is the relevance of the Scrolls for Christian origins. . . . The Dead Sea Scrolls are of great interest for early Christianity, because they describe a contemporary Jewish sect that shared similar hopes for the coming of a messiah (or messiahs) and life after death, and had some similar ritual practices. The values of the two movements, however, were poles apart. One was introverted, obsessed with issues of purity, while the other looked outward, even to the Gentile world.²³

The Sadducees

The Sadducees, as already mentioned, stood in stark contrast to the Essenes. While the Essenes withdrew from the society around them to preserve a religion undefiled by their Roman overseers, the Sadducees adopted many of the customs of their Gentile conquerors—most especially the Greeks, who had preceded the Romans. Our knowledge of the Sadducees is somewhat terse, most information about them being written largely by those who disagreed with them and often largely in contrast to the Pharisees. In fact, some go so far as to claim that the Sadducees were not so much an organized sect as a group described primarily to act as a counter to the Pharisees.²⁴ The Sadducees made up much of the upper class, including much of the upper echelon of priests, and were of such character that they were concerned much less with caring for the sanctuary [the temple] than for civil matters which were also in their hands.²⁵ In other words, they were more politicians than religious devotees, but in the Jewish world, the two spheres were not readily separated. Still, as members of a standing nobility, the archpriests who sat among their ranks were very much interested in maintaining their positions, especially since they reserved most of the tithe collected from Jewish temple goers for themselves.²⁶ In fact, during much of the first century, the high priesthood changed frequently and mostly among four families, each of whom would purchase the office from funds that they accrued by their position, in turn driving the regular priesthood, whose funds they deprived, into greater depths of poverty.²⁷

This does not mean, however, that the Sadducees were without beliefs and practices of their own, as little as we know about them. Josephus describes, in both his Antiquities of the Jews and The War of the Jews, a group that is conservative in its interpretation and acceptance of scripture but who also rejects in many ways the active role of God in human affairs. The Sadducees, in contrast to the Essenes and Pharisees, rejected the role of fate in life, believing utterly in free will; rejected the idea that God was concerned with the good or evil of human actions; and rejected the concept of an immortal soul, as well as the resurrection or, in fact, any afterlife in which awaited rewards or punishments for men's actions.²⁸ Acts 23:8 notes that they rejected even the existence of spirit and of angels, though it is possible that what they rejected was not the complete existence of angels but an angelology laid out by the Pharisaic tradition.²⁹ Such views, in part, probably derived from a very rigid and narrow view of scripture, as unlike the Pharisees, they accepted only the written law of Moses and not the oral traditions that the Pharisees claimed also derived from Moses.³⁰ Some go so far as to say that the Sadducees accepted only the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, as scriptural, rejecting the rest of the Old Testament, not just the oral law.³¹ No matter, the Sadducees' views were not popular, and as Josephus notes, they were able to do almost nothing of themselves; for when they [became] magistrates, as they [were] unwillingly and by force sometimes obliged to be, they addict[ed] themselves to the notions of the Pharisees, because the multitude would not otherwise bear them.³²

How a sect from which derived much of the higher Jewish priestly class came to conclusions so demonstrably different from those of the people they oversaw relates to the way in which this particular sect came to power, which in turn relates to their interactions with the non-Jewish world around them, beginning most especially with the Greco-Macedonian Empire and the Hellenization it inspired in the various provinces that it conquered. Greek ways appealed to certain Jews, and this attraction soon spelled doom for the Jewish priesthood as it had existed from the time that the Jewish people had returned to Jerusalem under the Persian king Cyrus the Great. Around 180 BCE, the high priest Onias was forced to flee by his brother Jason, who, by way of a bribe for the office, had curried favor with the king of the Seleucid portion of the former Greek empire (which had been split into four parts after the death of empire's founder, Alexander).³³ When a new king, Antiochus, took power, Jason went further, offering more money in exchange for the opportunity to make Jerusalem into a center of Greek culture—a polis—as Antioch in nearby Syria was, a move most of the inhabitants of Jerusalem supported. The monetary messenger, however, a priest named Menelaus, offered Antiochus yet another bribe, which was duly accepted, and Menelaus became high priest in Jason's stead. But Menelaus was not from the family of Zadok and, thus, was not qualified to be high priest. Furthermore, he recovered the bribe money from the temple treasury. These actions tempered the mass's enthusiasm for the Hellenization project.

Jason's attempt to regain the power Menelaus had seized brought Antiochus's armies to Judea and the temple around 166 BCE, and continued disorder kept them from leaving for any sustained length of time. A fort, with its accompanying soldiers, was placed in Jerusalem near the temple to keep order. The temple's treasury was raided. And the Jewish faith itself was outlawed—no more Sabbath, no more circumcision, no more temple worship in the manner prescribed by Jewish scripture or tradition. In its place was substituted the worship of Zeus. Pagan customs were brought into what remained of the temple (Antiochus having pillaged many of its furnishings) and swine offered on its altar.

Thus arose the Hasmonean family and their eventual leader Judas Maccabee. This priestly family fled Jerusalem for the surrounding hills. From there, they conducted raids against the Seleucid troops. Within three years from the time that Antiochus took control of the temple, he was forced to rescind his edict against the Jewish religion. The Hasmoneans came to power, with Judea becoming completely independent from the Greek empire about twenty years later. However, the issues with the priesthood did not abate. The Hasmoneans, with the aid of the Seleucid rulership they opposed but also compromised with during the twenty-year struggle for Jewish independence, took for themselves not only kingship of Judea but also the high priesthood, though they too were not of the high priestly line of Zadok. And though they proved good at maintaining power, their personal morality often left something to be desired (one of the Hasmonean rulers was killed by his own sons). In the end, they proved to be nearly as open to Hellenizing influences as priests like Jason and Menelaus had been, building out a sector of Jerusalem to the west of the temple that resembled a Greek community for the rich and aristocratic. From this noble class, centered around the Hasmonean dynasty, the Sadducees would largely derive.

The lack of legitimacy for the high priesthood, along with the compromising ways of those who had freed the Jewish people from their Greek overlords as well as personal riches gained in the process, led, in time, to the formation of various other sects such as the Essenes and, as we will see, the Pharisees and the Zealots, each of whom saw themselves as restoring a better understanding of the Torah and the priesthood. The popularity of these sects, most especially of the Pharisees, would lead one of the Hasmonean kings, Alexander Jannaeus, to encourage his wife, Alexandra Salome, who would succeed him to the throne, to incorporate them into the government council, known as the Sanhedrin, a body that hitherto had welcomed only those of the Sadducean disposition. The maneuver proved disastrous, as after Salome's death, the struggle for power between her two sons, Hyrcanus II and Aristobulus II, would encourage the intervention of Rome, at the appeal, in part, of the Pharisees, who wished to abolish the Hellenistically inspired monarchy altogether.

The intervention of Rome did not have the quite the effect that those who had called for dispute resolution were hoping. Once Rome put its preferred people in power, the Jewish leadership, including the high priest, became mostly figureheads. In fact, Rome itself would eventually elicit direct control over who held the high priestly office through its appointed governors of Judea. What had been a set of factions fighting for political power within the nation of Judea thus would be reduced to merely rival religious factions.

While Hyrcanus II would return as high priest after Roman intervention, the Romans eventually appointed Antipater, from a family of Jewish converts and an ally of Hyrcanus II, as prefect of Judea, and about two decades later, one of his sons, Herod, would be named king of the province. Because he was not a Hasmonean, the Pharisees supported his rule; nevertheless, to shore up power, Herod married a Hasmonean and appointed her brother Jonathan as high priest, a decision he would quickly regret when Jonathan gathered a certain amount of popular support. Herod had him murdered and from then on appointed and deposed high priests as befit his needs. Because Herod distrusted his family—putting his wife and three of his sons to death for apparent plots against him—he did not clearly designate which of his three remaining sons should be king after his death in 4 BCE. Rome split the kingdom into three—Idumaea, Judea, and Samaria; Galilee and Perea; and parts of Syria and Lebanon—placing each son as a ruler over one of them. Archelaus, the son placed in charge of Judea, however, proved so cruel, especially toward the Pharisees, that Rome removed him in 6 CE, and thereafter, Judah became a Roman province, with a Roman prefect serving as its governor. As such, until about 50 CE, as alluded to earlier, Rome, through its local governor, chose the high priest.³⁴

Thus the Sadducees, as the aristocrats from whom the high priest was generally drawn, were dependent on Rome for whatever power they held, and the office of high priest, though a religious one, became in many ways secular and political. Meanwhile, the Pharisees, to whom we turn next, also largely supported Roman rule, as it was more sympathetic to their cause than most of the old-time Jewish aristocracy.

As Jesus spread his teaching, therefore, he came into the middle of this conflict. While he seems to reserve most of his ire for the Pharisees (and their allies, the scribes), the Sadducees were not left without criticism. In one of the few Gospel passages that directly single out the Sadducees for critique (Matt. 22:23–30), the Sadducees ask Jesus a hypothetical question with regard to the resurrection: If a woman were to become a widow seven times, which would be her husband when she rises back to life? Jesus's answer, that those who are resurrected are as the angels in that they do not marry, is prefaced with this statement: Ye do err, not knowing the scriptures, nor the power of God (Matt. 22:29). Jesus here criticized the Sadducees for their usage of the scriptures and their rejection of God's intervention in human affairs.

A passage in Matthew 8 may hint at a similar critique. There, Jesus heals a leper but tells him to reveal himself to no one until he shows himself to the priest. Jesus tells the man to give an offering, as commanded in the law, but what's interesting about the direction to see the priest is the reason Jesus gives it is to be a testimony unto them (Matt. 8:2–4). If the Sadducees doubted God's interaction with mankind, evidence of a miracle—let alone one performed by the one thought by some to be the Messiah—would have been a great witness to the falsity of the understanding and teaching of much of the priestly class. Not that it mattered. As Acts 4:7 denotes, even after Jesus's apparent resurrection and the healing of a lame man by two of Jesus's apostles, the priests would ask, By what power, or by what name, have ye done this?

The letter of James the brother of Jesus unto the twelve tribes scattered abroad—at the very least, a metaphor to the church as spiritual Israel, a concept that caught on quite early among Jesus's followers after his death—may also take a subtle swipe at the Sadducees, insofar as they were largely affiliated with the aristocratic class. In reprimanding the church for its inattention to the poor, its favoring of certain well-off people over others who were not so well off, James asks, Do not rich men oppress you, and draw you before the judgment seats? Do not they blaspheme that worthy name by the which ye are called? (James 2:6–8). The reference here to judgment seats and coercion to blasphemy suggests that James is referencing the Sanhedrin, over which the Sadducees, through the office of the high priest, had ultimate sway.

The Pharisees

While the Sadducees came out of a tradition that accepted much of Greek culture and concerned itself heavily with politics—the physical power and material blessings that came with the upper echelons of the priesthood—and while the Essenes, in reaction, separated themselves from the temple community to forge a purified community of their own, the Pharisees represented a middle ground between these two positions: concerned with purity, as an extension of temple purification, but not immune to the quest for political power, as the earlier narrative on the history of the Sadducees shows. In his Antiquities of the Jews, Josephus describes the Pharisees this way:

They live meanly, and despise delicacies in diet; and they follow the conduct of reason; and what that prescribes to them as good for them they do; and they think they ought earnestly to strive to observe reason's dictates for practice. They also pay a respect to such as are in years; nor are they so bold as to contradict them in any thing which they have introduced; and when they determine that all things are done by fate, they do not take away the freedom from men of acting as they think fit; since their notion is, that it hath pleased God to make a temperament, whereby what he wills is done, but so that the will of man can act virtuously or viciously. They also believe that souls have an immortal rigor in them, and that under the earth there will be rewards or punishments, according as they have lived virtuously or viciously in this life; and the latter are to be detained in an everlasting prison, but that the former shall have power to revive and live again; on account of which doctrines they are able greatly to persuade the body of the people; and whatsoever they do about Divine worship, prayers, and sacrifices, they perform them according to their direction; insomuch that the cities give great attestations to them on account of their entire virtuous conduct, both in the actions of their lives and their discourses also.³⁵

Elsewhere, Josephus notes that the influence the Pharisees held over the people of Judea was so great that if they opposed a king or a priest, their opinion held sway; as such, he calls them a cunning sect.³⁶ Josephus also notes how they delivered to the people a great many observances by succession from their fathers, which are not written in the laws of Moses.³⁷

How is it that a sect that enjoined on people heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, as Jesus called these added observances (Matt. 23:4), could also hold such popularity among the masses? Certainly, Josephus provides one clue—that they were respected for their virtue, both in conduct and speech. How they came to hold such positions of respect is also the story of how the Jewish religion was transformed into rabbinical Judaism, for it is from the Pharisees that what we know as Judaism descends.³⁸ In other words, the Pharisees ultimately won the battle for the hearts and minds of Jewish believers, a battle that at the time of Jesus was still ongoing, even if it would not begin to draw to an end until after the Herodian temple's destruction in 70 CE.

Just as the Sadducees were associated with the upper priestly class, the Pharisees were associated with another facet of the Jewish religious order: the scribes. Scribal authority came about gradually, as priestly authority waned, most especially after the destruction of Solomon's temple and the Jewish exile during the Babylonian captivity. Without an organized priestly caste to teach and elaborate on scripture and to make decisions based on it, those who copied and studied the scriptures began to have more influence.³⁹ After a segment of the Jewish people returned from Babylon and the priesthood began again to take on the duties of the sacrificial system, the scribes began to fill in as teachers, and when the upper priestly caste turned heavily toward the ideas and concerns of the Jewish people's eventual Grecian conquerors, it was to the knowledgeable scribal class that those who objected to the corrupt priesthood would turn.⁴⁰

As with many of the stakeholders among the Jewish peoples, the scribes were a varied lot. Certainly, among them were priests themselves, but also among them were a good many laypeople. All that was required to become a scribe was education, but as the historian Joachim Jeremias notes, It was knowledge alone which gave their power to the scribes.⁴¹ Once a man studied long enough to be ordained into the company of scribes, he "was authorized to make his own decisions