Page 388 - ILIAS ATHANASIADIS AKA RO1

There were, naturally, variations on each main theme.

In Jewish Palestine, for example, there were three small but important religious
parties that differed from each other in several ways: the Pharisees (numbering

about 6,000 at the time of Herod),

Essenes (about 4,000), and Sadducees (“a few men,” according to Flavius
Josephus, in The Antiquities of the Jews 18.17). A largely lay group that had the

reputation of being the most-precise interpreters of the law,

the Pharisees believed in the resurrection of the dead. They also relied on the
nonbiblical “traditions of the fathers,” some of which made the law stricter

while others relaxed it.

The Essenes were a more-radical sect, with extremely strict rules. One branch of
the group lived at Qumran on the shores of the Dead Sea and produced the Dead

Sea Scrolls.

At some point in their history the Essenes were probably a priestly sect (the
Zadokite priests are major figures in some of the documents from Qumran);

however, the composition of their membership at the time of Jesus is unclear.

Many aristocratic priests, as well as some prominent laymen, were Sadducees.
They rejected the Pharisaic “traditions of the fathers” and maintained some old-
fashioned theological opinions.

Most famously, they denied resurrection, which had recently entered Jewish
thought from Persia and which was accepted by most Jews in the 1st century

Most Jews based their faith and practice on the five books of Moses (slightly

modified by the passage of time) and rejected the extreme positions of the three
parties.

The Pharisees were respected for their piety and learning, and they may have
exercised substantial influence on belief and practice. The Essenes were a fringe

group, and those who lived at Qumran had dropped out of mainstream Judaism.