I find it interesting that this chapter is titled, “How many Judaisms?” because it doesn’t define the time period in those words. As a history guy, I guess I love when I see the past come to the present. When you think today of all the strains of Judaism, the parallel helps a person understand the past. Too often, people used to kind of create a picture of Judaism as one thing, or maybe a few varieties but even these they kind of boxed in. With the help of more recent scholarship we’ve learned some interesting things about the Judaism of Jesus’ era.
First, it was quite complex in terms of makeup. You have to assume at least four major “parties”. You had the Sadducees who were clearly an influential group in the society. We don’t know a ton about their religious philosphy, at leat not a lot beyond what some of their critics said. The picture painted is of a group that is somewhat Epicurean in theology, believing God kind of left the world alone. They didn’t believe in a physical resurrection and some question whether they believed in the eternal soul. They also were agains the extrabiblical regulations of the Pharisees finding them to be manmade regulations unsupported by Scripture. Sounds almost kind of Lutheran doesn’t it? Important to see the good in all groups.
Then you’ve got the Essenes and Qumran community. Qumran specifically was a community of people who may have been related some to the Sadducees historically speaking, but end up going a completely different direction. They opposed the political powers in Jerusalem while the Sadducees buddied up and they end up in self-exile. As time goes on they become more and more sectarian and began to focus on ritual purity and the idea that the Temple was polluted. Related to them directly is a group called the Essenes who seem to have had the same beliefs as those in Qumran but who were scattered around the whole of Israel.
Then of course we have the Pharisees. These are the most famous group but often the most misunderstood. They did indeed add a lot of material and regulation, but it wasn’t necessarly because they were so focused on themselves. They loved God’s laws and saw this extra regulation as a way to build a “hedge” around it to make sure everyone did things correctly. Hearts perhaps in the right place, but ending up in the wrong direction. In addition they had a concept that some call “every Israelite a priest, every table a Temple meal”. The idea is that all Israelites should aspire to the utmost spirituality and that while the Temple and its sacrifices were ordered by God, what was most important was the purity and repentance associated with these things. So you see here already that many of the Pharisees may not have opposed Jesus quite as much as you would assume. In fact, some may have liked where he went and many of his supporters may have been Pharisees. Again, it’s imporant to understand the group holisticly.
Then you have the Zealots. They were said to agree with the Pharisees in terms of theology but they also focused on extreme right wing nationalism. They were involved in guerilla warfare against Rome and finally started the Great War vs. Rome which ended in the destruction of the Temple in AD 70.
Now that’s just the main groups. You’ve got strains and mixtures of these. And you have important groups like the priests and Levites in addition to this. This is a big group, numbering thousands of people, but that group probably included people associated with all of the differing theologies above. The bulk of the people who were Jews probably didn’t actually associate with any of the above philosphies directly. They were Jews, but not necessarily involved in the intellectual debates that a Pharisee and Sadducee would have had.
The point here is that the Judaism into which Jesus was born was quite complex and varied. And Jesus wasn’t attacking it from the outside, but rather coming at it from the inside. You can’t pigeon hole him into one of the above, but rather he is a reformer speaking truth to all of them. As you think about the varieties of Judaism today, or maybe even the denominations of Christianity today, this is probably a more helpful picture- something truly multifaceted.
Tags: essenes, jesus, judaism, pharisees, qumran, saducees, zealots