Jesus was not the only rabbi teaching in first-century Palestine.

There were at least four other religious groups teaching their own understandings of what God was like, and how people should live.

Many of Jesus’s teachings were responses to these groups. To understand His teachings, we must understand something of theirs.

Sadducees

• The Sadducees tended to be wealthy and had close links to the temple in Jerusalem. They also had a (relatively) good relationship with the Romans.

• They were conservative: they argued that the Jewish people should strictly follow the Torah (i.e. the five books of Moses) and NOT the interpretations of it that had developed since.

• As such, they did not believe in an afterlife (which is not mentioned in the Torah).

Pharisees

• The Pharisees were mostly laypeople (i.e. not priests at the temple), though they would have been more educated than the average person of the time.

• They were reformers: they believed that the written law needed to adapt. They taught a body of interpretation (the ‘oral law’, or halakah) which applied the Torah’s principles to ordinary peoples’ lives.

• They believed in an afterlife, angels and demons, and a form of predestination (though they disagreed on the details of these).

Zealots

• The Zealots were similar to the Pharisees in terms of their membership and religious beliefs.

• However, unlike the Pharisees, they were unwilling to accept Roman rule even temporarily: they wanted to force the Romans out by any means necessary.

• They organised several armed revolts against the Romans. In the ‘First Jewish Revolt’ (66–70 CE)., the Romans destroyed the temple at Jerusalem; this profoundly changed the shape of Judaism in the future.

Essenes

• The Essenes rejected both the Sadducees’ temple-based practice, and the Pharisees’ practice of living and teaching among the people.

• Instead, they withdrew into the desert where they lived simple lives dedicated to ritual and prayer.

• Many of their writings are ‘apocalyptic’: they expected that the world as they knew it would come to an end soon, that God would re-make the world, and that they would live in the new perfected world.

Sources:

• Kelly, Jane. 2019. Religious Studies: New Testament Studies (Hodder), pp. 19–20.