‘jewish doctrine takes three forms’ 139
Providing for continuity in a celibate community is not easy, as Chris-
tian monastic orders have sometimes found. Pliny noted it as admirable
that the Essenes had survived so long by recruiting penitents to their
number. Philo asserted that only ‘men of ripe years already inclining to
old age’ became Essenes, in direct contradiction to Josephus’ statement
that the celibate Essenes ‘adopted the children of others at a tender
age in order to instruct them’, and his reference to the ‘other order of
Essenes who accepted the necessity of marriage specifically for a propa-
gation of the species’, since otherwise ‘the race would very quickly
disappear’. At any rate even someone born as an Essene would be hard
put to live an Essene life without a community to join. There was of
course no need for the Temple in Jerusalem to continue to function for
Jews to choose to adopt the lifestyle of the Essenes. But if they did so in
later antiquity they left no trace in the Jewish sources from after 70 ce
which were preserved by the rabbis.^48
The ‘Fourth Philosophy’
The origins of the Essenes is shrouded in mystery; Josephus simply
stated that in the time of the Hasmonaean High Priest Jonathan in the
mid- second century bce the Essenes were already one of three haireseis
of the Jews, and if we are to believe Pliny (as we probably should not)
the Essenes had existed for ‘thousands of centuries’ before his time. By
contrast, the origin of what Josephus referred to as the ‘fourth philos-
ophy’ (in comparison to the Pharisees, Sadducees and Essenes, the three
standard Jewish doctrines) was pinpointed by him precisely to 6 ce, the
year when the Romans imposed a census on Judaea to prepare for the
direct taxation on land which accompanied the imposition of rule by a
Roman government. It was then that ‘a certain Galilean man by the
name of Judas incited the locals to rebellion, lambasting them if they
were going to put up with paying tribute to the Romans and tolerate
masters after God. This man was a sophist of his own peculiar school,
which had nothing in common with the others.’ In his parallel (and
fuller) account of the history of the same year in his Antiquities, written
some years later, Josephus emphasized specifically the new- fangled
nature of this philosophy as the reason to consider it pernicious: ‘Here
is a lesson that an innovation and reform in ancestral traditions
weighs heavily in the scale in leading to the destruction of the congrega-
tion of the people.’ The troubles which overtook the body politic all