‘jewish doctrine takes three forms’ 141
the Pharisees, Sadducees and Essenes, and not just in respect of Jos-
ephus’ disapproval. The lack of a name is telling: this was not a group
with a clear identity or programme (perhaps inevitably, in view of its
anarchic core). We have seen (Chapter 5) that, despite his generic claim
that this school of Judaism led to the ‘folly’ which followed the out-
break of revolt in 66 ce (sixty years after its origin), Josephus did not
attribute this philosophy directly to any individual Jew in all his detailed
history of the events which ended with rebellion and the destruction of
the Temple. It is perhaps better to think of this hairesis more as a ten-
dency to political anarchy on religious grounds, provoked by
heavy- handed Roman government, than as a really distinct type of
Judaism. In that case, agreement with Pharisees will have been the prod-
uct of acceptance of ancestral tradition (apart from the ‘love of liberty’),
and Josephus’ exaggerated claim in the Jewish War that Judas and his
followers shared nothing at all with other movements within Judaism
marks an attempt to highlight the exceptional nature of the principle of
opposition to Rome which arose from this radical devotion to God
alone as master.^52
Any attempt to categorize anti- Roman feelings within Jewish society
as marginal in this way was hard to sustain after the Jews of Judaea had
just fought and lost a major war against Rome, and in practice Josephus
referred to other Jewish groups between 6 and 70 ce who were ranged
against Rome. Of these, one group, the sicarii, were explicitly linked by
Josephus to the Fourth Philosophy when he described the defence of the
fortress of Masada by the Dead Sea against Roman forces in 74 ce by
a band of sicarii who had occupied it in 66 ce:
This fortress was called Masada; and the sicarii who occupied it had at
their head a man of influence named Eleazar. He was a descendant of the
Judas who, as we have previously stated, induced multitudes of Jews to
refuse to enrol themselves, when Quirinius was sent as censor to Judaea.
For in those days the sicarii came together against those who consented to
submit to Rome and in every way treated them as enemies, plundering their
property, rounding up their cattle, and setting fire to their habitations.This passage implies that the sicarii followed the Fourth Philosophy,
and, in describing the fortitude under torture by the Romans of those
sicarii who escaped to Egypt after the fall of Judaea, Josephus stressed
their refusal, in line with the teachings of Judas the Galilean, to utter the
crucial words which would have acknowledged the lordship of Caesar.
But elsewhere in his history Josephus discussed the sicarii as a group