‘jewish doctrine takes three forms’ 145
my ancestors.’ The Mishnah lays down that ‘if a man stole a sacred
vessel, zealots [kanaim, the Hebrew equivalent of the Greek zelotai]
may fall upon him.’^57
Extreme religious enthusiasm could clearly take many forms, includ-
ing licensed violence on behalf of perceived morality, and evidently in
68– 70 ce it was harnessed by one group of Jews to channel opposition
to the Roman state. Nothing connects these Zealots to the followers of
the Fourth Philosophy preached in 6 ce by Judas and Saddok, apart
from Josephus’ ascription to both groups of blame for the disaster that
had overtaken Jerusalem. Josephus was generous in apportioning blame
to more or less all the actors in the drama he described, apart from him-
self. But there might seem rather stronger grounds for connecting the
Zealots to the sicarii. We are told that in 66 ce sicarii led by a certain
Menachem, ‘son of Judas called Galilean, that most clever sophist who
once upon a time in the days of Quirinius had upbraided the Jews for
recognising the Romans as masters after God’, seized weapons from
Herod’s armoury in Masada. He then returned ‘like a veritable king’ to
Jerusalem, becoming ‘an insufferable tyrant’, and went in state to the
Temple ‘decked in royal dress and attended by armed zealots’, before
being crushed and killed by the priestly aristocrats who had begun the
revolt against Rome and had no intention of losing control to this
intruder and his gang. But Josephus recorded in this same passage that
among Menachem’s sicarii was Eleazar b. Yair, ‘a relation of Menachem,
and subsequently despot of Masada’, and in his account of the eventual
siege of Masada, Josephus went out of his way to distinguish Zealots as
a group separate from the sicarii.^58
Little thus suggests that the radical anarchic philosophy preached by
Judas in 66 ce ever became a movement within Judaism in its own
right. We have seen in Chapter 5 that, despite claiming that Judas’
preaching had been responsible for the destruction of Jerusalem, in all
his descriptions of specific anti- Roman uprisings between 6 ce and the
outbreak of revolt in 66 ce Josephus ascribed none to Judas’ followers.
The author of Acts put into the mouth of the Pharisee Gamaliel the
explicit statement that ‘Judas the Galilean rose up at the time of the cen-
sus and got people to follow him; he also perished, and all who followed
him were scattered.’^59
The hostile account of Josephus does not disguise the common con-
cern of all these anti- Roman groups for worship in the Temple,
misguided though they may have been in their attempts to preserve it. In
the case of the Zealots their willingness to allow other Jews to worship