RELIGION AND SOCIETY BEFORE 70C.E 91nowned for their ability to manipulate demons and free people from their
influence. It was a movement, or rather a loose collection of related groups,
that took shape around a distinctive understanding of the myth complex, a
movement in which the Torah was not ignored (it could not possibly have
been) but was definitely of secondary importance. In this sense, at least, Jose-
phus’s classification of Jesus and James among the assorted troublemakers is
entirely accurate.
The Sects
What place did the sects occupy in the system? Obviously, in my view, not a
central one, for I have just presented an account of Palestinian Judaism in the
first century in which the sects scarcely figure. Indeed, in my view, Sanders’s
attempt to leave the sects to one side in his account is one of the most interest-
ing and significant characteristics of his work.^104 Nevertheless, it is probable
that though the sects were not quite central, they were not quite marginal
either. In the brief discussion that follows, I will concentrate on setting forth
my own views, without explicit engagement in polemics.^105
The following is, however, in dialogue with Albert Baumgarten’s recent
book,The Flourishing of Jewish Sects in the Maccabean Era: An Interpretation
(1997), even where this is not explicitly stated. Though this book is not un-
problematic, its insistence on viewing the sects as an essentially unitary, and
essentially mainstream, phenomenon and, as a corollary, on trying to under-
stand their relation to general Jewish society and its embrace of a comparative
approach and adoption of a complex theory of causation, are all admirable
and in general, if not always in the details of their exposition, correct.^106
First, it is necessary to be specific about who “the sects” were. Though
Josephus speaks of three (and in one polemical passage of four) sects, it seems
certain that there were many more sectarian groups in first-century Pales-
tine.^107 Christian heresiographers usually speak of seven sects, though some-
times, especially in later, derivative accounts of six, eight, or ten. The number
seven is suspect and the components of the list differ in the different accounts;
(^104) Sanders,Judaism: Practice and Belief.
(^105) It may be worth pointing out that since the rescission of the monopoly on the publication
of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and more specifically since the long-awaited publication of 4QMiqsat
Maasei HaTorah (E. Qimron and J. Strugnell,Qumran Cave 4, V: Miqsat Ma’ase ha-Torah,
Discoveries in the Judaean Desert 10 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994)), many old questions of detail
have no wbeen reopened; see, e.g., J. Kampen and M. Bernstein, eds.,Reading 4QMMT: New
Perspectives on Qumran La wand History(Atlanta: Scholars, 1996).
(^106) See also my review,AJS Review24 (1999): 374–78.
(^107) See Baumgarten,Flourishing of Jewish Sects, pp. 2–3.