146 A History of Judaism
in the Temple at Passover in 70 ce led to the end of their independence
as a political group in control of the inner Temple while Jerusalem was
under siege:
When the day of unleavened bread came round ... Eleazar and his men
partly opened the gates and admitted citizens desiring to worship within
the building. But John [of Gischala, leader of a rival faction], making the
festival a cloak for his treacherous designs, armed with concealed weapons
the less conspicuous of his followers, most of whom were unpurified, and
by his earnest endeavours got them stealthily passed into the temple to
take prior possession of it. Once within, they cast off their garments and
were suddenly revealed as armed men ... Being now in possession of the
inner court of the temple and all the stores which it contained, they could
bid defiance to Simon.The Fourth Philosophy and the Zealots left no direct legacy in later
forms of Judaism. The rabbinic sages as recorded in the Babylonian Tal-
mud were to recall the Temple’s destruction as a product of the ‘causeless
hatred’ of the Jews of that time. The rabbis preserved a deep hatred of
Rome as the wicked kingdom that had brought the Temple worship to
an end, but they did not advocate rebellion. Nor did they claim that
Jews should seek political freedom on religious grounds.^60
The Yahad in the Dead Sea Scrolls
The discovery and eventual publication since 1947 of some 900 ancient
texts which had been hidden in caves near Qumran by the Dead Sea
have brought to light types of Judaism in the late Second Temple period
to which neither Josephus nor any other source preserved by the late
Jewish and Christian traditions referred. Historians have tried over the
past sixty years or so to identify the authors of some of these texts with
previously known groups, including all four of the philosophies described
by Josephus, but, although the forms of Judaism revealed in these texts
exhibit some characteristics in common with each of these groups
(unsurprisingly in view of their origin in the same traditions of post-
biblical Judaism), they do not appear identical to any of them. Josephus
was composing military and political history rather than ethnography
or theology, and there are no reasons to suppose that he intended to
include all current forms of Judaism when he described the four philos-
ophies of Judaism. Since, on the contrary, he wrote elsewhere about John