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Untitled >> Anarchism >> The Resistance to Christianity >> Chapter 3
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Chapter 3: The Judean Sects
Originally the term “sects” did not carry any perjorative connotation. It designated certain political and religions factions in the general population.
Alexander and Greek domination confirmed the existence of a Samaritan sect, which issued from the separation between the kingdoms of the North and the South. Hellenization encouraged this sect by allowing it to build a temple distinct from the one in Jerusalem. Its members only knew and only recognized the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible) and the Book of Joshua/Jesus, in which a sermon by Origen, written in the first half of the Third Century, revealed its influence on the mythic genesis of the Messianic Savior. The Samaritan Bible differed from the Masoretic text, was established latter, and was close to the manuscripts discovered at Qumran.
The Sadduceans
One believes that the sect of the Sadduceans appeared about 300 years before the Christian era. This sect inscribed itself in the political line of Yahwehist centralism. Pre-dating the exile (586–536 [B.C.E.]), but actually drafted in the Fourth Century [B.C.E.], the Book of Ezekiel describes priests who conformed to the Sadducean belief in the Son of Sadoq (or Tsadoq). Combining the role of prophet and the function of the sacerdote, Ezekiel unified in the same ministry two religious attitudes that had often been opposed: the popular agitator and the temple functionary.
A priest who claimed to have ordained Solomon (Kings 1, 38), Tsadoq evoked the idea of justice according to the Semitic practice of wordplay known as themoura, “a Kabbalistic practice by which, on the basis of a logical table of permutations, one replaces one Hebraic letter with another. When applied to Biblical texts, these replacements permit one to multiply the hidden meaning (or what is held to be such).”[36]
Here, the key word is tsedeq, “justice,” which was used by the Judeo-Christian sect of Melchizedek, Melchitsedeq. One finds it in the Essene cult of the Master of Justice, and in the name they conferred upon themselves, “Sons of Tsadoq,” and in the quality of “Just(ness),” ascribed to Jacob, who was later held to be an apostle by the Christian and Catholic evangelical legends.
Sadduceaism comforts the unitary doctrine of the State and monotheism. A sacerdotal ruling class, the Sadducean party built the Temple of Jerusalem, which formed the axis of its temporal power and the privilged space in which God manifested the will to guide his people. High functionaries of the divine judgment, the Sadduceans devoted themselves especially to quarrels concerning precedence and rivalries for power.
Charged with accomplishing the sacrifices of the Temple, and with watching over the observance of the rites with which YHWH folds [plie] everyday existence, the Sadduceans were hardly different in mindset from the Prince-Bishops of the Middle Ages and the Rennaissance who, living in opulence and debauchery, only protested their faith so as to better assure the prerogatives of the Church and its sacred authority.
Good wardens, the Sadduceans assimilated revolt into change, and apostasy into prophetic proclamations. All the more attached to their privileges, which they prided themselves on and allowed them access to an all-powerful God, the Sadduceans didn’t hesitate to collaborate with the invaders or to ferociously repress the Jews who didn’t accommodate themselves.
The Pharisaians treated the Sadduceans like they were Epicureans, which the Pharisians thought to be an insulting term. The Christians accused the Sadduceans of not believing in anything, a reproach that — by a malicious turn of events — Celse and his contemporaries addressed to the Christians, with whom (as late as the Second Century) they still confused with the Orthodox Jews who had disappeared in the aftermath of 70 [C.E.]. The Sadduceans, it is true, rejected the three great Pharisaian doctrines that were later reprized by the Christians: the expectation of a Messiah; the immortality of the soul, and — evoked for the first time in the Book of Daniel in 165 [B.C.E.] — the resurrection of the body.
The Sadduceans’ support of Antiochus IV Epiphane’s politics of Hellenization and the pillaging of the Temple and the massacre of the factions hostile to the Greek party, followed two years later by the instauration in Jerusalem of the cult of the Olympian Jupiter, revived a popular nationalist and religious upheaval that was led by a certain Mattathias. The movement partook of great prophetic agitations that required a strict obedience to Mosiac law by everyone.
Killed in 166 [B.C.E.], Mattathias was succeded by his son, Juda, surnamed Maccabee. Under his lead, the rebellion grew and in 164 [B.C.E.] forced Antiochus IV Epiphane to abrogate the measures taken against religion. Despite the amnesty and the reestablishment of the cult, Juda pursued the combat against the occupiers. As his prosecution also struck the partisans of Hellenism, his fanaticism alienated him from a faction of the Jews sensible to the freedoms of Greek thought and the cogency of rational critique. The death of Juda in 160 [B.C.E.], during the course of combat, brought forth a pitiless repression.
The ascension to power by Jean Hyrcan the First (134–104 [B.C.E.]) marked the beginning of the Asmonean dynasty. Hyrcan made himself idious to the Samaritans by seizing their country. He destroyed the Temple on Mount Garizim; he annexed Idum to the south of Judea and Judaized cosmopolitan Galilee. His son Aristobule succeeded him, but died a year later, in 103 [B.C.E.]. His widow married Alexander Jannee (103–76 [B.C.E.]), who arrogated for himself the title of king.
According to Flavius Joseph, a new party intervened in the quarrel between pontifical and monarchial power — the old quarrel between the temporal and the spiritual. Pharisaism confronted the Sadducean sect, which thanks to an alliance with the despots of the day had maintained in its privileges.
The Pharisians pronounced themselves against the attribution of the royal title to Alexander Jannee. He soon therefater crucified 800 Pharisians; the throats of their women and children were cut before his eyes.
From the same tormented matrix would come a third sect, that of the Sons of Tsadoq, or the Men of the Community, whom the Greeks called the “Essenes.” Hostile to the Sadduceans and to the Pharisians, they also showed a violent opposition to Jerusalem, the Temple and the practice of sacrifices.
Collaborators with all of the occupiers of Palestine, the Sadduceans did not survive the war of the Zealots, which ended with the sacking of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple in 70 [C.E.]. At the end of the First Century, only the Pharisians possessed a monopoly on Jewish orthodoxy.[37]
The Pharisians
The Hebraic term peroushim means “separated, placed apart,” an allusion to the schism that would, in 163 [B.C.E.], lead to nationalist and holy war against the Greek occupiers by Mattathias and his son, Juda Maccabee. Better known by their Hellenized name “Pharisians,” these sectarians extolled the strict observance of Mosaic law and opposed Sadducean hypocrisy with working-class fervor.
Vituperating the dissolute morals of the sacerdotal caste, Pharisaism — precursor of a reform movement that castigated the morals of the Roman Church — celebrated the virtues of esthetic morality, emphasized the importance of solidarity, encouraged piety and rallied a crowd of oppressed people, whose feelings of frustration, disorder and envy it channeled.
In its struggle against Sadducean domination, Pharisaism disposed of two institutional weapons that proved its power of organization: the Rabbinat and an assembly of the faithful, or synagogue, the model for future churches.
Whatever his trade, the rabbi (“my master”), a secular pedagogue, dispensed religious instruction among the working classes. After the defeat of 70 [C.E.] and the disappearance of Sadduceanism, there were rabbis who imposed modernity on the Jewish religion, fixed the canon of sacred texts, defended orthodoxy, condemned the heresies of the minim (dualists or Gnostics) and the noisrim or Nazarenes.
The “synagogues,” from the Greek synagoge, “meeting,” designated the houses of priests, studies and meetings. The Essenes would imitate the synagogues by calling theirs “communities,” in Greek ekklesiai, or, in French, “church” for the place, and “Church” for the assembly.
When bloody repression by Alexander Jannee put them down in 100 [B.C.E.], a large number of Pharisians would leave Judea and go to Galilee. There they were rivals with the Nazarenes in the second half of the First Century before the Christian era. In the cities of the Diaspora, their influence would not cease to grow before the great anti-Semitic waves of 70 and 135.
When Pompei seized Jerusalem in 63 [B.C.E.], thereby inaugurating a Roman domination that would perpetuate itself until 324, the Pharisians chose to collaborate with the occupiers.
In the same period, under the pontificate of Jean Hyran II, a dissident Rabbi, the head of an Essene community and known by the name Master of Justice, was put to death with the consent of the Pharisians, if not their instigation. The Essenes vowed against the Pharisians a hatred equal to that which they heaped upon [accablent] the Sadduceans and Judaism in general. Not only would the execution of the Christ or Essene Messiah lend its dramatic aura to the crucification of Jesus as reported by the evangelical legends, but it would also accredit the opinion of a death reclaimed by the Pharisians.
* * *
Although little taken with kings chosen by the Romans (such as Herod the Great), the Pharisians estimated that sovereigns govern by reason of a divine will and they supported the principle that it was necessary “to render unto Ceasar what belongs to Ceasar.”
The Pharisians took the side of Rome in the struggle against the Zealots, [so much so] that one of their most celebrated sectarians, the historian Flavius Joseph, called them lestoi, “bandits,” [and] “terrorists.” Isn’t it with the consent of the Roman authorities that, a little before the destruction of Jerusalem, the great rabbi Johanan Ben Zakai and the Pharisians left the city? The exodus, voluntarily undertaken so as to avoid a confrontation of which the Pharisians disapproved, would in a falsified version enter into the apologetic novel known as Acts of the Apostles (end of the Second Century); in it, the Pharisians have transformed themselves into Christians, thus credited with nourishing no hostility towards Rome (from the second half of the Second Century on, the politics of the diverse Christianities strove to obtain a diploma of good citizenship from Roman imperial power). They took refuge in Pella, in Macedonia. Like the Sadduceans, the Pharisians made a pact with the powers-that-be so as to better situate their religion above terrestrial contingencies. The Catholic Church would not do otherwise all the way through the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. On the other hand, the Pharisians drew down the hatred and scorn of the Zealots and the Essene factions that were favorable to them.
* * *
Pharisaism popularized the practice of midrash or biblical commentary. The so-called sacred texts had been re-copied and revised without scruple as a function of on-going polemics, read in public, explained, glossed, corrected by the evolution of mindsets, brought up to date, nay, suppressed, like the Book of Tobias. A whole literature — targum, midrash, mishna, Talmud — was thus forged in the fires of the assemblies and the necessity of extracting from these texts a moral rule applicable to the community, or to the entirety of the believers.
The Pauline current, which Marcion would impose around 140 [C.E.] so as to counter the Judeo-Christian communities that claimed Peter and John for themselves, took a large part of its doctrine from Pharisian doctrines: notably, the beyond where the dead would be individually resuscitated after a Last Judgment that would divide all into the blessed, raised up to a celestial Eden, and the damned, hurled [down] into Gehenna; the existence of angels, agents and interceders of Divine Grace; the end of the world, in which a Messiah, sent by God, annihilates the terrestrial kingdoms, so as to substitute the Kingdom of God for them; and the imminence of the times in which the power of the Savior will be revealed.
Like the Essenes, the Pharisians practiced the Holy Communion or eucharistic banquet, but they defended a more personal religion, less austere, better accorded with human weakness. Although attached to sacrifices and to the fussy rigors of the observances, they showed themselves much more accommodating, calling forth the reproach of laxity from the Essenes, who themselves refused the sacrifices of the Temple, so as to substitute for them the sacrifice of existence and the maceration of the body.
The Pharisians showed themselves to be ardent proselytizers but, unlike the Essenes, Nazarenes and Elchasaite Christians mentioned in a letter from Pliny the Younger to Tarjan, they were rather inclined to discourage neophytes. Another paradox: like the Christian Jews in the Epistle attributed to Barnabas (90? 100? 110?), they did not raise objections to circumcision, the Sabbath, the rites of purification or prohibited foods.
Placing the accent on an active solidarity, the Pharisians made the synagogues places of mutual assistance and encounter. They developed in them in a kind of social security, providing assistance to the poor, the elderly, widows and the sick. The Judeo-Christian, then de-Judaized Churches reclaimed for their own accounts the charitable politics of the Pharisians, betting on them so as to implant themselves more easily in the working-class [populaire] milieux.
The Zealot Movement
The Zealots constituted less a sect, properly speaking, than a front for a nationalist guerrilla war that re-grouped (in a communal hatred for the Roman occupation) diverse religious tendencies in Palestine and across the Diaspora.
The king from 37 to 4 [B.C.E.], Herod did not fail to re-build the Temple, appease religious scruples and be assured of the favor of the Sadducean and Pharisian parties. Nevertheless, an agitation that no doubt issued from the Essene and Baptist milieux (Dositheans and Nazarenes) ravaged the State.
Speaking of the revolt of Juda of Gamala, Flavius Joseph mentions a bandit by the name of Ezechias: “There was also a certain Juda, son of Ezechias, the redoutable head of the brigands who had only been taken by Herod with the greatest of difficulties.”[38]
Juda of Gamala or Galilee was the leader of the revolt in the year 6. The crucification of his father, Ezechias, took place around 30 [B.C.E.].
The endemic state of the revolt became worse after the death of Herod in 4 [B.C.E.]. “Troubles exploded from all sides of the country [...] A slave of the deceased king assumed the diadem and, traveling the region with the brigands whom he had assembled, burned the royal palace at Jericho, among many of the luxurious residences.”[39] A shephard, Athrongee, also assumed the diadem and traveled the countryside, killing Romans and the King’s people. Then, the Roman General Varus was sent with two legions and four regiments of cavalrymen.
In 6, the census organized by Quirinus, the papal legatee of Syria, gave the signal for a general insurrection that was conducted for religious reasons, because “only God can take account of his people” (which is how the census is mentioned by David in the Book of Samuel 2, 24), but was stirred up everywhere by the miserable lot of the excluded classes. The insurrection was led by Juda of Gamala, to whom Flavius returns several times:
Then, a Galilean by the name of Juda pushed his compatriots to revolt by reproaching them for agreeing to pay taxes to the Romans and for supporting mortal masters, beyond God ...[40]
There was also a certain Juda, son of Ezechias, the redoutable leader of the brigands, who had only been taken by Herod with the greatest of difficulties. This Juda united around Sepphoris, in Galilee, a troop of desperate people who made an incursion against the Royal Palace. Being in possession of all the weapons that they found there, he equipped those who surrounded him and carried off all of the riches that he had collected. He terrorized the neighboring areas with raids and pillaging, aiming to take a great fortune and even the honors of royalty, because he hoped to attain this dignity, not by the practice of virtue, but by the excess of his injustice... [41]
But a certain Juda the Gaulonite from the city of Gamala joined with a Pharisian named Saddok, and participated in the sedition. They claimed that this Census provided nothing less than complete servitude, and they called upon the people to reclaim their liberty. They said, if it should happen that they succeeded, this would be to the benefit of the fortune they’d already acquired, and if they were frustrated by the goods that remained for them to take, at least they would obtain the honor and glory of having shown the grandeur of the soul. Moreover, God preferred the success of their projects; so, in love with great things, they spared no expense in realizing it...
Here were born seditions and political assassinations, sometimes of enemies, sometimes fellow citizens, immolated by the passion that animated them to fight one against the other and to never cede to their adversaries; the famine pushed them to the most shameless extremities; the seizure and destruction of cities, up to the last revolt in which even the Temple of God was surrendered to the fire of the enemy. The change in and upset of the national institutions had so much influence that those who attained them were lost, such as Juda of Gamala and Saddok, who introduced and aroused among us a fourth philosophical sect and surrounded themselves with many adherents, and immediately filled the country with troubles and planted the roots of the evil that would much later rage in it, and this thanks to this unknown philosophy of which I have wanted to speak a little, principally because it was the youth’s interest in this sect that was the ruin of the country.
The fourth philosophical sect had Juda the Galilean as its author. His sectarians in general accorded themselves with the doctrine of the Pharisians, but they also have an invincible love of liberty, because they judge that God is the only chief and the only master. The most extraordinary forms of death, the torture of parents and friends leave them indifferent, provided that they do not call any man by the name of master. As many people have witnessed the unshakable firmness with which they submit to all of these evils, I can say no more, because I fear, not that one doubts what I have said about this subject, but on the contrary that my words do not give too weak of an idea of the scorn with which they accept and support sorrow. This madness began to rage in our people under the government of Gessius Florus, who by the excess of his violence will cause them to revolt against the Romans. Such are the philosophical sects that exist among the Jews... [42]
Flavius Joseph’s text calls for several remarks. The movement of the Zealots or “zealous servants of the law of Moses” was not born under the government of Gessius Florus, that is to say, in 65; it took place in the form of Juda of Gamala, called the Galilean, just like the Messiah Jesus, who also wanted to become King of the Jews, of whose existence [Flavius] Joseph is ignorant.
The name of the Pharisian, Sadoq, which Flavius Joseph (himself a Pharisian) held in mediocre esteem, evokes the idea of justice, which was shared by the Essenes’ Master of Justice and the Judeo-Christians’ Jacob/John. Finally, the regrouping of diverse religious tendencies that the historian calls the “fourth sect” — does it not suggest the idea of a religious syncretism in which each combatant, not recognizing any authority other than that of God, is the brother of and model for Adonai, Kyrios, the Savior?
In 45, Caspius Fadus — named the governor of Judea by Emperor Claude — had to face an insurrection led by the Messiah Theudas (aka Juda or Thomas), who was followed by a great many poor people. In the manner of Elie and Elisee in Hebraic mythology, he promised his troops they would take Jerusalem and cross the Jordan without getting their feet wet. By promising to lead his flock into the promised land, he repeated the gesture of Joshua. Fadus suppressed the revolt. Theudas was decapitated, his partisans massacred.
Between 46 and 48, Tiberias Alexander, who succeeded Fadus, ordained the crucification of the two sons of Juda of Gamala: Simeon (Simon) and his brother Jacob (John).
Under Agrippa III, around 49, new clashes broke out between Jews and Zealots. Battles were fought beside the Temple. In 66, Cesaria was the theater of battle between Jews and Greeks. Two years later, an incident brought fire to the powder. Eleazar, son of the great priest Anania and leader of the Temple’s guards, killed the third son or the grandson of Juda of Galilee, Menachem, one of the leaders of the Zealot movement (his name means “Paraclete” [in Greek] and “Comforter” [in Latin]). The general war against Rome and for the independence of Israel were proclaimed in a great confusion, because Jews from rival factions killed each other in Jerusalem. It would last up to 70 [C.E.].
Flavius Joseph, who had been governor of Galilee, said with full knowledge of the causes of the Vespasian campaign:
After the taking of Jopata, all of the Galileans who had escaped from the arms of the Romans surrendered to them. The rebels then occupied everywhere, except for Gischala and Mount Itabyrios (Thabor). They also occupied Gamala, the city of the Taricheans, situated above the lake, where the kingdom of Agrippa ended, and their neighbors were Sogone and Seleucie and Lake Semechonitis. The lake’s width is sixty verstes and extends to the market town called Daphne, which is completely beautiful and has access to sources of water originating in the Little Jordan, flowing under the Temple of the Golden Cow (one of the golden cows of Jeroboam: I Kings 12, 29), before reaching the Great Jordan. By deputizing these places and giving them his faith, Agrippa has pacified them.
But Gamala did not submit, counting on its solidity, because the soil was rocky and the town stood straight up on a buttress, as [a head] on a neck and shoulders, and thus had the appearance of a camel. Thus it was called Gamal, but the people of the country did not call it by its real name, Kamil (the Galilean pronounciation of Gamal) because they detested this animal (in Greek, Kamelos).
On its flank and in front, there were depthless precipices; behind, it was not very fortified, but the inhabitants had reinforced it with a deep ditch. As far as dwellings, they had been built extremely closely together at the center, and there were shafts bored through, all the way to the end of the city.
As strong as the place was, Flavius Joseph had it fortified even more by constructing solid ramparts and establishing conduits and tunnels, so that one could also circulate under the ground.[43]
Situated to the east of Lake Toberiade (Genesareth), Gamala — despite its privileged situation — fell into the hands of Titus, son of Vespasian, at the cost of difficult fighting.
In August 70, the Roman Decima Legio[44] seized Jerusalem, sacked it and ruined the Temple. The Zealots’ desperate resistance was sustained until the fall of Masada, their last fortress, in 73.
In the first half of the Second Century, the revolt broke out again under the leadership of the Messiah Bar Kochba. Hadrian crushed him in 135, reducing the Jewish nation and state to inexistence for nineteen centuries.
* * *
If Flavius Joseph speaks of the Zealots as if they were a single sect, it is because the insurrection had been lived like a veritable national and religious epic, a saga of which the scattered fragments nourished the midrashim of anger, despair and eschatology, before being revised and faultily translated into Greek and implanted into the recitations of Christian, and then Catholic propaganda, which distorted the meaning.
Jews of all beliefs were among the Zealots. A Hellenized aristocrat, Flavius Joseph — a functionary of the Roman Empire — reproached them [the Zealots] for their violence and fanaticism. (The fire that ravaged Rome in 64 [C.E.] and to which Nero’s pogroms responded was the work of the hardcore of Zealots who were active in Rome’s Jewish community. In 49, troubles attributed to the Jews had exploded in Rome. Supposing that it isn’t an interpolation, the formula “impulsatore Christo” appears in 130, in Suetone’s Life of the Twelve Caesars: “on the incitement of a Messiah,” chrestos or christos translating simply the Hebrew messiah.) With xenophobia and nationalist messianism helping out, the religious tendencies amalgated themselves into an apparent unity, from which Judeo-Christianity would draw a kind of specificity after the defeat [of 70 A.D.].
Pharisaism expressed the hope for salvation, the imminent end of the world, the approach of the Last Judgment, and the resurrection.
Despite the pacifism with which one generally credits them, the Essenes participated in the Zealot movement. The Decima Legio would raze the site of Qumran. Among the texts discovered at Masada — in addition to the Wisdom of Jesus ben Sira — was a specifically Essene ritual, [namely] the Sabbath prayer [sung] in union with the angels of heaven.[45]
What about the Judeo-Christian presence of the Ebionite or Nazarean type? The works of Flavius Joseph mention many names that also appear in the exegetical and propagandistic literature, popping up in the Hebrew or Aramaic midrashim of the First Century, and the Catholic texts of the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Centuries. It thus seems that, due to the ahistorical spirit of Judaism, the two Zealot leaders, Jacob/John and Simon, son of Juda of Gamala, [respectively] “assumed” to be Jacob of Kepher Schanya, leader of the Nazarean community, executed between 41 and 42 on the orders of Herod Agrippa, and Simon the Essene, enemy of Jochanaan, also called John the Baptist. The first of the two would later become John the Just and the second Simon/Peter, descended from Simon Cephas (Simon the Rock, Simon the Pebble, Simon the Bald, Simon the Cruel, Simon the Unshakable?).
The agitator Theudas contains the doublon[46] Jude/Judas and Thomas. The evangelical legends call him/them/it “Athlete” (according to the Essene expression “fighters of virtue”) and “father of the Savior.” The four names would enter into the future recollections of the apostles chosen for patronage of the diverse communities. Around the end of the Second Century, the reassembling of the [original] apostles would put together a team of heroes on which only Joshua/Jesus has no existence outside of the Hebraic mythology.
* * *
It would not be without interest to mention Brandon’s thesis, in which Jesus was a Zealot put to death along with other brigands or lestoi. Saul/Paul, an adversary of the communities or churches that claimed John and Simon/Peter for themselves, erected him as the exemplary value of his [Saul/Paul’s] sauteriological and peniteniary system. So as to please Rome, he substituted for the terrorist a saint put to death, not by the Romans, but by the Jews, who would not pardon him, nor his pacifism, nor the ecumenism of his God of Kindness. These were the fictions that, through the Twentieth Century, took up the slack for the canonical Gospels so as to disparage the status of a historical Jesus that would have accorded growing credit to the Zealot hypothesis, which supposed that Jesus was the father of John and Simon, and thus the son of Juda of Gamala. (One can not fail to cite one of the two remarks that do not conform with the [image of] the softness of the Messiah and that have subsisted through the composite redaction of the Gospels: “Moreover, bring here my enemies who have not wanted me to reign over them and cut their throats in my presence. After having spoken thus, Jesus put himself at the head of his followers so as to go up to Jerusalem.” Gospel attributed to Luke, 19, 27–28.)
Although Dubourg’s thesis of a biblical Joshua who was incarnated in many prophets confirms the inexistence of a historical Jesus as late as the second half of the Second Century (in 150, a work recognized by all the churches of the epoch as Pastor attributed to Hermas does not mention him), it does not exclude the intervention — in the long struggle of dissident Jews against Rome — of a “new Joshua” with whom Theudas/Thomas (much later called the “twin brother of Jesus”) might have identified himself.
After 70, Rome imposed the peace of the cemetary on Palestine. The Sadducean aristocracy disappeared; the last Zealot party desperately resisted at Masada. The Samaritans and the Essenes entered the war on the side of the Judeans, were decimated and took refuge in the cities of the Diaspora. Only the Pharisians — friends of Rome and defenders of the peace — escaped the violence of the conquerors, only to fall to the animosity of the vanguished, that is to say, the Esseno-Christians, who themselves fell apart into a multitude of sects that repudiated the bloody God of Israel, contested Mosaic law and rediscovered pacifism, which had been briefly forsaken.
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