The World of First-Century Palestine

Overview

Recall questions on Roman rule and the Herods, the Temple and its place in Jewish life, how Greek culture and Jewish tradition pulled against one another, and the Pharisees, Sadducees and Zealots.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   Who were the Pharisees, and what did they stand for?

   Model answer

   They were a lay movement concerned with applying the law to daily life, developing an oral tradition of interpretation that extended priestly standards of purity and tithing beyond the Temple into the ordinary household. They accepted a body of belief the Sadducees did not, including resurrection, angels and a providential ordering of events. Their influence rested on teaching and popular respect rather than on office.

2. 2

   How did the Sadducees differ from the Pharisees?

   Model answer

   The Sadducees were associated with the priestly and landowning aristocracy and with the running of the Temple. They restricted authority to the written law and rejected the oral tradition, and with it the belief in resurrection. Their position depended on the Temple and on workable relations with Rome, which made them politically cautious and, after the destruction of the Temple, left them without an institutional base.

3. 3

   What is known about the Essenes?

   Model answer

   Ancient writers describe a strict separatist movement practising shared property, ritual washing, careful purity and, in some accounts, celibacy. Most scholars connect them with the community whose library was found near the Dead Sea, which awaited a decisive divine intervention, followed its own calendar and regarded the Jerusalem priesthood as corrupt. They are not named in the gospels, but they show how far dissent from the Temple establishment could go.

4. 4

   What did the Zealots and other resistance groups want?

   Model answer

   They held that paying tribute to a pagan emperor was a denial of God's sole kingship, and that armed resistance was a religious duty. Organised revolt is best attested in the decades leading to the war of the late sixties, so historians debate how far a defined Zealot party existed in Jesus' lifetime. What is clear is that violent messianic movements arose repeatedly and were crushed, which conditioned how any popular leader was heard.

5. 5

   Where do the scribes, the Herodians and the Samaritans fit into this picture?

   Model answer

   Scribes were the professionally literate, trained in the law and employed across the parties, so they appear as expert interpreters rather than as a sect. The Herodians supported the client dynasty and the accommodation with Rome it represented. The Samaritans shared much with Judaean Jews but worshipped at their own mountain sanctuary and accepted only the books of Moses, and the mutual hostility between the groups gives several gospel episodes their edge.

6. 6

   What was Hellenism?

   Model answer

   It is the spread of Greek language, education, city institutions and thought through the eastern Mediterranean after Alexander, and the long process by which local cultures absorbed and resisted it. It brought the gymnasium, the theatre, Greek civic organisation and a shared educated vocabulary, and it made Greek the working language of trade and administration far beyond Greece itself.

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