The relation of Judaism to Jesuism, then, was somewhat as that of a mother country to a colony; the latter growing by help of the former, deriving from it speech, lore, ideals, methods, models, and prestige, till in time the new environment elicits special characteristics, and mere geographical division no less than self-interest vetoes the payment of the old tribute. As usual, there was in the colony a loyalist party which bitterly resisted the severance.
While Josephus specifies four Jewish "sects," there was in Jewry really only one dissenting sect in the modern sense of the term, apart from the Jesuists. Pharisees and Sadducees were analogous rather to the sections or "schools" of the Churches of Rome and England, the former being "orthodox and more," inasmuch as they held by the law, but further insisted on the doctrine of a future state, which was not contained in the Mosaic books; while the Sadducees, either from pre-Maccabean conservatism or from Hellenistic scepticism, held by the pure Mosaic system, of which, being for the most part of priestly status, they were the main administrators. It is noteworthy that it is the Pharisees, who held the tenet of a future life, rather than the Sadducees, who rejected it, that are most acrimoniously handled in the gospels: the former being naturally the most dangerous competitors of the new cult within the Jewish pale. A third body mentioned by Josephus, that of Judas the Galilean, was rather a political than a religious party, being bent simply on maintaining the Jewish nationality as against the Romans.
The term "sect," however, to some extent applies to the Essenes, whose existence and characteristics are specially noteworthy in connection with Christian beginnings. All the evidence goes to show that there had existed in Jewry for many generations a body so named (or perhaps formerly called Chassidim), living an ascetic life, rejecting animal food and animal sacrifices, avoiding wine, warm baths, and oil for anointing, wearing white garments and preferring linen to wool, forbidding all oaths save one, and greatly esteeming celibacy. Many of them lived in a male celibate community, by their own labour, with community of goods, on the shores of the Dead Sea, under a strict hierarchical rule; but many others lived scattered through the Jewish cities, some marrying, but all maintaining ascetic principles. To secure entrance into the community there was needed a long probation. On the side of creed they held firmly by the law of Moses, yet also reverenced the sun, to which they sang a morning hymn of praise; strictly observed the Sabbath; conducted their religious services without priests, and studied magic and angelology, but tabooed logic and metaphysics. Ethically the cult was in the main one of physical purity and fraternal humility, hostile to slavery and war as well as to the normal vices, but running to mysticism on the line of a belief, often seen in early religion, that asceticism could raise men to supernatural powers. As a whole, the system had so much in common with that of the Pythagoreans on the one hand, and with the Mazdean religion and Buddhism on the other, that it must be held to prove a connection between these, and to point to a movement which once spread over Asia as far as Buddhist India, and over the Mediterranean world as far as early Grecian Italy, surviving for many centuries in scattered sects.