The New Testament and the People of God (Christian Origins and the Question of God Book 1)

by N.T. Wright

As a result, their agenda always pushed in one of two related and parallel directions. Either they would make common cause with the out-and-out rebels, continuing the tradition of ‘zeal’ which we examined earlier. Or they would withdraw into the deeper private study and practice of Torah, creating an alternative mode of Judaism which achieved its liberation from Rome, and from corrupt Judaism, by living in its own world where neither pagan nor renegade could corrupt it. It seems to me highly likely that these two options, the sword and the ghetto, were among the real points at issue between the Pharisees of different schools in the Roman and Herodian periods, even though later memory depoliticized the controversy and, in a period when revolt had been abandoned as having twice led to disaster, translated it into the less threatening debate between stricter and more lenient understandings of the Torah’s code of purity.