Philip Davies wrote:

> And let's infer that since Joesphus says there are four haireses then the
community described in D will fall into one of those four.

This would be where we differ, then. I do not agree that every Jewish school
of thought must fall into one of the three/four listed by Josephus. BJ
2.119-166 has three forms of philosophy; AJ 13.171-176 has three haireseis;
AJ 15.371-379 compares Essenes to Pythagoreans; AJ 18.9-25 has three
philosophies supplemented by another fourth; Life 10 has three. Al
Baumgarten has convinced me that there was room for many more haireseis
(e.g., where would Bannus and his disciples be slotted? or the group
described in AJ 18.63-64, if it has any shred of originality?). The numbers
given for the Essenes, Pharisees, and Sadducees amount to  4000+6000+a few,
not nearly enough to cover the entire Judean population. Steve Mason has
convinced me that Josephus divides Jewish philosophy into three not because
every Jewish religious community must have belonged to one of these three,
but in order to parallel the widely recognized three schools of Greek
philosophy, as I argue in my article in
http://journalofbiblicalstudies.org/issue4.html

Ken Penner, McMaster/DSS
Dead Sea Scrolls scholars' list owner,
http://mailman.McMaster.CA/mailman/listinfo/g-megillot

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