Rick sent me this note and the next one about the Maccabees and their relation to Pharisees and Saducees, and gave me permission to pass them along --
It seems that the Maccabees have long been frequently mischaracterized as exemplars of Judaic heroes rebelling against the Greco-Roman heathens. Is this the framework of understanding that Bassano et al. were working from, or is this what we are supposed to believe? Could they understand the Flavian typology fully, or only partially? Or was the whole business just intended as a further dialectic ruse?
Elsewhere, Hadas discusses that the early Pharisees were populists in opposition to the elite alignments of the Sadducees (which includes the Hasmoneans). It is only late in the Maccabee internal conflict that the Pharisees are made concessions to. So here we can see the reason why Josephus would later state that the 'first' school of the Pharisees were killed off, which is because they were aligned in the older tradition of sovereignty of the Jewish polity from which a high priest or king was a servant to.
But the Maccabees were in search of means to change the equation such that they had a more conventional Hellenistic sovereignty of the few over the many. Hence their alliance with the Romans, which the Romans later took advantage of. Later, the Flavians would supplant the old Pharisees with the new, compliant ones which we still see today. One then has to wonder if the Pharisees legalisms mocked in the gospels were fabricated as well, as the original Pharisees were no longer around to refute.
From Hadas's Hellenistic Culture pp. 42 - 44:
It seems that the Maccabees have long been frequently mischaracterized as exemplars of Judaic heroes rebelling against the Greco-Roman heathens. Is this the framework of understanding that Bassano et al. were working from, or is this what we are supposed to believe? Could they understand the Flavian typology fully, or only partially? Or was the whole business just intended as a further dialectic ruse?
Elsewhere, Hadas discusses that the early Pharisees were populists in opposition to the elite alignments of the Sadducees (which includes the Hasmoneans). It is only late in the Maccabee internal conflict that the Pharisees are made concessions to. So here we can see the reason why Josephus would later state that the 'first' school of the Pharisees were killed off, which is because they were aligned in the older tradition of sovereignty of the Jewish polity from which a high priest or king was a servant to.
But the Maccabees were in search of means to change the equation such that they had a more conventional Hellenistic sovereignty of the few over the many. Hence their alliance with the Romans, which the Romans later took advantage of. Later, the Flavians would supplant the old Pharisees with the new, compliant ones which we still see today. One then has to wonder if the Pharisees legalisms mocked in the gospels were fabricated as well, as the original Pharisees were no longer around to refute.
From Hadas's Hellenistic Culture pp. 42 - 44:
... Organized opposition [to Hellenization], where it occurred, was motivated not by antipathy to hellenism but by normal desire for independence or by the ambition of rivals for power. ...
The one rebellion which has been recorded in history as directed against hellenism, that of the Maccabees in Judea, was not, in its origin, a reaction against hellenism. 41 From the contemporary or almost contemporary accounts in I and II Maccabees it is clear that hellenism had proceeded very far indeed, and apparently without protest, before the insurrection began, Violence started in consequence of rivalry between equally hellenized contenders for the high priesthood, and religion was not an issue. The standard of religion was raised in the countryside, and then served to rally the people to the cause. It was only after religion had become the battle cry of the rebels that Antiochus IV issued his decrees against the observance of central religious rites, and it is highly significant that as soon as the anti-religious decrees were rescinded the pietist group withdrew from the fighting. The object of the Hasmonean rulers was not to protect religion---their bitterest opponents were pietists---but to maintain a sovereignty which should be able to hold its head up among others which were being carved out of the weakened Seleucid empire. They were permitted to do so as the price of their support of one or another rival to the Seleucid succession. Neither the nationalists nor even their opposition objected to hellenism as such; both parties, as we shall see, borrowed freely from Greek political and literary models. Among the Jews as among the other self-conscious peoples in the Seleucid empire the controlling principle was something like "Accept the largest possible measure of hellenization and retain the greatest possible measure of loyalty to the native tradition." Obviously the simultaneous pursuit of discrepant objectives necessitated compromise or self-deception. ...
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