A new author joins the library: The Three Sects — the Trihaeresium of Nicolaus Serarius, S.J. (Mainz, 1604), in English for the first time.
Serarius, whom Baronius called the light of the Church of Germany, wrote the Trihaeresium to answer Johannes Drusius’s little book On the Hasidaeans — and out of the quarrel came the fullest treatment its century produced of the three most famous sects among the Jews. Book I asks how many sects there were and defends the ancient triad; Book II treats the Pharisees and the Sadducees — their names, origins, doctrines, fortunes, and sayings; Book III treats the Essenes, and closes by asking whether the Essenes described by Philo were in truth Christians. Along the way: the phylacteries and fringes, the vow of corban, the houses of Hillel and Schammai, the schools of the rabbis, and the Hebrew names of the planets and the zodiac.
The translation restores the Hebrew of the 1604 print — the sect names, the terms of the Law, and a quotation of Gorionides that the printed page gives only in Hebrew — each reading verified against the original edition. The work may be read online chapter by chapter, or downloaded as a PDF with a clickable table of contents and as an EPUB for e-readers, alongside the original’s own index of things and words, translated. And as always, every chapter is joined to the library-wide indexes of subjects, persons, scripture, councils, and heresies — where the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes now take their places.