(printed p. 9 — Book I)
If my purpose were merely to answer Drusius, there would certainly be no reason for me to labor over retaining the triad of Jewish sects which I asserted in chapter 3. For the greater the number of these sects was, the more Drusius would be overwhelmed, since, as I shall say below, he wants only a pair of them.
[margin: Continuation of John Leo on Jews “under arms.” Scaliger, fol. 303.]
(printed p. 10)
But because I want even this rather small labor to serve truth and the reader’s profit, I shall try to explain briefly how that established triad stands. I shall not do this by playing the boys’ game, as the saying goes, that a lesser number is always contained in a greater one. Boys, when asked how many parts of speech there are, if they answer two or three and are taught that there are eight, reply that, if there are eight, there are also two or three.
Observation I
First, it must be held that not every impiety and crime of impious and wicked men is rightly called a heresy. For that reason, of the twenty-eight sects Philastrius was listing, at least eighteen must be excluded from this enumeration. The Heliognostics, and all who follow them in order except only the last, namely the Herodians, were idolaters, not heretics, as is clear from the very things that Philastrius himself handed down concerning them. Likewise the Caelicolae, whether they were Jews or Christians, a question Baronius discusses in volumes 1 and 5, must be removed from here, as must all others of whom the Talmud speaks in Abodah Zarah.
Observation II
When the number of Jewish heresies is being considered, only those are in view which existed before Christ the Lord. Therefore the Herodians, and those men who denied tribute and obedience to mortal lords, who were afterwards called Gaulonites, Zealots, or Sicarii, and about whom Josephus says so much in the Jewish War, and Saint Chrysostom, Oecumenius, and Theophylact say something in the cited places, must be entirely set aside.
[margin: Seven observations for reducing the number of sects.]
(printed p. 11)
Perhaps also those first three in Philastrius, the Ophites, Cainites, and Sethians, must be set aside. For Tertullian, in On Prescription against Heretics 47, Saint Epiphanius in heresies 37, 38, and 36, Saint Augustine in his book On Heresies, heresies 17, 18, and 19, John Damascene, the follower of Epiphanius, and others place them among the heresies that arose after Christ the Lord.
Observation III
The Samaritans also do not properly belong to the Jewish sects. As Saint Epiphanius explains before heresy 9, they were Cuthaeans, Emathaeans, Avvites, and Sepharvaimites from Babylonia, of whom 2 Kings 17:24 and 17:41 speak, although he calls them by Greek forms of those names. Again, there were those who later passed over from the Jews to them in the time of Alexander the Great, so that they no longer sacrificed in the old and universal temple at Jerusalem, but in their own new temple on Garizim, as the same Epiphanius indicates from the opposite side in heresy 14, which is that of the Sadducees.
Although those who deserted from the Jews to them, and yet did not worship idols, were truly heretics for this very reason, that they admitted neither all the divine books nor any interpretations of them,
[margin: Observation II. Observation III.]
(printed p. 12)
nevertheless Josephus does not count them among the Jewish sects, either because they were not Jews by birth, or, if they were, because they had separated themselves from the Jewish temple. Josephus otherwise knew them very well. In book 12, chapter 7, he says that, when Jewish affairs flourished, they used to say they were relatives and brothers of the Jews; but when the Jews were pressed by various calamities, they used to profess themselves their adversaries and enemies. And he treats their Garizim temple in book 13, last chapter.
Thus, then, those who in Epiphanius and Damascene are Samaritans - the Essenes, about another kind of Essenes I shall speak later, the Sebuaeans, the Gorthenes, and the Dositheans - must now be set aside by us.
Observation IV
Those offices or institutions that have been established in some commonwealth or religion and worship of God are not properly to be placed in the number of sects. Therefore the Scribes and Experts in the Law, of whom I shall speak later, must be removed from here, as must those Nazirites who dedicated themselves to God either for a time or forever. The same judgment applies to the Nethinim named in Ezra.
Observation V
Sometimes sects are divided by writers into various smaller parts, and a new sect, as it were, is constructed from some difference in doctrines or institutions of life. On the other hand, other writers pass over certain smaller subdivisions and pursue the larger classes themselves.
[margin: Observation IV. Observation V.]
(printed p. 13)
This can be seen in the sects of our own Germany today. When they are cut up more carefully, are they not thousand-formed? Yet those who touch on their chief heads name only Lutherans, Calvinists, Schwenckfeldians, Anabaptists, and Arians.
Thus Saint Epiphanius counts seven heresies of the Jews, while Josephus counts only three. But these three, as Theophylact and Oecumenius explained in the places already indicated, are general and principal; the others are more particular and, as it were, attached to those general sects. So too the Talmudists, in tractate Sotah 3, folio 22, make seven orders or classes of Pharisees, although these are really rather hypocrites: the Pharisee Schichmi, Nikohar, Cizai, Medoukia, Mahchobathi, Veescheneh, Mehaiebah, and Mirah.
To those same Pharisees and Sadducees belong the Nazareans, standing, as it were, midway between the two, or rather sharing in both, except that they would sacrifice nowhere, nor would they eat any flesh of victims, indeed not any living creature at all, as Saint Epiphanius testifies in heresy 18. In the same way the four groups attributed to the Samaritans could be attached to them. And the Caraim themselves, of whom I spoke above, are referred back to the Sadducees by the one who wrote in book 2 On the Correction of Chronology: “Those Caraim are from the remnants of the ancient Sadducees.”
[margin: Scaliger, fol. 144.]
(printed p. 14)
Before him Elias, in the Tishbi, under the word Tzadok, said: “Bilshon romi korin lahem Tzadusee,” that is, “In the Roman language they call them Sadducees,” namely those who are Caraim. By the same reasoning, the Hasidaeans were elsewhere referred by me to the Essenes in 1 Maccabees 7, on four arguments; by Drusius, however, they were referred to the Pharisees on one argument only, and that a very slight one, about which below.
The same can be said about the Tubieni, of whom I spoke in the Harmony of the Maccabees, if indeed they constituted any sect. Yet it seems more probable to me that the Tubieni are called Jews who lived in the land of Tob, mentioned in Judges 11:3 and 5, 2 Samuel 10:6 and 10, and 1 Maccabees 5:13. For even if Tubieni can be translated “the blessed,” in the same way that in the Syriac title of the Acts of the Apostles the apostles are called Scheliche Toubune, that is, “blessed apostles,” it is nevertheless less suitable for people still living to be called blessed in a strict and simple sense. The saying of Solon is true, which the poet bound in verse:
No one should be called blessed before death and the final rites.
And another says:
Do not think anyone blessed before he is wise and good.
It could nevertheless have happened that this name was first derived either from the goodness of some single person, whether a prince or a famous man, as in Laertius’s preface certain philosophers are called blessed by disposition, or from the fertility and happiness of the land itself, just as in Ptolemy’s Geography 6 Arabia is called Arabia Felix.
(printed p. 15)
Observation VI
Sometimes one and the same sect is marked by several names because of differences of places, times, or other circumstances. Those who today are Calvinists were once called Berengarians and Predestinarians. Those who in Germany are Calvinists are in France Huguenots; those who are Lutherans are Martinists. Among religious orders also, how great is the abundance of such names?
Thus I taught in chapter 1 of Judges that the Kenites, the Rechabites, and the Essenes are in some sense the same; nor have I yet repented of this opinion, about which later.
Observation VII
Sometimes new and different names of certain sects are invented for no weighty reasons, or names once invented are corrupted. Why, for instance, are there Genists in Honorius and Rabanus? Rabanus says: “They are called Genists because they boast that they are of the stock of Abraham. For when the people of God came to Babylon, many abandoned their wives and attached themselves to Babylonian women. Some, content only with Israelite marriages, or born from such marriages, when they returned from Babylon, separated themselves from the whole people and took this name to themselves in boasting.”
But what ancient writer ever coined such a name? Who accused them of boasting? Who disapproved the cause of that kind of separation? Certainly not Ezra in book 1, chapters 9 and 10; nor Nehemiah in the second book of Ezra, chapter 13, verse 23 and following.
[margin: Observation VI. Observation VII.]
(printed p. 16)
What are the Esnaei? Are they not, by a foul error, Essaei? What are the Marbonei? Are they not Sebuaeans or Dositheans? For the same Rabanus says: “The Marbonei say that he is Christ who taught them to keep Sabbath in every matter.” Some in Origen, homily 28 on Saint Luke, thought that Dositheus was Christ; and he taught that he himself was Christ, as from the same Origen, tractate 2 on Saint Matthew, book 2 against Celsus, and on John 4, it will again have to be noted below.
Finally, what are the Merisei or Meristae? Rabanus says: “They are so called because they separate the Scriptures, not believing all the Prophets, saying that they prophesied by different spirits.” For the Greek word meros means “part” in Latin. All the Samaritan heresies fit such people. Indeed, all heretics could be called Merici or Meristae, since, as was said in chapter 3, they divide one body and make parts.
Nor would someone perhaps go very far wrong who thought that those Meristae were invented from the fact that, after the Samaritan heresies in the Greek text of Saint Epiphanius, the phrase follows, “Judaism remains divided.” Eusebius, in Ecclesiastical History 4.22, says of all heresies that “they divided the unity of the Church.” Therefore, from so great a multitude of sects which seem to have existed among the Jews, there remain only those three which were handed down in chapter 3: the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes.
(printed p. 17)