(printed p. 18 — Book I)
Drusius says on page 58: “This is clear from history, that at the beginning there were only two sects.” If you wish to deserve well of me, and of the reader eager for antiquity and truth, as you claim, my Drusius, then come, name even one historian who affirms this. Produce for us any one Hebrew, Greek, or Latin writer in whom that can be read. Why were you silent? Why, in smaller and less necessary matters, are you so eloquent, but in this one, which could have been for you the great trumpet and support of your opinion, are you so mute, tongueless, without witness? Plainly no such writer was available to you; no one who asserted this had been read or heard by you. And yet you say, “It is clear.”
(printed p. 19)
If this is not plainly selling smoke, painting a gourd, and making sport of the reader, what, I ask, is it? If you had said that the triad of sects could later be reduced to two, that would have been tolerable from the things I discussed above. If you had affirmed from reasoning that there were two, it could in some degree be heard, because when one departs from one, it arrives at a pair before it arrives at a triad or at any other number. If you had wished to say not “at the beginning,” but “especially,” or “finally,” or in some other way that there were or are two, some room for excuse would be open. For perhaps writers could be found who either speak in that way or at least do not greatly shrink from that way of speaking.
For example, Sigonius, in book 5 On the Hebrew Commonwealth, chapter 11, speaks thus: “Of all these heresies of the Jews, the Pharisees and Sadducees especially flourished before the coming of Christ.” The Drusian Gorionides, of whom I shall speak shortly, could perhaps be drawn into the same opinion. But now you have pronounced something far different: you said that it is clear from history that at the beginning there were only two sects.
Moreover, I wish you had also explained what that beginning was in which there were only two. For Josephus has already explicitly told us that there is a very ancient triad of them, so that Rufinus once translated that phrase “from the very ancient” in this way: “Among the Jews there were three philosophies, already from the beginning after the ancestral institutions had been abandoned: that of the Essenes, that of the Sadducees, and the third, by which those who were called Pharisees philosophized.”
(printed p. 20)
And in the Genevan edition, which is more pleasing to men like you, a more recent translator says: “The Jews, devoted to the study of their ancestral wisdom, had already been divided for many centuries back into three sects.” But when I speak about the origin of each sect, these matters concerning that beginning will become clearer.
Still, I shall not move on from here without mentioning the mind of Saint Jerome when he writes on Matthew 22: “There were two heresies among the Jews, one of the Pharisees, the other of the Sadducees.” For he does not say with Drusius, “There were only two heresies among the Jews.” Then let it be so: let us add that word “only” to the words of that holy man. For if Luther added that particle twice to Saint Paul in Romans 3:20 and 3:28, why should Drusius not be able to add it once only to Saint Jerome?
Let Saint Jerome therefore say that there were only two heresies among the Jews; still he will in no way support Drusius. For he is speaking about the time when Christ the Lord disputed with the Pharisees and Sadducees. Yet Drusius himself wants a third sect already to have existed then, on folios 58 and 62. Moreover, Saint Jerome passes over the Essenes because, as must be shown later in another discussion, he more readily refers them to Christian discipline. Indeed, the same holy man wished to exclude the Herodians also, whom Saint Epiphanius, Philastrius, and others place among the sects, and whom Saint Matthew mentions in that very chapter 22, verse 16, because he considered them soldiers of Herod and alien from divine worship. But let us now proceed further.
(printed p. 21)