ABSTRACT
In the 400 years or so either side of the birth of Christ (a date, at the time, of almost no significance), Jewish political and military structures were firstly extended and consolidated, then fractured in a civil war, then annihilated by Roman arms and subsumed into the Roman Empire as just another conquered territory. As part of this process, whatever there might have been of Jewish political and theological unity was pulled apart. The cultural and religious life of these centuries was characterised by a most exotic flourishing of rival sects and religious movements-the ‘World Turned Upside Down’, a ‘Turbulent, Seditious and Factious People’, to use as analogies the titles of Christopher Hill’s books, which describe a period in English history as productive of expostulatory tracts, other-worldly angularities and messianic loquacities as the world of the Maccabeans, Herod, Hadrian and Bar Kokhba.
