ese taxes, giving these men the
right to extort whatever they could, provided the required tribute was
paid to Rome. Of course all true Jews hated and despised these Jewish
tax-gatherers or publicans even more than they hated and despised the
Romans themselves.

VARIOUS PARTIES AMONG THE JEWS

There were some respectable Jews, indeed, as well as these
tax-collectors, who favored the Romans. There were for example the
Sadducees, a group of wealthy and aristocratic men, mostly priests,
who formed a sort of political party called by this name. Many of them
were members of the Sanhedrin. They were prosperous, and so long as
their power was not taken away they sided with the Romans. It was
nothing to them that the great mass of their poor fellow countrymen
were being brutally and wickedly robbed and ill-treated.

=The Pharisees.=--We have already spoken of the Pharisees as being
"Separatists," that is, the people who were most opposed to any
contact with heathen foreigners. Strange to say, most of the Pharisees
were opposed to any violent rebellion against the Romans. They
believed that God himself would come to the aid of his people. Many
books of the class called apocalypses were written during this period
of the history in which the writers tried to comfort their readers by
prophesying that the Lord would soon descend from heaven with armies
of angels or would send his Messiah to drive out the Romans and set up
his own kingdom. The word "Messiah" (in Greek, "Christ") means
_anointed one_.

The book of Daniel in the Old Testament is one of the books of this
period. Many similar books were written which were not included in the
canon of the Scriptures. All of them were written in rather mysterious
language--with references to trumpets, vials, seals, beasts with many
heads and many horns, and so on. This was to keep their heathen rulers
from understanding the real meaning. It would not have been safe
openly to predict that in a few years God was going to send all Romans
to eternal punishment.

=The Zealots.=--There were still others among the Jews at this time
who were not willing to wait for Jehovah to come down from heaven.
They wanted to start a revolution right away. One such man, Judas of
Gamala, led a revolt when Jesus was about ten years old in which many
Galilaeans joined. It was put down by the Romans with their usual
cruelty. Very likely the fathers of some of Jesus' boyhood friends in
Nazareth of Galilee