cts at the time of Christ.
There were three of these, cardinally differing from each other in
their theories of the future fate of man. First, there were the
skeptical, materialistic Sadducees, wealthy, proud, few. They
openly denied the existence of any disembodied souls, avowing that
men utterly perished in the grave. "The cloud faileth and passeth
away: so he that goeth down to the grave doth not return."29 We
read in the Acts of the Apostles, "The Sadducees say there is no
resurrection, neither angel nor spirit." At the same time they
accepted the Pentateuch, only rejecting or explaining away those
portions of it which relate to the separate existence of souls and
to their subterranean abode. They strove to confound their
opponents, the advocates of a future life, by such perplexing
questions as the one they addressed to Jesus, asking, in the case
of a woman who had had seven successive husbands, which one of
them should be her husband in the resurrection. All that we can
gather concerning the Sadducees from the New Testament is amply
confirmed by Josephus, who explicitly declares, "Their doctrine is
that souls die with the bodies."

The second sect was the ascetical and philosophical Essenes, of
whom the various information given by Philo in his celebrated
paper on the Therapeuta agrees with the account in Josephus and
with the scattered gleams in other sources. The doctrine of the
Essenes on the subject of our present inquiry was much like that
of Philo himself; and in some particulars it remarkably resembles
that of many Christians. They rejected the notion of the
resurrection of the body, and maintained the inherent immortality
of the soul. They said that "the souls of men, coming out of the
most subtle and pure air, are bound up in their bodies as in so
many prisons; but, being freed at death, they do rejoice, and are
borne aloft where a state of happy life forever is decreed for the
virtuous; but the vicious are assigned to eternal punishment in a
dark, cold place." 30 Such sentiments appear to have inspired the
heroic Eleazar, whose speech to his followers is reported by
Josephus, when they were besieged at Masada, urging them to rush
on the foe, "for death is better than life, is the only true life,
leading the soul to infinite freedom and joy above."31

27 Ibid. p. 164.

28 See, in the Analekten of Keil and Tzschirner, band i stuck
ii., an article by Dr. Schreiter, entitled Philo's Ideen uber
Unsterbl