Dr. Helen Bond

Well, yes.

I mean, one good thing about Josephus, and he does mention the Pharisees a few times, and he gives a little sort of pocket description of the Pharisees in comparison to the Sadducees, who are this sort of aristocratic priestly sect connected with the temple, and another group called the Essenes, who are the ones who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls, probably.

Now, he loves the Essenes.

He goes into great detail about Essenes, doesn't like the Sadducees much, and

Doesn't like the Pharisees all that much either and just gives very, very kind of brief account of them.

But one of the things he says is that they believe that everybody has a soul and that there's a resurrection.

Now, resurrection seems to have been an idea that came into Jewish belief in about the second century BCE.

probably after the Maccabean crisis and the uprising there where Jews shook off their Syrian leaders and established Jewish home rule.

And I think the reason for that is a lot of people were martyred.

People were going out to fight for their religious beliefs, getting killed.

And then where does that leave you?

Why are you going to do that?

So the idea of there is something after death.

seems to have come in in the second century.

And Pharisees were major believers in this, whether it was sort of them who came up with the idea or whether they're just kind of propagating it seems to be uncertain.

But certainly resurrection generally seems to be a very popular idea in the first century.

And it's particularly connected with the end of time.

You know, at the end of time, there's going to be a general resurrection and Pharisees are going to be there.

Yes, I think that's exactly when they are most likely to have emerged.

I mean, some people push their origins even further back.