Endnote 2 – How Reliable Is Josephus?

E.P. Sanders, Judaism: Practice and Belief, 63 B.C.E.—66 C.E. (Philadelphia: Trinity, 1992), pp. 64, 93–95, 224–227, 378. Note, however, that the Scrolls provide an increasingly doubtful base of information about the Essenes, and Sanders’s argument concerning the immersion pools is filled with difficulties: (a) We do not have most of them; (b) most that we do have come from aristocrats, who were not representative of the masses; and (c) deriving what Pharisees thought about immersion pools before 70 C.E. from later rabbinic literature is more complicated than Sanders allows.