the procuratorship of Pontius Pilate. In the life of Christ all these parties are active and aggressive in public life, save the Essenes, who lived in the wilderness apart from the whirl of politics and theology. With the destruction of Jerusalem all vanish save the Pharisees, who become practically the nation. Pharisaism after 70 A.D. may be said to be the religion of official Judaism, and it has remained so ever since. First it gathered round the oral law or Midrash, as the interpretation of the