In Palestine, in the first century, there were 4 major groups that were religious groups.

Pharisees

We know about them. That's the political group that is in the synagogues, out among the people. They love the Word of God, they believe in resurrection, but they can be fairly legalistic, and their opponent, not unlike the Republicans and Democrats in America, you had the Pharisees and the Sadducees.

Sadducees

The Sadducees did not believe in resurrection. They were scribes and scholars. They were centering their focus on the temple and the seat of power, and oftentimes their representative was the high priest or his family. 

Essenes

They were kind of a unique group of people that believed that you want to reject the physical and reject all of these things, and so they were a little more of the people who would go off in a colony by themselves and try to live out that belief in the Torah and the Word and live for God. We find them most famously throughout history as the Qumran community. And if you've ever heard of the finding in which a shepherd boy broke into a cave and found some pots full of documents, they discovered what was called the Dead Sea Scrolls, probably preserved by this Essene group. They had hibernated themselves away from all the political unpopularity. They were kind of withdrawing. "We're not going to associate with all those sinners. We're going to try to stay true to God in our own way." And the opposite of them was... 

The Zealots

It was in 167 BC that a guy named Mattathias, who had 5 sons, he was a priest in a little town not far from Jerusalem, and he was very devout in his passion. We would call him today a fundamentalist. He was so committed to the law and the letter of the law that he taught his sons that it was worth dying for. 

     So when a Seleucid ruler rises to power, his name is Antiochus IV Epiphanes, he rises to power, and in that rise to power, he wants to go to Jerusalem and set up a statue of the Greek gods, and he wants to sacrifice in the second temple. And guess what he wants to sacrifice? A pig. It was the lowest attack possible. It was the greatest abomination they could think of, that instead of serving in the second temple that they were worshiping Yahweh, the God who was the covenant God of Israel, that a pagan ruler would come in and desecrate their temple and sacrifice an unclean animal - a pig, disease-ridden, infested, and sloppy pig, sacrificed to desecrate the holy place. 

     Mattathias then begins a revolt, it's called the Maccabean Revolt. It will actually impact that region for 100 years. But he will begin that revolt, they will overthrow the Seleucids for a while, and then they will kind of give into the Hasmonean Dynasty. When Mattathias is dying on his deathbed, recorded in the Apocrypha, which is that group of books we don't ascribe as scripture, but in the middle of a Catholic Bible, if you ever pick those up, there are several of those books. There's 1 and 2 Maccabees, describing what happened. In 1 Maccabees 2:50, it says that he said to his sons on his deathbed, "Be zealous for the law and for the people of the covenant." 

     In other words, he told his sons to have zeal for their faith and to die for it, if necessary, to protect the people of God, and they took it to an extreme. The Zealots became assassins who would kill anybody that had to do with the Romans or their enemies, or sometimes even in a marketplace would come up and kill somebody related to the Herodian Dynasty.

Just a last thought regarding the zealots, specifically Simon the Zealot a disciple of Jesus: think about it, who else is one of the 12 that is going to be hated by a Zealot? Matthew, the tax collector. So Jesus calls Matthew, the tax collector to follow Him. A guy who sold out to the Roman Empire, who's taking in taxes, who the Jews hate, and a guy who hates those kind of people and would kill them in the marketplace if they got a chance. 

     And yet, have you ever noticed Jesus is incredibly able to bring opposites together? He can bring men and women together. Men and women have often battled and disagreed throughout history, ever since Adam and Eve. Who's going to be the boss? Who's going to rule? He can bring them together. He can bring Jews, the chosen people, and Gentiles together. And perhaps more exciting than anything else, He can bring fallen, sinful people like you and me together with a holy, perfect God. Jesus brings people together, even when they have great differences.