Quote:I'd like a source for Judaism's 'sects.' To my knowledge, most of Israel was united under the same Law.
Josephus Antiquities of the Jews Book XVIII, Chapter 1:
Quote:2. The Jews had for a great while had three sects of philosophy peculiar to themselves; the sect of the Essens, and the sect of the Sadducees, and the third sort of opinions was that of those called Pharisees;
Of course, we now know from the Gabriel Revelation Stone that there was a group at the end of the first century BC which did expect a warrior Messiah to be killed and rise again in 3 days. They were crushed by P. Quinctillius Varus in 3/4 BC and were probably insignificant by Josephus' time at least as far as a power structure in Palestine was concerned. We can't ever know how many other splinter groups there might have been but your assertion that all Jews were Jews is disputed by the Jews themselves.