“
Women are often belittled for trying to resurrect these men and bring them back to life and to love. They are in a world that would be even more alienated and violent if caring women did not do the work of teaching men who have lost touch with themselves how to love again. This labor of love is futile only when the men in question refuse to awaken, refuse growth. At this point it is a gesture of self-love for women to break their commitment and move on.
”
”
bell hooks (All About Love: New Visions)
“
I believed in immaculate conception and spontaneous combustion. I believed in aliens from outer space and vampires, prophecy, and the resurrection of the dead. I had deja vu many times each day. I was thirteen.
”
”
Kate Braverman (Small Craft Warnings: Stories (Western Literature and Fiction Series))
“
Resurrection. In the crude form in which it is preached to console the weak, it is alien to me. I have always understood Christ's words about the living and the dead in a different sense. Where could you find room for all these hordes of people accumulated over thousands of years? The universe isn't big enough for them; God, the good, and meaningful purpose would be crowded out. They'd be crushed by these throngs greedy merely for the animal life.
But all the time, life, one, immense, identical throughout its innumerable combinations and transformations, fills the universe and is continually reborn. You are anxious about whether you will rise from the dead or not, but you rose from the dead when you were born and you didn't notice it.
”
”
Boris Pasternak (Doctor Zhivago)
“
No woman was ever truly safe. It didn’t matter if you were as tough as Sigourney Weaver in Alien Resurrection or Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2 because wherever you went there were men.
”
”
Kate Atkinson (Case Histories (Jackson Brodie, #1))
“
That is the best picture of what the incarnation means when we look at in its true context. For that is what happened in Jesus Christ from his birth to his resurrection. The Son of God entered into our broken, Fallen, alienated human existence. He took upon himself our fallen flesh. He stood in Adam's shoes, in Israel's shoes, in our shoes, and he steadfastly refused to be Adam, He refused to be Israel. He refused to be what we are.
”
”
C. Baxter Kruger (The Great Dance: The Christian Vision Revisited)
“
The resurrection at our awakening-after that beneficent attack of mental alienation which is sleep-must after all be similar to what occurs when we recall a name, a line, a refrain that we had forgotten. And perhaps the resurrection of the soul after death is to be conceived as a phenomenon of memory.
”
”
Marcel Proust (The Guermantes Way)
“
It was like some mad scientist threw a bunch of DNA into a blender and this is what came out. What the heck could it be? Was it some kind of alien? A scientific experiment gone horribly wrong? Did we have a Dr. Frankenstein living in Billings? Seriously, the creature looked like a resurrected Wookiee made from spare parts.
”
”
Kendra C. Highley (Matt Archer: Monster Hunter (Matt Archer #1))
“
Magic carpet rides, rune magic, Ali Baba and visions of the Holy Mother, astral travel and the future in the dregs of a glass of red wine. Buddha. Frodo's journey into Mordor. The transubstantiation of the sacrament. Dorothy and Toto. The Easter Bunny. Space aliens. The Thing in the closet. The Resur-rection and the Life at the turn of a card ... I've believed them all at one time or another. Or pretended to. Or pretended not to.
And now? What do I believe right now?
'I believe that being happy is the only important thing,' I told him at last.
Happiness. Simple as a glass of chocolate or tortuous as the hear. Bitter. Sweet. Alive.
”
”
Joanne Harris (Chocolat (Chocolat, #1))
“
As the Great Creatrix, the feminine is no vessel and passage for an alien, masculine Other that condescends towards her, enters into her, and favors her with the seed of living. Life originates in her and issues from her, and the light that appears projected on the night sky, which she is herself, is rooted in her depths. For she is not only the protomantis, the first and great Prophetess, but also she who gives birth to the Spirit-Light, which, like consciousness and the illumination that arises in transformation, is rooted in her creative efficacy. She is the creative Earth, which not only brings forth and swallows life, but as that which transforms also lets the dead thing be resurrected and leads the lower to the higher. All developments and transformations that lead from the simple and insignificant through all gradations of life to the complicated and intricately differentiated fall under her sovereignty. This matriarchal world is geocentric; the stars and signs of the zodiac are the heavenly girdle of the Earth Goddess and are arranged around her as the true center around which everything revolves.
”
”
Erich Neumann (The Fear of the Feminine and Other Essays on Feminine Psychology)
“
There can never be a clock at the center of the Universe to which everyone can set their watches. Your entire life can be the blink of an eye to an alien who leaves Earth traveling close to the speed of light, then returns an hour later to find that you have been dead for centuries.
”
”
Clifford A. Pickover (The Physics Book: From the Big Bang to Quantum Resurrection, 250 Milestones in the History of Physics (Union Square & Co. Milestones))
“
To choose the wrong strategy is a serious matter. All the movements that only play on liberation, emancipation, on the resurrection of a subject of history, of the group, of the word based on “consciousness raising,” indeed a “raising of the unconscious” of subjects and of the masses, do not see that they are going in the direction of the system, whose imperative today is precisely the overproduction and regeneration of meaning and of speech.
”
”
Jean Baudrillard (Simulacra and Simulation)
“
Virgin Birth. Abiogenesis. Resurrection from the dead. Random mutations producing the raw material for new organs. Intelligent creation ex nihilo. Eternal matter. Eternal mind. Heaven. Multiverses. Speciation by unguided, natural selection. Hell. Natural DNA information generation. Adam. Panspermia. Angels. No immaterial soul. Miracles. Space aliens. God. No God.”[11] That’s how blogger Roddy Bullock began a post called, “Everyone Believes Something Unbelievable.
”
”
Frank Turek (Stealing from God: Why Atheists Need God to Make Their Case)
“
The mythology of Doctor Who has built into it the continuation, evolution, and longevity of the character’s mythical qualities through his regenerative process. I have to agree with Lou Anders, when he states: “Doctor Who is the truest expression of Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces ever conceived. The idea of an alien, come down to earth, repeatedly dying and resurrecting for the salvation of others is as close to the perpetual reenactment of the eternal Hero’s Journey as you can hope to find.”(6)
”
”
Anthony S. Burdge
“
Because I Cannot Sleep
Because I cannot sleep
I make music at night.
I am troubled by the one
whose face has the color of spring flowers.
I have neither sleep nor patience,
neither a good reputation nor disgrace.
A thousand robes of wisdom are gone.
All my good manners have moved a thousand miles away.
The heart and the mind are left angry with each other.
The stars and the moon are envious of each other.
Because of this alienation the physical universe
is getting tighter and tighter.
The moon says, 'How long will I remain
suspended without a sun?'
Without Love's jewel inside of me,
let the bazaar of my existence be destroyed stone by stone.
O Love, You who have been called by a thousand names,
You who know how to pour the wine
into the chalice of the body,
You who give culture to a thousand cultures,
You who are faceless but have a thousand faces,
O Love, You who shape the faces
of Turks, Europeans, and Zanzibaris,
give me a glass from Your bottle,
or a handful of being from Your Branch.
Remove the cork once more.
Then we'll see a thousand chiefs prostrate themselves,
and a circle of ecstatic troubadours will play.
Then the addict will be freed of craving.
and will be resurrected,
and stand in awe till Judgement Day
”
”
Jalal ad-Din Muhammad ar-Rumi
“
[1] The first premise is that you should know that in the world as a whole and in its parts, both upper and earthly, there is nothing which forms an exception to the facts that God is the cause of its being and origination and that God has knowledge of it, controls it, and wills its existence; it is all subject to His control, determination, knowledge, and will. This is a general and superficial account, although in these assertions we intend to describe it truly, not as the theologians understand it; and it is possible to produce proofs and demonstrations of that. Thus, if it were not that this world is composed of elements which give rise to good and evil things in it and produce both righteousness and wickedness in its inhabitants , there would have been no completion of an order for the world. For if the world had contained nothing but pure righteousness, it would not have been this world, but another one, and it would necessarily have had a composition different from the present composition; and likewise if it had contained nothing but sheer wickedness, it would not have been this world but another one. But whatever is composed in the present fashion and order contains both righteousness and wickedness.
[2] The second premise is that according to the ancients Rewards is the occurrence of pleasure in the soul corresponding to the extent of its perfection, while Punishment is the occurrence of pain in the soul corresponding to the extent of its deficiency. So the soul's abiding in deficiency is it's 'alienation from God the exalted', and this is the 'curse' 'the penalty', [God's] 'wrath' and 'anger', and pain comes to it from that deficiency; while its perfection is what is meant by [God's] 'satisfaction', with it, its 'closeness' and 'nearness' and 'attachment'. This, then, and nothing else is the meaning of 'Reward' and 'Punishment' according to them.
[3] The third premise is that the resurrection is just the return of human souls to their own world: this is why God the Exalted has said, 'O tranquil soul, return to your Lord, satisfied and satisfactory.'
These are summary statements that need to be supported by their proper demonstrations.
”
”
Avicenna (ibn sina's essay on the secret of destiny)
“
his cry on the cross was our cry of desperate alienation from God taken up into his and transformed through the resurrection. As we allow ourselves to experience our own pain, we can know that what we feel is Christ suffering in us and redeeming us. Rather than condemning ourselves for our weakness and making self-conscious efforts to try harder, we can allow the Crucified to love us in our brokenness. There is no way of healing from the wounds each of us carries except through the love of Jesus that forgives seventy times seven and keeps no score of our wrongdoing.
”
”
Brennan Manning (The Signature of Jesus)
“
The Gnostics believed that we can experience resurrection before death. In other words, Gnostics are granted such special knowledge that they can regenerate their bodies and resurrect themselves before dying. Moreover, they have special abilities to control their DNA. The Sufi Dervishes know and teach these practices. Additionally, in Dzogchen (a teaching from the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism) they speak of the "Rainbow Body". The exceptional practitioners of Dzogchen, when they are about to die, concentrate on their Body of Pure Light. His physical body releases itself into a body of non-material light (a Sambhogakaya) with the capacity to exist and to remain where and when indicated by one's compassion. In Gnosticism, this is called the radiant body, resurrection body, or immortal body (the soma athanaton). This body has also been called 'The Philosopher's Stone.
”
”
Laurence Galian (Alien Parasites: 40 Gnostic Truths to Defeat the Archon Invasion!)
“
The answer was Stellar Wind. The NSA would eavesdrop freely against Americans and aliens in the United States without probable cause or search warrants. It would mine and assay the electronic records of millions of telephone conversations—both callers and receivers—and the subject lines of e-mails, including names and Internet addresses. Then it would send the refined intelligence to the Bureau for action. Stellar Wind resurrected Cold War tactics with twenty-first-century technology. It let the FBI work with the NSA outside of the limits of the law. As Cheney knew from his days at the White House in the wake of Watergate, the NSA and the FBI had worked that way up until 1972, when the Supreme Court unanimously outlawed warrantless wiretaps. Stellar Wind blew past the Supreme Court on the authority of a dubious opinion sent to the White House the week that the Patriot Act became law. It came from John Yoo, a thirty-four-year-old lawyer in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel who had clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas. Yoo wrote that the Constitution’s protections against warrantless searches and seizures did not apply to military operations in the United States. The NSA was a military agency; Congress had authorized Bush to use military force; therefore he had the power to use the NSA against anyone anywhere in America. The president was “free from the constraints of the Fourth Amendment,” Yoo wrote. So the FBI would be free as well.
”
”
Tim Weiner (Enemies: A History of the FBI)
“
We observe that the life of Jesus differs substantially from typical alien accounts. Aliens usually arrive in a spaceship; Jesus was born on earth. Aliens usually appear for a very short time; Jesus was on earth for over thirty years. The usual report of an encounter with aliens describes them as abusive; Jesus was loving and compassionate.
The supposition that life exists in the universe outside Earth is questionable. Contrary to the popular media's portrayal of aliens in movies like ET, Cocoon, and Contact, the scientific evidence from astrophysics within the past thirty-five years makes it seem increasingly improbable that life exists anywhere else in the cosmos.
”
”
Gary R. Habermas (The Case For The Resurrection Of Jesus)
“
Emily’s own conservatory was like fairyland at all seasons, especially in comparison with the dreary white winter cold outside. It opened from the dining-room, a tiny glass room, with white shelves running around it on which were grouped the loveliest ferns, rich purple heliotrope, the yellow jasmine, and one giant Daphne odora with its orange-bloom scent astray from the Riviera, and two majestic cape jasmines, exotics kin to her alien soul. She tolerated none of the usual variety of mongrel houseplants. A rare scarlet lily, a resurrection calla, perhaps—and here it was always summer with the oxalis dripping from hanging baskets like humble incense upon the heads of the household and its frequenters.
”
”
Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi (Emily Dickinson Face to Face (McNally Editions))
“
Ephesians 4:18 talks about “having the understanding darkened.” If you don’t renew your mind and use it to study and meditate God’s Word, it’ll automatically gravitate toward what you can see, taste, hear, smell, and feel. This darkens your understanding. Understanding is the application of knowledge. “Knowledge” puts food into your mouth and chews. “Understanding” actually swallows and digests it so that the beneficial nutrients can be released into your body. The knowledge of God is critical, but must be understood to be useful. Without understanding, you can’t release the life that’s in it. When a Christian walks like an unbeliever, they get the same results—death. Believers who don’t understand and apply the knowledge of God in their lives gravitate toward carnal mindedness. Without spiritual knowledge and understanding, your mind can’t be renewed, and the life of God in your spirit can’t be released. That’s why understanding this revelation of spirit, soul, and body is the first step toward walking in life and peace! When a believer’s understanding is darkened, they are “alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart” (Eph. 4:18). In other words, the life of God is still there, but they are alienated from it due to ignorance, which refers to the mind. This is where most Christians live their lives—separated from the life of God within, due to their own ignorance of spiritual truth. In His Word, God declares that by His stripes, you were healed (1 Pet. 2:24). You look at yourself and ask, “Is that cancerous tumor gone?” Still feeling pain, emotionally drained, and fearful, you continue, “God says I’m healed, but I’m not. It’s still there, so I must not be healed.” By adopting that attitude, you’ve allowed your five senses to dominate you more than God’s Word. The same power that raised Jesus from the dead is in you, but you didn’t believe it (Eph. 1:18-20). You let your mind be controlled by what it saw in the physical realm more than the spiritual realm. Therefore, even though you have the resurrection life of God in your spirit, it won’t manifest in the physical realm because you’re carnally minded, which equals death.
”
”
Andrew Wommack (Spirit, Soul and Body)
“
We have resolved to know nothing but Christ and Him crucified. All revelation and experience flow out of this fountain. O the depths and the riches! God has forever poured Himself out in a concrete act of assuming our human nature and redeeming mankind completely from depravity, decay and alienation. This was not a limited act for a select few. For God was in Christ reconciling the cosmos to Himself (2 Cor. 5:19). There is no limited atonement any more than there is a limited incarnation. Fully man for all of humanity. Christ plunged headlong into the human condition. Sinless though He was, He assumed fallen flesh like ours at its most corrupted level. He baptized that same humanity in His death and brought it back to life in the will of the Father and the power of Holy Spirit. Such a mystical connection we have! Christ wove mankind into the Trinitarian life – there is forever a resurrected human being sitting in the middle of the Godhead. And there we sit in Him, fully united to God in heavenly places. In assuming the human form, He assumed and included all of humanity into Himself. As early Church father Gregory Nazianzen says, “the unassumed is the unredeemed.” And we know from the apostle Paul that “as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive” (1 Cor. 15:22).
”
”
John Crowder (Cosmos Reborn)
“
Human life was reduced to slavery and the soul-ruled earthly realm through Adam’s fall but is now awakened to lordship in the heavenly realm of spiritual realities through the knowledge of our co-resurrection with Christ. ([See Col 3:1-11.] We theologically created the idea of man being “sinful by nature” as if humans are flawed by design. In fact it is a distorted mind-set that we inherited from Adam that Jesus had to free us from. “Your indifferent mind-set alienated you from God into a lifestyle of annoyances, hardships, and labors, sponsored by the law of sin and death that lodged in your bodies hosting a foreign influence, foreign to your design; just like a virus that would attach itself to a person.” Col 1:21 There is nothing wrong with our design or salvation, we were thinking wrong. [See Isa 55:8-11, Eph 4:17, 18 and also Eph 2:1-11.])
”
”
François Du Toit (The Mirror Bible)
“
Leonid Andreev, whom I love very much, has this parable about Lazarus, who looked into the abyss. And now he's alien, he'll never be the same as other people, even though Christ resurrected him.
”
”
Svetlana Alexievich (Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster)
“
Rien sat transfixed by the music, old and alien and like nothing she'd heard before. She felt her symbiont accepting the new information, integrating it. Making it part of her flesh and bone. It immersed and surrounded her, but even as she heard it performed, she sensed it as gestalt, knew the notes and chords. She could have played it, if her hands were sufficiently trained to the task. She could have seeing it, if her voice was adequate. She could have rearranged it, resurrected it, reinvented it, if she had been a composer.
”
”
Elizabeth Bear (Dust (Jacob's Ladder, #1))
“
what good is a peace movement that works for peace for the same idolatrous reasons we build bombs—namely, the anxious self-interested protection of our world as it is? Christians are free to work for peace in a nonviolent, hopeful way because we already know something about the end. We do not argue that the bomb is the worst thing humanity can do to itself. We have already done the worst thing we could do when we hung God’s Son on a cross. We do not argue that we must do something about the bomb or else we shall obliterate our civilization, because God has already obliterated our civilization in the life, teaching, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
”
”
William H. Willimon (Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony)
“
Both men had grown up in families where the grandparents had been active and committed church people before the revolution. With official sanction, the communist youth organizations and the educational system worked to alienate children from their believing parents and grandparents.
”
”
Nik Ripken (The Insanity of God: A True Story of Faith Resurrected)
“
To speak of Jesus as the Messiah or Son of Man of the End-time would have made no sense at all; and, as we have already seen (ch.10), the resurrection of the body was a wholly alien idea.
”
”
Alan Robson (The Resurrection of Jesus: The Origins of the Tradition and its Meaning for Today)
“
Like the idea that there were aliens among us. That there always have been, I mean. I’d read about Elvis being an alien and Richard Nixon being an alien and Jimi Hendrix and Donald Fucking Trump being aliens.
”
”
Sean Platt (Resurrection (Alien Invasion #7))
“
Offspring of some wretched tribe, he prowls the boulevards of the West. Cherishing one country after the next, he no longer hopes for any; stuck in a timeless twilight citizen of the world--and of no world--he is ineffectual, nameless, powerless... Peoples without a destiny cannot give one to their sons who, thirsting for other horizons, attach themselves to a fate and ultimately exhaust it to finish their days as ghosts of their admirations and their exhaustions. Having nothing to love at home, they locate their love elsewhere, in other lands, where their fervor astonishes the natives. Overworked, the feelings erode and disintegrate, admiration first of all... And the Alien who dispersed himself on so many highways of the world, exclaims: "I have set up countless idols for myself, have raised too many altars everywhere, and I have knelt before a host of gods. Now, weary of worship, I have squandered my share of delirium. One has resources only for the absolutes of one's breed; a soul--like a country--flourishes only within its frontiers. I am paying for having crossed them, for having made the Indefinite into a fatherland, and foreign divinities into a cult, for having prostrated myself before ages which excluded my ancestors. Where I come from I can no longer say: in the temples I am without belief; in the cities, without ardor; among my kind, without curiosity; on the earth, without certitudes. Give me a specific desire and I could shake the world to its foundations. Release me from this shame of actions which makes me perform, every morning, the farce of resurrection and, every night, that of entombment; in the interval, nothing but this torment in the shroud of ennui... I dream of wanting--and all I want seems to me worthless. Like a vandal corroded by melancholy, I proceed without a goal, self without a self, toward some unknown corner... in order to discover an abandoned god, a god who is his own atheist, and to fall asleep in the shadow of his last doubts and his last miracles.
”
”
Emil M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay)
“
In this hysterical phase, it was, so to speak, the femininity of man which projected itself on to woman and shaped her as an ideal figure in his image. In Romantic love, the aim was not now to conquer the woman, to seduce her, but to create her from the inside, to invent her, in some cases as achieved Utopian vision, as idealized woman , in others as femme fatale, as star - another hysterical, supernatural metaphor. The Romantic Eros can be credited with having invented this ideal of harmony, of loving fusion, this ideal of an almost incestuous form of twin beings — the woman as projective resurrection of the same, who assumes her supernatural form only as ideal of the same, an artefact doomed henceforth to l'amour or, in other words, to a pathos of the ideal resemblance of beings and sexes - a pathetic confusion which substitutes for the dual otherness of seduction. The whole mechanics of the erotic changes meaning, for the erotic attraction which previously arose out of otherness, out of the strangeness of the Other, now finds its stimulus in sameness - in similarity and resemblance. Auto-eroticism, incest? No . Rather a hypostasis of the Same. Of the same eyeing up the other, investing itself in the other, alienating itself in the other - but the other is only ever the ephemeral form of a difference which brings me closer to me. This indeed is why, with Romantic love and all its current spin-offs, sexuality becomes connected with death: it is because it becomes connected with incest and its destiny - even in banalized form (for we are no longer speaking of mythic, tragic incest here; with modern eroticism we are dealing with a secondary incestuous form - of the protection of the same in the image of the other - which amounts to a confusion and corruption of all images).
We have here then, in the end, the invention of a femininity which renders woman superfluous. The invention of a difference which is merely a roundabout copulation with its double. And which, at bottom, renders any encounter with otherness impossible (it would be interesting to know whether there was not any hysterical quid pro quo from the feminine in the construction of a virile, phallic mythology; feminism being one such example of the hystericization of the masculine in woman, of the hysterical projection of her masculinity in the exact image of the hysterical projection by man of his femininity into a mythical image of woman).
”
”
Jean Baudrillard (Screened Out)
“
Yes, as we have already said, Christianity was on the one hand the end of all natural joy. It revealed its impossibility, its futility, its sadness—because by revealing the perfect man it revealed the abyss of man’s alienation from God and the inexhaustible sadness of this alienation. The cross of Christ signified an end of all “natural” rejoicing; it made it, indeed, impossible. From this point of view the sad “seriousness” of modern man is certainly of Christian origin, even if this has been forgotten by that man himself. Since the Gospel was preached in this world, all attempts to go back to a pure “pagan joy,” all “renaissances,” all “healthy optimisms” were bound to fail. “There is but one sadness,” said Leon Bloy, “that of not being a saint.” And it is this sadness that permeates mysteriously the whole life of the world, its frantic and pathetic hunger and thirst for perfection, which kills all joy. Christianity made it impossible simply to rejoice in the natural cycles—in harvests and new moons. Because it relegated the perfection of joy to the inaccessible future—as the goal and end of all work—it made all human life an “effort,” a “work.” Yet, on the other hand Christianity was the revelation and the gift of joy, and thus, the gift of genuine feast. Every Saturday night at the resurrection vigil we sing, “for, through the Cross, joy came into the whole world.” This joy is pure joy because it does not depend on anything in this world, and is not the reward of anything in us. It is totally and absolutely a gift, the “charis,” the grace. And being pure gift, this joy has a transforming power, the only really transforming power in this world. It is the “seal” of the Holy Spirit on the life of the Church—on its faith, hope and love.
”
”
Alexander Schmemann (For the Life of the World)
“
All of this to say, what if. What if the stories are true and the prophecy that was written concerning both the first advent and second coming are true also? What if the Shroud of Turin is the evidence of the resurrection?
”
”
L.A. Marzulli (The Alien Interviews: Conversations with people who experienced UFO Contacts)
“
Adepts and saints have such a deep and ecstatic connection to the Divine that they are not aware of any physical suffering while being martyred. There are Gnostics who believe in the Resurrection. Rudolf Steiner, the famous Christian Gnostic, taught that the blood of the Christos had to enter the Earth. As the Christos is the consort of Sophia and Sophia is the Earth, the mixture of the blood of the Christos with the body of Sophia, is the ritual called in the Greek Hierogamia (Sacred Marriage). Plainly speaking, the crucifixion then becomes a symbolic sexual relationship between the Christos and Sophia.
”
”
Laurence Galian (Alien Parasites: 40 Gnostic Truths to Defeat the Archon Invasion!)
“
In Palestine, the one sanctuary of the worship of Jahve, the Temple, retained its high prestige. The sacerdotal hierarchy, swayed by the aristocratic Sadducean party, strictly maintained the ritual observances. But the luxury, the depravity, the religious indifference of these sacerdotal leaders, their subserviency to the Roman authorities, their contempt for the Messianic hope and the doctrine of the resurrection, had alienated from them the affection of the people, and, in the eyes of some, even cast discredit on the Temple itself. Some indeed were so much disgusted that they fled from the official sanctuary and its servants, and, afar from the world, devoted themselves to the service of God and a strict observance of the Law. The Essenes represented this movement: grouped in small communities they lived on the borders of the Dead Sea, near Engaddi. The Sadducean priests persecuted Jesus Christ and His disciples. As for the Essenes, they lived alongside of the new Faith, and if they did embrace it, it was but slowly. The Pharisees, so often condemned in the Gospels for their hypocrisy, their false zeal, and their peculiar practices, did not form a special sect; the name was applied generally to all those who were ultra-scrupulous in following the Law, and not the Law only, but the thousand observances with which they had amplified it, attributing as much importance to them as to the fundamental precepts of morality. Still, they were faithful defenders of the Messianic hope and of belief in the resurrection. Beneath their proud and overstrained attachment to details of observance, they had a solid foundation of faith and piety. Amongst them the Gospel made many excellent converts.
”
”
Louis Duchesne (Early History of the Christian Church: From its Foundation to the End of the Fifth Century (Volume I))