From the beginning, the Jewish people were both a political (nation-forming) and a religious (God-fearing) entity. The nation was required, from the covenant between God and Abraham onward, to be a holy — that is, separated — people, not intermarrying or being otherwise corrupted by the pagan peoples around them, even those who ruled over them. As the Jewish wars and the destruction of the Temple later in the first century would demonstrate, the greatest crisis they ever faced was the Roman empire. It was in the height of this national crisis that Christ came. The Romans destroyed the Temple in A.D. 70, as part of their suppression of Jewish uprisings against Rome, and the Temple has never been restored. In Jesus' time the Temple in Jerusalem was the only lawful place where sacrifices were made for the atonement of the sins of the Jewish people, and where prescribed worship took place. And Jewish worship, without a Temple, has been incomplete ever since.

Josephus, a first-century historian from a priestly family of Jewish people, provides the best-preserved view of Jewish life, apart from the New Testament, in Jesus' time. He presents it as an era of much political upheaval, as some Jewish parties tried to mobilize revolts against Rome. At least five political groups existed in the Judaism of Jesus' life-time: the Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, Zealots, and Samaritans.

Pharisees

The Pharisees were laymen who tried to preserve the Jewish faith through pious and legalistic practices, and although as a group they were strongly censured in Jesus' sermons, some of them were friends and supporters of Jesus and his disciples.

Sadducees

The Sadducees, the elite of the Jewish priesthood, tended toward less exact expressions of the faith than the Pharisees, and toward accommodating the political rulers of their time. They are described as denying the resurrection of the body, which is not specifically taught (only suggested) in the Old Testament, but which many Jewish people believed in at that time. Most of the historical information about the Sadducees, apart from the references in the New Testament, are from their critics, so historians describe them as hard to pin down.

Essenes

Though Essenes are not mentioned in the New Testament, some believe that John the Baptist may have been an Essene before beginning his prophetic ministry. They are known from archaeological research (primarily from the Dead Sea Scrolls found at Qumran between 1947 and 1956) as a strict, almost monastic, sect of Jewish people who separated themselves from the Roman Empire, choosing to live in seclusion in the Sinai desert.

Zealots

Zealots were politicized Jewish people who advocated insurrection against Roman power. They were considered dangerous by the mainstream Jewish people of their time because they are thought to have tried to force the whole nation to join their rebellion, creating warlike conditions coming both from within and outside their ethnic and religious community.

Samaritans

Samaria, 35 miles north of Jerusalem and between Judea and Galilee (the region around Nazareth and bordering the Lake or Sea of Galilee), was home to another sect — Samaritans — claiming Jewish roots and faith, but not accepted by the Jerusalem establishment of that time, or any other Jewish establishment, since the nation had been taken captive by the Babylonians.