Defining who belonged to the group was one way of coping with some of the pressures on first-century Judaism. The group's resilience could always be reinforced by defining out some of the weaker or more faithless members or by offering a renewed vision of what it was to be a Jew. Setting priorities for members' behavior and devising ways of reinforcing such behavior, were other, related ways of enabling the group to withstand the erosion of its values and norms.

There is, of course, a measure of overlap here with the previous chapter. Defining what it was to be a true Jew obviously entailed specifying what were the correct forms of behavior. What we shall be principally concerned with in this chapter are the distinctive emphases different groups made in so specifying patterns of behavior, and the strategies they devised for upholding them.

The problem here was simply this. God, so Jews believed, had chosen the people of Israel and made a contract with them: if they were faithful to his will as expressed in the Law he would be faithful to them. But in the first place the Law was complex and at times contradictory. In the second, many of its rulings had their roots in a pastoral, nomadic existence; this meant that often considerable ingenuity was required before they could be applied in first-century agrarian and urban Palestine.