The natural and apparently inevitable conclusion of the whole matter, therefore, is that we have here to deal with a primitive Judaeo-Christian body of people which consisted of priests and Levites belonging to the Boëthusian section of the Sadducean party,(101) fortified—as the document shows—by a considerable Israelitish lay element, besides a real or contemplated admixture of proselytes. They acknowledged, as we have seen, John the Baptist, as a Messiah of the family of Aaron, and they also believed in Jesus as a kind of second (or, perhaps, as pre-eminent) Messiah whose special function it was to be a “Teacher of Righteousness.” Paul they abhorred; and they strove with all their might to combine the full observance of the Mosaic Law, as they understood it, with the principles of the “new covenant,” again as they understood it. On the destruction of the Temple by Titus, finding that it would not serve any good purpose to linger in Judaea, they determined to migrate to Damascus,(102) intending to establish their central organization in that city, and to found communities of the sect in different parts of the neighboring country. It was at this juncture that the manifesto, bearing as it does unmistakable marks of personal touch, was composed by a leader of the movement. No scholar who has made an independent study of the texts published by Dr. Schechter can have failed to consider the question whether these schismatics, with their “unique teacher,”(103) their “new covenant,” their “Supervisor,” whose name and functions might be compared with those of a bishop ἐπίσκοπος, their loyalty to their dead leader, God’s Anointed one (Messiah), who made them know his holy spirit, and their expectation of an Anointed one in the last times, their hostility to the Pharisees, can have been a Jewish Christian sect. The more closely the documents are examined, however, the less tenable this conjecture appears. One feature of the sectarian eschatology which, if established, would afford the most striking coincidence with early Christian belief, namely, that the Messiah who died in the early days of the sect is to “reappear” (Margoliouth), or “rise again” (Schechter), has no support whatever in the text.(104) The “new covenant” in the land of Damascus is plainly the obligation by which the members of the sect bind themselves to the organization, with its peculiar interpretations of the law and its distinctive observances. Neither in the terms of the covenant nor in the law itself is there anything that suggests Christian origin or influence. That “a man should love his neighbor as himself” is not peculiarly or even preëminently a Christian precept. The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs reiterate it; by the most orthodox rabbis it was recognized as the most comprehensive commandment in the law.