The things which the sect esteems of vital importance lie wholly in the sphere of the law; polemic zeal for a code which is at every point more rigorous than that of the Pharisees is the salient characteristic of both parts of the book. The moral precepts are the commonplaces of Judaism narrowed to a sectarian horizon.(105) The judgment of God is similarly circumscribed. It is not a judgment of the world or of the Jewish people, but of those who reject and controvert the legal interpretation of the sect, and of those who have fallen away from it. The code of law which is the constituent principle of the sect and the reason for its existence was given it by its founder, the Teacher of Righteousness. This unique teacher was not a prophetic reformer, but “the interpreter of the law who came to Damascus,” “the legislator.” The statutes he decreed are final; the sect “shall receive no others until the teacher of righteousness shall arise in the last times.” Mr. Margoliouth thinks that the “teacher of righteousness” to whom the sect attributed its institutions and laws was Jesus. The statement of this conjecture is its refutation. The rôle of a legislator is the last which the character and teaching of Jesus in the Gospels would suggest even to a sect in search of a founder. That he, whose disregard for the Pharisaic rules of Sabbath observance repeatedly got him into trouble, should, within a generation after his death, have been metamorphosed into the author of the sabbatical code in our texts, which out-pharisees the Pharisees at every point, surpasses ordinary powers of imagination. The Christian Jews of the first century in Palestine, so far as we know anything about them, conformed in the matter of observance to the authority of the scribes and Pharisees, and alleged the express command of Jesus for this practice (Matt. 23 2). Early Christian heresies sometimes exhibit ascetic features reminding us of the Essenes; but none of ultra-legalistic tendency is known.