Levite
Higher and Higher
I am fairly confident I know how many Karaites there are (and how many some Karaites claim there are) and what Karaism's origins are. I am also aware of various different Karaite pseudohistorical accounts of their origins that substitute the actual, sordid details with more high-minded sounding legends of inheriting some mantle of the Tzedokim (Sadducees) and the glories of Torah "literalism;" when in fact, they have their own interpretive techniques and structures of practice which are, in structure, only modestly different than Rabbinic techniques and halachic structures.
I am also fairly aware of where and when my understandings of text and tradition may be Orthodox, and when it simply happens that those understandings share common ground with Orthodoxy because they are normative. You seem to be conflating normativity and Orthodoxy, which is both false and simplistic. The real question, it seems to me, is exactly what you really know about Judaism. Because it doesn't seem like you know much.
In any case, none of that changes the fact that, whatever Jesus' ultimate thoughts about the Oral Torah may have been-- which we are unlikely to discover, and surely cannot conjecture with certainty based on the canon of Christian scriptures, or such "non-canonical gospels" as have yet been found-- he very likely did start off as a Pharisaic student. If he were truly an Essene, he would've been living in one of their ascetic monastic colonies, and been far more interested in strict enforcement of ritual purity and impurity laws than he appears to have been. He was certainly not a Sadducee, since they were largely wealthy and concerned with maintaining control of the corrupted elements of the Temple priesthood. Karaism has nothing to do with Jesus, since it was founded seven hundred-odd years after Jesus died. And Ebionitism also has nothing to do with the historical Jesus, since they were Judaizing Christians of the Second and Third centuries CE.
