From what I understand, a lot of Romans found them straight up peculiar, and their dogmatic views and senseless contrarian stubbornness frequently came into direct conflict with what the Romans expected from anyone under the empire's control.

And a lot of those expectations weren't especially harsh, and the Romans even made allowances for Jews to get certain exceptions. Yet even so, they were frequently at the forefront of fairly senseless and violent rebellions against Rome in spite of the wide berth of allowances granted to them.

And this is more-so in line with mainstream historians, but it's something that still stood out as rather curious.