Abstract

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Monday, November 30, 1998

The Dead Sea Scrolls

Shortly after the second World War ancient scrolls were found in caves at Qumran near the Dead Sea. Even in the dry climate of the Judaean wilderness the scrolls had mainly crumbled to powder. But, amazingly, several were found essentially complete, and there were thousands of fragments, mainly small, some of which could be pieced together. Every book of the Jewish scriptures except for Esther and Nehemiah have been found at the caves of Qumran, often in multiple copies. Is it merely coincidence that the three most popular books in the Qumran collection (Psalms, Deuteronomy and Isaiah) were also the three books of the Jewish scriptures most often cited in the New Testament?

Parts of eleven copies of the Book of Enoch, known before 1947 as five linked booklets by different authors, were found at Qumran, but no fragments of the Parables or Similitudes (Book II, En 37-71). The likely explanation is that this part of Enoch was a later work. Its importance is that it features a “Son of Man” and seemed to be confirmation of a “Son of Man” figure in Jewish mythology. Now, it looks likely to be a first century Christian substitute for the book that appears in its stead among the scrolls, the Book of Giants, which previously was known in a revised form as part of the Manichaean bible. Even more popular was the Book of Jubilees, an account of the exodus up to the meeting of Moses with God at Sinai, present in about 15 copies.

Complete scrolls—the Community Rule, known in the USA as the Manual of Discipline, the Damascus Document, the Rule of the Congregation, the Habakkuk Commentary, the War Scroll, the Temple Scroll—have been translated but scholars’ comparative work has been hindered by restrictions on access to the fragments. Only John Marco Allegro had published his full quota by 1968. Allegro was the only one of the international team who was an independent scholar, if indeed the others can be called scholars, for scholarship is more than erudition, being also a moral responsibility for truth. The other members were Christians, whether Catholic or Protestant. Allegro thought they were deliberately withholding publication until public interest waned. The scandal of such restrictions on scholarship has forced more openness and now two US scholars, Eisenman and Wise, have published translations of 50 Qumran fragmentary texts not previously open to public scrutiny. With the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls we have, according to Eisenman and Wise, “nothing less than a picture of the movement from which Christianity sprang in Palestine”.

Allegro published a text in 1956 which showed that the Essenes had a “Teacher of Righteousness” who was crucified, c 88 BC, one of eight hundred revolutionary conspirators crucified by Alexander Jannaeus, a Jewish king of the Maccabean family, after he had suppressed an attempted revolt, and also showed that the Teacher of Righteousness had the name “Jesus”. The international team accused Allegro of “recklessness” in publishing such a text. They ostracized him and they denied him access to other scrolls. Christianity was never interested in contrary opinion, let alone truth.

Ruins near the caves of the scrolls, and in just the place described by Pliny as the home of the Essenes, apparently were the headquarters of the community that had hidden the scrolls. Excavations seemed to confirm that the ruins had housed a monastic religious order similar to that of the Essenes described by Pliny, Philo and Josephus. The Damascus Document however refers to marriage and children—showing that Essenes in general were not celibate monks—and to other affiliated communities in Palestine, showing that the Qumran Community was not the only Essene settlement.

US professor, Norman Golb, thinks the scrolls had nothing to do with any sectarian community, yet to dismiss them as typically Jewish is nonsense, unless Judaism then was more Essene than Pharisaic. Many of them indeed are merely versions of the Jewish scriptures, and others are paraphrases of them, but the sectarian documents were unimagined and match nothing that anyone previously expected of Jewish literature of the time. Even if the nearby site of Khirbit Qumran had nothing to do with the “sectarian documents”, they prove that aspects of the Jewish religion of the time were stranger than imagined, and that these Jews, sectarian or mainstream, were extremely anti-gentile.

The Damascus Document, copies of which had amazingly already been found in 1897 in a Cairo synagogue, was plainly important to the sect because portions of as many as nine copies were found in the caves. In part it tells the story of a group of Jews who with their “Teacher of Righteousness” went to a place in the wilderness—which they seemed to call Damascus—to uphold the Law. They became barjonim—outsiders. Lawrence Schiffman, a respected Jewish scholar writes:

We know that the sectarians, especially in the Zadokite Fragments, often spoke in code words. We find all kinds of pseudonyms for actual personages, yet almost never a personal name that would allow a definite identification. The Jewish sects of the day are never mentioned by name even though we see numerous references to them designated with code words in the sectarian texts. Why then should we fall into the trap of taking place names literally? Rather it is more likely that “Damascus” is a code word for Qumran.

The sectarians had entered into a New Covenant with God. “Damascus” seems to be Qumran, the name of Qumran at that time being otherwise unknown to us. With this knowledge Paul’s trip to Damascus in the New Testament takes on a new meaning and several problems can be explained. The New Covenanters called it Damascus after a staging post of the Jews “returning” from “exile” in Harran in Mesopotamia.

Cyrus the Persian allowed the Jews to “return” to Palestine. The “returners” painted the destruction of the First Temple in 586 BC, when Jews were deported to Babylon, as a divine punishment for laxity in observing the proper worship of Yehouah. The people settling in Palestine resolved to follow the Law to the letter. Since the Jewish religion was based on the Persian worship of Ahuramazda and the Babylonian worship of Marduk, many Jews never had anything to do with Yehud and saw Babylonia as their main home even after Yehud had a high Jewish population.

The Damascus Document tells us of those who had returned from exile in “the land of Damascus” having gone “out of the land of Judah” and with whom…

God established his Covenant with Israel forever, revealing to them the hidden things in which all Israel had strayed,

where “all Israel” means the whole nation whereas “Israel” means the select few who are pure enough and observant enough—the sectarians themselves. Here the reference to the “Land of Damascus” cannot be to Qumran because the Damascus Document clearly says it was “out of the land of Judah” whereas Qumran is only a few miles from Jerusalem. The Damascus Document explicitly quotes, apparently by way of explanation, Amos 5:26-27 which describes the place of exile as beyond Damascus. Babylon is, of course, beyond Damascus, but Babylon had been destroyed 300 years earlier by the Persian King, Xerxes. Perhaps some Jews, heading to Israel, had found Damascus comfortable. It seems quite likely, that having settled at Qumran the former exiles nick-named it Damascus after their place of origin. The exilic origin of the group is supported by many rules which pertain to life among the gentiles, a situation that scarcely applied in Judaea despite it being under foreign rule, but obviously would apply to Jews living in a foreign country.

This interpretation is confirmed from an unusual source. The Damascus Document implies that not all the New Covenanters in the land of Damascus returned when the Jewish free state was set up. What happened to them? There was always a large Jewish population in Mesopotamia, and among them evidently were some of the New Covenanters.

Around 800 AD a Mesopotamian Jewish reformer, Anan ben David, called for a return to the basics of Judaism and a rejection of the Talmud. He wanted, like the Essenes, a literal interpretation of the Mosaic Law, and he founded a sect called the Karaites. Scholars had noticed the astonishing similarities of the Karaites and the Essenes, separated as they were by almost a millennium. However, the discovery of the Cairo Damascus Document in 1897 seemed to them the source of Karaite beliefs. Evidently the Cairo Damascus Document was a holy book of the mediaeval Karaites who were strong in Egypt around 1000 AD when that version was transcribed. The Karaites opposed Rabbinic Judaism and proved to be very successful in the near and Middle East in mediaeval times. Now, only a few thousand remain. The New Covenanters must have maintained their identity for over a thousand years in Mesopotamia before emerging as the Karaites.

History of the Essenes

The history of the Essenes is not properly known. If Pliny’s guess that the name Essene derives from hesed then they probably evolved from the Judaean Hasidim of pre-Hasmonean times who aligned with Judas Maccabbee against Antiochus Epiphanes IV about 160 BC. Some might have been part of the priesthood who broke away from the Sadducees. Their relationship with the temple is plainly hostile, yet the village Essenes continued to sacrifice there unlike the monastic members. They continued through the Herodian age and were not mentioned again much after the Jewish War.

The New Covenant evidently was founded by Jews in exile. According to the first ten lines of the Damascus Document, a remnant (Isa 37:31, 46:3, Ezra 14:22, Zech 8:12, etc) who were righteous were visited by God, 390 years after the fall of Jerusalem to Nebuchadrezzar and He…

…caused them to sprout from Israel and from Aaron a shoot of the planting, in order to possess his land (Isa 60:21) and to become fat with the good things of the soil.

While the interval of 390 years is unlikely to be precise, it seems to be meant to be historic and not just symbolic, so corresponds to a date of about 196 BC. Another 20 years of uncertainty follows before the remnant is led back to the land. The year is about 176 BC. God has raised a Teacher of Righteousness but he is opposed by a Scoffer.

The High Priest at this time was Onias III, a saintly man who was deposed by his brother, Jason, through the support of the new Greek king, Antiochus Epiphanes whom he had bribed with the promise of a mass of money. Were these brothers kinfolk or were they brothers in an order? Was Onias the Righteous Teacher and Jason the Scoffer, or Wicked Priest? We seem to have here a split in the Zadokite priesthood into Sadducees and Hasidim. Onias seems to have been the priest for the traditionalists, the Persian faction of Hasids, nicknamed the Pharisees for supporting the Persian religion.

The time of priestly power and particularly that of the High Priest had been in the Persian and early Hellenistic periods from about 500—170 BC. To limit opposition, the Persians exercised control through the priesthood which enjoyed political as well as religious power as agents or collaborators.

Under the Ptolemies, the traditional priesthood had been supported by the kings even though they were Greeks. The Ptolemies had accepted Egyptian ceremonial and seemed disinclined to interefere with traditional religion. The northern Greeks, the Seleucids, who took the Levant from the Ptolemies in 200 BC, were much more inclined to allow Hellenization to proceed apace. Antiochus Epiphanes was opposed to the Jewish religion and wanted to Hellenize it. So he had his own reasons for supporting Jason, the leader of the Hellenistic faction of the Jerusalem priesthood.

Jason will have been the founder of the Sadducees who were intent on adapting the temple to the Greek model. That was an abomination to the traditionalists. The conservative Hasids had to withdraw leaving the temple to the unclean Sadducees, but a few decades later they split yet again into progressives and conservatives, the progressive conservatives retaining the name Pharisees, the conservative conservatives being the Essenes. The Pharisees claimed to be just as traditional as the Essenes, but a whole lot more pragmatic.

The Maccabees in the second century BC were to regain power for the Jews and become priest-kings bolstered by the political doctrine that the Levites had assumed the mantle of David. The Essenes had expected the purity of the Temple to be restored by the Maccabees. When it was not they decided to withdraw into the wilderness, to set up a pure people ready for the Judgement of God.

The earliest reported date for the Essenes is in Josephus, writing about the death of Antigonus in 103 BC. Josephus tells us that Essenes were noted for predicting the future. An Essene prophet called Judas, never known to be mistaken, foresees the murder of Antigonus by his brother, Aristobulus, king of Judaea. The point about Josephus’s tale is that at first Judas seems to get the prophecy wrong but actually has merely mixed up two places of the same name. Judas was teaching his scholars one afternoon near the temple when the victim, Aristobulus, passes by, though Judas had just explained to his students that he would die that very day 600 furlongs away—an impossible distance to travel before night, thus apparently rendering the prediction false. Judas felt humiliated since it was his first mistake but soon the news comes that Aristobulus had indeed just been murdered in some subterranean chambers beneath the temple, having the same name as the predicted murder spot by the sea. If Josephus is to be believed then, the leading Essenes were respectable and acceptable citizens of the city of Jerusalem at this time. They were not apparently monks living in the wilderness at Qumran by the Dead Sea.

In the following 30 years another Jewish party that struggled in Jerusalem against Alexander Jannaeus, grew into great power with the ascendency of his widow, Alexandra in 76 BC. This, of course was the Pharisees, whom Josephus indicates at that time was “a Jewish sect that appeared more pious than the rest and stricter in the interpretation of the Law”.

One fragment is a short poem dedicated to a King Jonathan. The brother of Judas Maccabee (155 BC) was called Jonathan but he was never recognised as a true king. However Alexander Jannaeus (d 76 BC) was known as King Jonathan. Alexander Jannaeus spent time in the wilderness in guerrilla warfare against the Syrian Hellenistic King, Demetrius, who had been invited into the country by the Pharisees. In 88 BC Alexander Jannaeus crucified 800 Pharisees. The Essenes seemed to admire him for this and the Pharisees and Essenes were no longer fond of each other.

From this time on the Essenes seemed to have been living often at their wilderness retreat. It is possible that Herod called them back into respectability for awhile but then offended them again. Thereafter Qumran does not seem to have been abandoned until the Jewish War of 66-70 AD.

The New Covenant

The Qumranites and the early Christians, both of whom considered themselves members of a New Covenant (2 Cor 3:6; CD 20:2), were children of a common parent tradition in Judaism.

J C VanderKam

It was with those who had gone out of the land of Judah into the land of Damascus that God established his covenant with Israel forever, revealing to them the hidden things in which all Israel had strayed, where all Israel—meaning the whole nation—is deliberately distinguished from Israel—meaning the remnant who were pure enough and observant enough, the sectarians themselves. The new covenanters had returned from exile in about 160 BC expecting the purity of the temple to be restored by the Maccabees, the rebellious family of Jewish nationalists. When it was not, they decided to withdraw into the wilderness, to set up a pure people ready for the judgement of God.

A group of Jews went with their righteous teacher to a place in the wilderness to uphold the law. The Community Rule, following Isaiah, commands:

They shall be separated from the midst of the gatherings of the men of wrongs to go to the wilderness to prepare there the way of the Lord, as it is written: In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord; make straight in the desert a high way for God. This is the study of the Law, as he commanded them through Moses to do all that has been revealed from age to age, and, by his Holy Spirit, as the prophets revealed.

God’s covenant with Israel in the desert brought down by Moses had been replaced by the new covenant with God’s elect in the desert, because of the backsliding of the children. The military preparations the children of Israel made to enter the promised land were now being made by God’s elect to enter the kingdom of God. Many Qumran sectarian documents are aggressive in their phraseology and content. When Josephus wrote that the Essenes were pacifists, it must have been for Roman consumption. He himself tells us of a John the Essene who was a general in the Jewish war. God’s soldiers had to be pure, whence the Essene’s celibate regime, baptism and exemplary lifestyle.

Oddly, nowhere in the scrolls are their owners called Essenes but, since the Qumran caves and ruins are just where Pliny said they were, there is no doubt who they are. The source of the word “Essene” is a mystery. Scroll scholar, Dupont-Sommer, proposed that the word comes from the word “’esah” meaning “council” or “party” and the phrase “esath ha yahad”, meaning “the council of the community”, which occurs often in the scrolls. Philo derived his word for Essene from “hosio”, which he thought was a Greek version of the Hebrew word, for holiness, “hesed”, often translated as “piety”, “grace” or “saintliness”. In fact, “hosio” seems more likely to be from the semitic root, “os”, meaning “a place of refuge” and therefore “salvation”, the meaning of the name of the prophet, Hosea. Then “Essenoi” or “Essaioi” is from the Semitic, “osim”, meaning the “saviours”!

The Hebrew word “hozeh” means “seer” or “prophet”, from the word for a vision. Essenes were noted prophets and evidently considered themselves to be prophets. If this were the root of the word Essene then its occurence in the prophetic books of the Jewish scriptures—Isaiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea, Amos, Micah and Habakkuk—would tie in with their fondness of these scriptures. Prophecy was less the ability to see the future, as simple Christians think, but more interpreting God’s law. For Essenes, this was its real purpose, though they were interested in judging the signs of the times to anticipate the End Time too.

These derivations of the word Essene and more are probably all true. Just as Christians are fond of pious lying, the Essenes were fond of pious punning. John Allegro explains in The Dead Sea Scrolls: A Reappraisal that the Qumran sectaries knew themselves as the Covenant (berith), and particularly the New Covenant (berith ha dashah), the Congregation (edah), the Assembly (qahal), the Party or Council (’esah), the Community (yahad) and the Party of the Community (esath ha yahad). They were the Keepers of the Covenant, Joiners for War, Holy Ones or Saints, the New Covenanters, the Perfect of the Way, the Sons of Zadok, the Sons of Light, the Poor Men, the Righteous and the Doers of the Law. They loved multiple names especially if they sounded similar. We find exactly the same in the meaning of the word Nazarene.

The word “yahad”, which is central to the Scroll writers, though translated “community” is more emphatic of “unity” than our word. The community meant by “yahad” is better rendered as the “United Ones”. Unity was vitally important to the Essenes as it must be to any subversive or revolutionary organisation. The way such movements are broken today is to infiltrate them and create disunity—divide and rule. The Romans knew all about this principle and so did Herod the Great. Both had extensive networks of spies and provocateurs. In the gospels, Jesus has trouble keeping his flock united. After his death, it is even more difficult and up pops Paul the apostle promoting disunity in the church. He has every characteristic of a provocateur.

The believers refer to themselves as “the church” over 100 times in the New Testament but never in Mark, Luke or John, and only three times in Matthew! Any or all of the Aramaic words edah, “qahal”, “’esah”, and “yahad” might have been translated into the Greek as “church” (ekklesia). Indeed in translating “ekklesia” into English from the Greek, the words “assembly” and “congregation” are used as well as “church” according to the context or the whim of the translator. Incidentally, the root of the Greek word “ekklesia” means to “shut out” or to “break off”, echoing exactly the exclusive and separatist nature of the Essenes and indeed the converts of Paul the apostle if Romans is to be believed—the emphasis on separation in the first seven verses is striking.

Many of the scrolls are holy orders for the various classes of Essene initiates. Among the complete scrolls found by the Dead Sea were four books of regulations for Essene communities—the Community Rule, the Damascus Rule, the War Scroll and the Rule of the Congregation. The Damascus Rule refers to marriage and children and to other affiliated communities in Palestine, showing that the Qumran Community was not the only Essene settlement. They were organised into at least two branches—celibate monks at Qumran and lay members in all the villages and towns, just as Josephus said.

Two Cave 4 manuscripts of the Damascus Document (4Q266/4QDa and 4Q270/4QDe), include a penal code which is clearly based on the same text as the one in 1QS 7. Either the writers of the Community Rule and those of the Damascus Document used the same source, or one of the codes is directly dependent on the other. The point is the two rule books were connected somehow, and were not quite independent works as some have suggested. J Baumgarten comments:

It thus appears that the penal code, which in the Community Rule seems to reflect the discipline of an all male order, was capable of being also applied to a society in which both men and women took part in communal life.

Each different rule book provided for different circumstances and therefore differed in many ways from others but the underlying common values remained and they are plainly rules for a single organization.

Books like the Community Rule were common in Christian communities of the early centuries as exemplified by the Didache. Geza Vermes, an Emeritus Professor of Jewish Studies, assures us that there are no precedents in ancient Jewish literature for the lists of social rules given in the Qumran documents—the law of Moses sufficed. This cannot be coincidence and adds to the proof that Christianity stemmed from one particular type of Judaism, the Essenes, and not Judaism in general. The Qumran books reveal the tap root of Christianity in Palestine.

The Dead Sea Scrolls are clear that the purpose of the Essenes was to keep themselves spiritually and ritually pure because they were expecting the apocalypse when God would endow a messiah to purge and judge the world. Josephus said the Essenes rejected the temple as unclean and offered their sacrifices by themselves. The communities of the Essenes were the true Israel and the priesthood they maintained in the wilderness, the true Zadokite priesthood. Not that they could have restored the hereditary line of priests but they expected to restore purity in sacerdotal practice. They objected to the debasement of the temple and the venality of the Sadducees. They scorned the illegal priests of Jerusalem, and had rejected them to adopt a largely frugal and monastic life uncorrupted by the scandal of pollution and collaboration.

They were opposed to foreign invaders, and their expected war between good and evil was largely a conflict between the Jews and the gentiles. Despite Philo and Josephus, they were not peace-loving monks. Hyppolytus, writing about 230 AD, said Zealots were a branch of the Essenes.

The Essenes saw the history of the chosen people as a sucession of God’s covenants with respectively Noah, Abraham, Moses and Joshua. Jews were the Chosen People with whom God had made his Covenant. In the covenant God made with Abraham, if a male Jew was circumcised at eight days old, then he became one of the Chosen, and this was considered sufficient by most Jews. The sect of the scrolls however was exclusive. They believed, following God’s announcement in Jeremiah 31:31,33 in a new covenant between God and the remnant of Israel that was righteous.

Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah. But this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; After those days, saith the Lord, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people.

Only the Essenes were writing the law in their hearts and only they—the remnant of Israel—were God’s people. It was with the remnant of Israel that God made his new covenant—it excluded all but those who, after the age of twenty, undertook the solemn vows of the sect not to depart from any command of God. Most Jews were not righteous and were excluded but herein lies the distinction of the Nazarenes from the Essenes. Nazarenes were Essenes who regarded the new covenant as the saviour of the old covenant of Abraham. The Essenes kept perfect so that they could bring back into the flock the lost sheep of the house of Israel in the last days before the end time when God would right the wrongs of the world.

All men were formed at birth with fixed amounts of good and ill in their dispositions. Only perfectly good people would be saved at the judgement day—evil people would be scourged for eternity. The Essenes could assay the degree of goodness of a person from his characteristics, but all was not lost for those who were not born perfectly good. All men had free will to be good despite their disposition at birth and could benefit from the grace of God. Even men born evil could submit themselves humbly to the precepts of God, and through self-discipline offer their souls for salvation, but the final decision was God’s.

Like Paul, the sectaries made salvation depend ultimately on the grace of God, but the sectaries saw a clear role for works. For them a life devoted to achieving perfection—or alternatively sincere repentance of sins—was a necessary condition for salvation, but it was not sufficient because God had the final say. But God was not whimsical, he was just—so Essenes believed that their own righteous deeds submitted humbly to God could gain them salvation. What they did not know was how God considered their various iniquities in coming to His judgement, and this uncertainty kept them constantly striving for humility and perfect holiness in all respects.

The Master

The monks of the headquarters at Qumran were the men of perfect holiness also known as saints, the word used of Christians by Paul in his epistles and often in Revelation. The practical head of the monastery and of the movement as a whole was the Mebaqqer, the Guardian or Bishop, also called the Master (Maskil). There was also a bursar and a titular head, nominally above the Mebaqqer. Each of the camps of village Essenes had a Mebaqqer as well. Jesus was called master in the gospels and Judas was the bursar of the Nazarenes, showing that they organized on Essene lines.

The Master or Mebaqqer was a Righteous Teacher to whom the community listened to as a prophet, an interpreter of the prophets (QpHab 2:7). The Community Rule, an instruction manual for the Master, directs him to teach the saints the ways of perfection and it agrees remarkably with Josephus. The Master had to instruct the community in the dualistic theology of the Essenes and show them how to interpret the scriptures correctly, not just the law but the prophets also, and to act in judgement over infringements of the rules.

The Master shall teach the saints:
To seek God with a whole heart and soul, and do what is good and right before him as he commanded through Moses and through all his servants, the prophets.
To love all that he has chosen and hate all that he has rejected.
To put away all evil and hold fast to all good.
To practise truth, righteousness and justice upon earth.
To walk no longer in the stubbornness of a wicked heart and eyes of fornication, doing all evil.
To bring all those that have offered themselves to do God’s precepts into a covenant of lovingkindness.
To be joined to God’s scheme of things.
To walk before him perfectly according to all the things that have been revealed of the appointed times of their testimonies.
To love all the sons of light, each according to his lot in God’s scheme of things.
And to hate all the sons of Darkness, each according to his guilt in the vengeance of God.

1QS 1:1

Whoever disobeyed his “word” were unfaithful and were condemned. Matthew depicts the word of Jesus as having the same effects (Mt 7:24-27) where the reference is to a “house”—an Essene metaphor for the kingdom of God.

In the Damascus Rule the Master instructs everyone in the congregation, examines them in counsel with the assembly to assess and grade them and inscribes them each year in their rank. The Damascus Rule specifically orders, “He shall not rebuke the men of the pit nor dispute with them”, meaning those outside the community, especially the wealthy—the Sadducees—and orders him not to give them any doctrine:

He shall conceal the teaching of the law from men of deceit, but shall impart a knowledge of truth and righteous judgement to those who have chosen the way.

These restrictions are qualified by the Master’s song of blessing to God which contains the line, “I will not grapple with the men of perdition until the day of vengeance”, evidently permitting disputation on that day if no other. The scenes in the gospels of Jesus disputing with Sadducees and Pharisees are false except those in the temple after he has captured it. Jesus then thought the day of vengeance had come and that he was allowed to tell the men of the pit what he thought of them. Previous disputes featured in the gospels arose within the Nazarene community, with Jesus in his role as Master instructing novitiates, except those where he taught in parables which were intended to enlighten those who had ears to hear but, as Mark says, conceal doctrine from others, and so must have been spoken in public.

The Master is the one who had to keep God’s appointed times and watch for the signs of the coming visitation by God:

He shall be zealous for God’s appointed time for His Day of Vengeance… He shall constantly watch for the judgement of god.

The sectaries took literally God’s prescription in Joshua 1:8:

This book of the law shall not depart out of thy mouth; but thou shalt meditate therein day and night, that thou mayest observe to do according to all that is written therein.

The oft mentioned “Book of Meditations” of the scroll texts is revealed as the books of Moses, the Pentateuch or Torah. The Essenes had to recite from the book of the law continuously, by day and by night. To keep the recitations going by night, the congregation had to watch together in a rosta for a third of every night of the year, and the Master had to lead prayers:

at dawn and at dusk and at the various watches of the night and the days of the new moon.

And, finally:

He shall perform the will of God in all his works and shall freely delight in ought that befalls him.

Jesus warned that the day of vengeance was nigh. When he decided it had arrived he entered Jerusalem as a king. He watched and prayed throughout the night for God’s judgement in the Garden of Gethsemane. At the end he admitted he was a failed prophet and stoically accepted his fate.

Essene Monastic Life

From the Community Rule we discover the rules the members of the Monastic Community were required to live by and they agree remarkably with Josephus. Monastic Essenes were to:

• be admitted to the Community only after a lengthy procedure
• obey the Laws of Moses—indeed vow to be “Zealous for the Law” …“until there shall come the prophet and the Messiahs of Aaron and Israel” (apparently suggesting that three people were expected, the prophet, the Priestly Messiah and the Kingly Messiah, but it seems the two messiahs at least were the same person)
• hold their property in common under the control of a “custodian of property”
• bathe daily in holy water
• eat each day a sacred meal and pray together
• be ruled by a Community Council which shall “preserve the faith in the land with steadfastness and meekness and shall atone for sin by the practice of justice and by suffering the sorrows of affliction”
• maintain total self-control—members were fined if they showed anger
• organise themselves in a strict hierarchy of members and speak only in order, keeping silent when others are speaking and respecting the wishes of the majority
• follow meticulously the appointed times which is to say the official schedules and solar calendar
• separate from the ungodly
• follow liturgy precisely.

The complicated procedure for admission was as follows.

• Appear before the full congregation to be examined by the Master of the whole sect for suitability. On acceptance swear to follow the Community’s interpretation of the Law of Moses—any transgression to be punished by expulsion, enter a long period of instruction by the Master in the rules of the community
• appear for a second time before the congregation for acceptance as a novice, on acceptance spend a year as a novice regarded by members still as impure and not worthy of the sacred meal
• appear for the third time before the congregation, on acceptance leave all possessions with the bursar who would keep them distinct from the possessions of the Community, complete a second year as a novice still unable to partake of the drink of the congregation
• submit yet again for examination and if accepted enter fully the congregation allowing all possessions to be taken into the Community and partaking fully of the sacred meal
• love God and each other and hate the wicked (but leave it to God to punish them).

The last of these rules was really the most important one. In Mark 12.28-12:34 a scribe asks Jesus to say what was the greatest commandment. For all Jews the greatest commandment is to love God, and Jesus’s answer is in the Shemah (Deut 6:4-5) which pious Jews recite every day:

And Jesus answered him, The first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord. And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment.

Note that “The Lord is one”, denies the Trinity. Since he was asked for one only, Jesus curiously gives a second commandment, to love your neighbour, from Leviticus 19:18—exactly matching the Essene rule except that the part about hating enemies is omitted. The Damascus Rule has:

They shall love each man his brother as himself; they shall succour the poor, the sick and the needy.

The Essenes were a brotherhood, so the meaning here is that they should love those who were members of it, and care for the weak. Gentiles are excluded. The quotation from Leviticus 19:18 in full reads:

Thou shalt not take vengeance nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people but shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.

showing that it applies to Jews specifically. The “children of thy people” are the Jews. Neighbour is not used in the sense of any neighbour and once it is recognized that Jesus was an Essene it is plain that he could only have meant a Jewish neighbour.

And Rabbi Hillel, when challenged to teach the Torah as succinctly as possible, offers it in the form:

What is hateful to thee, do not unto thy fellow. This is the whole law.

Hillel called it the great practical principle.

Jesus gives both commandments together as if they were one. Josephus in Antiquities says John the Baptist taught righteousness toward men and piety towards God, bracketing the two together and also notes this as Essene practice. In the scroll fragments we find that the community’s notion of piety meant loving God’s name—piety towards God is another way of saying loving God. Essene teaching, the teaching of the Baptist and the teaching of Jesus are the same. Both the Epistle of James and the Qumran texts associate piety with poorness and meekness and they and the gospels declare that wealth is not compatible with righteousness.

Jesus’s Pharisaic inquisitor agrees that these principles are more important than burnt offerings, an expression of Pharisaic opposition to the Sadducees whose emphasis was on ritual rather than piety. Pharisees accepted sacrifice only as a token of sincere repentance. The Damascus Rule quotes Proverbs 15:8 as Essene belief:

The sacrifice of the wicked is an abomination, but the prayer of the just is as an agreeable offering.

The agreement over the burnt offerings is significant in that both Pharisees and Essenes consider temple ritual alone is insufficient for entry to God’s kingdom. Pharisee and Essene have united against the Sadducees.

Jesus concludes by telling the scribe that he is not far from the kingdom of God. The scribe was righteous but not an Essene. He had to repent sincerely and be baptized to be one of the elect. Mark normally runs down Pharisees yet here he leaves a good impression. It all leads you to think it must come from genuine tradition. Because Mark was the first gospel, written while the church was still evolving, the treatment of the story is liberal. It was edited in later gospels to temper this praise and leave no credit to the Pharisee.

However, the way it is presented in Luke 10:25-28 sounds more authentic in that it is all in the mouth of the Pharisee. The Pharisee does not ask Jesus what the first commandment is, but asked him how he could inherit eternal life—meaning enter the kingdom. Jesus did not tell him but asked the scribe to explain what was written in the law. It is the scribe that answers Jesus’s question in the rabbinic fashion to be expected and Jesus compliments him. It all fits in better, which might be Luke’s literary skill, but the original question is better in this context than Mark’s rather phony sounding one. Thus it avoids the problem of getting two answers from one question, because the question was not simply what was the first commandment, the answer to which any Jew would know, as we noted above.

In Luke, the phrase about burnt offerings is missing, possibly because Luke is not using the incident to run down the Sadducees but as a link to the likable but bogus parable of the good Samaritan which continues the theme of neighbourliness. The parable is bogus because the hero is made into a Samaritan to represent gentiles, fulfilling one of Luke’s aims—to render Jewish teaching suitable for non-Jews. The original story might have been a genuine parable but we shall dismiss it as uncertain. The logic of the sequence of priest then Levite is that the next along the road should be an Israelite, a lay Jew, not a Samaritan, the castes of society in the Jewish theocracy below Levite being Israelites and proselytes. In this context, the lay Jew implies an unpious Jew, a publican, a man of the land, a backslider. The parable depicted the layman, the simple of Ephraim as more neighbourly to the downtrodden and more righteous than the priesthood, the acknowledged rulers of God’s kingdom. It could have been a Nazarene parable directed at the Jewish nobility, the Sadducees. Luke’s extension of the story into the tale of the good Samaritan was a distortion of the evangelist to prove that one’s best neighbour need not be a Jew for Christianity to prosper.

Essenes were to be admitted to the Community only after a lengthy procedure, but evidently Jesus, and before him John the Baptist, had decided there was not enough time for a probation period because of the imminence of God’s visitation. Normally, initiation was at least three years but the day of vengeance could happen at any time, such were the portents. So Jesus would have started his ministry believing that the kingdom was due within three years.

When admitted fully into the new covenant, the priests blessed the elect with a prayer for God to preserve the new sectaries from evil:

May God bless you with all good and preserve you from all evil. May God lighten your heart with life-giving wisdom and grant you eternal knowledge. May God raise his merciful face towards you for everlasting bliss.

All priestly blessings were concluded with calls of Amen, Aramaic for “quite so” or “truly” or “verily”, as it is often translated in the gospels. The curses of Satan and apostates by the Levites which followed were similarly concluded with cries of “Amen”, “Amen”. In John’s gospel Jesus is depicted idiosyncratically saying, “Verily”, “Verily”, just as the Essene liturgy required.

This liturgy was probably observed each year at the annual renewal of the covenant held at Pentacost. On that occasion, the Dead Sea Scrolls (1QS 2:19) tell us that the wilderness chaste brotherhood (called “priests” and “levites”) and the village Essenes (called “people” and “Israelites”) congregated in the desert for a covenant renewal ceremony. New members were admitted to be instructed by the Master (1QS 1:7) when they would hear the Essene interpretation of the law of Moses and commit themselves to it. They were taught they were living in the last days (End Time) (4Q174 1:2,12,15,19) and that strict adherence to the law was essential to enter God’s kingdom, or “house” or “sanctuary.” Those who were saved were those who held fast to the community’s rules, followed the law, listened to the righteous teacher and confessed before God.

The various rules of the community prescribe punishments for infringements of the rules. Essenes were to be truthful, righteous and just that they might do as Jeremiah had commanded—seek God with their entire heart and soul. The Community Rule declares that the men of perfect holiness, each with his neighbour, shall walk according to these rules. They had to practise what was good and what was just, love one another, and share with each other their knowledge, powers and possessions.

The constant emphasis Essenes placed on being righteous or just leads one to believe that the title “the Just” or “the Righteous” actually denotes an Essene just as a Sikh is customarily called Singh. There were other men among the Jews who were good men, but it was the prime objective of the Essenes, so their leading men were often given that title. In studying the New Testament, it is a fair bet that anyone described as righteous or just, or given one of those titles is an Essene. Hebrew scholar, Millar Burrows, one of the translators of the sectarian Scrolls of Qumran, believes that the saintly Onias the Rainmaker, also called Onias the Just, who was stoned to death in about 65 BC was an Essene. The leader of the Jerusalem Church, James the Just, so-called the brother of the Lord, seems on this basis also to have been an Essene. Essenes were respected as righteous men up until the war with Rome, but their righteousness was not merely exemplary behaviour but taking the right attitude toward the land of Judaea. They were righteous because they were uncompromising in their disapproval of foreign rule!

Essenes could not transgress one word of the law of Moses—Jesus said not one jot or tittle (Mt 5:18). The punishment was expulsion and shunning by every member unless the transgression was inadvertent when the member could be readmitted after two years.

They had to live, eat and pray together and own only limited personal possessions, everything else being held by the community under the control of a custodian of property. This reflects Nazarene practice as we know from Acts. Lying in matters of property such as concealment of personal possessions was punished by partial expulsion for a year and a cut in rations. But in Acts 5:1-10 two converts are apparently killed for doing this, showing that their true crime was far worse. Expulsion was the punishment for rebelling against the leadership of the community or for slandering them. The Community Rule has:

Whoever has slandered the congregation shall return no more. Whoever has murmured against the authority of the Community shall be expelled and shall not return.

Expulsion was death as far as the sectaries were concerned. Their oath was to do only what their Mebaqqer permitted. A conscientious Essene would die if expelled. The deaths in Acts, however, are quick ones, carried out by God in the presence of Peter—in short, by Peter! The two in Acts probably committed treason, betraying the sect to the authorities for money. Neither the Essenes nor the Nazarenes could have had any legal powers of execution. That is not to say that they would not have killed, but they would only have done it according to the rule of God as they perceived it. The scrolls state that no one was allowed to condemn a fellow according to the law of the gentiles—the punishment being death. Ananias and Sapphira must have tried to betray the community to the gentiles and this is why Peter struck them down.

Monastic Essenes had to bathe daily in holy water and eat each day a sacred meal of bread and wine. They were to keep meticulously the appointed times of the solar calendar prescribed in the Book of Jubilees. They had to maintain total self-control—members were fined if they showed anger toward each other (unless it was ritualized). No one was allowed to be ill-tempered or stubbornly obtuse and could not bear malice from one day to the next. Disagreements between the sectaries were to be expressed truthfully and openly, and heard humbly and charitably. If a disagreement were serious then the plaintiff had to publicly rebuke his tormentor before he could take his complaint before the full congregation to be judged. To indicate correct procedure the Damascus Rule quotes Leviticus 19:18 and 19:17:

You shall not take vengeance against the children of your people, nor bear rancour against them… You shall rebuke your companion and not be burdened by sin because of him.

Jesus teaches the same (Mt 18:15-17).

The monks had to organize themselves in a strict hierarchy of members and speak only in order, keeping silent when others were speaking and respecting the wishes of the majority. They had to follow liturgy precisely.

Above we saw the Community Rule’s instruction that members had to swear to hate the Sons of darkness for all eternity. Rich people were regarded as deceitful and wicked, and the Essenes were to keep apart from ungodly and wicked men whom they were obliged to hate with everlasting hatred. The Damascus Rule specifies that they should:

separate from the sons of the pit and shall keep away from the unclean riches of wickedness acquired by vow or anathema or from Temple treasure; they shall not rob the poor of His people, make of widows their prey and of the fatherless their victim… They shall love each man his brother as himself and succour the poor, the needy and the stranger.

They were to love their brother Essenes as themselves but not all men—most of them they hated as wicked. Riches are wicked, the poor are venerated, widows should not be robbed of their mites nor orphans exploited. The language is very much the language of Jesus, but Christians in setting up a universal religion, omitted the qualifications—a brother was not any man. The pit is one of the three snares of Belial discussed below and represents riches, so the sons of the pit are the wealthy—mainly Sadducees. The poor are subtly distinguished from the poor of His people. The poor is a name for themselves, whereas the poor of His people are the poor of the children of Israel—God’s children. In the final sentence the poor, the needy and the stranger all stand for fellow Essenes, brothers who they have to love as themselves.

The Community Rule also emphasizes separation from the wicked, citing Exodus 23:7, “Keep thou far from a false thing”. The verse continues, “and the innocent and righteous slay thou not, for I will not justify the wicked”. Isaiah 2:22 is also quoted, “Cease ye from man, whose breathe is in his nostrils; for wherein is he to be accounted of”. This is in a passage in which God is saying what punishments he will mete out to wicked men. Yet Essenes were not to take it upon themselves to punish the ungodly. That was God’s job and, in the Community Rule, the blessing of God, which the Master has to recite at the various watches, says:

I will pay no man the reward of evil. I will pursue him with goodness. For judgement of all the living is with God and it is he who will render to man his reward.

In practice this is stronger than turning the other cheek. It was not for men to punish anyone who had wronged them for it is up to God alone to punish, but nor was the recommended course as indifferent as simply turning another cheek—pursuit with goodness was needed. Hatred of the ungodly was required but no one could judge another man with a view to handing out punishment. He had to pursue him with goodness.

All this sounds odd in the light of the War Scroll and many other texts but it was a command which applied only until God set about purging the world of the wicked on the day of vengeance when the perfect would become agents of God’s vengeance, and it was a rule which would not have applied to gentiles in any case—it applied only to Jews. The gentiles had to be driven from the land irrespective of individual personal qualities. The net effect was that initiates of the Essene order had to hate the wicked but could do nothing about it until God indicated the appointed time.

The Essene language of extremes of love and hate is partly caused by the absence of comparative elements in Aramaic. Comparatives needed circumlocutions and so were not often used and shades of grey or degrees tended to be viewed as opposite poles. With inadequate ways of expressing ideas, ideas and thoughts similarly become polarised—love the righteous, hate the sinners! Jesus said no man can serve two masters (Mt 6:24; Lk 16:13) but must love one and hate the other. This is hardly practical advice, but is typically Essene, and doubtless partly conditioned by the practicalities of Aramaic speech and thought.

The temple of Herod with its unclean Sadducaic priests was disregarded by the sectaries living in separation in the monastery at Qumran, though the village Essenes still used the Jerusalem temple in the normal way. The Community Rule commands that:

the men of the community shall be set apart as a house of holiness for Aaron and those who walk in perfection shall be joined as a holy of holies and as a house of community for Israel. The council of the community will be established in the truth as an eternal planting—a holy house for Israel and a foundation of the holy of holies for Aaron. It shall be a witness to truth at the judgement, when the Elect, by God’s will, shall atone for the land and pay to the wicked their recompense.

Note here that the elect were to atone for the land, and pay the wicked their recompense at the judgement day. Atoning for the land refers to the occupation of Judaea by the gentiles, and of other Jewish lands by the puppet Herodians, who were all to receive retribution. Essenes were not just pacifist monks as Josephus implied.

A house for Aaron is, of course, a temple, Aaron being Moses’s brother and priest of Israel who might enter the holy of holies. Since the community was a temple and the temple was the most substantial building in the land, the sectaries were fond of solid architectural metaphors like, “It shall be the tested wall; the precious cornerstone; its foundation will not shake or become displaced”. In the Master’s song blessing God of the Community Rule we find:

He has joined their assembly to the sons of heaven, to be a council for the community, a foundation for the building of holiness, and eternal plantation throughout all ages to come.

Evidently the new covenanters considered themselves to be joined to heaven already—the foundation of heaven on earth—God’s bridgehead for the coming kingdom.

Daniel tells us that there is a god that revealeth secrets, who maketh known what is to come to pass. In the dream of Nebuchadnezzar, a “stone” destroys the four great kingdoms of the dream. Later in Daniel the four kings are replaced by the saints of the Most High, an Essene name for themselves, who take the kingdom and possess it for “ever, even for ever and ever”. The everlasting kingdom therefore replaces the earlier four earthly kingdoms and must therefore be on earth. Essenes expected heaven and earth to unite to form a perfect and incorruptible earth.

The Qumran Community regarded itself as a living temple, an image found in John 2:21: “He spake of the temple of his body”, and used by Paul (1 Cor 3:16-17). In 1 Peter 2:5 the Christian church was to be a spiritual temple in which spiritual sacrifices are made. Each believer is described as a “living stone” in this spiritual temple and the chief corner stone is Jesus (Eph 2:20), the whole growing to become a living temple to the Lord—purely Essene.

If the community council was a holy of holies for Aaron and a temple for Israel, it seems that the council at Qumran was an alternative temple for all Essenes. The monastic Essenes did not live in the buildings of Qumran but in caves nearby and a tented city which would have provided for a transient as well as a permanent population. The Essenes of the villages had cause to visit as pilgrims.

The Essenes aimed to be perfect. Yet they could not be sanctimonious about it. An absolute requirement was to be meek and humble. Their hymns and writings reminded them constantly that they were wicked and sinners, that they had disobeyed God and strayed from his precepts. They were unworthy and must try constantly to be perfect—by the grace of God they would succeed. The Community Rule orders, “None of the saints shall lean upon works of vanity”, and, as if to counter any grand ideas the sectaries might get from hearing the Master’s blessing of God several times a day the Master goes on to say:

I belong to wicked mankind, to the company of ungodly flesh. Mankind has no way, since judgement is with God and perfection of way is out of His hand. All things come to pass by His knowledge and He establishes things by His design and without Him nothing is done.

If they showed any such failings, they fell down the rankings at their yearly assessment and might be expelled altogether. These requirements of humility are the origin of the humble and gentle Jesus, meek and mild. For those who tried with all their heart, God was bountifully merciful. Note that in the preface of John we find:

All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made,

John 1:3

an identical sentiment to the final sentence above. The author of the fourth gospel is using an Essene song without even mentioning the Essenes—unless they were the Nazarenes.

Furthermore, in Numbers 12:3, “the man Moses was very meek, above all the men which were upon the face of the earth”. For the Essenes, Moses was the priest, prince and prophet, the first messiah sent by God—and they were sure that the expected messiah could be no less. Thus all Essenes had to be meek toward each other—but not toward the men of darkness.

Essenes vowed to be zealous for the law “until there shall come the prophet and the messiahs of Aaron and Israel”, apparently suggesting that three people were expected, the prophet, the priestly messiah and the princely messiah. In fact, they expected one man to embody all three roles like Moses.

Village Essenes

For a village Essene matters were less rigid but many requirements were the same as those for the monastic order. Both branches:

• considered themselves the true Israel
• followed the Zadokite priesthood—every group of ten or more had to include a priest
• partook of a common meal
• arranged themselves in a strict hierarchy
• insisted on a correct interpretation and strict adherence to the Laws of Moses
• swore to uphold the New Covenant
• followed a solar calendar precisely so as not to deviate from his appointed times, including holding an annual congregation.

The children of any Jew—those who had entered the covenant granted to all Israel forever—could become an Essene by swearing an oath on their reaching twenty, the age of enrolment. Before then nothing of the statutes was to be revealed to them. Particular rules for village Essenes were given in the Damascus Rule and the Rule of the Congregation:

• Members had to cleave to the laws of Moses
• the Mebaqqer of the camp or village community was its head, its teacher and its director. He allowed commerce with the impure and the imperfect but had absolute power over it, permitting no casual contacts
• temple sacrifice was permitted and demanded absolute ritual purity
• full maturity was reached according to the Rule of the Congregation only at the age of 30
• observance of the sabbath was strict, the rule expressly forbidding the picking and eating of fruits from the fields
• members were not allowed to bear witness in the courts of the gentiles—the Romans. The punishment was death but since the Community had no powers of capital punishment it is plain that expulsion was meant. Expulsion was eternal death, but for a strict Essene was often physical death too.

Note that village Essenes brought up in an Essene community were not considered mature until the age of thirty, the age at which Jesus was baptized. No Jewish priest was allowed to enter office until he was thirty years old and the Essenes were a priestly sect.

Village Essenes, unlike the monastic variety, owned their own property. Instead of holding goods in common they donated two days’ wages a month into a common fund to provide for orphans, the old and needy and widows. The Community whether in the monastery or the camps was bonded by a common meal. Only the perfect were allowed to partake of it and in particular to partake of the “new wine” which is to say the unfermented grape juice of the congregation.

The Damascus Rule requires that the village Mebaqqer “love his people as a father loves his children and shall carry them in all their distress like a shepherd his sheep”—two metaphors, children and sheep, used by Jesus for his followers tumbling out of one scroll sentence. He had to ensure that there was no friendly contact with those outside the sect, the sons of the pit. The Mebaqqer would allow commerce but not friendship. Transactions must have been very abrupt and matter-of-fact.

Some Criticisms Answered

Entering the new millennium, the idea that Qumran had nothing to do with Essenes seems to be reviving in popularity. One set of arguments, and the basis of the following list, can be found at a contrary but interesting and well presented website run by Ian Hutcheson.

The Essenes are located in the Dead Sea region by Pliny who relates them to being in the vicinity of Engedi. Why would he make that connexion when Qumran was much closer to the better known Jericho?

Who says that Pliny was talking only about Qumran? He speaks of the Essenes being on the western littoral of the Dead Sea and “below” them was Engedi, and “beyond” or “next” was Masada. He is therefore defining the part of the Western littoral that they occupied—that north of Engedi, or from Engedi to roughly Qumran, or the mouth of the Jordan. The Essenes were not only at Qumran but were also at Ain Feshka, confirming that they occupied this region of the wilderness of Judaea.

Philo tells us the Essenes were held as exemplary and had no clashes with any of the rulers of Palestine. The DSS however shows a central episode in the history of the Qumran Sect as being a conflict with authorities in Jerusalem.

No allowance is made for propaganda purposes here, or for the time factor. Philo, like Josephus wants to paint them as exemplary, and doubtless in normal behaviour, they were. If I declared that the presidency of the USA was corrupt and should be abolished, would it necessarily mean that I do not lead an exemplary life?

The Essenes of the classic authors, Pliny, Philo and Josephus, were pacific, whereas some of the scrolls, especially the War Scroll sound militant.

Critical emphasis has traditionally been put on the direct statements of the classic authors that the Essenes were peaceful, and so the DS Scrolls have been accused of not being Essene. Yet, Josephus speaks of an Essene that fought in the Jewish War. One could say that the orders of monks in the Middle Ages were pacific, but there were some decidely militant orders, like the Templars. Josephus assures us there were at least two types of Essenes, so some Essenes might not have been pacific. Furthermore, Josephus might have been deliberately coy about the nature of the Essenes to avoid any further punitive or suppressive action by the Romans.

Besides that, it could be valid to call Essenes pacific in general, even though they were preparing for what they considered as a Holy War. Pliny will therefore have seen them as simple monks or communal farmers but, when they thought the time was ready for the Holy War to commence, they abandoned their farming and pacifism believing that they were soldiers of God, just as Christians did. They certainly cannot have been openly training as liberation troops in an occupied and subject country, so they had to have a pacific face to survive at all.

There were only 4000 Essenes all together, according to Josephus, and they lived in all the cities of Judaea. They must therefore have been thinly spread and few of them can have lived near Qumran.

It is a silly argument that takes no account of whether the 4000 were only males or men women and children. If they were only males as seems likely then the total of men, women and children might have been around 25,000 (the celibate Essenes being only the most devout, leading members of the sect, the equivalent of catholic priests).

It also ignores the total population of Judaea. Even in 1960, the population of Israel was only 2 million, and it seems likely it was much less in the year dot, so 4000 active men would have been significant.

Finally, when Josephus speaks, almost as an afterthought about the Essenes who married, did he include these married ones within his 4000 or were they in addition to them. If the latter, the 4000 were most significant, because they were the celibate leadership and we can guess that the “lay” Essenes, if that is what they were, were far more numerous. Who is to say that the Essenes were not the main sect of the time, taking into account the diaspora, and not the Pharisees as the Rabbis claim.

Why were the Essenes only mentioned explicitly in three authors’ works, if they were a major part of Judaism, or even the main part of it.

The answer surely is precisely that. The gentile authors knew only of the Jewish cult of the temple and were not interested in internal disagreements between the Jewish parties, which doubtless seemed like nit-picking to observers.

The Qumran sect is said not to have been celibate, on the ground that graves of women were found at the ruined site, and provisions were made for marriage in some of the scrolls.

A bit flimsy, this! The classic authors all said the Essenes were celibate, though Josephus distinguishes a class of Essenes that was not. Again, we could look at the monks of the Middle Ages and, from them alone, claim that Catholic Christians were celibate. Josephus seems to be telling us that there were monkish Essenes and there were more pragmatic Essenes. Furthermore, some of the graves at Qumran might have been those of visitors, especially if the buildings were a centre of an annual renewal ceremony.

The Essenes disapproved of slavery. The Qumran Sect tolerated it.

So disapproval and toleration are incompatible? Cults with rules peculiar to themselves often have to live in a world that operates on the basis of different laws—laws of which they might disapprove but which they have to tolerate. A recently discovered ostracon at Qumran speaks of the transfer of the property of a neophyte to the community and includes a slave, but there is no necessity to believe that having been so transferred, he remained a slave of the community. He probably joined too.

The Essenes disapproved of animal sacrifices. The Qumran Sect admitted it and paid special deference to priests.

The same comment, and which priests did they defer to? The scroll authors claimed they were priests, but they still disapproved of the temple as polluted. In fact the scroll authors preferred a sweet savour to offer to God not sacrifice, as they say several times.

The Essenes avoided oaths. The Qumran sect prescribed them, on certain occasions.

The same comment, avoidance is not proscription, so they could avoid them but prescribe them. They prescribed them when they entered the order and therefter proscribed them, just as Josephus says.

“Baptism” among the Essenes had a regenerative power. There is no evidence in the voluminous Dead Sea literature that this was the case in the Qumran Sect.

So the Qumran sectaries, in an arid and waterless region, were just being hygienic in insisting on immersing their whole body before eating each meal. The Community Rule forbids the unjust from entering “the water to partake of the pure meal of the men of holiness.” Josephus also says the Essenes bathed before their meals twice a day.

The Essenes practised community of property. The Qumran Sect did so, if at all, in only a restricted degree.

If a community of property is practised even in a restricted way, it is practised. But, what was the restriction? The Community Rule 6:20-21 is clear that the novice must hand over all property to the bursar on acceptance, and line 25 says the punishment for deception in regard to property is severe—exclusion for a year and partial starvation. The ostracon found at Qumran seems to be an account of a novitate handing over his possessions, a house, orchards and a slave, to the bursar.

This also shows how the order of Essenes could have been extremely rich while the initiates practiced the spirit of poverty. Their successors, the Christian churches, are precisely the same, though their officials have shown more inclination to make a personal use of the institution’s wealth.

Whoever occupied the site before it was abandoned about 37 BC would have reoccupied the site after the earthquake and not waited another 33 years to do so. If Essenes were there before 37 BC, they are not likely to have reoccupied the site.

Why indeed should an earthquake have made them abandon the site, when they would have been expected to set to work immediately to repair the damage? Since they, or someone else, lived there later, it was not irreparable. This is not evidence but an opinion. Another opinion is that the Essenes were wooed by Herod in this intervening period because he wanted to rebuild the temple, and wanted the support of Essenes, not their disapprobation. Herod later welched on the Essenes and they left Jerusalem to return to their old wilderness base.

Pliny’s account, and indirectly Josephus’s account as well, describe the “Essenes as flourishing undisturbed after the hostilities”, the Jewish War.

Who says they flourished in the same place as before? If the Romans had seen Qumran as a fortress they would have been obliged to “flourish” elsewhere. The scrolls say they lived in camps, imitating the Israelites in the desert. They doubtless did this again, and those who lived in the cities could have flourished anyway, but later many would have abandoned apocalyptic for Rabbinism or for Christianity, notably after the Bar Kosiba war.

If the Essenes “were held up as models of behaviour by the Romanophile Josephus” and so admired by Pliny, why was their centre destroyed by the Romans?

Is this serious? Both were writing after the War, and Josephus had political and probably personal reasons for painting the Essenes as innocents. After the failure of the Jewish uprising, the Essenes would have returned to passivity for practical reasons and to revise their cosmic schemata.

The sheer number of scribal hands, of up to 800, seen in the scrolls tells against them all being written by a local sect at Qumran.

The fallacy here is the assumption that this was only a local sect. The Essenes, as Josephus says were represented throughout Judaea. Furthermore, they might have been accumulating the library for some considerable time, perhaps 200 years. If the centre of the sect was at Qumran as Pliny implies, then books collected throughout Judaea for this long period of time would have been deposited at Qumran.

Critics of the Essene hypothesis try to make a lot of arguments like Norman Golb’s that the scrolls actually were brought from Jerusalem to Qumran for safekeeping (during the war) or to deposit in a geniza of old sacred texts. If books were brought from Jerusalem at the time of the Jewish war for safekeeping, the collection was still a library of a sect, rather than a general library.

Nor would owners of a library in Jerusalem have gone so far as Qumran to find caves to deposit the books into—there were suitable inaccessible caves closer to Jerusalem. The caves at Qumran were not particularly inaccessible for some of them have been used as dwellings. In other words, the books were most likely to have been deposited by the locals but, if the books came from elsewhere, they were brought to Qumran because the sect dwelling there were of the same persuasion.

Wherever the scrolls came from, some of them are plainly sectarian in being markedly eschatological and militant, and these are the books that are kept in multiple copies. It would be impossible to claim that mainstream Judaism as defined by the temple organization fitted into the category indicated by the sectarian works, and most Jewish scholars would add that they are also not the source of Rabbinism. They are therefore describing Essenes or some related sect.

Yet for Josephus there were only three sects he thought worthy of note, and the prevalence of the sectarian material among the scrolls shows that this was important enough to be one of them. Two of Josephus’s sects were Sadducees and Pharisees, and the other was the Essenes. Only the Galilaeans, the followers of Judas of Gamala, or Judas the Galilaean, are mentioned besides these three. This sect, Josephus implies became the Zealots, but he also implies by association that they were a type of Essene. Admittedly, against this, he says they held the ideas of the Pharisees, but such ideas as he describes fit the scrolls and not the Pharisaic ideas, if the gospel descriptions of them are true.

Many of these criticisms are those of Cecil Roth who thought that the Qumran Sect were Zealots. Quite so. The Essenes were Zealots, and so was Jesus.

Differences between the scrolls and the descriptions of the classic writers, particularly Josephus, are often cited, but the astonishing agreements indicate that Josephus was accurately describing the sectaries identified in the scroll manuals and pesharim—Josephus called them Essenes! As to the differences, they might easily have been because the sect evolved between the time the sectarian manuals were written and Josephus learnt what he knew about them, or Josephus’s recollection might have been faulty, or he might have been altering some things for his own reasons such as to mitigate possible Roman retaliation, or Essenism was already split into factions such as Hemerobaptists, Galilaeans, Nazarenes and so on. Obviously, the details of all of this cannot now be clearly seen, but a coherent outline certainly can.

A criticism of Jesus that he is too often depicted as angry is used by non-Christians to show that Jesus was not good enough to be God incarnate.

It seems a silly argument when Jesus’s anger is compared with that of the Old Testament God, but more realistically it has been argued as proof that Jesus was not an Essene. It is true that the rules of conduct in the scrolls have strong penalties for members of the brotherhood who show anger to each other, but scrolls like the War Scroll show that the Essenes were exceedingly angry with other people. Jesus was angry with unrepentant cities, for example, and his Pharisaic opponents, and even sometimes with his own converts, but he was not angry with John the Baptist when he criticised him in Matthew, and the Essenes had no rule against damning even a brother with faint praise!

Another criticism is that Jesus unreasonably demands that his followers should choose to live in poverty and yet still love other people—a hard requirement.

This is simply a failure to understand from the gospels what we now know from the scrolls—that Jesus meant by the “Poor” his own sect of the Essenes, the Ebionites (the Poor Men). The Ebionites valued poverty for its spiritual value, but it did not mean that the Ebionites were destitute or in any way economically insecure. When they joined the order, they gave it all their possessions except for certain personal items, so each individual Essene was impoverished but the order was not, and it had bursars who dealt with purchasing, from the common purse, anything the brothers could not produce themselves. The village Essenes, who must have been the large majority of them, had quite a different system, that adopted by the modern Mormons—they gave a proportion of their income to the order, but otherwise their earnings were their own. Either way, Essenes were not destitute and so were free to concentrate on matters of God, whether it was loving fellow Essenes or preparing for a holy war.

Jesus also is criticised for asking the impossible of his followers in wanting them to be perfect even as his Father was perfect.

There is little doubt that the Essenes knew just as any modern Jew knows that there is no perfection outside of heaven, so to demand perfection seems to ask too much. But Jesus was expecting the world to end and the renewed world to be part of heaven and therefore, like heaven, perfect. He asked Jews to repent—thus absolving them of all previous sins—and then to practise perfection for the short time he expected before the kingdom came—not such an onerous task, for as Christians still tell us, it was to be “soon”.

Professor John Knox raised this issue in the context of the man whose brother had stolen his inheritance. Knox points out that Jesus had no useful advice, telling the man effectively not to bother. The man however was concerned with the injustice of it—he did bother. For Jesus, if the world was going to end soon, there was no point in getting angry about such matters and risking an adverse judgement that meant no eternal life. His message was to renounce covetousness to enter the kingdom. It was a minor sacrifice by comparison but the man was not convinced. Jesus therefore had no general advice about injustice in this world, because it was only temporary and its end was nigh!

J J Cadbury points out that nowhere is Jesus interested in the rights or needs of another party or in society as a whole.

He was interested only in securing Jewish sinners—apostates from the faith—for God’s kingdom through repentance. Third parties like the gentiles and unrepentant Jews were of no interest to him, though righteous gentiles might be considered for God’s kingdom if they came in supplication. John Bowden put it succinctly when he said, “His aim was personal repentance not structural reform.” What is the point of reforming what will be destroyed?

Jesus is absolutely positive in Mark’s gospel in his teaching on divorce—it is impossible (Mk 10:1-12).

The underlying reason was that God was betrothed to Israel—the land and people personified as a woman—and God would not abandon her however wayward she was. Matthew 19:1-9 defeats the entire point, bringing back as a practical reason for divorce the very failing that Jesus was forbidding—adultery. If this were the law of God, then God would have been justified in abandoning his faithless spouse. Matthew’s author either did not understand this or, since the Jews had indeed been abandoned by God with the crucifixion of their apocalyptic leader, he decided the practical law could be restored!

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