Abstract

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Tuesday, July 20, 1999

Jesus and the Essenes

The notable student of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Professor Bent Scholar, has compiled a list of comparisons between Jesus and the Essenes (JHC-JDSS 9), which, is not a “non-debatable consensus”, but is his own selection, based on insights developed and defended in lengthy monographs by international experts. It is “the consensus among the most prestigious Qumran specialists”. He means, all his best friends agree on it. Bent explains that experts are not embroiled in controversy over the discoveries in the Judaean desert. Curious then that many people have the impression they are hiding something.

Anyway, we are to believe there is a consensus, it is among the best specialists, and nothing is being concealed. Bent Scholar refers to eleven of the best specialists, and guess what? Eight of them are professional Christians! One other was a professional Jew. The other two had non-religious professions but we are not told whether they held religious views. Professional devotees of the modern Hebraic religions are hardly likely to get themselves sacked by saying that their discoveries render their professional beliefs untenable. Even they are not stupid enough to saw off the branch which supports them.

Professor Scholar tries to be a liberal in his interpretations of the discoveries but, though he disparages both ends of the spectrum of opinions about Jesus’s relationship to the Essenes, the Christian fundamentalists at one end and absolute skeptics like myself at the other, he betrays his own prejudices in many ways.

Why should institutions for men to live devout lives essentially segregated from the world, and particularly from the other sex, not be called monasteries? Bent Scholar objects to Qumran being called a monastery because it “transports Christian ideas” to pre-70s Judaism. Does he object to Tibetan monasteries being given the same name because it “transports Christian ideas” to a a distant Asian plateau? His real fear is that it might seem to be admitting more about the Essenes than the “best specialists” want to concede—that Qumran was the first Christian monastery, as could arguably be the case, if Jesus were shown to have been an Essene.

We shall see similar dishonesty in the following discussion of Bent Scholar’s lists of similarities and dissimilarities between Jesus and the Essenes.

Summary of Fundamental Similarities

Scholar begins with a summary of the “numerous fundamental ways” in which Jesus and the Essenes were similar.

• They were in the same small country, Judaea, about as big as Delaware or Devonshire
• They were Jews
• They were seriously religious
• They were deeply conservative, basing their beliefs on ancient scriptures not the world as it was
• They disliked non-Jews
• They resented the temple priesthood, the Sadducees
• They disliked another Jewish sect, the Pharisees, but saw some good in some of them
• They expected God to change the world and destroy the wicked soon—they were apocalyptic and eschalogical
• They were disliked by the Romans and Jesus and many Essenes were killed by them

If we were not talking about someone believed by Christians to be the son of God, this list of identities would be sufficient to categorise Jesus as an Essene, the Essenes having existed at least 100 years before Jesus was born. It is not sufficient for Christians, who prefer to believe unbelievable myths rather than obvious truths, out of ignorance or greed. They hope to find relief from their possible discomfiture in the detail.

The scholarly consensus are fairly blind about the list of detailed similarities but over the list of detailed dissimilarities they really show their absurd prejudices. Their trouble is they are determined not to let Jesus be an Essene at any cost to truth and scholarly values. If Jesus is to be God’s revelation, he has to be unique. Professor Scholar tries to reassure doubters that if Jesus is not quite unique, it is no bad thing for it combats the worst Christian heresy—docetism, but he is still intent on stopping Jesus from being recognised as an Essene. In desperation, in the face of insurmountable odds, he will concede a marginal influence of the Essenes on Jesus, but not close association and certainly not membership, God Forbid!

It is not hard to find differences between what we know of the teachings of Jesus and what we know of the teachings of the Essenes. Both are incomplete, so, when we find something missing on either side and present on the other, the Christians thank God and chalk it up as a difference. We cannot be sure that all the documents at Qumran are Essene, and we might be reading some as Essene when they are simply a book in the library for reference or a book given to them for safekeeping by someone else. In the New Testament, we cannot know what Jesus actually taught because he did not write it down or dictate it, and tradition might have inadvertantly or deliberately distorted it. In my view, most of the narrative of the gospels has been shaded to make it appear innocent. Some, at least, of the sayings will have similarly been altered or omitted because they were too obvious.

But the main reason for the differences is precisely to do with the great concern of Essenes—the Day of God’s Vengeance. Essenes knew they were in the Last Days, but they did not know precisely when the great event would happen. At the start of the gospels, John the Baptist and Jesus knew they were in the Last Days and urged people to repent, but they also did not know precisely when the occasion would be. Jesus himself explains it in Mark 13. For reasons that are not clear, Jesus comes to think that the Last Days really are at hand. In other words, they were literally down to days, not years. The last voluntary act of his life was to go to the Mount of Olives and watch for God’s miracle. He literally thought it would happen on the night of the Last Supper. It did not! Jesus was caught and crucified.

Bent Scholar concludes that Jesus was not an Essene. This, he declares, is the consensus among scholars. He means by “scholars” those who are members of the consensus! His attitude to anyone else who dares to venture an opinion is an absolute delight. Since the 1950s, many people have written that Jesus was an Essene but they were “journalists seeking attention” or “scholars who have become confused or even insane”.

Bent Scholar is certain that Jesus did not even have any tuition from an Essene, though how he knows is anybody’s guess—revelation, I suppose—Christian scholars have such advantages over we skeptics! Jesus was influenced by the Essenes in only “minor ways”. In truth, there are so many points of coincidence in the list below that, if Jesus was not an Essene, he was brought up in an Essene school and by an Essene mum and dad.

Some scholars explain some of the points of similarity—of Christianity, not Jesus—to the Essenes, by Essenes joining the new movement after 70 AD, but this is hardly any easier to take, if Jesus and the Essenes were so disalike as Bent Scholar thinks. The Hellenists among the Nazarenes will have taken advantage of an Essene network across the Empire, and doubtless densest in the eastern provinces in which Christianity began to thrive. That many Jews did not like them is shown in Paul’s epistles and Acts.

Jewish Christians in the Jerusalem Church will have fought alongside the Essenes and militant Pharisees against the Romans. At this point any Essenes in the wider church would surely have left to support the freedom fighters. If many Essenes died fighting the Romans in the Jewish War, it seems unlikely that the survivors would have joined what had by then become largely a gentile church. After 70 AD, any remaining will have fled to Arabia, or joined the rabbis rather than Christianity. The sects that did join the Christians after 70 AD were the sadducees and the Herodians. History and logic point to Essenes leaving the Christian Church, if they had ever joined it.

But Bent Scholar claims to have shown that the church became more influenced by Essenes after the crucifixion for several generations. The later epistles like Ephesians are more Essenic than earlier ones like Galatians and Romans. The gospels of John and Matthew are more Essenic than Mark.

The dating of Paul’s letters is sorcery not scholarship, so nothing can be said about them except that they are plainly indebted to the Essenes. The question of the gospels is straightforward to explain. Mark was not a Jew, or he was a highly Hellenised and apostate Jew, and he deliberately wrote to hide the truth not to reveal it. That in itself might show Essene influence but the gentile Christians could not be seen as associated with a rebel nation and particularly with a militant sect. Mark wrote his gospel deliberately to depict it as anodyne.

Essenes fought bitterly in the Jewish War, a war that they considered a holy war against the men of darkness, and any scholarly consideration has to take this irrefutable fact of the first century into account. Bent Scholar quotes F J Murphy as properly insisting:

Any reconstruction that does not see Jesus within first century Jewish society is unacceptable.

It is unacceptable to ignore the huge tensions in Jewish society that led up to that ferocious war, and their effects upon the embryonic Christian religion that was rooted in a hated nation.

A glimmer enters the dark recesses of Bent Scholar’s partiality. Jesus was closer to the village Essenes than to the monastic ones.

Jesus was desperately trying to convert the sinners of Israel, expecting ha-Megiddo at any minute. What has come to us of his attempt has come from some of those converts. He was a professional Essene, we would say today, but preaching to the masses. He did not try to explain to them the finer points of theology. His object was to have them repent and be ritually purified by baptism, ready for God’s Appointed Time. So, the people who told us the story were more like village Essenes. For all we know, earlier Essenes had thought the big one was coming and had made recruits before and nothing happened. The repentant converts might well have formed themselves into the body of lay-Essenes of Palestine. We don’t know, but the objective of Jesus as the head of the Essene Church was exactly what Christians have always said. Bent Scholar tells us himself:

He moves and begins to call Jews to follow him and restore the Covenant loyalty of Israel.

Bent Scholar fails to comprehend the urgency of it all—God’s Appointed Time is here—and the fact that, if God sent Jesus, he sent him as head of the Essenes! The consensoids cannot even let these possibilities enter their heads, but they are virtually the complete explanation of the differences between the Essenes of the Scrolls and the Essenism of Jesus. Let them think the unthinkable. Jesus was an Essene and try to explain the differences from:

• the urgency of his situation
• the desire of gentile Christians to obscure the truth
• the possibility that sufficient is missing from both sets of records, or has been sufficiently obscured, that small irreconcilable differences might still remain.

What appears will be an overwhelming argument for Jesus as a man of his place and time.

Bent Scholar, expert as he is, choses to try to distinguish Jesus from Christians in what follows. It is absurd to anyone rational. All we know about Jesus has been filtered through the beliefs of a Church at least forty years old when the first gospel was written and twice that age when Christians tried to improve it. It is useful for Bent Scholar to do this because he can ignore many signs of Essenism in the early church as importations when he wants to suggest that Jesus was not influenced by Essenism.

This ignorant non-scholar, drawing on the scholarly work of scholars but not their ludicrously childish attitudes or their piously distorted faith-conditioned opinions, maintains that Jesus can be thoroughly understood. We only need to read the gospels with some insight and empathy for the people and the time and the story can be reconstructed with some veracity.

I know full well that this will be ignored by the Christians and probably by the Jews too, but it is much more likely to be true than infantile and unhistorical beliefs about demi-gods and miracles.

Jesus and the Essenes
Agreed Similarities

Both Jesus and the Essenes believed in the traditional God of Second Temple Judaism

For all Jews who were not apostates, Yehouah was considered the Most High God as the creator of the universe (Mk 10:18; 12:29, 32; 13:19; 1QS 3:15-20). This belief is always described as monotheistic, but it is hard to know what it means since the Hebrew God has an enemy who is just as powerful, judging by his inability to subdue him, he has his own lesser gods as messengers and lackeys (angels) and they all have to contend with the lackeys of his enemy (demons). At the same time, various humans like Moses, Enoch, the Essene and Christian saints and Jesus can take on god-like qualities, although only Jesus officially becomes one.

Both Jesus and the Essenes believed in a powerful enemy of God, the Evil One

He was called Satan by the New Testament writers and Belial by the New Covenanters. God, being all-powerful, would eventually win the struggle, although what reason he could possibly have for not ending it immediately thereby saving a lot of pain is not apparent. Jesus actually never explicitly says Satan will be defeated but the sectarians do. The nearest is Mark 3:26 when he says Satan would have an end, if he is divided, and Luke 10:18 where Jesus had a vision of Satan falling from heaven like lightning. Nevertheless, the gist of the kingdom parables is that evil will be defeated in order to create the kingdom of God. All of this is code for the defeat of the Romans and the establishment ofa theocracy in Israel.

Both Jesus and the Essenes believed in the Torah or Law of Moses

It was the will of God gifted to mankind and which they devoted themselves to, absolutely. Not even Christian scholars try to pretend any more that Jesus had abrogated the Torah.

Both Jesus and the Essenes believed in the Jewish scriptures

They particularly believed the Torah, but also the Prophets as their holy guide to behaviour and expectations. Few practising Jews other than the Sadducees would have demured, the Sadducees, however, accepting only the Torah. The big question here is, “What were the Jewish scriptures in the first century?”. The Jewish canon was not set until later by the Rabbis whose outlook was that of the Pharisees. It is quite plain that the Essenes regarded 1 Enoch, Jubilees, Tobit, the Testament of Levi and the Testament of Naphtali all as “scripture”. Jesus seems only to quote from the canonical Old Testament, but some of the epistles quote other works.

Both Jesus and the Essenes had the same particular books of scripture as favourites, Deuteronomy, Isaiah and Psalms

If this could be shown with some certainty is would be powerful confirmation that Jesus was an Essene, but the Christians will give thanks that we have such an incomplete record of what Jesus said that a proper assessment will be impossible. Our record of Essene practices are also, of course, highly incomplete, but at least what we have is probably their own. What we have about Jesus has been highly coloured by the gentile bishops.

Both Jesus and the Essenes believed in the importance of Isaiah 40:3

A voice crying, In the wilderness, prepare ye the way of the Lord.

Jesus’s followers wrote this into the gospels, saying it meant John the Baptist. Oddly, John baptised in places that could not have been wilderness themselves because there was fresh water available—oases or the Jordan river, albeit often surrounded by wilderness, whereas Qumran and its caves were unquestionably wilderness and the sectaries had to build elaborate channels and cisterns to capture the seasonal rains.

This passage in Isaiah was so important to the Essenes that in their copies of the text of Isaiah they lifted it out of its context, effectively boxing it out, as we might do in a book today. Equally, it is written in the core of their own rules, the Community Rule (1QS 8:13-14). It appears in the third verse of the earliest Christian gospel, the first being the book’s original title, and the next introducing the prophecy of God’s messiah, although Christians pretend it is the messiah’s messenger, John the Baptist. Of the myriads of verses in the Jewish scriptures, Christians could have chosen to begin their own gospel, they chose the very verse that defined the place and purpose of the Essene community. If Jesus was not an Essene, do not the Christians have to admit that the Holy Ghost was doing its best to make him look like one? Bent Scholar urges us to “ponder” whether Jesus’s followers might have been influenced by the Essenes!

Both Jesus and the Essenes believed in the institution of a New Covenant

In the synoptic gospels, the Last Supper is where Jesus starts this New Covenant (Lk 22:20 and some manuscripts of Mark and Matthew) or Covenant (Mk 14:24; Mt 26:28). It is noteworthy that even when “new” is omitted by the manuscripts, the reading becomes “the” Covenant, implying that it was a covenant that they all already knew about and not really one that was newly instituted then. In short, it was the New Covenant of the Essenes, one that was “new” relative to the Old Covenants and for the Essenes when they founded it but not “new” at the Last Supper. The Qumran sectarians called themselves the New Covenanters, entering into the New Covenant when they joined ((CD 6:19) and regarding their community as the Everlasting Covenant (1QS 3:16).

Of course, the idea of a New Covenant comes from Jeremiah 31:31-34 where the prophet speaks of a new covenant which God writes on men’s hearts. The Essenes were the people who developed the idea of a New Covenant into a living community of New Covenanters long before the putative Last Supper. Yet Bent Scholar again “ponders” whether Jesus was influenced by the Essenes. Fatuously, he concludes it unlikely because this passage influenced many New Testament writers, proving that it was a popular idea at the time.

This is scholarship? The New Testament writers he refers to were, amazingly, all Christians and therefore all New Covenanters, if that is what Jesus was. The very word translated “Testament” in New Testament can equally be translated as “Covenant”, and in the light of the Scrolls, one might conclude it should be translated as “Covenant”. If Jeremiah’s passage was popular at the time it was because the Essenes made it popular and though there was no copyright law in the Torah, it seems unlikely that anyone could come along, take all the main doctrines of another group and pretend to be something else. The Christians were only able to do it because they took Essene doctrines into the Roman Empire and subsequently the true Essenes were wiped out in revolutionary defeats by the Romans.

Both Jesus and the Essenes called themselves the Poor

In the sermon to the multitude, in Matthew 5:3ff and Luke 6:20f, the Poor are offered the kingdom of God—or heaven. In Matthew, they are even called the “Poor in Spirit”, not those suffering from depression but those with the Spirit of Poorness—they see a spiritual benefit in poverty. This expression baffled everyone until it was found in the War Scoll (1QM 14:7). In the War Scroll the Poor win the cosmic battle at God’s intervention. Bent Scholar acknowledges the “uniqueness” of the term “the Poor Ones” and so thinks it conceivable that Jesus “inherited” it from the Essenes. In fact, this is an astonishing and quite conclusive agreement especially since Paul the apostle to the gentiles collected money for the Poor Ones in Jerusalem, the Jerusalem Church, and the Jewish Christians written of by the Church Fathers as heretics from Christianity called themselves the Poor Ones or Ebionim.

Jesus and the Essenes
Agreed Similarities II

Both Jesus and the Essenes held their property in common

Judas was in charge of a money bag (Jn 12:6; 13:29) from which the followers of Jesus bought their needs. Though Jesus was called a carpenter, he never does any work in the gospels. He and his group seem to travel around while getting invisible support. In Acts 2:44, the Nazarenes held everything in common and to withhold from the common purse was a mortal crime. The Essenes held all they had in a common pool (1QS 6:22) with a bursar in charge. They provided succour to other travellinhg Essenes, so that no one needed anything except a staff when they travelled.

Both Jesus and the Essenes believed in a cosmic battle between good and evil

The forces of good are angels and the forces of evil are demons. Bent Scholar tries to deflect us by saying that many Jews accepted this in the first century, which is true, but he cites as evidence the very books that the Essenes themselves held dear, but that were rejected by the Rabbis when they selected the Jewish canon. Again, therefore, sharing a doctrine of cosmic battle is evidence of Jesus and the Essenes having common beliefs. By itself it would be inconclusive but, it cannot be divorced from everything else they have in common.

Both Jesus and the Essenes expected the present age to end

Bent Scholar for once gets sensible, but he still cannot reach a conclusion. Jesus was closer to the End Time than the Essenes because he spoke of the “hour” whereas the Essenes spoke of the “last days”. He cites:

• Mark 13:32 where Jesus warns his disciples that no one knows the day or the hour when heaven and earth will pass away
• Matthew 24:44 which is part of a similar warning for them to watch for the day (Mt 24:42) or the hour (Mt 24:44)
• Matthew 26:40 when Jesus is plainly expecting God’s miracles at any moment and is berating the weary trio because they could not watch with him for an hour
• Luke 12:40, where Jesus is not really saying that the son of man is due in an hour but simply that they would not know which hour he would come—it could be anytime
• John 4:23; 5:25,28 are other references simply to the hour of the event, not that it is expected in an hour, but showing that there was some urgency about it all—he was counting in hours.

If you are waiting for a momentous event, like the birth of a child, say, you begin by calculating in months, then weeks, then days, then hours. If Jesus was thinking in terms of hours rather than days, it does not distinguish him from the Essenes who thought in terms of days. He is simply an Essene who thought himself closer to the event than the ones writing in the Scrolls. If the end of the world could be prophesied, eventually some prophet will be talking in terms of hours. But his beliefs are no different from those that went before. Jesus did expect the world to end while he watched in Gethsemane (Mt 26:40), but it didn’t.

Both Jesus and the Essenes believed in prophecy

Once again this is a correspondence of major importance, because the other important Jewish parties believed that the succession of prophets had been lost (Josephus, Against Apion), so even if a prophet appeared, no one would know whether he was genuine or a faker. However, there was a scriptural test (Deut 18:18-22) which is simply that a prophet is false if his prophecies are wrong. Sadducees and Pharisees evidently had decided that they had seen enough wrong prophets for the whole profession of prophecy to have been thoroughly discredited, but Essenes still valued prophecy and, if 4Q375 is anything to go by, they had a ceremonial test for it.

The Righteous Teacher was a prophet to whom had been revealed the mysteries of the Last Days (1QpHab 7:4-8). Was Jesus a prophet? All Christians would say he was, and here the Moslems would agree. What then did he prophesy? Not much except his own death, according to the gospels and, since Jesus was dead when the gospels were written, it wasn’t hard for the evangelists to get correct. He did get one important prophecy wrong! He said the kingdom of God would appear within a generation. The start of the kingdom of God is, of course, the end of the present time and the beginning of a new one. In short, it is the same eschatological moment in time that interested the Essenes. So, by the criterion of Deuteronomy, Jesus was a false prophet! In my view, he knew this and provided for his own dispatch should his prophesy fail (The Hidden Jesus) but in fact was arrested first.

Really, for anyone impartial, the case is already answered—Jesus was an Essene who turned out to be a false prophet. Not so for the Christian. There is room for “further exploration”.

Both Jesus and the Essenes regarded God as a king ruling a kingdom

Both Jesus and the Essenes believed in the expression Lord of heaven and earth (Mt 11:25; Lk 10:21). Otherwise unsuspected in Palestine writings, it has appeared in the Genesis Apocryphon (1QapGen 22:16,21).

God was a king of heaven and earth (Mt 11:25; Lk 10:21, where Jesus even uses the introductory formula,”I thank thee, O Lord” used in the Thanksgiving Hymns), and they prayed that God’s will be done in earth. In the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice (4Q400-407), God is continually called a king. Anyone reading a translation of the Scrolls meeting the phrase “God’s dominion” can be sure that in the New Testament it would have appeared as “the kingom of God”.

Bent Scholar considers this like the expression the “Poor Ones”. Jesus, “could well have discussed” the kingdom of God with the Essenes. Is this hilarious or sad?

Both the Essenes and Jesus expected an earthly messiah

Indeed, the Essenes expected two messiahs, a priestly messiah and a kingly messiah. Jesus is mainly seen as a kingly messiah, being a supposed son of David, but Luke tries to show him as a descendent of priests through Mary. Bent Scholar often refuses to accept what is written by the gospel writers if the words are not attributed to Jesus, again a stupid, certainly far from scholarly, procedure. None of the words were written by Jesus. All of the gospels were written by his followers. To imagine that there is some spurious validity in the words of Jesus repeated in more than one gospel is nonsense.

Both Jesus and the Essenes revered the Holy City of Jerusalem but despised the froward priests of its temple

The Essenes only made the minimum contribution to the temple required by law (All-DSS 164), a half shekel once in a lifetime, but Jesus is depicted paying the tax, in Matthew. In fact, the Christian interpretation of this incident in Matthew is diametrically wrong (The Hidden Jesus). Some Essenes did attend the temple at certain times as Josephus attests (Josephus, Antiquities), however, the assumption that Jesus is simply going to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover in the gospels on the only occasion he definitely goes there, is silly. Essentially, the gospels depicts Jesus as having nothing to do with the defiled temple until he cleanses it.

Both Jesus and the Essenes saw God’s people, the Jews, as being sinful and in need of God’s forgiveness and were sure God would grant it

It was a general tenet of Judaism that God was merciful to those who tried to live by His law, even if they stumbled, but would burn up the wicked. Essenes considered that flesh and blood people were all wicked, and only God was perfect and righteous, but that God was merciful to those who sought righteousness, and pardoned their sins (1QS 11:12-14). Though Christians have taken it that any sinner would be forgiven by God, this was never the belief of either Jesus or the Essenes.

Essenes were the “children of God’s truth” and they were the ones who God would forgive—the point being that they were trying to be righteous. John the Baptist and Jesus both wanted people to repent of their wickedness to obtain God’s acceptance. Without sincere repentance they were not going to be forgiven. In Mark 3:28-29, the “sons of men” referred to were his suppoerters whom he was addressing, not any riff-raff. Note that a “son of man” is simply a man, not a messiah! Admittedly, God was almighty and could do what he wanted, which is why forgiveness was thought by both groups as God’s gift, but neither Jesus or the Essenes thought God was capricious. God was just, and believers of either sect could be certain He would forgive all deserving people. Neither Jesus nor the Essenes were concerned about gentiles—a feature added to Christianity when it entered the gentile world, and not based on any message of Jesus.

Both Jesus and the Essenes put especial emphasis on prayer

Sometimes Jesus prayed all night (Lk 6:12), and the Essene Master apparently almost continuously (1QS 10:10, 13-16).

Both Jesus and the Essenes considered sacrifice in the temple of no importance

Their aim was inward purity and devotion to God and righteousness (Mk 12:33-34; 1QS 9:4-5).

Both Jesus and the Essenes, and John the Baptist, emphasised the purifying power of water

In the fourth gospel Jesus even identifies water with eternal life—salvation. Jesus began his career baptising (Jn 3:22; 4:1—the parenthesis in 4:2 being a blatant insertion intended to distinguish Jesus from John, though his message in Mark 1:15 was also the same as John’s in Mark 1:4). Christians like to find a marked difference here between the Essenes whose lustrations were repeated and the followers of Jesus and the Baptist for whom baptism was a single act. As usual, they deliberately put their microscopes to their blind eye. Baptism was an expedient of urgency.

Both Jesus and the Essenes condemned divorce

This is a major identification of Jesus and the Essenes. A Jew was permitted to divorce his wife, according to the Mosaic law (Deut 24:1) simply by writing a bill of divorce. Jesus taught divorce was not allowed (Mk 10:2-9). The Damascus Rule criticises the Pharisees for allowing remarriage while “the first wife was alive”, making a man into a double fornicator. The rule forbids polygamy and divorce. The Essenes cite “Male and female, created he them” (Gen 1:27) as scriptural authority, the very passage quoted by Jesus (Mk 10:6). Both Jesus and the Essenes support this, their main authority, with others, different in each case, but the coincidence of the principle argument is devastating. Bent Scholar, therefore, does not use this item but choses a less convincing one from the Temple Scroll that applied apparently only to the king anyway. Here we have in a nation which had clearly laid out in its law a permit for divorce, yet two groups, unconnected, Christians try to argue, used the same scriptural authority to deny the common practice. This is quite beyond coincidence.

Both Jesus and the Essenes used the terms “Sons of Light”—no one else did in Palestine at the time

Once again, Bent Scholar believes he can tell what Jesus believed solely from what he is reported to have said. He said nothing much about Sons of Light or Sons of Darkness, yet his followers were fond of this light and darkness metaphor. Was it another of the strange coincidences that beset Christianity? Bent Scholar will tell us that Essenes who joined the Christian movement introduced it after the crucifixion. Perhaps so, or the Master introduced it himself and that is why his followers used it. The Christian explanation is special pleading to keep their God unique. It is not scholarship.

Bent denies that Jesus was a dualist. Why then did he believe that God had a most dangerous enemy in Satan, the God of Evil, who aimed to stop Yehouah in everything he did? The central pivot of dualism is this conflict, and Christianity is dualistic until this day. If the reply is, “Good will eventually win with God on its side”, then Christian dualism differs not a whit from Essene dualism and Persian dualism.

The expression “Sons of Light” is common in the Scrolls (1QS 3:3) and appears (Lk 16:8) on Jesus’s tongue in the parable of the Unjust Steward in Luke 16:1-9:

There was a certain rich man, which had a steward, and the same was accused unto him that he had wasted his goods. And he called him, and said unto him, How is it that I hear this of thee? Give an account of thy stewardship, for thou mayest be no longer steward. Then the steward said within himself, What shall I do? For my lord taketh away from me the stewardship. I cannot dig, to beg I am ashamed. I am resolved what to do, that, when I am put out of the stewardship, they may receive me into their houses. So he called every one of his lord’s debtors unto him, and said unto the first, How much owest thou unto my lord? And he said, An hundred measures of oil. And he said unto him, Take thy bill, and sit down quickly, and write fifty. Then said he to another, And how much owest thou? And he said, An hundred measures of wheat. And he said unto him, Take thy bill, and write fourscore. And the lord commended the unjust steward, because he had done wisely. For the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light. And I say unto you, Make to yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness, that, when ye fail, they may receive you into everlasting habitations.

It seems disparaging. Luke has Jesus saying that anyone of this world is wiser than the sons of light. If the Sons of Light meant the Essenes, Jesus evidently did not think much of them and cannot have been one of them.

The parable has always been a difficult one for Christians to explain—it seems to commend dishonesty, and the conclusion seems to say be friendly with thieves as an insurance policy. Luke obviously had the same trouble understanding the parable as later clerics. A Jewish friend of Bent Scholar seems to think the parable is meant to run down the Children (Sons) of Light as stupid, which would require the followers of Jesus to be identified with the crooked Children of this World in their generation. On this basis, the silly conclusion by Luke is correct. Naturally, it is not. A close look at the parable shows it to be entirely in the line of the teaching of Jesus and the Essenes.

Jesus and the Essenes were The Poor who could not have been admiring grasping people or their servants who handled their affairs for them. What then had the steward done that Jesus might commend? He had been clever in devising a way of providing for himself in the unknown circumstances that would arise when he was sacked. The steward and his employer were the children of this world, as ought to be plain. This world and its generation were, for Essenes and for Jesus, wicked. The children of it therefore behave in the parable as might be expected of them. Yet they are cleverer than the Children of Light, the name that everywhere it appears means the Essenes. Plainly, it is a warning to the Children of Light to be smarter. Jesus is saying that even the sinners of this wicked world look to their future and pursue it with guile. The Children of Light ought to take a leaf out of their book in this respect. They too should prepare for the future, the coming kingdom, by being on their guard to be constantly righteous, making sure they are not deflected from their goal by the wicked of the world. Note a similar warning in Matthew 10:16:

Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves. Be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.

The context of both gospels when these instances occur is that of Jesus explaining the kingdom, and who God would welcome. The world was soon to end. The only future there was was that in the kingdom of God. The sinners would have no future, unless it was one of hell fire. But the kingdom would come when God was ready. There was time to be guileless and be tempted in this world, and at that instance, the kingdom might come, with fearful consequences just for one slip. The message to the Children of Light was to be cleverer than the Children of this World. So, Children or Sons of Light meant those expecting the kingdom—the followers of Jesus and the Essenes. The Bent Scholarly consensus are prevaricating yet again.

The followers of Jesus also said they followed “the Way”, notably in Acts. Bent Scholar has to concede that this expression was highly likely to have come from the Essenes but prefers to believe it was the gullible followers of Jesus who took up Essene terminology. We simply do not know what Jesus called his followers, except disciples or Children of Light! But since the church from early times tried to make out it was the result of a revelation of God, it had extremely good motives for excising all references to the predecessors of Jesus in the gospels. Fortunately for truth, they were inept and have left fossils of the Essenes throughout.

Both Christians and the Essenes had a charismatic leader, Jesus and the Righteous Teacher

From the earliest days of Scroll research, Christians have been defensive about the Essene Righteous Teacher as the model upon which Jesus was built, if not Jesus himself, they had such similar characteristics and history. A Righteous Teacher led the sectaries into the wilderness in protest at the corruption of the Jerusalem Temple, but this seems to have been long before Jesus. Unless there has been some sort of confusion of chronology, the two could not be identified. What is not certain is whether the leader of the Essenes, their Master or Mebaqqer, always held the honorific title of Righteous Teacher. The Essene leader was chosen because he behaved like their founder. If so, Jesus might well have been a Righteous Teacher, one among many, though not the Righteous Teacher—the founder of the sect.

Both Jesus and the Essenes did not marry

Jews had been commanded by God to be fruitful and multiply the seed of Adam (Gen 1:28). The only celibate party known in first century Judaism were the Essenes. Would a devout man like Jesus have defied God’s commandment to have children unless he had the authority of a devout community? The Essenes were the Elect, God’s warriors in the cosmic battle to come. They had been forbidden to join God’s army if they had wife (Deut 24:5) and so they remained celibate. The Essenes justified this by regarding women as temptresses. In the passage in Matthew 19:11-12, Bent Scholar asserts, with no argument, that Jesus was not praising celibacy, but might have been praising the Essenes for their celibacy. So, here Jesus is just making an observation? Nonsense, he concludes saying, “There are eunuchs which made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. He that is able to recieve it, let him receive it.” Anyone who cannot see that this is a recommendation of chastity does not deserve to be considered a scholar.

Both Jesus and the Essenes believed there was a power called the Holy Spirit

Bent Scholar admits at the outset that Jesus may have had this from the Essenes. The reason is that it is not a concept important in the Jewish scriptures, where it occurs only twice (Ps 51:11; Isa 63:10-11). Yet it appears almost a hundred times in the New Testament and frequently in the Scrolls. In both writings, it has the same personality, that of an entity separate from God. It is quite impossible to believe that the identical concept could have arisen indepnedently in the same community. It is not a strong concept for the Rabbis who believed it was associated with the Prophets and ceased when prophecy ceased, so it cannot have been simply a popular fad of the time. It is proof that the Christians were Essenes. The Essenes developed the idea when they left Jerusalem and the temple for the wilderness believing that they had God’s commission to uphold the true second-temple tradition. God was always with his people in the years in the wilderness with Moses, though he had no “house” to live in, and the outcast Essenes believed the Shekinah or Presence of God went with them. This was the meaning of the Holy Spirit in Isaiah and the Essenes grasped it and personified it as the Will of God.

Both Jesus and the Essenes believed in the guidance of the Holy Spirit in reading the scriptures

Neither was concerned about interpreting the scriptures in peculiar ways—guided by the Holy Ghost! Both felt they had the secrets of correct interpretation—prophecy, in its correct Jewish sense. Christians call it “revelation”, the Qumran sectaries tended to call it “knowledge of the mysteries of God” (1QS 11:3-4,15-17). Both concluded that God’s promises to Israel were about to be fulfilled in the end of the age, the End Time or Last Days (1QSa 1:1; Jn 6:39f). Essenes granted guidance by the Holy Ghost is a severe blow to Christians who thought it reserved its incompetence for them. They wriggle visibly trying to find weedling ways out.

He [Jesus] offered a new way of reading the Torah against the background of specific ideas of the Qumran Community.

Stegemann

Jesus may have been influenced by Essene exegesis, but if so he reshaped it in the light of his own claims of direct revelation,

and

Any Essene exegetical influence on Jesus would have been reshaped creatively by his own revelatory experiences and claims and understanding of his mission.

John Charlesworth

Yes, this is the scholarship of the same Professor Bent Scholar who is disparaging about writers who are not scholars!

Jesus and the Essenes
Supposed Differences

Jesus’s group was open while the Essenes were exclusive

Jesus taught publicly while the Essene teachings were secret. Bent Scholar considers this a major difference between the two societies, yet it is simply explained, and in a way that is Christian. Jesus and John the Baptist, as Essenes thought the Last Days were upon them. What were Essenes to do when they were convinced the Last Days were not just a theoretical concept in their arcane interpretations but had actually arrived? The portions of the book called by Vermes, the Messianic Rule (1QSa) gives the precise answer. All Israel had to be summoned to those offering atonement for the Land—the Promised Land, the country of Israel—and told the precepts of the Covenant! The Essenes would become the salvation of Israel. Plainly Jesus and John the Baptist were following this rule and summoning All Israel. All Israel meant all Jews including sinners and apostates. As for secrecy, Jesus deliberately taught in parables, remember? you Christians.

Jesus taught love while the Essenes taught hatred

Bigoted as cardinals to a man, they cannot see that the two groups were identical. It is simply that Jesus addressed his message only to Jews and, in the words attributed to him, did not succinctly express hatred of gentiles while the Essenes did. Both believed in turning the other cheek to enemies, as long as they were Jews. Bent Scholar quotes Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount (Mt 5:44), a composed speech. Jesus was only addressing Jews because he tells them he came to fulfil the law and the prophets—gentiles had no knowledge of these matters and were not subject to them. So, when he says love your enemies, he meant love your Jewish enemies because you are Jews and hope to be saved. He did not mean “love your gentile enemies” because he plainly does not love them. He tells the Syro-Phoenican woman he would not throw the children’s bread (salvation) to the dogs (gentiles).

This outlook is exactly that of the Essenes in the Last Days. They hated the wicked and kept separated from them but accepted that God had chosen the Jewish people, and they had God’s promise of salvation when the time came—they had to be reminded, even though normally Essenes were extremely secretive. Bent Scholar blithely ignores the Messianic Rule and quotes the everyday rules that the New Covenanters lived by in the Community Rule. No one denies that Essenes normally separated themselves from the ungodly. Yes, and they prayed that God would destroy the followers of the Devil. Do Christians differ? The wicked will burn in everlasting torture in hell, according to them. What is the difference? It is just what Jesus taught, yet Bent Scholar tries to pick it out as a difference.

Bent Scholar harps on about the Sermon on the Mount pretending that it showed a lenient attitude by Jesus to Romans, presumably because Jesus ’s message was for gentiles too. It is nonsense. It is pure expediency. His followers were in no position to refuse a Roman who made him carry his backpack. If it meant anything, it simply meant, “Don’t do anything silly. Bide your time”. A simple understanding of the situation of the Jews and Jesus’s expectations explains it as not inviting premature trouble, not as being extra matey with fascistic oppressors. Bent Scholar highlights a similar situation in the writings of Philo, who claimed that the Essenes were pacific, possessing no weapons. For that matter, Josephus also said Essenes were peaceful.

Does any pattern occur to Bent Scholar or his consensoids? No? Then let me suggest that all these writers and the Christian ones were being careful so as not to invite Roman retribution on the Essenes, or, in the case of Christian writers themselves, because they were still close enough to be regarded by the Roman authorities as the same—see Acts, where a centurion considered Paul a seditionist.

Bent Scholar favours the interpretation that those who “hate their enemies” (Mt 5:43) were the Essenes. It is surely so, but the explanation is the same. The Essenes in normal times hated their apostate and sinning fellow nationals. I conjecture that the Sermon in Matthew is exactly that mentioned in the Messianic Rule when the precepts and statutes of the Covenant are read to the Called of Israel. Jesus is saying that no Essene should any longer hate the sinners and publicans but should love them as fellow Jews of God’s promise who, if repentant, might be with them in Paradise in a few days time. He is certainly not referring to gentiles who had to approach God’s kingdom cap-in-hand.

In Matthew 5:46, Jesus even says that merely loving those who love you back is no better than publicans—Jewish collaborators—who do the same. He doesn’t say no better than gentiles, who do the same, showing that he speaks only of Jews. In the next verse he mentions gentiles but quite disparagingly, even gentiles will say, “Hello”! Jesus had no thoughts of loving gentiles, despite Christian distortions. No Jew will have thought it wrong to hate gentiles. Leviticus (19:18) had the rule, “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thy self”, but gentiles were not the neighbours of the Israelites. In Leviticus, God had just thrown out the Canaanites, with their idolatrous habits, that He hated, or abhorred. If God hated or abhorred them, why shouldn’t His people?

Jesus was not concerned with ritual purity and taboos but Essenes were

Bent Scholar immediately tells us that Jesus declared all foods clean (Mk 7:19) when no honest “scholar” will deny that it is a patent interpolation, irreconcilable with Acts of the Apostles where the apostles know nothing about their Master’s famous declaration. In the section of Mark Bent Scholar quotes (Mk 7:1-8;14-23), Jesus appears to be defying the cleanliness taboos of the Jews, but his own explanation proves that they were pursued, presumably by Herod, and he was justifying an expediency, not redefining law.

In contrast, Essenes were obsessive about purity as the Scrolls show extensively. The trouble is that once more, the changed circumstances are not considered. These were the Last Days when God’s soldiers, His Elect, the Essenes, would have to engage the sons of Darkness, the Romans, and their Jewish helpers. The rules of the normal communities did not apply, and Jesus explains it in Mark. Read it, you scholars! Jesus is telling men fleeing their enemies, “Don’t bother about cleanliness and food taboos as long as you are pure in heart”. It is not a permanent abrogation of the law but a practical expedient. Some of his followers were concerned that they were unable to practise the law in the difficult circumstances of being fugitives. Jesus tells them that, when such problems arise, God’s righteous do not have need to worry, as long as they stay pure of heart. The scriptural examples he choses to explain his pragmatic decision show the circumstances the Nazarenes were in (MAG-THJ 192).

Bent Scholar cites a pseudepigraphic psalm but it fails to illustrate his point. The psalm says that God would test all and declare the Elect pure but reject the impure hated ones. That is exactly what Jesus was saying to his men because they had been selected already as the pure ones. In the circumstances, but not in general, the need for strict cleaving to the law was lifted.

Bent Scholar asserts, with no reasons, that Essenes would have been appalled by Jesus’s exhortations for people to tear out eyes and limbs (Mk 9:42-47) lest they lead to sin. My own guess is that this is part of an Essene litany akin to those described in the Community Rule. The sequence is certainly bizarre and is conducted as call and response. What views do the “scholars” have? If ever this should turn up in a fragment, they would simply say it had been inserted by an ex-Essene follower. Scholarship? If Bent Scholar is correct that purity demanded stone vessels not pottery ones then the specification of stone vessels in John 2:6 suggests that Jesus’s followers at Cana were sticklers for purity, not grubbers in filth, as Christians were for centuries in the mistaken belief that dirt was godly.

Jesus associated with the unclean but for Essenes it was anathema

Either Bent Scholar is a fool or he is dishonest. Most preaching Christians are one or the other. Since he is a self-proclaimed scholar we cannot assume he is a fool. He cites 4Q174 as proof that the Qumran community hated the unclean. The fragment is talking about the perfect unpolluted sanctuary that God would build for His people in the Last Days. It is heaven on earth. The Essenes, as many of their hymns show were not arrogant, they were extremely humble, knowing that however hard they tried, it would take God to make perfection on earth. Nevertheless, they saw it as their destiny to start to make the world a bit more like heaven and eventually, they thought heaven and earth would merge. So, they had to try to be as pure as they could in anticipation of heaven.

It did not mean that when they thought the kingdom was nigh, they would not try to save others of the House of Israel. That was their purpose. Indeed, the Qumran Essenes considered people not places as holy. The Holy Spirit resided in the community not in an empty room in the temple. When John’s gospel says that Jesus spoke of the temple of his body, it is a clever way of avoiding the charge of threatening to destroy the temple, but it draws upon the Essene idea that people not buildings are holy. Nor did the Essenes keep themselves isolated in ghettoes as, Bent Scholar claims. They explicitly provide for the accommodation of travellers and their provisions are just those that Jesus expects when he sends out his disciples.

Jesus associated with gentiles but for Essenes it was anathema

Bent Scholar says that Jesus even commended the faith of a centurion, a Roman. The story is quite at odds with Jesus’s command to his disciples only to go to the lost sheep of the House of Israel (Jews), which even Bent Scholar does not dispute as genuine. It is the most substantial of the so-called minor agreements between Matthew and Luke and is altogether so strange few will question it as a late addition to both gospels. In one of his ubiquitous footnotes, Bent Scholar recognises that Jesus may not have included gentiles in his call, so why should he have gone around commending them? In particular, why would he have commended one of the occupying soldiers of an unwanted foreign invader?

And how does this centurion, the equivalent of a modern major, approach Jesus, a despised native of a disgusting colony? “Beseeching him!” Whoever writes it sees it as unconvincing and has the officer giving his own explanation that he is used to giving orders. Quite. And all this for what? His batman! It is farcical. Incidentally, the servant had palsy, showing it is copied from the miracle of the paralysed man in Mark. Palsy or paralysis is Essene code for an apostate from the law of Moses, so the servant must have been a Jew.

Bent Scholar says the Essenes had strict rules which prohibited any commerce with gentiles when their rules were precisely the opposite in purpose, to allow commerce, by strict regulation, between the righteous and the Sons of Darkness. The internal evidence of the documents and the known exile of the Jews in Babylonia, together with the existence in Mesopotamia for over a thousand years of a sect closely akin to the Essenes, the Qaraites, suggests that the sect might have been founded in exile, as an alternative, or parallel school to that of Ezra. The purpose of the Damascus Document seems to be to offer ways in which the separated Essenes could live alongside foreigners in an acceptable way, without corruption or pollution. These, therefore, are not major differences, as Bent Scholar pretends, but explains how Jesus felt able in his mission to mix with unclean people while not getting neurotic about it.

Jesus mixed with women but for Essenes it was anathema

Essenes were extremely concerned to keep themselves pure but the Messianic Rule required them to summon All Israel when the time came. It meant that, despite their concern for purity, some Essenes had to take it upon themselves to summon them. The Essene absolute requirement for meekness and humility meant that the only man who could do the missionary work was the Master himself. Essene humility was perfectly expressed several times in the gospels as “the first shall be last and the last first”. It was the first therefore had to become the last. He had to humble himself and suffer the pollution of the ungodly to offer them a last chance of salvation. John the Baptist did it, then Jesus.

Bent Scholar says Jesus and the Essenes were at the opposite ends of the spectrum with regard to women. He cites Luke, the Syro-Phoenician woman and the woman from Samaria. Bent Scholar sees his image of Jesus, not the one really present, even in the gospels. In Mark’s gospel, the first one, women have no significant role. They could be removed from the story without affecting it. Later gospels import more and more women, Luke’s being the women’s gospel. It is full of women of no consequence, introduced incidentally. There is a good reason why the gentile evangelists wanted to introduce women into a story about men. The first gentile converts were predominantly women! The gospel writers increasingly pander to the need to have women in the story because the congregations were female. Roman men spent their time in all male groups worshipping Mithras. It simply would not have done for the gentile bishops to try to sell Christianity as another all male brotherhood in origin, even if they had changed the rules to admit women.

The other side of this particular coin is that the Essenes were not implacably opposed to women, any more than Christian monks are. They based themselves on scripture beginning with Eve and so they mistrusted women, but as Josephus said, they realised you had to have them for the procreation of the human race. Josephus tells us that there were two types of Essenes, those who lived apart—like the sectaries at Qumran—and those who had commerce with others on a regular but regulated basis. These were the Village Essenes, who married and even attended the polluted Temple. The chief of the Qumran sectarians was apparently the head of the whole order, so it would be absurd if he did not relate with Village Essenes, including women, if only for the purposes of grading and instruction. Women certainly visited Qumran because their graves have been found there.

Bent Scholar’s extreme case simply has no substance, and his quotation that Jesus recognised women as of equal humanity to men is sheer romance—he does not even treat his mother with respect, and is also rude to the Syro-Phoenican woman. As for the Samaritan woman, it appears in John’s gospel, a late, highly refined and historically quite untrustworthy work, and the actual relationship of Essenes and Samaritans has yet to be properly understood. It should be noted that Samaritans were a sect of Judaism, a sect disliked by the Pharisees, but possibly of some affinity with the Essenes. The situation is ambiguous, but it cannot be assumed willy-nilly that, if Jesus, were an Essene he would have had nothing to do with a Samaritan woman.

Jesus had a reputation as a wine bibber and a glutton but Essenes were ascetic

If Jesus had this reputation it is strange that his most devout followers are all killjoys. It is a reputation they forget, if it is true, and Bent Scholar only devotes four lines to it. It is, of course nonsense and built really upon very little evidence (Mt 11:19; Lk 7:34). This single passage defines Jesus as a glutton and drunkard out of his own mouth. Plainly, it is a distortion of the Eucharistic meals which Jesus offered his converts, the messianic meal of the Essenes.

Based on the wedding feast at Cana, Bent Scholar also says Jesus loved a good party—presumably because he used his god-given powers to make himself and his pals twelve firkins of wine out of water. Could anything be more puerile? Essenes used symbolic wine called “New Wine” in their rituals. Really it was blessed water. That was the miracle—blessing the water and thereby making it into “New Wine”—a miracle that Essenes probably did on a daily basis. It is the origin of the Eucharistic wine of the Christian churches, and its sacramental holy water.

Essenes were not interested in missionary work but Jesus was

The Messianic Rule tells the sectaries that All Israel had to be summoned. How can anyone summon anyone else without going out to tell them? This part of the rule for the Last Days shows conclusively that the Essenes were interested in getting converts even if it was only in the few months before the destruction of the world. In fact, the exhortation in the Damascus Rule is quite analogous to the Sermon on the Mount (CD 2-6), and obviously served the same purpose. It was an address to new recruits. If we were to believe the classic authors alone, the Essenes only replenished their numbers from misfits fed up with the world. There might have been quite a lot of them but even they probably needed a recruiting sergeant.

Bent Scholar tries a pretty crude distraction by saying that the Essenes only recruited priests—in the early days. The point is that Jesus and his followers thought they were going to be the last of the righteous in this corrupt world. Whatever the first Essenes did is totally irrelevant. It seems that B F Meyer understood the Messianic Rule, being quoted as writing that the Essenes “appealed to pious Jews to join Israel”, except that the document says All Israel, so includes impious Jews too, though they would not have been saved unless they sincerely repented and were baptised.

Almost certainly, Essenes, in normal conditions, would have been happy simply to attract people fed up with life’s vicissitudes, and the products of Essene marriage. Essenes saw their duty as a duty to God not some obsession with growth for its own sake. These, however, were not normal conditions. They had to try to persuade Jews to join the ranks of God’s army of saints. This is rather different from normal missionary work. This was the last chance saloon for God’s Chosen People. Surely this is what Christians believe except that they take Jesus to be a one off. He was. Roosevelt was the one-off President when the war began and Jesus was the one-off Nasi when the kingdom began—as he thought.

Jesus spoke simply but the Scrolls are abstruse and sometimes in code

This rather illustrates these Christian scholars’ powers of self deception. They seem quite unaware that Jesus also spoke in code called parables. His parables according to the first evangelist in chronological order, Mark, had to be deciphered to his disciples, which necessarily means they were incomprehensible to everyone who heard them. Do these “scholars” ever read their bibles?

The truth is quite evident. Judaea was an occupied country and both Jesus and the Essenes had to be circumspect. They wrote and spoke for the initiated—in the gospels, those that have ears to hear. Jesus’s code was one of allusion that Jews would understand but gentiles or thoroughly apostate Jews would not. Bent Scholar, the scholar who disparages journalists, and even calls other scholars mad or confused, doesn’t even realise that the gospel we have has been digested and interpreted several times before it got into English. That is why much of the Nazarene, or Essene, code has, actually, disappeared making the interpretation of the parables seem unnecessary. Besides that, parables have been added that are not Jesus’s parables, but merely moral stories and difficult parables have been turned into miracles. What Christians will not accept, but which is true, is that the gentile bishops deliberately interpreted pericopes about Jesus how they wanted them.

Bent Scholar is naïve enough to say that Jesus’s message was “pellucidly clear”. He probably thinks the story of Humpty Dumpty is “pellucidly clear” too. It is pellucidly clearly about a silly fat egg sitting on a wall and getting broken when he fell off. It is, isn’t it kiddies? Well, no. It is written in code. It is a parable. But it has been turned into a fairyland fantasy by Christians who found it too offensive for modern children. Originally, “the forty doctors and forty wrights couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty to rights”. Why? She was a little fat thing because she was pregnant! It was a game with a moral for young girls who had to throw themselves over backwards without showing their ankles. The Christian gospels are like this. They have been reduced to nursery tales, and the people, scholars or otherwise, who believe them in this form are thumb-sucking infants. Remember poor Humpty Dumpty when you read your bibles, you Christians. It will remind you that there is something real behind it.

On the other hand to pretend that the Scrolls are all abstruse is propaganda. Bent Scholar, recognises this in a footnote, a popular technique of his. He resolves his sins of omission by using footnotes that will save him from being totally dishonest. Here is an interesting quotation: The “Essenes wrote only for the learned and initiated in their own closed group”. A bit like Bent Scholar and his consensoids in scholarship.

Bent Scholar ends by telling us that Jesus spoke more like a Rabbi and actually quotes the Golden Rule of Hillel a member of the party Jesus was supposed to have been the enemy of, the Pharisees. Are we to believe that Jesus was a secret Pharisee? Jesus, according to Bent Scholar recommended collaboration with the Romans, just as the Pharisees did. Why don’t the Christian churches disband and invite everyone to become Jewish proselytes? Jesus was never plotted against by Pharisees because they were too cautious about what God’s intentions might have been, but they still didn’t like him. Messiahs were ten a penny and they all caused trouble. The age of prophesy was over. And the Pharisees were correct and Jesus was wrong. We still have no sight of the kingdom of God.

Jesus, not the Essenes, was famous for healing miracles

The Qumran sectaries were not interested in healing, Professor Scholar says, but he realises he is on tricky ground talking about Jesus’s miraculous healings, and has to argue that at least some seem historical. Well, they were and they weren’t. They were healings all right but not healings of physical ailments, but what all Christians should recognise them as, metaphors for spiritual healings.

The Essenes were noted by Josephus as healers and many still say the name Essene comes from a Semitic word for healer, as Bent Scholar notes in a footnote! Essenes were healers all right, like Jesus, but like him they wanted to heal the spiritual sickness of Israel, ready for entry into God’s kingdom. Nevertheless, they were noted as doctors of medicine too, using “stones and roots”, and a fragment from cave four (4QTherapeia) is part of a doctor’s report of his rounds at a hospital for guests. Presumably, like medieval monasteries, Qumran had a hospital. If it is fair to surmise that the Feast of the Renewal of the Covenant was held at Qumran, when 4000 Essenes from all over Palestine attended, a hospital would have been essential.

Nevertheless, Jesus cannot have been any more interested in the paralysed or blind than he was in the dead. He was sent to save the living. If any Jew had already died unrighteous, there was no hope for them. He says, “Let the dead bury their dead”, doubtless meaning the incorrigible sinners who were spiritually dead, but there was still hope for the living. Jesus was winning people back to Yehouah from apostasy so that they could repent of their sins and face God’s judgement with pure hearts. When he wins people with various ailments back to God, he cures a particular illness depending on the nature of the spiritual crime. The subterfuge was based on scripture and intended to fool Roman spies, who would not have known the real nature of the cure.

Jesus did not require any prolonged initiation but the Essenes needed three years

As Bent Scholar observes, Jesus invited people to give all they have to the Poor—the Essenes, as we now know—repent and be baptised. Absolutely correct. Essenes had to give all they had to the Poor, commit themselves to daily lustrations and be carefully tested for three years before they participated in the messianic meal. To judge from the gospels, Jesus gave the messianic meal straight after repentance and baptism. Why the difference in time scale? You got it, I hope! Jesus did not think there would be three years before the kingdom started.

All we know about what should be done when the situation became urgent is what is in the Messianic Rule. All Israel had to be called and have the rules read to them. Many scrolls are missing and the relevant bits are probably lost forever, but it is hard to conceive of a sect who held lustrations in such high esteem, not preserving a token of it as an abbreviated initiation. Soldiers going to war were ritually purified, and it is assured that the Essenes regarded themselves as God’s Elect—His army. The baptism of Jesus and John is the residual lustration required for the truly repentant, in preparation for God’s Day of Vengeance. To ignore the changes necessitated by the imminence of the fateful day, is to walk around with closed eyes.

Jesus had twelve apostles with three special ones but did not have a clearcut hierarchy

Bent Scholar tells us that no links between the Nazarene structure and the structure of the Qumran Council have proved fruitful. What sort of links does he mean? My guess is that like all Christians, he will accept nothing to soil the uniqueness of the Jesus movement even if, or maybe only if, it floated out of heaven on tablets of gold accompanied by a heavenly host.

Here we have two organisations with twelve lesser councillors and three senior councillors and a Chief Officer. It is quite unlike other organisational structures in Jewry at the time. The Sanhedrin had 70 members. The Priesthood had twenty four courses. Jesus followed Essene practice. The only point at issue is whether the twelve included the three or not. At Qumran, it seems the three were separate, but we have no strong evidence that the three were not separate in the Jesus band as well. No interest was shown in most of the apostles and their supposed histories are apocryphal. It is quite likely that the gentile Christians did not realise that the three were separate from the rest and therefore included them in the twelve. The implication of 1 Corinthians 15:5-7 is that there were more than twelve apostles. Peter and James saw Christ individually, but so did “the twelve” and “all the apostles”. So, the twelve were not all the apostles, and the implication is that Peter and James were special ones. Only John is omitted otherwise the evidence might look better still.

They might not even have known the names of all the twelve, but more than twelve names appear in the four gospels. Christians identify some of them as the same, but only for the purpose of harmonisation. There is no good evidence that there were not twelve besides the three. The mistake will have began with Mark, who related the experiences of Peter, according to tradition, without properly understanding them. It is also possible, even likely, that some of the twelve were killed. Only the replacement of Judas is mentioned in Acts, but that was merely to explain a bad rumour that was circulating and had nothing to do with organisation or the replacement who is not heard of again. It is not only fruitful to link the two organisational structures, no reasonable man could not do so.

Regarding hierarchy, Bent Scholar cites two verses:

If any man desire to be first, the same shall be last of all, and servant of all,

Mk 9:35

Whosoever of you will be the chiefest, shall be servant of all.

Mk 10:44

He contrasts this with the Essenes who had strata with rules for advancement and demotion and punishment. We know the rules of the Essenes in some detail because we have some of their most important rule books. We do not have the rule books of the Nazarenes, except whatever we find by accident in the gospels. The Sermon on the Mount is a set of rules and many of them match Essene ones, but we do not have a Community Rule. Nevertheless, if the post-crucifixion Christians followed the teachings of the Master, they had punishments, as we know from Acts.

Religious experts, depend upon their faithful flocks to be ignorant. Bent Scholar’s book is aimed at “all who are interested”, really meaning the interested lay-Christian, not a prelate or theologian who would have a smug chuckle. So, he does what all Christians have done since the movement left Palestine and became gentile—he is economical with the truth. We know little about Christian punishment, partly because the movement under its leader did not last long, but largely because the gentile bishops did not want to discourage people from joining by writing about punishments. The reverse is true of the Essenes. We know nothing about how they actually lived and thought, but know a great deal about their strictness. One thing is certain, the were healthy and happy. Josephus tells us they lived to ripe ages and returned from work every day, joyful.

Josephus tells us the four grades of membership remained strictly segregated and were not allowed contact for fear of spreading pollution. Once again, we are talking about the attempts by men on earth to aspire to be angels. They felt that having advanced a grade they were a step nearer heaven. Their progress should not be hampered by contact with lesser mortals. What Bent Scholar omits is that progress depended on the deepist humility, as 1Qs 5:4-6; 25-26 testifies, and many later rules forbidding anger, obstinacy, lying, insulting, bearing malice, not caring for a fellow, interrupting and slandering. Plainly, the Essenes had strict ranks, but by failing in any of these rules they would be set back or even expelled. How does this differ from the gospel saying? Though Consensoids will not accept it, the Community Rule explains precisely what Mark meant by his perverse sounding sayings. So, when Christian scholars tell us that Jesus was warning against the Essenes’ rank consciousness in these passages, they are spouting, to use an appropriate scroll word.

Jesus did not follow the solar calendar but the Essenes did

There is simply not enough evidence to call this one, but if Jesus did not, he could not have been an Essene. The trouble is that the Essenes used the solar calendar for their own festivals but must have kept the lunar one too. Otherwise they would not have been able to effect any commerce with other Jews. This means that even if there were something in the gospels, say, like the date of Passover, that proved Jesus was using the lunar calendar, it would only prove he was using it to know the date of Passover followed by the Jerusalem temple, which he would have had to know, anyway.

Certain peculiarities might suggest that Jesus used a different calendar, such as the apparent disagreement between John and the synoptics over the date of the Last Supper. Was it a Passover supper or was it the day before? When did the day start for Jesus, in the morning or as the stars came out? Most people seem to think that the day for the first Christians was morning to morning, like our own in practice. The Jewish day was evening to evening. If so, Jesus was an Essene because the Essenes seemed to start the day in the morning. In the final vigil in the Garden of Gethsemene, Jesus seemed to wait through the night, giving up as dawn approached, or at dawn, when the day ended. That would have been Essene behaviour.

Jesus wrote nothing but the Essenes wrote continuously

The terrible Day of God’s Vengeance was nigh. The time for writing anything except obituaries was over. For the next forty years, Christians, expecting Jesus to return on a cloud and begin the miracle that he himself expected in Gethsemene, wrote nothing. When people expect the world to end, they rightly conclude that putting down pernanent records is fruitless. Jesus was out there to call the Godless back to God. No Christian will disagree. He expected the world to end, within a generation, he said at first, but he plainly came to think it was a more urgent case, and eventually was captured disappointed that it did not happen when he expected it. Such men are not putting pen to paper.

It is not to say that in earlier years when Jesus was in training at the sectarian camps, he did not write, or at least copy, at lot. Some of the Scrolls discovered at Qumran might have been written by Jesus!

Jesus possessed no formal training but Essenes devoted their lives to biblical study and interpretation

Bent Scholar quotes Mark 6:2 in support of this:

And when the sabbath day was come, he began to teach in the synagogue, and many hearing him were astonished, saying, From whence hath this man these things? and what wisdom is this which is given unto him, that even such mighty works are wrought by his hands?

But the amazement of the crowds, which Bent Scholar thinks is because an ignorant man has appeared inspired by the Holy Ghost, is really because Jesus was teaching something astonishing—defiance of Rome, indeed, in the parallel passage in Luke 4:16-24, that he is the messiah! Quite apart from this, the only basis for it is the kiddies’ idea that Jesus was a simple carpenter. Yet, in the days before charlatans could get fat-cat incomes for writing crap, scholars had to earn a living. That is what the rabbis did and there is no reason to think, even if Jesus was simply a wandering teacher, that he was not trained.

Bent Scholar pretends or thinks that the question asked of Jesus in Jerusalem:

By what authority do you do these things?

simply meant, “Goodness, how did you get to know all that?” Jesus, in the gospel had just conducted a riot, breaking up legitimate traders in the temple. They were not simply asking him for his diplomas, as Bent Scholar implies. They wanted to know who gave him the right to take the law into his own hands. Legally he had no right. That was sufficient reason for him to be crucified, but Christians still maintain, “He was innocent, milud”.

Bent Scholar asserts, with no foundation in the least, that Jesus was taught in no academy and by no instructor, a prime example of pious lying. No one has any idea what Jesus did until he came out as the baptist who succeeded John. No rational man will give any credence to virgin birth stories or even stories of twelve year olds, wandering off from their parents to puzzle sages with his questions. Oh, and be quite insulting to an apparently concerned mother. But, if Bent Scholar wants to take them seriously, then they must show that Jesus was indeed prepared for his task, and lots of his relatives and friends as well as angels and shepherds must have known about it.

Jesus was alone whereas the Essenes would have supported each other

Bent Scholar acts towards Jesus like a child whose pet rabbit has run off into the undergrowth and has been left out all night. Sob. He was opposed by religious lawyers. So were the Essenes. Jesus is intermittently reclusive. So were Essenes. He was rejected. Go on? Didn’t he have throngs of people cheering after him when he entered Jerusalem? It is all part of the kiddy-wink myth. If Jesus was rejected, it is because he failed at what he offered. No kingdom, then or now.

Scholar accuses his disciples of abandoning him at the end of his life. Is this serious? Even on the basis of the gospel story, did they have any choice? The gospels skid over the main story, but even as it stands, no sensible man was going to hang about! They did the sensible thing—a runner. One of the facts the gospel does skate over is who died with Jesus. The aim of the gospels is to focus on Jesus alone, although two more at least were hung with him. The truth is that many more will have been as well. There is no guarantee that the ones who survived were even close to Jesus. They had no knowledge of who provided the ass or who provided the room for the Last Supper. Somebody did. Yet Bent Scholar tells us Jesus was alone, with no community like the Essenes to support him. It will have been the Essenes who gave him this support and doubtless more which has been omitted because it would spoil the story of the solitary son of God battling alone against the wicked Jews.

Jesus told his supporters not to swear an oath whereas the Essenes swore solemn oaths when they entered

Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount:

Again, ye have heard that it hath been said by them of old time, Thou shalt not forswear thyself, but shalt perform unto the Lord thine oaths. But I say unto you, Swear not at all, neither by heaven, for it is God’s throne.

The Nazarene converts believe it is all right to swear by God’s name. Jesus tells them it is not, nor should they swear by heaven either. It is better not to swear at all rather than risking these prohibitions. You know what? This is just what the Essenes taught, yet Bent Scholar tells us he knows of no ban on oaths in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Let him look at CD(MsA) 15:1, which teaches precisely that a man must not swear on any name of God.

The Essenes took a solemn vow on entering the Community, but they had to swear it to themselves. They took on themselves the vow to return to the law of Moses. It was a personal commitment. The classic authors tell us that having sworn this solemn commitment they did not swear any more oaths. Jewish vows were vows to God and no one else. Someone had been criticising the Essenes for making this personal commitment instead of vowing to God. Essenes believed that an oath on God’s name which was broken, sullied God himself. Jesus, according to Matthew, says it was better not to swear at all, rather than pollute God’s name. Jesus taught exactly the same as the Essenes.

Oddly, Bent Scholar concludes from this that Jesus is teaching the exact opposite of the Essenes. Indeed, his teaching was directed against them. Not only that, but for the sake of the kiddies who think that swearing in this context is saying naughty words and calling people rude names, he points out that the Essenes did just that in the Community Rule, cursing the lot of Satan. Can you believe it? This is puerile. Swearing is making a solemn commitment before God, and only one such oath is necessary. God knows if it is broken, and that is the end of your heavenly ambitions. So, Essenes made one vow, when they joined, and thereafter had no need to swear again.

Bent Scholar now contrast the ability of Jesus to summarise the law into the first two commandments of the ten of Exodus, saying this would have been anathema to the Essenes who were absolute sticklers for all of the law. Considering this is the case, it is curious how many of the rabbinical interpretations they ignore or reinterpret. The point is that Jesus feared that the kingdom of God could begin instantly. If, in that instant, he could save a soul, it was his God sent duty to do so. That is why Jesus did, in the trying circumstances of the anticipated end of the wicked world, what Essenes would not normally condone. That is why as the first among the Essenes, he had to be the last when summoning All Israel to salvation. The summary of the law that could be taught while standing on one leg, according to Hillel, was to love your neighbour, your fellow Jew. When the world is about to end, all rancour should end first for those hoping to enter God’s kingdom. “Love your neightbour” was the essence of the law that could be simply taught in the last few days of worldly existence.

Jesus honoured the prophets but the Essenes re-interpreted what they wrote implying they thought them ignorant

Bent Scholar states and defends this in four lines, so he obviously thinks it feeble, which it is. The Essenes revered the prophets, and although they did think they were ignorant of the true meaning of what they wrote, it did not mean the prophets were ignorant but that God was clever and had withheld the understanding of some of his mysteries even from the prophets. The Righteous Teacher had discovered how to read the scriptures in such a way that God’s mysteries were revealed. What is more to the point than this is that there is a remarkable agreement between passages quoted from the scriptures in general between Jesus and the Scrolls. Jesus might often have given peshars on the prophets, only parts of which were remembered, together with the quotation itself, which would have been easier to remember for the less backsliding members of the Nazarenes. When scripture is quoted by the gospel writers, they often quote it incorrectly, but in a way which suits them. This was a technique used by the Essenes.

Jesus taught in parables but the Essenes just set down endless laws

Bent Scholar says that Jesus sought to free the Jews from legalism, yet elsewhere admits that he was a fully orthodox Jew committed to the Torah. These professional shepherds depend upon the Christian sheep having the memory span of an ant. All Jews were legalistic because the most holy gift of God they had was the law handed down to Moses. Jesus, as any Christian will concur, was a Jew devoted to God. It was therefore quite impossible for him to have sought to free the Jews from the law. That was the work of Satan.

Jesus was later shown as freeing people from the law so that gentiles need not be circumcised. The gentile bishops were stealing Judaism and making it applicable to the gentiles because it was seen by many as a noble religion. Many gentiles, especially women, had become godfearers, associates of Judaism who would not convert. Women were inclined to convert but their menfolk would not. They had to undergo the dangerous operation of circumcision, and most would not consider it. Christianisation of Judaism made a religion appropriate for these people and they joined in droves. No honest scholar would pretend that Jesus wanted to abrogate the law. But since the time of the first gentile bishop, few Christians have been honest to God, believing He prefers pious bleating to truth.

Jesus did not teach formal law, because the people he wanted to win back from apostasy were often simple people with imperfect legal education. There was no time to give even crash courses in the Torah and God’s requirements. He wanted the Jews to repent and be baptised, as Christians should know. This huge reduction in legal necessity for salvation was because Jesus came to think the world might end in the very next moment. It was that urgent, which is why he thought it necessary to send out disciples to the Jewish cities. He just did not have time to do it himself. The consequence of this was he had to teach his message in short memorable stories, but they were stories in code—they were parabolic messages or parables, like a parabola, they were not direct and had to be understood. They were most comprehensible to Jews because of their scriptural allusions but seemed like cosy stories to onlooking Romans.

Bent Scholar claims that Mark 4:10-12 was added by the gospel writers, reflecting later interests. In it, Jesus says that the parables held the mysteries of God and were not readily understood by those without (outside):

Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God: but unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables: That seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand; lest at any time they should be converted, and their sins should be forgiven them.

You could say the same about the whole set of gospels, it being purely arbitrary what is considered original and what is added. It is certain, as Bent Scholar concedes, that Jesus wrote none of it. Everything we read about Jesus was therefore what the “post-Easter community” wanted future generations to know about him. When it suits Bent Scholar that a saying is originally Jesus’s, he quotes it. When it suits him to say it is merely the disciples or the early church speaking, he ignores it. The end of Mark 7:19:

This he send rendering all meats clean,

it suits him to accept, though it is a glaring interpolation. These two verses in Mark explain too clearly that parables are not nursery stories for infant Christians. That is too much. It could not have been Jesus who said it. Yawn!

Jesus did not believe in fate but the Essenes did

It is hard for a skeptic like me to make anything of this, coming from a Christian. If God had a plan which Jesus followed, how did he not believe in fate? Three times in Mark, Jesus predicts his own death. Isn’t that a belief in fate? These people really do talk a load of tripe, apparently without even realising it, because they have divorced Jesus so thoroughly from the historical world that none of the rules of Nature even apply to the way he thinks. Or, perhaps they are just stupid.

Jesus believed in the resurrection of the dead at the End Time but there is no clear evidence that Essenes did

Josephus says Essenes believed in the immortality of the soul, comparing it with Greek beliefs. Bent Scholar quotes 2 Maccabees 14, seemingly as being “not (?) clear evidence” that the Essenes believed in bodily resurrection. Judas dies with his bowels hanging out and calling upon God to resurrect him, evidence that the Hasidim believed in resurrection. The Essenes were the Hasids, staunch believers in the Jewish theocracy.

Bent Scholar dismisses passages in the Scrolls, which suggest a belief in resurrection, as ambiguous and metaphorical. This one is fairly clear (Vermes 1QH14 10-15):

Thou hast purified man of sin… that bodies gnawed by worms may be raised from the dust to the counsel [of thy truth]… that he may stand before Thee with the everlasting host and with [Thy] spirits [of holiness], to be renewed together with all the living and to rejoice together with them that know.

There is no disagreement necessary between a belief in resurrection and the belief in an immortal soul. It is after all what the Christians are supposed to believe. If anyone is to be resurrected to life then notionally the soul must be returned to it. The soul therefore lives while the body is dead. Heaven is perfect and God’s kingdom on earth is heaven on earth. It too is perfect. The Essenes were trying to bring it about by aiming to act perfectly. But a perfect world has no corruption. It is therefore difficult to see how the Essenes could not belief in resurrection.

Quite apart from the gnawed bodies, the passage quoted says that the man who is free of sin will stand before God and his everlasting host and will be renewed. It is resurrection. All Jews other than the Sadducees believed in the prophets and undoubtedly Jesus and the Essenes did. Hosea promises a general resurrection on the third day. Are we supposed to think that the Essenes ignored this bit of scripture. Unfortunately, their commentary on Hosea is almost destroyed and the relevant part is missing.

Jesus never mentioned the names of the angels but Essenes had to remember them and had an extensive angelology

This is pretty fatuous. Christians are usually keen to warn we critics of Christianity that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Whatever Jesus might have had to say about the names of angels has not come to us, but it does not mean he had nothing to say. His followers were extremely interested in angels and they appear all over tha place in the birth narratives and at the empty tomb. More angels are mentioned in the New Testament than in the much larger Old Testament. Doesn’t that show that Christians had an unusual interest in angels? Jesus plainly believed angels were important and would appear in hosts at the end of the wicked world. Luke mentions the name of the angel Gabriel, but Michael, who is eschatologically important is not mentioned in the gospels although he is named in Jude and in Revelation. The reason is that his job was given to the risen Jesus as the one like unto a son of Man of Daniel returning on a cloud. The Jesus who returns will be Michael!

Jesus was a martyr and prophesied it but the Teacher of Righteousness was not

Christians are particularly sensitive about the Righteous Teacher because there are clues that his career was remarkably like that of Jesus. My own argument is not that Jesus was the Teacher of Righteousness who founded the Essenes but he was probably one of his successors as the Righteous Teacher, having a senior rank among the Essenes. Somebody had the task of summoning Israel and reading in their ears the requirements of holiness before the world was renewed and the wicked were destroyed. My guess, based on what we know of Essene humility and that of Jesus, is that only the holiest man could undertake such an important task. John the Baptist did it until he was imprisoned and then Jesus.

If Jesus prophesied his own death, it was only as part of the general renewal that everyone had to experience, but only the righteous would emerge to be resurrected. Later, Jesus became the sole subject of this general story he told to assure the faithful. Not just Jesus but every righteous person would be raised on the third day! This obvious scriptural fact has been willfully ignored by the pious liars for two thousand years.

Jesus was liberal about observance of the sabbath while Essenes were sticklers for it

Essenes would not even help an animal out of a pit on the sabbath, so this passage seems to be directed at them.

What man shall there be among you, that shall have one sheep, and if it fall into a pit on the sabbath day, will he not lay hold on it, and lift it out?

Matthew 12:11

But an examination of the original piece in Mark shows this part about the animal in the pit is missing. It is also absent from Luke. Plainly, then it is a later elaboration by Matthew or an editor. Not one of the passages in which Jesus is considered cavalier about the sabbath carries any conviction when studied.

This curing of a man with a withered hand is certainly a distorted parable. The episode of plucking which precedes it is the real case and that is explained internally as an expedient, which even Essenes would have respected, based as it was in scripture. Matthew’s interpolation would have been strong evidence that Jesus disdained the Essene sabbath observances, had it been original. It is derived and the incident that suggests it is a distorted parable not a real incident.

Bent Scholar wants to consider this interpolation as original because, it was on a matter which did not concern the later church. He says it was an intra-Jewish debate about sabbath laws. No! It was a Christian justification for avoiding the sabbath laws. The gentile Christians wanted to prove that the strict Jewish sabbath need not be followed by their godfearing converts. Matthew, or an editor, therefore put this bit of Essene law into Jesus’s mouth. It seemed an ideal example of the absurdity—to the pagans who would be reading Matthew—of Jewish sabbath observance. It is one of the more obvious instances of the way, the later Christians avoided the central beliefs of Jesus himself. They need hardly have bothered because most of the beliefs of Jesus recorded in the gospels are ignored by Christians anyway. This is the one exhibit out of all that has been presented, that Bent Scholar considers “astounding!”

Jesus considered himself to be God’s son but the Righteous Teacher did not

Bent Scholar tells us that Honi the Circle Drawer also considered himself God’s son. He was called by Josephus, a “righteous man”, denoting that he was an Essene. All male Jews were God’s sons and it seems likely that anyone with a particular holy calling might have used the explicit expression. In the Psalms of Solomon the righteous men who are saved by God are all Sons of God. Probably the terms “righteous” and son of God or Barabbas are synonymous. The Essenes might well have considered themselves as sons of God, and therefore addressed God as Abba. The evidence of Acts of the Apostles is that Barabbas was a title but it has been distorted into various similar names in a Malapropish sort of way, but deliberately for sure. Christians were trying to distance themselves from the strong and persistent rumour that Jesus was Jesus Barabbas, crucified as a seditionist. So they had to change the occurrences of Barabbas to Barsabas, etc.

The Essenes prayed at dawn and dusk and had an extended metaphor of light and dark for good and evil which Bent Scholar denies that Jesus had

Bent Scholar knows these things. Curious then that “light” occurs almost as often in the New Testament as in the Old Testament, even though the Old Testament is much bigger. Any concordance will show that light especially but darkness also appears in the New Testament and often with the fearful meaning of the Essenes. If the usage is not as intense as it was for the sectarians, it is probably merely an historical development rather than a product of revelation. Curious too that Jesus’s followers are fond of using light and darkness comparisons. Jesus himself, according to Matthew’s account of the Sermon on the Mount (Mt 6:22-23), uses the light and darkness metaphor beloved of the Essenes. If not Jesus, was it then Paul who was the Essene, for Paul sounds thoroughly Essene when speaking in 2 Corinthians 6:14-18? Or maybe Peter was the Essene infiltrator. He prayed at dawn in Acts. But Jesus several times prays all night, so must have prayed at dusk and at dawn. We saw that in the parable of the Unjust Steward in Luke, Jesus called his audience, the Sons of Light.

Jesus taught about the coming kingdom of God but the Essenes never used the expression

This last is a highly dubious assertion which even Bent Scholar himself has to virtually contradict by offering quotations from the Scrolls which say, “the kingdom shall be to the God of Israel,” and “an awesome God in the glory of your kingdom” and “God” and “His kingdom”. Not, though “the kingdom of God!” On this criterion, Matthew’s Jesus had nothing to do with the Jesus Bent Scholar is talking about. He does not use the “technical term” the kingdom of God just as the Essenes apparently don’t. Matthew calls it the “kingdom of heaven”, but it is Jesus who says it. Bent Scholar actually quotes one scholar who maintains on the basis of the Gospel of Thomas that the term Jesus habitually used was simply “the kingdom”. If that is true, the question arises, what kingdom did Jesus mean? The obvious conclusion is that Jesus was being deliberately parabolic in these references. The kingdom of God was the kingdom of the Jews.

See also: Christian and Essene Common Features

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