Nazarene 1
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Tuesday, November 16, 1999
Abstract
The Call to All Israel in the Last Days
Scroll scholar, Yigael Yadin, thought that Jesus was the leader of a schismatic faction of the Essenes, an Essene who advocated revision of the Community Rule. It is not so. There does seem to be a distinction between the Essenes and the Nazarenes—the Nazarenes seem less exclusive—but the philosophy of the Nazarenes was Essene philosophy. The Essenes recognized that in the last days all Israel must be told of the coming visitation and have the chance to repent and enter the kingdom. The Essenes allowed for the recruitment to the elect of the simple of Ephraim, those who had been misled by the Pharisees who seek smooth things, as described in the Nahum Pesher:
This concerns those who seek smooth things, whose evil deeds shall be uncovered to all Israel at the end time… the simple shall support their counsel no more… Many shall understand their iniquity and treat them with contempt because of their guilty presumption. When the glory of Judah shall arise, the simple of Ephraim shall flee from their assembly. They shall abandon those who lead them astray and shall join Israel.
Besides pointing to the expectation that all Israel will join Israel at the end time, this passage illustrates that the Essenes had contempt for the Pharisees as well as the unclean Sadducees. The Essenes disdained them because they presumed to do God’s will in building walls around the law and taking easy options in placating the foreign oppressors rather than aiming to evict them.
The Rule of the Congregation also orders that in the last days:
all the congregation of Israel shall join the Community to walk according to the law of the Sons of Zadok the Priests and the men of the Covenant… they shall summon them all.
When the whole congregation of Israel had been summoned—women and children too—they had the statutes of the covenant read into their ears that they may no longer stray, implying that there was no time for the usual three years of initiation—simply being told the rules would have to suffice as long as the simple had sincerely repented. Thus, at the end time all Israel would be called to enrol into the elect.
The Essenes evidently had the same idea as John the Baptist and Jesus—to warn all Jews that their time was nearly up, and that they should repent if they wanted to enter the kingdom. Neither Essenes nor John the Baptist or Jesus regarded anyone of the congregation of Israel as irredeemably lost to Belial, but note that their message was addressed only to Jews—all Israel or the congregation of Israel—the Jews were God’s chosen people and they alone were called, not foreigners.
The duty of the elect was to try to take as many of the chosen as possible into the coming battle for the kingdom. Jews were needed as soldiers of the sons of light, and any Jew could have a favourable outcome in the kingdom of God no matter what sins they had committed as long as they sincerely repented. The Essenes were no longer exclusive at the end time. The New Covenant made with the elect was a covenant to ensure there were enough righteous Jews to preserve the old covenant and ensure that the chosen people had the chance to repent and enter God’s kingdom.
This suggests the following Essene practices at the end time. When the diviners of the signs considered the end time was nigh, a Nasi was sent out into the community to test the mettle of the simple of Ephraim. He took on the role of Elijah. Elijah was the prophet who triumphed at Carmel over the prophets of Baal and founded a community of monks there. Some Jews regarded Elijah as an angel who visited earth then returned to heaven whence he would return to announce the Judgement day, others as a perfectly holy man who overcame death because he had not sinned. Essenes would have seen these as being the same thing. They believed that by behaving perfectly—as God wanted—they would become angels. In so doing they would be forming heaven on earth and facilitating the coming of the kingdom of God.
On Elijah’s return, he would raise the dead but meanwhile, though he had been returned to heaven, it was his wont to wander the earth at intervals assisting the poor and humble and instructing scholars and sages as a sort of Jewish Orpheus. The apparent absence of God that the priests of the Ezra school had produced compared with the times when God seemed to be present, led to a desire for an intermediary or messenger between the Chosen People and their God who could go before the face of God and plead for the people. The men sent out by the Essenes to convert the simple like John the Baptist seem to have been regarded as serving this function of Elijah. They were sent to herald the coming of the Day of Vengeance of God when the archangel Michael would come with his heavenly hordes. In the Orthodox church Elijah is a saint.
As Elijah, the Nasi, the Maskil, told the Simple of Ephraim of the imminence of the kingdom and called them to repentance. This safeguarded the Essenes as a whole while allowing God to show whether the auguries were correct or not. Cryptic A 4Q298, the Maskil’s Address to the Sons (children) of Dawn, is the personal coded script of the Maskil, concealed from the eyes of others. The Children of Dawn are those who are not properly initiated—not yet Children of Light—but sincerely hope to be so. In normal times they were novices, but in the days before the End, they are all Jews who sincerely repent, are baptized and join the Elect before the terrible Day of God’s Vengeance arrives. Stephen J Pfann, of the Center for the Study of Early Christianity explains:
It is the responsibility of the Maskil to teach all members of the community… He must leave the community premises to teach them. The small size of the scroll (4Q298) permitted it to be safely carried (or hidden) while travelling. The use of the esoteric script (aside from the title) protected the scroll’s contents from being read by anyone except the Maskil and other elite members of the group. In case the scroll was stolen or lost, the legible title made it possible for the scroll to be returned to its rightful owner (s)…
All Essene teaching was mystical knowledge, and so secret, even if it was freely revealed to the repentant ones in the Last Days. The Maskil’s little scroll was therefore coded, just as Jesus often coded his speeches, but it could be the scroll which the Sermon of the Mount tries to reconstruct. Unfortunately only eight minute fragments exist but they urge the audience to listen, to seek strength, modesty, humility, truth, righteousness and kindness, and suggest that they have chosen the path of knowledge and of life. The themes of these few tiny fragments remarkably match some of the themes of the Sermon on the Mount.
Not only the Essenes used veiled ways of saying things, at about this time. No society had been as rife with spies than the Roman Empire since the days of the Persians, and so Philo of Alexandria, in On Dreams, had to write his criticisms of Rome circumspectly. Modern students of Philo have noticed that he seems strangely obscure or ambiguous, mixing up politics with with an analysis of the meaning of the soul! His discussion of the soul was natural enough to those who knew educated Jews were interested in such matters, but those in the know—the Jews—could see his veiled criticism of Roman imperialism. Comments about a Roman Prefect (the rank of Pilate in the gospels) were veiled as a discussion of Babel which ended with innocuous reflexions again on the soul.
It is too intricate a mixture to be merely a question of style. Philo seems conscious of the political implications of apocalyptic words, rarely speaking of a Messianic hope, and showing an apparently ethical interest, and nothing more, in the stories of Enoch. Nor does he speak much of those Jews who were expecting the end to come. Philo’s sole hero is Moses, and he mentions others little. Isaac is passed over, some say because the later Christians suppressed the parallels that existed in the Isaac tradition with that of Jesus, including the virgin birth. Perhaps Jesus was a veiling of an eschatological Isaac tradition!
The dreams Philo presents are those of politicians, and political schemes he presents as dreams. It seems to be a political work veiled as a religious one, rather as John Bunyan did in Pilgrim’s Progress at the time of the English revolution. A knowledgeable Jew knew what he was getting at, but a Roman would not understand the code Philo was using to veil his real meaning.
That was why the Essenes had to be cautious. John the Baptist was a Nasi—Jesus was his heir, the prince, the leader of a vanguard whose duty was to mobilize the rank and file. Accordingly his converts were called Nazarenes—followers of the Nasi. This explains why the followers of John the Baptist were also called Nazarenes. The Nasi might not be the messiah, that depended upon God. He was simply the leader of the congregation of Israel in the last days, but the semitic root “nsr”, meaning “protector” or “saviour”, suggests that by god’s will he would become the messiah. The sectaries identified the two because the Nasi played the role of the messiah at the messianic meal of the men of renown or repute (Essene leaders—the Council of the Community).
Whenever as many as ten members of the Community gathered for a meal they took their seats in the order of their rank, and the Priest presided. No one could touch the bread or new wine until the Priest had blessed them and taken his. But in the Rule of the Congregation, at a meeting of ten or more men of renown, the Messiah is also present and takes bread and wine after the priest but before the others did, according to their seniority.
And when they shall gather for the common table, to eat and to drink new wine, when the common table shall be set for eating and the new wine poured for drinking, let no man extend his hand over the first fruits of bread and wine before the priest, for it is he who shall bless the first fruits of bread and wine, and shall be the first to extend his hand over the bread. Thereafter, the Messiah of Israel shall extend his hand over the bread.
This is the procedure followed in the gospels for the mass feedings and the last supper. Qumran scholars consider the sacred meal to anticipate the banquet in Heaven at the End of Days. They assume the participation of the Messiah to be symbolic—he was present only in spirit. But, from the description, it sounds as if the Messiah were really there. Maybe he was! In the Qumran literature the Hebrew word Nasi, meaning “leader” or “prince” is used frequently to mean a messianic leader—not the Messiah as such but the “Prince of the Many”.
Did the Nasi play the role of the Messiah at the sacred meal of the Council of the Community? If so Nasi could be the real origin of the gospel term Nazarene. The Essenes felt that when their predictions proved correct the Nasi would be transfigured into the messiah. As the kingdom arrived, men would be transformed into angels and the first would be the Nasi who would become the archangel Michael.
The literature of Qumran describes a messianic elite who had chosen to follow Isaiah 40:3: to “make a straight way in the wilderness for our God”. They lived in desert camps waiting to be joined by a heavenly host of angels to engage in a holy war against their enemies. They were preparing themselves for the last days by living a life of extreme purity. They sought the way of perfect righteousness and the way in which the law works. Acts 9:2 calls members of the early church the followers of “The Way”!
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Moses and Exodus
