Christianity
John, Jesus and the Essenes 1
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, 14 June 2006
Mass Preacher and Solitary Ascetic
John the Baptist, who appears in the gospels as the herald of Christ and who practised ritual immersion, was a real person in history, to judge by Josephus. Christian exegetes have always been keen to distinguish Jesus and John the Baptist and categorize John merely as an solitary ascetic preaching penitence. As such his characteristics are:
- Inviting repentance
- Living as a solitary ascetic
- Insisting upon particular ritual observances
- Of a gloomy and fearful outlook
- Practising baptism as a magical cure for sin.
Rudolf Otto (OTT-KOGSOM) gives such a list and comments that Banus, the teacher of Josephus, fell into this category. This might be taken as evidence from Josephus then that John the Baptist, like Banus, was an Essene.
Needless to say, Christian scholars say that Jesus was the opposite of all this. Undoubtedly the idea has always been that Jesus should not be depicted as being at all like John the Baptist, but the early Christians were not writing the story of Jesus as pure fiction, but were attempting to explain the stories about him that were already in the public domain. They were therefore not free to write absolutely whatever they wanted. Their account had to touch the popular versions in sufficient places to make them seem convincing. That is why there are so many inconsistencies in the story.
Few try to deny that both Jesus and John the Baptist were calling for Jews to repent. Both preached it and in both cases a movement formed among their followers after they had died.
This also disproves the idea that John was a solitary ascetic. He is depicted as living alone in the desert and the multitudes wanting to repent had to go out to see him. Jesus however was supposed to have freely wandered among his flock. Yet how could a solitary man have disciples? The gospels and Acts of the Apostles agree that John had disciples, and indeed, Jesus seems to have been one of them, so John was not a solitary man at all. Essenes in general were solitary men, separating themselves from the sinful mass of the people, but they lived together. They were only isolated from the sinful not from other righteous men that lived with them. Nevertheless in the gospels John seemed quite different from Jesus.
Yet, Jesus made a point of avoiding large towns. Jerusalem was the only large town he ever visited and according to the synoptic gospels that was on the occasion of his crucifixion. When he carried out a mission in Galilee, he never visits any of the large towns we know were there. We only hear of him visiting unknown towns, and towns which remain unknown to this day, the towns bearing the gospel names having been founded or renamed in the fourth century precisely because the gospel originals did not exist. The gospels also frequently show Jesus as going into mountains or into desert places to pray and contemplate. Perhaps his most famous miracle took place in the desert.
The object of the gospels is to tell us the story of Jesus not John the Baptist, so we do not know whether John’s real behaviour was more like Jesus’s. Certainly, even the gospels make Jesus seem sufficient of a solitary man to match John the Baptist. The two seem remarkably similar bearing in mind the absence of information we have about John and the aim of Christians to make the two seem quite different. The most remarkable fact of all is that they both had disciples with the same collective name.
The name of John’s disciples was Nazoraioi. The name of Jesus’s disciples was also Nazoraioi, but sometimes written and conventionally translated as Nazarenes. Ignoring the identity of the two names, Christians claim that Nazoraioi means Observers because of the ritual observances that John’s followers had to follow. In fact, the name has multiple allusions, Observers, Keepers or Watchers merely representing one aspect of it. If they were Essenes, they doubtless did carefully observe ritual but they were also Watchers because they watched for the coming of God’s Appointed Day, the coming of the kingdom.
On the basis of faith rather than fact, Christians assume that John’s main observance was to fast. Jesus on the other hand led his followers in gluttonous bouts of feasting and wine drinking showing that Jesus, if he began as a follower of John, had abandoned fasting for feasting. That is why Jesus’s followers could not have been called Observers, Nazoraioi, because they observed these rituals—they did not. Why then were they called Nazarenes? Because Jesus was born in Nazareth! Tortuous or not? The truth is that the followers of both had the same name because John and Jesus were different leaders of the same movement, the Watchers for the Kingdom.
In the Jewish messianic expectations of the time, some thought the messiah would be a Nazir who would free the Jews from their foes, as the Nazir Samson had freed Israel from the Philistines. The technical term for a Nazir is a Nazirite unto God, or holy unto God (cf Samson, Judges 13:7, 16:9). They were God’s holy ones, and it can be no coincidence that the Essenes were called the “Holy Ones”. The prophecy of Isaiah 11:1 of the sprout from the root or stem of Jesse also excited the popular imagination. Punning here too was important. “Sprout” in Hebrew is “neser” or “nezer”, and this “neser” was to be the “saviour” (again “neser”) and both sounded like “nazir”. So, he must have been a “Nazaraian” (Heb, “noseri”, Gk, “nazoraios”), or a carpenter (Aram, “bar nasar”), like Noah whose carpentry saved the world ones before.
Jesus supposedly replaced all the boring and pointless Jewish practices with the Good News, faith in which was sufficient to get you anywhere. Among them apparently was baptism. Though baptism was the favoured initiation ritual for Christians for two thousand years, Christians like to think that Jesus did not baptise. Why then did Jesus go to Galilee when John was arrested? Most Christians will say it was because there he could baptise, presumably using the water of the Sea of Galilee. But when Jesus split with John, from the fourth gospel Christians deduce that he gave up baptising and instead left it to his minions.
The truth is that, as we find in Acts 19:1ff, John’s disciples were baptising alongside the first Christians in the gentile world. The bishops had to produce a distinction between the Baptists and the Christians, so they invented the idea of baptism with the Holy Ghost. In Acts we are told that some believers had only had the baptism of John—baptism with water. Christians pretended it was not sufficient, baptism with the Holy Ghost, the baptism of Jesus, being necessary. This new ritual was a laying on of hands to transmit the Holy Ghost from one to another, the process still believed as the “Apostolic Succession”, though now it seems only to apply to ordination of priests. Plainly it failed to unseat baptism, which regained full favour once the Mandaeans had ceased to be a problem in the West—except with the Cathari.
The reference in Mark 1:8 to baptism with the Holy Ghost was inserted into Mark’s gospel to justify the, then new, practice that was meant but failed to supplant baptism with water. In Matthew 3:11, we find “and with fire” added, but Matthew is restoring what was there originally, because if John the Baptist said these words, he was referring to God or the Archangel Michael and not to Jesus, as Christians believe because their Holy book says so. There was no precedent for the herald of the Final Judgement himself having a herald.
Having set up a new form of baptism the message to the faithful became “Repent and believe the Good News” instead of “Repent and be baptised”. Despite the importance baptism has in the Christian churches, commentators are happy to declare John’s baptism as a magical ceremony to wash away sin. If that is so, from here, it is hard to see the difference, and even though there probably is none, the faithful think there is. Of course, the Jews of that time were not dolts and it is fair to guess that even apostate Jews would also not have had thought of their ceremonies as being magic. The baptism of John was a symbolic cleansing of the body to reflect the cleansing of the soul by repentance. It was not a magical washing away of sins but a visible proof of repentance.
Nevertheless, Christian scholars pretend, in the interests of making their own beliefs seem vastly superior to those that preceded them, that John’s disciples believed in magic, the Christian replacement for which was a message from God—the Good News. Yet the Christians then continued to baptise. This is proof enough that Jesus had nothing to do with this. If Jesus had replaced empty aqueous baptism with a brimming-over message and ghostly baptism, why did he not forbid the pointless ritual of baptism by water once and for all? Jesus never stopped baptising and did not advocate stopping it. The passage in John 4:2 (”Though Jesus himself baptized not, but his disciples”) is part of the attempt of the first Christians to make Jesus superior to the Baptist. John was only the herald. It was too demeaning for the god to do the same as his compere. If Jesus had abrogated baptism it should never have carried on, yet today, some Christian churches consider it so important they call themselves Baptists!
The message of John was considered gloomy whereas that of Jesus was joyous. Quite what is joyous about failing to pass the judge on Doomsday and finding yourself in hellfire, only the happy clappy knows. Christians have accepted this joyous news for 2000 years because Jesus himself told them it was true as part of his Good News.
Fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.Mt 10:28
Once again, we have this question of balance based on incomplete evidence. The gospels might not place as much emphasis on the gloomy side of Jesus’s message and place more on the gloominess of John’s, but it was deliberate and for a purpose. In the first century the Christians had to distinguish themselves from the Nazarenes who had followed John. Even though both had had the same message, the Christian one had to be altered to make it seem superior. It worked!
A final trick tried by Christians to fog the truth, that Jesus and John were fellows of the same school, is to declare arbitrarily that the message and the person form a unity, so that the message cannot be understood without a knowledge of the person. The simple folk of Christianity have a childish image of their god drifting through the world illuminating its dark corners, so they readily accept this nonsense. It can only mean that if someone burst into their bedroom crying, “Fire, fire,” they would react quite differently according to which of the two delivered the message. Christians are happy to believe anything that singles out their hero as unique even if it is manifestly absurd.
John’s Dissatisfaction with Jesus
Beguiled by stories of miracles, Christians try to distinguish the teaching of Jesus from John the baptist, though they mostly accept nowadays that both were eschatological—both expected the End of the World. Then God would purify it and set righteous Jews over all other righteous people that pass His judgement. Their thesis included the fact that Judaea had to be won back for God from the Romans, because until it had, all Jews bore the terrible sin of having let the land of Israel, the betrothed of God, be ravished by a foreigner.
Mark tells us (Mk 6:14) that Jesus’s recruitment activity had got through to Herod who commented that John the Baptist had returned from the dead, although we have not yet been told that John had died. The implication of this is that Jesus was John’s successor. But John did not, in fact, die until after Jesus. Jesus had to take John’s mantle prematurely because John was imprisoned by Herod for the latter part of his life. This in turn indicates that John the Baptist was more than just a desert hermit forgiving sins in the Jordan. He too had been recruiting supporters to the cause of national rebellion. Indeed in Mark 6:20, John is described as a zaddik and a saint (a just man and an holy), one of the righteous—an Essene.
The synoptic gospels make John recognize the messiahship of Jesus, and the later and correcting John affirms he did so from Jesus's baptism. The earliest tradition was less certain. In Q, John had no such conviction. The imprisoned prophet sent messengers to Jesus asking him:
Art thou he that should come, or look we for another?Mt 11:2-19; Lk 7:18-25
No direct answer is given to the question. Evidently, John the Baptist was impatient with Jesus’s work. As the Essene High Priest, he knew just as well as Jesus that the signs of the times were prophesying the Day of the Vengeance of the Lord. Yet Jesus did not seem to be preparing for it adequately as the Nasi. These gospels tell us Jesus gratuitously demonstrated his healing powers to prove to John’s disciples that he was doing his job.
Any prior knowledge by John of Jesus as messiah is unknown in this tradition, nor does John accept healing as proof of messiahship. It strongly suggests that many did not feel that Jesus was an adequate successor of John once he had been imprisoned, and that Jesus did not seem to them to be doing enough to warrant discipleship. Jesus became famous for doing something spectacular for the time, that has been suppressed to get gentile converts, but which persuaded many Jews at first. Later he failed, and the Jewish support evaporated, while the gentile support condensed rapidly. Most of Jesus’s Jewish supporters will have returned to some normative form of Judaism but evidently some returned, or always remained, supporting John. They became the Mandæans.
In Matthew 11:7 and Luke 7:24, John’s disciples depart, to report Jesus’s reply back to their master. It is quite apparent, however, that the verses in Matthew 11:7-15 and in Luke 7:24-30 are out of sequence. This is transparently clear in Matthew because his verse 15 contains Jesus’s formula for ending a parabolic speech: “He that hath ears to hear, let him hear”, but the speech continues. Matthew 11:16-19 and Luke 7:31-35 are part of the reply to John’s messengers, although tampered with by Christian editors at the end. Jesus is complaining to the messengers of John, “we can mourn before people but they will not lament, we can pipe for people but they will not dance”. The proverb we are familiar with is, “you can take a horse to water but you cannot make it drink”. He is complaining about the response from the simple of Ephraim, ordinary sinning Jews.
Only after this should follow the misplaced verses. The messengers go, and Jesus turns to those observing and berates them:
What did they think John was doing in the desert? Dressing as a king or waving a reed in the wind?
He was a great prophet sent to prepare the way for the coming kingdom, not a namby-pamby. John is the herald of the kingdom. With him it begins but it has suffered violence under the oppressors and has to be taken by force. This little speech probably belongs elsewhere but has been placed here because it refers to John the Baptist.
The Teaching of Jesus and John
Christians like to think that Jesus was the “antithesis” of John being a charismatic exorcist while John merely preached repentance. Once you notice, though, that miracles were deliberate distortions of events that would have been unacceptable to Christians at their face value and Jesus quickly becomes an image of John. The Christian will emerge and say there is more to it. John taught a gloomy “Day of God’s Vengeance” whereas Jesus taught a glorious advent of the kingdom of God, a new and different concept. Yet the two conceptions are the same, differing only in the emphasis that Christians placed on them to make Jesus look different.
Furthermore, the Christians persist, Jesus taught spiritual power whereas John taught only baptismal power. Quite what these mysterious powers are that Christians can see such clear difference between them is mysterious enough, but in any case the Christians are wrong again! Jesus, it is admitted in the gospels, sought to baptise the repentent, just as John did. The existence of the aqueous initiation of Christians to this day proves that Jesus and his followers never dropped the baptismal variety of power from their rituals in favour of the superior spiritual variety.
Matthew 3:2 admits that John the Baptist spoke of the kingdom of heaven and Luke 16:16, echoed in Matthew 11:13, says that the kingdom of God was preached from the time of John the Baptist.
The law and the prophets were until John. Since that time the kingdom of God is preached.
If Luke did not mean to include John, why should he have used John’s name rather than Jesus’s? Despite these two admissions in the Holy Book, Christians try to exclude John the Baptist from the teaching of the kingdom to come. They claim that the passage in Matthew is an interpolation into their words of God and Luke means to exclude John, not include him, in Luke 16:16.
Because Christians were deliberately trying to make Jesus seem unique, they were not likely to allow John the Baptist to steal his thunder, so the question really is why did two passages get into the gospels that tell us that John taught the same message about the kingdom of God as Jesus. If it were not true, it is hard to understand why it should have arisen in error. Matthew and Luke both categorically say that John knew of the gospel of the kingdom of God. Arguably, Jesus emphasised this more than John but it is typically Christian truth to pretend that the message was uniquely Jesus’s.
The other side of this coin is that John supposedly taught the coming judgement of wrath but Jesus taught the glorious coming of the kingdom. Quite how Christian commentators managed to make this distinction when the coming of the Christ was always to be accompanied by a judgement over which Christ himself presided, defeats the observer. Plainly, for those who were judged to have been righteous, the reward was the kingdom of heaven, whereas for those who had been wicked, the reward was God’s vengeance. This is what Christians still believe and so presumably is what Jesus taught. It is also what John taught, since he spoke of the judgement of wrath and the coming kingdom. Only the weasel logic of Christian theologians can find a difference.
Another way Christian theologians try to wheedle around this problem and keep Jesus unique is to admit that Jesus began as a disciple of John, teaching the same message, but then they disagreed and Jesus went his own way with his now unique intepretation. Regrettably for Christians, this opens up a new schism for them. Many cannot bring themselves to admit that Jesus was ever a disciple of John the Baptist. The clear evidence of the split however appears in Matthew’s gospel (Mt 11:2-19) when John is obviously impatient with Jesus. He behaves as if he is superior to Jesus and Jesus has to answer to him even though John is in prison. This is another glimpse of the truth through the evangelical fog. Jesus was the de facto leader of the Nazarenes because John was in prison, but John remained the de jure leader.
Christians like to think the difference between John and Jesus was that Jesus became an evangelist of the gospel of God, preaching :
The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand.Matthew 1:14
But they have no choice but to accept that his message was also John’s:
Repent and believe in the gospel.
All Christians besotted by their faith and unredeemed by reason, determine to see the two messages as qualitatively different, though they are plainly the same. Rudolf Otto, for example, choses to distinguish them by pointing out that “the kingdom has come” (forcing the argument by putting the kingdom in the present though that was never Jesus’s message in any other sense than that a seed is a tree) was a promise not a threat like John’s warning about God’s vengeance. Yet their joint message was obviously both a promise and a threat, and surely it remains the same for Christians. The righteous were promised God’s kingdom and the unrighteous were threatened with God’s wrath.
Rational people cannot follow the Christian fantasy which requires us to believe that God would take vengeance on everyone, according to his Old Testament prophets, until Jesus arrived to declare it to be all wrong—God would not “cut men down” but give them the helping hand of salvation. Blatantly, it is rubbish. The prophets offered salvation to the righteous, just as Jesus did, and Jesus offerred retribution to the wicked, just as the scriptural prophets did. What, then, is the difference? There is none, except in the heads of those determined to justify, by any crooked deception, the delusions they hold.
Christian commentators deliberately refuse to face up to the truth. The distinctive feature of the teaching of Jesus and John was that the coming kingdom would lift from the Jews the weary and heavy burden of foreign occupation. The distinctive promise that got Jesus a following was that the kingdom of God was a Jewish kingdom. The Jews would be the world leaders not the Romans. Gentiles were not excluded from the kingdom, but had to come in supplication and would be accepted if they were worthy.
Watery and Fishy Allusions
John was sure that prophecies were being fulfilled, and so the time of the End was nigh. The New Testament tells us John had been vowed from birth as a Nazir, and this vow, his garb and diet of repentance, and his confident proclamation of the imminence of the end of this æon, or age of the world, made many think he was The Nazir or “The Neser”, the “holy one of God”. Others thought he was Elijah returned, as Malachi had prophesied (Mal 4:5):
Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and terrible Day of the Lord come.
Like the prophet Elijah, he wore a skin robe. According to a Rabbinic legend, after the fall, Adam and Eve exchanged their garments of light (’o-r) in paradise, they lost at the fall, for coats of skin (’o-r), illustrating the Jewish joy in punning. Some thought that he was “That Prophet” of promise “like unto Moses” (Deut 18:15). That Prophet was thought to be Moses returned, and John was seen by some as being Moses, just as Jesus was. Moses is shown as having horns of light, and John is dressed in skin, and sometimes is also depicted with horns like a satyr. The name, “Moses”, is the latter part of “Ahuramazda” (Oromazes), the first part being the origin of these “or” words.
Nothing suggests John made any such claims, though his deliberate choice of garb might suggest he took himself to be Elijah reincarnated, and his role that prophesied by Malachi. He was proclaiming the approach of “the great and terrible Day of the Lord”. If Jews wanted to be saved, they had to repent. John was also a wonder-worker, if the synoptics gospels are right. Jesus was thought to be John returned from the dead because of his healing wonders, implying that John had done the same.
It is curious, if it is true, that John baptized in the Jordan because the Jordan near its outlet, the Dead Sea, is slow moving and brackish. But what of his characteristic baptizing in the Jordan of all places? Theologians thought it unfit for purification. It confirms one thing—that baptism was not a purification but was symbolic. In the vision of Ezekiel (Ezek 47:1-8), the prophet is addressed as Son of Man and sees a mighty stream of holy water from the temple on Zion flowing to heal the unclean waters of the Dead Sea. Eisler conjectured this is from the original Isaiah 28:16, well known till the third century AD.
Behold, I lay down in Zion a living stone, a stone of probation, a precious threshold-stone for a foundation. Out of its hollow shall flow forth rivers of living water, he that believeth on me shall not suffer from drought.Extended Isaiah 28:16, according to Eisler
Allegorical interpretations, of which the Essenes were the masters, made the most of this, explaining puns on stones, amd masonry, as well as fishing for men, and so on. The living water signified the Word of Yehouah, the outpouring of the spirit of God. Spiritual imaginings and material reality were never wide apart in the mind of the pious Jew of the time.
So, the proper sense of John’s motive has escaped the historian. Stirred by the exhortations, power and extraordinary conviction of John that the terrible Day was nigh, the people, as in evangelical revivals still, were filled with a penitential anguish. The baptism symbolised, not any washing off of sins, but their death to this world and their rebirth from the sacred stream with its life-redeeming properties.
He [God] will turn again, he will have compassion upon us, he will subdue our iniquities. Yea, thou wilt wash away all our sins into the depths of the sea.
Having sincerely repented and been born again, they need not fear death, for they would be reborn in the kingdom of God, and could die willingly fighting the holy war!
Now, as the rite of proselytes involved a purificatory washing, it is perhaps not surprising that some saw the procedure of John as the same, or its equivalent, and many of those most impressed by this preaching were to be Hellenized Jews, not the most pious of them. A proselyte or a “new comer” (advena) who would join the assembly of Israel, had to be baptised. This really was a baptism akin to that of the Christians, yet preceding them. It was a bath of purification and regeneration before legal witnesses. The candidate stood in the water and listened to a short discourse consisting of commandments from the Law. Thereon the gentile convert dipped completely under the water, signifying the drowning of his previous impious and idolatrous self. Then, he arose reborn a Jew, and literally so, for the neophyte could no longer inherit from his gentile relatives, or even commit incest with any of them! Its basis was:
I will sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean: from all your filthiness and from all your idols, will I cleanse you. A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit will I put within you.Ezekiel 36:25-26
John saw this promise as applying to Jews, foreshadowing the Last Days. Moreover, John’s insistence on baptism for the Jews acknowledged that it was Israel itself which required regeneration. Physical kinship with Abraham could be no guarantee against the wrath to come. To escape the trials and terrors of that Day, they must repent, and join the true Israel. Unrepentant they were no better than heathen idolaters.
Ye out births of vipers, who hath given you a glimpse of fleeing from the Wrath to come? Make fruit, therefore, worthy of (or sufficient for) your repentance. And think not (Lk begin not) to say within (or among) yourselves: We have Abraham [for] father. For I say unto you that God is able of these stones (Aram, ’abenayya) to raise (or wake) up children (Aram, benayya) for Abraham. But even now the axe is laid unto the root of the trees: every tree, therefore, which beareth not good fruit, is hewn down and cast into the fire.Q, Matthew 3:7-10; Luke 3:7-9
Jesus used the same expression “generation” or “out births of vipers” several times. Snakes were associated with death, living in cairns ans tombs. The vipers were the ones who would die—for good! In vain they think they will escape because they are kin with Abraham. No Christian will consider the argument here, that God needs no human help, because he could raise up children (Heb, “sons” or banim) from stones (Heb, ’abanim) if he wanted them. What of the reference to trees? In the same vision in Ezekiel (Ezek 47:1-8 is:
By the river upon the banks thereof, on this side and on that side, shall grow all trees for meat, whose leaf shall not fade, they shall bring forth new fruit month after month, because their waters issue from the sanctuary: and the fruit thereof shall be for meat and the leaf thereof for medicine.
And in verses 9 and 10 of the vision, we read, in Eisler’s rendering:
Wheresoever the river shall come, everything that moveth shall live, and there shall be a very great multitude of fish, because the waters shall come thither… And it shall come to pass [that] the fishers stand by it from En Gedi unto En Eglaim, they shall be [a place] to spread forth nets [for all fish] according to their kinds.
En Gedi and En Eglaim were two fresh water springs forming oases—the Gedi or Kid Spring and the Eglaim or Calf Spring—on the shores of the Dead Sea. The former was the chief center of the Essenes. In the Days of the End, they saw themselves as prophets who would be “fishers of men”.
Many references to this fishing of souls echoes legends of John the Baptist, and blend with early Gnostic tradition. The Mandæans, believers in the “Manda” or Gnosis, the “Nazoraya” as they call themselves, called Baptists or Subba’s by the Arabs, speak often of the “Fisher of Souls” and the wicked “fishers of men”. Mandæan traditions are hostile to Christianity and to Judaism. Their doctrines often parallel those of the Elchasaites, and some parts of the Clementine romances which preserve Ebionite traditions and legends of Simon the Magian, with whom John is brought into connection.
The Fisher figure must conjure a thought of the Babylonian fisher god Oannes, or Ea, father of Marduk the saviour god of Babylon, who rose yearly from the dead. This primeval God of Wisdom was the pre-Orphic culture god who had taught early mankind all the arts of civilization. Berossus, the Chaldæan historian priest describes six manifestations of Oannes in successive periods, revelation and saving in successive periods being fundamental to the Mandæans. Since Judaism was established from Babylon under the second Darius who lived there, ancient Babylonian myths suffused Judaism originally, and appear in Ezekiel’s visions. Oannes is the same name, at root as John. Jonah in Hebrew means Dove, the Mandæans had a class of the perfect called Doves, and the Greek Physiologus (41) has:
The Dove… which is John the Baptist.
Jonah is sometimes found as a shortened form of Johanan.
The belly of the Great Fish, as in the Jonah legend itself, was Sheol, the Underworld, the Pit. Another Great Fish, probably the same, in fact, was the monster Leviathan. Leviathan was the name the Ophites of Celsus gave to the Seven—the devourers of souls of men and animals. The Mandæan tradition has the Fisher of Souls catching the Seven in his net and destroying them. It is a version of the Babylonian myth of the Saviour god Marduk catching in his net and killing Tiamat, the primeval dragon of the deep. The Midrash Yalqut Yona relates that, when Jonah was in the belly of the Great Fish, he prayed it to carry him quickly to the Leviathan, so that he could catch it himself to make of a feast of it for the righteous. A Messianic fish banquet was to take place in the days of the End. Mistaking ancient glyphs and images without proper knowledge of the story of it was common, and led itself to many myths. Sometimes it was a deliberate reinterpretation of the image, to suit a new trend or a new religion brought perhaps by conquerors, or those who threw them off and were left with images they deplored. Images of oannes, half a fish, could have been read as a man swallowed by a fish. The god Ea or Oannes made the Assyrians repent, but when god became kineffable, the images were given a new meaning. Jonah, a man swallowed by a fish, was reborn and converted the heathen. Simple! Such a death and rebirth fitted in with Jewish messianic ideas, and these became the sign of Jonah.
A fish was a symbol of the righteous Jew—he lived his life in the waters of the Torah. The Aboth de R Nathan (40) has:
The pupils of Rabbi Gamaliel the Elder were divided into four kinds of fish: into clean and unclean fish from the Jordan and fish from the Ocean, according to their high and low descent and to the degree of their learning and quickness of their understanding.
Nor could John have been ignorant of the prophecy concerning the gathering together of dispersed Israel:
Behold, I will send for many fishers, saith the Lord, and they shall fish them.Jeremiah 16:16
Of maassive significance in view of the early Christian preference for a fish as a symbol of their faith is this:
As the Israelites are innumerable, even so are the fishes, as the Israelites will never die out on the earth, the fishes will never die out in their element. Only the Son of Man named “Fish” could lead Israel into the Land of Promise, namely Joshuah ben Nun ( = Fish).Berešith Rabba (97)
Joshuah in the Septuagint is always written as Jesus. The Samaritans, who accepted only the five books of the Law, called their messiah Joshuah, and gave him the title, the Ta’eb, the Returner. They believed he would be a reborn or returned Joshuah. The title Ta’eb means “The Repentent One”, or “The One Who Makes Us Repent”. The Returner is not himself returning, literally turning back, but is turning others back. The name “Noah” is a pun on the word for repent “noham”, bringing the ancient saviour from the Flood back into the picture full of watery metaphors. God told Noah to make an ark (tebah, cf Ta’eb), but he told the Ta’eb to make people repent (Aram, shuba, tubah).
The ark (tebah) saved Noah from the flood of perdition, and the conversion (shuba, tubah) will save the Penitent One (Ta’eb) and all the sons of Israel from the [flood of] perversion.G R S Mead, The Mandæans
Among the messianic expectations was the belief that in the Last Days it would again be as in the times of Noah, as indeed we are expressly informed by Q (Mt 24:37ff; Lk 17:26ff.)
John expected the catastrophe of the End Time to be a purification by fire, for Christians, effected by the holy spirit. Previous ones had been by water and by wind. The winnowing fan of John’s declaration connects catastrophe with wind, without which winnowing was impossible—the breath or spirit of God—and, for the good, would be a blessed harvesting, but, for the evil, would be a scattering of chaff.
John points to a widespread Jewish eschatological and so messianic movement before Christianity, of which Christianity was the outcome, albeit later modified by the ignorance and opportunism of its professionals. If the gospel narrative, which is that of Mark, is to be read as history, the ease by which Jesus called and persuaded his first disciples, and their readiness to leave all and follow him to become “fishers of men”, is mystifying unless something was in the air to prime them. Besides the generally tense situation, it was John’s teaching, as the author of the fourth gospel admits (Jn 1:40). Andrew, the brother of Simon Peter or Kephas, had been a disciple of the Baptist. Christianity had in it a lot of John’s influence, notably the call to repentence and baptism. John’s disciples, supported by Mandæan traditions, however, seemed to refuse Jesus’s messianic claims.
G R S Mead thought many of the images and expressions of Jesus were not original to him, but he shared them with those that had been taught by John, and the source of these mystic, apocalyptic and prophetical ideas was the Essenes. Even in the Christian gospels, Jesus praises John as the greatest prophet, even though the least in the Kingdom of God is greater than him. Since the least in heaven ought to be superior to anything on earth, the apparently demeaning remark does nothing to counter the acknowledgment by Jesus of the superiority of John on earth. As Christians accept John as the forerunner of Jesus, many of the his eschatological and associated beliefs must be the forerunners of early Christian doctrine. It is hard not to think that Jesus knew more of John personally and what lay at the back of him than the gospels would lead us to suppose, and used his ideas and symbols.
John, Jesus and the Essenes
Luke 1:36 makes out that John was related to Jesus, being the son of Elisabeth, the kinswoman of Mary, but what this hides is that the Essenes were a brotherhood because they were all sons of God. In typical biblical fashion, John was born to aged parents who had no right to expect a son, but this hides that the birth was a ritual birth or rebirth, and the ritual parents did not need to be young to have a ritual child. They were acting in a ritual capacity, and so as a priestly father and a ritual mother. Zacharias was the priest, and Elisabeth the ritual mother (Luke 1.5-25, 57-80). John grew up in the solitudes of the desert and in the lonely places (Luke 1.80), in other words at a wilderness camp like those near Qumran.
William Barclay was willing to see John as a waif adopted by the Essenes, but Christians will not accept Jesus as another waif, and probably from a younger age, also adopted by them. Rather, he is keen, as Christian theologians always are, to distinguish the Essenes as unlikely models of Jesus. He cites Schürer (The Jewish People in the Time of Christ) as saying the Essenes were a monastic order, unlike the Pharisees and Sadducees who involved themselves in society. Curiously, these same Christians deny that monasticism began with the Essenes despite this observation. Christians cannot stand to have any precursors in anything, but are not concerned that an argument used here will refute another one there. They assume that the flocks are too docile to bother, and, of course, they are right. For anyone more critical, however, they are plainly cheats and liars.
The Essenes were indeed monastic, but it did not mean that they never emerged from their monasteries, and even if it did, Christian commentators like Barclay are aware that there was another order of Essenes who were not confined to monasteries, and had special rules to allow them to mix with non-Essenes, and even gentiles, while preserving their purity. Often they are called village Essenes but they were not confined to villages, and Christians scholars are also aware that, not only was there an Essene quarter in Jerusalem, but Essenes participated in society and even in the Jewish War, because Josephus says so. Indeed, Barclay recognizes it, but flits over it rapidly, hoping no one will notice:
They could be found in small groups in the villages and in the towns, but they found their real life and their real flowering living in communities, closely disciplined and closely organized.W Barclay, The Mind of Jesus
The first characteristic of the Essenes was their washings and lustrations, and anyone who chose to be an Essene was put on a year’s probation before they could participate in them. Then after another two years’ probation, he was then admitted to their main characteristic, a common meal. Finally, he swore an eternal oath, the only one he was permitted to make, to submit his life to the brotherhood, but to say nothing about them to anyone outside of it. Thereafter they were subject to a rigid and ascetic discipline, holding whatever they owned, bar a few permitted personal items, in common with everyone else. Josephus wrote that no one among them suffered “the humiliation of poverty or the superfluity of wealth”. The common purse enabled them to stop the fears that afflicted all people in those days, sickness and old age, for the sick and the aged were looked after along with everyone else. Before all meals they carefully washed and undertook purificatory rites. They were sticklers for cleanliness, but not from any considerations of hygiene, but because they considered themsleves to be heavenly, or they aspired to be heavenly, and therefore perfect, and so they could not allow any ritual pollution or uncleanness about themselves for fear of excluding themselves from heaven. They had to wash off any ritual pollution before they ate, after their toilet and after contact with anyone impure, even someone lower in the Essene caste system.
The Persian foundations of Judaism seem to have been stronger among the Essenes than elsewhere, so that they still openly revered the sun, apparently as the face of God, especially praying each morning at dawn as the sun rose, and singing hymns to it. Barclay says it is “as if somewhere in their history and beliefs there had been some admixture of sun worship”. Quite so! It reminds us of the Persian reverence for Mithras, seen as the visible face of their transcendental God, Ahuramazda, which name seems to have been the origin of the founding brothers of Judaism, the first of the priests, Aaron, and the bringer of the law, Moses. They revered the law of Moses above all, and sneered at the Pharisees for wanting to protect people from it by building a wall around it of subsidiary laws meant to stop the Mosaic laws from being transgressed. Christian believers, following the Jews, accept the myth of Moses being an Egyptian, and the Israelites as having been Egyptian slaves. It was all written precisely to divert attention from the proper origins of Judaism with the Persians, and it was done when the Jerusalem priesthood and the Greek kings of Egypt, the Ptolemies, were allies in the third century BC. No one had ever heard of Moses as a leader of escaped slaves before then.
Barclay observes that there are striking resemblances and striking differences between John and the Qumran community when their normal life is read from their rule book, called by American scholars, the Manual of Discipline (The Community Rule). The striking difference are enough for Christian preachers and scholars to be able to claim no connexion! That suits them in their aim of preserving Jesus and John as unique. And, of course, no Christian sheep will ever want to check out for themselves the Essene books found in the caves by the Dead Sea and called the Dead Sea Scrolls. If they did, they would find that the Manual of Discipline is the manual of the monastic Essenes, and not surprisingly it is a strict rule that does not seem to meet the way of living of John. However, there are other sectarian books that do indeed allow people who are Essenes to mix with others, and one of the works even says it is an obligation when the signs show that the time is coming for God’s visitation, the great cosmic event they awaited. The theologians will not mention it, though. The reason is that the duty then of Israel—the name the Essenes took for themselves, as the true “Israel”—is to persuade all Jews, called in the scrolls “All Israel” to repentance so that they will be saved when God judges the world at his visitation. Now, if that is not precisely what John and Jesus were supposed to have been doing in the gospels, then words mean nothing.
Even the Manual of Discipline says clearly, in Theodor H Gaster’s translation, that the remnant of Israel (righteous Jews, the Essenes, Israel) were “to go into the wilderness to prepare the way”. It is from Isaiah:
Prepare in the wilderness the way… make straight in the desert a highway for our God.Isaiah 40:3
The “extraordinary fact” (Barclay’s description) is that the aim of this Qumran community is expressed in the words of Isaiah used in the New Testament to describe what John the Baptizer was doing (Mt 3:3; Mk 1:3; Lk 3:4). For the Essenes, the “way” is the law that God commanded Moses to deliver, and Jesus in the gospels insists that not a jot or tittle of the law shall pass away. It is Paul who abrogated it.
Barclay now claims that the difference was that they were preparing the way for themselves! That is the lie, for it says as clearly as possible in the scrolls that the object of the remnant was to save Israel, or as many of them as were willing to repent and be saved. The Essenes were in the wilderness doing what was commanded. They were preparing. If then, John was an Essene, and was doing what the Essenes expected, it follows that they had decided the time had come when God’s visitation was imminent. People were living in the End Time, or the Last Days before the world as it is would end and God would judge it. John had taken no individual or revealed path different from that of the Essenes who had trained him for an important and singular role—as Barclay, the desperate, but utterly dishonest Christian wants to persuade us—but had gone out into the community under orders to urge backsliding Jews to repent. Baptism was the outer ritual cleansing that went with the inner purification that comes from sincere repentance. If repentance is not sincere, then the pretence is valueless, because no unrighteous Jew could enter the kingdom of God anyway. God knows His own!
The Christian apologist wants to depict the Essenes as selfish, whereas the proto-Christian, John, and his successor, the Christian God, Jesus, were different. In fact, both were doing what was expected of them, and what is recorded truthfully in the gospels. They were trying to persuade unrighteous Jews to take a last chance of salvation. Christians have been doing it ever since, but the Day of God’s Vengeance has still not come, and few Christians would get past the judge, if it did. They have utterly lost the plot, and will not be corrected.
Essene Baptism
Ritual cleansing with water was, for the Essenes, a constant reminder of what was far more important—being internally pure, morally pure, pure in spirit. Of itself, it was worthless, so that no unrepentant man can be…
…cleared by mere ceremonies of atonement, nor cleansed by any waters of ablution, nor sanctified by immersion in lakes or rivers, nor purified by any bath. Unclean, unclean he remains so long as he rejects the government of God, and refuses the discipline of communion with him. For it is only through the spiritual apprehension of God’s truth that man’s ways can be properly directed. Only thus can all his iniquities be shriven so that he can gaze on the true light of life. Only through the holy spirit can he achieve union with God’s truth and be purged of all his iniquities. Only by a spirit of uprightness and humility can his sin be atoned. Only by the submission of his soul to all the ordinances of God can his flesh be made clean. Only thus can it be sprinkled with waters of ablution.Manual of Discipline, T Gaster, Trans
Christians came to think that baptism washed them free of sin in some sort of magic way. It shows how they have always sought to evade the proper interpretation of the Essene based religion they adopted. Of course, it is easier the Christian way, but they cannot seem to realize that it is not easier, if it is the wrong way. They will not be saved by false practice, however hard they practice it. They think that truth is whatever they as Christians happen to think and say at any particular time, utterly failing to realize that truth has to be won by hard work and dedication. It does not come perfectly formed with the words “I believe”. They do not need to study the Dead Sea Scrolls to know this. Their supposed God says it clearly enough in their own holy books, but, naturally, they do not want to hear it if it is too hard. Better to believe what Paul said. “Faith suffices for everything.” Certainly, the Essenes believed themselves that a good man will be rewarded by God by being sprinkled with the Spirit of Truth as if it was a sprinkling of purifying water, but being good was hard work, not just believing.
No one is to go into water to attain the purity of holy men, for men cannot be purified except they repent their evil.
It is precisely the ethical precept of John and then Jesus, and the bible is unequivocal about it, unless you prefer to believe, as a Christian, that Paul is more important than the man who was God in human form. That is just what Christians do. They believe Paul with his false but easy message, and ignore Jesus, John and James who say as clearly as the nose on your face that you have to sincerely repent of your past sins and work hard at actually being and especially doing good. It is because Christians prefer to ignore the hard work that they are hypocrites. They think they can saunter through the broad gate—and surely they can as it is the Devil’s gate—but their own God said the right gate was narrow and hard to find.
So, instructed by the Essenes who had decided that the End was nigh, John embarked on his mission of seeking repentance from ordinary Jewish sinners. The Lord God was coming to the earth to judge it for its past sins in His dreadful Day of Vengeance. Those who wanted to enter God’s kingdom had better be sure thay qualified. They had to have lived a spotless life of righteousness or they had better repent and show they had done so sincerely by being born again into their new sinless life by baptism. Most of the gospel parables are illustrations of this repentance in expectation of the coming of God, but there is little doubt that God’s kingdom was a Jewish one, with righteous Jews, God’s Chosen People in charge, and other nations, if worthy, coming in supplication.
Apologists will argue that the symbol that John used to signify the act of repentance, baptism, was something Jews had never experienced. Ever desperate to make John and especially Jesus uniquely revealed, they make up whatever they like that suits their argument. Barclay writes:
Never in history had a Jew been baptized.The Mind of Jesus
Baptism was something not for Jew but for a gentile. When a gentile came into Judaism as a proselyte, he was baptized, washed and cleansed of the evil of his gentile ways. Yet a Jewish encyclopedia, sub voce, “Baptism”, has:
Ritual purification by total immersion in water (tevilah). In the Second Temple Period baptism was practised by many pietist groups and sects.Eds, R G Z Werblowsky and G Wigoder, The Encyclopedia of the Jewish Religion (1965)
Why then do Christians “scholars” lie about it? Because they have to maintain the pretence for the benefit of their flocks that Christianity is uniquely revealed. And an honest approach to history shows unequivocally that it is not. It evolved from Essenism, and its evolution is given in the historical deeds of John and Jesus. They were Essenes doing exactly what Essenes were supposed to do when they concluded from their prophetic readings of the scriptures and the signs of the times that God was about to end the world. John and Jesus obviously elieved it, and so they acted accordingly. They tried to persuade Jews to repent and be baptised before it was too late. That multitudes of Jews did shows that baptism was not as unthinkably absurd as Christian the apologist makes out.
Baptism was a mark of repentance. What then of Jesus coming for baptism? What need had he of a baptism which was the mark of repentance? What need of repentance had Jesus, as an Essene, someone who kept himself righteous and ritually pure anyway, and considered by Christians as sinless. Of course, as an Essene, it ought not to have been peculiar for him to turn up for a ritual immersion, since he already had several a day, but it surely was a significant act. There was one serious act of folly that all Jews were guilty of. It was allowing the land of Judah to be occupied by a foreigner. God’s own land had been tainted by the pollution of the foreigner, and all Jews, His Chosen People, were responsible for allowing it. So even Jesus had to repent of this sin. Moreover, Jesus was the succesor to John, and the baptism will also have been the ceremony of succession, whereby one Essene leader “anointed” his successor. Essenes disdained the use of oil except medicinally, and seemed to use baptism instead of anointing as their way of designating the heir.
Mark describes John’s baptism as “a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” (Mk 1:4), and says that Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan (Mk 1:9). Luke also describes John’s baptism as “a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” (Lk 3:3) but is clear that Jesus is the senior of them. Matthew says John came with the summons to repentance but instead of it beiong explicitly for the remission of sins, it is because the kingdom of God is nigh (3:1). Ofd course, it is the same thing because whatever modern Christians might contrive to think, sinners cannot live in heaven. They have to sincerely repent first, so only righteous Jews, whether through a lifetime of right living or through repentance and baptism, can get into God’s kingdom. Matthew refuses to allow the thought that Jesus could be a sinner to come into view. Furthermore, John at first refused to baptize him, but Jesus insisted that all righteousness must be fulfilled (3.13-15). What could that have meant? It meant that Jesus was not fully righteous either, and needed to repent himself of some sin. It was the sin of allowing God’s land to be ruled by unclean and ungodly gentiles. John does not mention the baptism of Jesus by John at all. It is another illustration of the subtly evolving Christian message as the gospels get older and more Christianized.
Late works, such as those by Jerome make out that Jesus was baptized simply to please his mother. It suited the church to spread the idea of a family-man Jesus, to appeal to Roman housewives and maidens, but it does not hold water. The Essenes were a brotherhood, and Mary was a ritual mother, if she is not a pure invention of the early gentile church. She scarcely has any role in the earliest gospel, and where she appears is treated off-handedly, suggesting that whatever anyone remembered about the words of Jesus about his mother were not complimentary. And again, the reply of Jesus to his mother’s suggestion he be baptized by John, in the lost gospel cited by Jerome, is not at all Essene. Essenes had to be unusually humble, and this Jesus is arrogant. That is Paul and the early Church talking, not the Essene:
Wherein have I sinned, that I should go and be baptized by him? unless perhaps this very thing that I have said is a sin of ignorance.Jerome, Dialogue Against Pelasgius
Another work by an anonymous writer cites the lost Preaching of Paul:
Christ, the only man who was altogether without fault, both making confession respecting his own sin, and driven almost against his will by his mother Mary to accept the baptism of John.Tractate on Rebaptism
Now, it ought to seem fantastic to any Christian that Christ’s mother, knowing her son was literally a son of God, should want him to go and repent of his sins and be baptized to prove it. But would any ot them think about it? Justin Martyr makes Jesus the second Adam, bearing the first Adam’s sins, in an early argument of the need for redemption from original sin, but since Jesus was God and was going to be crucified, Christians tell us, in atonment of mankind’s sins, it still seems odd that he needed to repent and be baptized too.
We know that he did not go to the river because he stood in need of baptism, or of the descent of the Spirit like a dove; even as he submitted to be born and to be crucified, not because he needed such things, but because of the human race, which from Adam had fallen under the power of death and the guile of the serpent, and each one of which had committed personal transgression.Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho
The Christian view is that Jesus identified himself with the sin and the sorrow of mankind. Barclay explains:
These Jews came to John as sinners. They came because a sense of sin drove them, and because they were made to feel as never before their need of God and their need of the forgiveness of God, and it was precisely with sinful men that Jesus identified himself. He made, as it has been put, “common cause with all men in life in the mortal dilemma”.
It is all a bit wet, but if the sin is the one that the Jews had actually committed in letting God’s land be overtaken by a Roman emperor, and indeed that many Jews collaborated with this usurper of God’s role, then there was a sin that Jesus could identify himself with. Inasmuch as Jesus was a Jew, and Judaea was God’s Promised Land, meant for Jews, and regarded in the Jewish scriptures as God’s betrothed, he had sinned. The chosen wife of God had been ravaged by another, and Jews had allowed it. That is certainly how the Essenes of Qumran saw it, and why they made preparations for winning God’s land back from the enemy, the Romans. Jesus was their leader in this venture, and had repent of the sin, and be baptized to show his “common cause” with all Jews.
The Jewish proselyte baptism is a rebirth, and we have suggested that the same is true of the Essene ceremonies whereby the holy men are born again into a new and pure life. Curiously a variant text of Luke instead of reading:
Thou art my beloved Son, with thee I am well pleased,
it reads:
Thou art my beloved Son, today I have begotten thee.
It says quite clearly that the ceremony was a rebirth in which the repentant person, Christ, was reborn as a Son of God, as a Bar Abba in Aramaic, or Barabbas in Greek rendering of the Aramaic! Righteous Jews like the monastic Essenes themselves who lived carefully isolated lives to stay pure and unblemished by sin, and Jews who repented of the sins of their past and undertook to be baptized to signify it, became Sons of their Father, God. They became pure. They were angels on earth simply waiting for the Mount of Olives to split open and God and his hosts to arrive and end the world.
In Justin Martyr’s account of the baptism, he adds:
And then, when Jesus had gone to the river Jordan, where John was baptizing, and when he had stepped into the water, a fire was kindled in Jordan.
Indeed it was, for the coming of the kingdom of God meant that the Romans had to be expelled from Judaea. It was a fire that lasted for a century.
The Three Snares of Belial
The Damascus Document, in an interpretation of Isaiah 24:17: “Fear, and the pit, and the net, are upon thee, O inhabitant of the earth”, refers to three particular sins which concerned the Community, the “Three snares of Belial”. They were wealth, polluting the Temple, and “fornication”. Fornication included improper marriages such as taking more than one wife or marrying a niece. The Damascus Rule speaks of a spouter who married again while his first wife still lived, whereas the principle of creation is:
Male and female created He them.Gen 1:27
This is the same principle expounded by Jesus and yet it is quite alien to normal Jewish law which bases itself on the commandments brought down by Moses and not on Genesis.
The Damascus Rule forbids marriage between uncles and nieces on the grounds that the law of Moses prescribes only that:
You shall not approach your mother’s sister; she is your mother’s own near kin.Lev 18:13
The law quoted here forbids nephews and their maternal aunt marrying, so that there is no specific Mosaic law against uncles marrying nieces, and the Pharisees even took it to be worthy. The Essenes asserted that laws of incest true for men were true for women also. If an aunt could not marry her nephew neither could an uncle marry his niece.
Another complete scroll, the Temple Scroll, echoes the Damascus Rule in forbidding a king of Israel from marrying his niece. Since the only dynasty for which this was common practice was that of the Herodians, the scroll must refer to them. If so these scrolls must date from the time of Herod, the period of the gospels. This is the sin which Herod Antipas committed and which John the Baptist condemned. It must also negate the good terms Josephus said were shared by the community and the Herodians.
Though fornication is one of the three snares of Belial, the early characters of the Old Testament were unselfcritical fornicators. King David had many wives. How was this to be justified? The Qumran Community did so by arguing that the Law had not yet been revealed to them or had not yet been fully revealed. They could not live according to standards that God had not yet provided. Paul, showing familiarity with Essene reasoning, uses a similar argument in Galatians 3 and Romans 4 to back up his rejection of the Law. Abraham could not have been restricted by a Law which did not exist yet he remained good because of his faith. Thus, Paul cunningly and evidently deliberately uses the Essenes’ own argument to maintain that faith is superior to the Law. The evidence is that Paul had been trained as an Essene.
Finally for the sectaries the temple was polluted. Those in charge of it, the Sadducees, profaned it with their wealth, their disregard for the Mosaic law against sleeping with a woman who was menstruating and their acceptance of gifts from foreigners. Acts 15 and 21:25 depict James, the leader of the Jerusalem Church, as objecting to people indulging in blood, fornication and food or things sacrificed to idols—expressing concern at the pollution of the temple.
Besides John’s views on fornication, the three snares of Belial help us to understand Jesus’s outlook. He also identified wealth with sin so that it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. He rages at the pollution of the Temple and refuses to allow divorce. Acts 15 and 21:25 depict James, the leader of the Jerusalem Church, as objecting to people indulging in “Blood”, “fornication” and “food or things sacrificed to idols”—the latter expressing concern at the pollution of the Temple by offerings from abroad.
