John, Jesus and the Essenes 1
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, 14 June 2006
Abstract
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.
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Moses and Exodus
