Christianity
Messianic Hymns: A Self Glorified and Suffering Messiah in Essene Theology
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, February 17, 1999
Monday, 31 December 2007
The Messiah Before Jesus
Israel Knohl of the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, has been described as “a lonely figure swimming against the tide of 100 years of scholarship”. Knohl should consider this a complement because the tide of this scholarship is one based on the mass of uncritical Christians and Jews convinced that what their ancient books tell them is divine truth, and however great this mass of believers is, it cannot make falsehoods or even honest opinion into scholarship. The few genuine scholars—or even bent scholars in some circumstances, such as publication in scholarly journals unread by anyone else—follow scholarship where e’er it leads, even if, and indeed especially when, it leads away from cherished beliefs. They do not censor it on the basis of belief held on hearsay and indoctrination. Scholarship is nothing more than propaganda when it is not concerned with objective truth, and all believers ought to accept that it is so because God made it thus!
By combining the new scholarship of the Dead Sea Scrolls with Jewish and classical scholarship, Knohl has written The Messiah Before Jesus. The thesis is cogently argued, but what is important for these pages is that the evidence adduced also supports the thesis expounded in them. If the Scrolls contained evidence for another messiah besides Jesus but with a similar fate, it would be an excellent reason for the tardiness of the authorities in translating and releasing the texts, and possibly conspiring to destroy some of them—some were buried in a damp Jerusalem garden, and Lo! they rotted! Knohl rejects all such allegations, but the rest of us have no sinecures to preserve. We can remain suspicious.
The problem about “Christian scholarship” is that no identities except ones obvious to two year old believers are accepted by its “scholars”. If a man called Menehem was discovered who suffered an identical fate as the Christian God, he would be instantly discarded as a fake, a mistake, an imitation, or some sort of devilish illusion. Israel Knohl identifies a man called Menehem with a similar fate to Jesus’s a few decades earlier, and that is why the tide of Christian scholarship rejects him. Yet Knohl presents excellent evidence that the Essenes had a messianic leader who was a friend of Herod and had the titles Nasi, the Prince, and Menehem, a word meaning the “Comforter”, in Greek, Paraclete.
Messianic Secret
Recollect, that Jesus was hardly open in the gospels about claiming to be messiah. When anyone revealed the secret, he rebuked them and told them to keep quiet about it. Even when he prompted Peter to admit it, he told him to keep it quiet. Several times, Jesus told of the death and resurrection of the “son of man”, spoken of in the third person, as if it were someone else. Effortlessly, Christians see this son of man spoken of by Jesus as meaning himself, but the argument is circular, depending on “son of man” being a messianic reference. In John’s much later fourth gospel, there is no messianic secret, and so Christians have difficulty seeing it in the earlier ones. Paul also knew of no messianic secret either, but he never knew Jesus himself.
The problem with the messianic secret, even if Christians cannot see it, is “Why?”. Why must the identity of the messiah be kept secret in the synoptic gospels? Why was Jesus coy about his mission? Why forbid anyone who knew it from saying so? Why did he not openly declare it? Even in two of the synoptics, Matthew and Luke, his messiahship was prominently advertised at his birth, and was even known hundreds of miles away in the east! Moreover, why was Jesus apparently reluctant to use the pronoun “I” in the synoptic gospels, preferring the circumlocution “son of man”, when when he could not stop using “I” in the fourth gospel even in conjunction with God Himself. That “tide” of Christian scholars, for a hundred years, decided that the claim that Jesus was the messiah was a later invention of Christianity, not a claim of Jesus himself during his ministry. The evidence was that thre Jews had no tradition of a suffering messiah. The suffering servant of Isaiah was a personification of the Jewish people, not any model for Jews of a messiah, so Jesus could not have made the claim that he was a messiah who would suffer and die.
The Dead Sea Scrolls show these objections to have been wrong, though the supposed claim by Jesus that he would suffer and die cannot be considered upheld even so. The reason is that the Essenes, if they were the authors of the sectarian scrolls, treated their prince or leader as the messiah, or potentially the messiah, during his life, and one, at least, of these nesiim did suffer and die and was supposed even to have risen “after three days”. Therein lies the doubts over Jesus’s alleged claim—the legend of the earlier Essene Nasi was transferred to Jesus.
The Messianic Hymns
Four fragments of two linked hymns, called the Messianic Hymns, have been found at Qumran in two versions, 4QHe, 4QHa fragment 7, 4QHa column 26, and 4Q491 fragment 11 column 1. The second of the linked hymns typically calls upon members to praise God, but the first one is most peculiar, especially for an Essene work, and is called the “Self-Glorification Hymn”, after its peculiarities. Though often fragmentary, the Essenes wrote in familiar phrases, and so the hymns can be reconstructed much more substantially than the fragments first suggest.
The Self-Glorification hymn is in the first person and compares the author, who is most certainly superior to men, with the angels and even with God! He sat on a heavenly throne surrounded by angels, just as God did, but also had once been despised and rejected by men. In the Jewish scriptures, God is praised in the words:
Who is like thee, O Lord, among the elim (gods)?Ex 15:11
With astonishing audacity, the author of the Self-Glorification hymn writes:
Who is like me among the elim?
When it suits them, monotheistic translaters interpret elim as angels, but the word is literally gods. Either way, the parallel with the scriptures is indisputable, and cannot have been unintended. The author is claiming divinity. Interestingly, this scroll was badly mutilated in antiquity. It looks as if an effort was made to destroy it, but it was reprieved. Then the author of the hymn compares himself with the suffering servant of God (Isaiah 53:3) who “was despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief” writing:
Who has been despised like me? And who has been rejected of men like me? And who compares with me in enduring evil?
Even so, the flow from his lips, teaching, judgement, and endurance of afflictions and evil, were incomparable, but he would not crown himself with gold nor desire flesh for no one could accompany him in his exaltation to heaven to dwell in the Holy Council.
Angel, Messiah, Priest?
The figure who fits this description is the messiah, but as this is a first person account, it seems to give a messianic view of himself, the author, in which he is tantamount to God. Yet these hymns are dated by palaeography to the end of the last century BC, about the end of the reign of Herod, or about the time of the birth of the Christian messiah. If the dates are too high by only two or three decades, the author of these hymns could have been Jesus himself. Dating by palaeography is rarely that certain. Alternatively, the hymns could have been written earlier, and these were copies of the originals, adding to the probability that they were written BC, in which case the Christian image of the messiah was already, in some author’s head a generation or more before Jesus arrived at Calgary. These hymns suggest that the Qumran community had identified the Jewish messiah with God and with the suffering servant of Isaiah long before the Christian churches did the same for Jesus. The church simply reflected the Essenes’ already existing theology.
An alternative suggestion was made by M Baillet that this figure was the archangel Michael, a notion challenged by M Smith on the grounds that the chief angel could not consider boasting about being among angels, or of succeeding in the arts and solving the problems of men. It seems a valid point, unless the Essenes had a tradition that Michael, the angel, had a task on earth in which he had to be a man. It became the belief of gnostics, and might have been a tradition of the Essenes. For them, the messiah was an incarnated angel—Michael. Angels were sons of God, so, as an angel Michael had that title, but Michael was also the Angel of the Lord, the face of God to men. He was God! So this messiah was God incarnated, and the Self-Glorification hymn is showing it from the eye of the messiah—an exalted man. All of this is what Christians came to believe. Only the identity of Christ with the angel Michael was lost in orthodox Christian tradition, though the gnostics retained it.
If it is a unique revelation then God is responsible, and either the gospel events or the Scrolls are misdated, deliberately to divorce them from the gospel events or in error. Otherwise, the Essenes had Christian notions first, and Christ was repeating Essenic traditions. If Christ was the only risen messiah, then the Self-Glorification vision was futuristic. The messiah would be an Essene Nasi or Prince at the “End of Days” when God would wreak His vengeance on the wicked world. The Self-Glorification hymn was then the envisioned situation of that one of the Nesiim who took on the actual role of the messiah at the Day of God’s Vengeance. Scholar, J J Collins, had thought this to be the case but rejected it as being too unique in being put in the first person—written as if a man could be God—close to blasphemy, and unprecedented in the extant Scrolls. Unfortunately, the alternative is that it is blasphemy that some Essene leader believed he was the messiah and wrote it down. Note that blasphemy is claiming to be God and Jews in general did not think to claim to be messiah was claiming to be God, or even divine. For many Jews, the messiah was the human leader of God’s Chosen People.
It seems to have been the Essenes who considered the messiah to be an incarnation of the archangel Michael—“who is like God”. Michael was also like God in especially favouring the Jews. A statement in the form of a question avoided a blasphemy because the archangel “who is like God” need not be God, a clever evasion of the problem. So God appeared to men as the archangel who is like God—the archangel Michael—and worthy men could aspire to be the messiah, an incarnation of the angel who is like God who, in one instance, will be God, without being blaphemous. The circumstances will demonstrate the truth or otherwise of the claim, just as it does for prophets! If God were to appear on earth incarnate, what men see and interact with is the archangel who is like God, not the power that is greater than the universe, and so they can live. The messiah was Michael, the angel who is like God, because he is the nearest any human can get to God and live, though, on the Day of God’s Vengeance, no one does live! If the fateful day does not arrive as the culmination of the messiah’s ministry, then he was a fake! To us, it all seems sophistry, but, doubtless, it all seemed sensible theology or philosophy to the Essenes at the time.
J J Collins ruled out M G Abegg’s suggestion that the Righteous Leader, the founder of the Essenes, was the author of the Self-Glorification hymn. His grounds were that the Thanksgiving Hymns were the work of this man, but this hymn had quite a different style and sentiment. It is hardly convincing, though. Who is sure that the Thanksgiving Hymns were the work of the founder? Were the work of only one man? Or that any Essene could only write hymns in only one style? In the absence of any positive evidence of authorship, the community being literate, it seems safer to assume multiple authors for the hymns and successive leaders would add to the corpus. The community was doubtless founded by a Righteous Teacher, but his successors were not Unrighteous Teachers, and nor were they merely teachers. They had titles, some of which seem identifiable, and it is hard to be certain that only the founder was entitled Righteous Teacher, or Teacher of Righteousness. It is most likely the generic title of successive leaders. So, J J Collins is probably right in that the author of the Self-Glorification hymns was not the founder, but possibly wrong in that it was nevertheless a Righteous Teacher. The author of the Self-Glorification hymn probably was different from any of the authors of the Thanksgiving Hymns, but any or all of them could have been considered as Righteous Teachers, leaders of the community, but different ones.
Collins apparently claims the author of the of this messianic hymn was a single person, not a composite figure. Quite what this is meant to address is hard to say. One can put the sayings of any number of people into the mouth of one only, a single figure apparently. One can personalize a whole nation, as the Jews did for the suffering servant of Yehouah, a single figure. Christians shamefully made Judas stand for the whole Jewish race. So the author could have made up a figure based on others, or the whole race, but written as he saw it. Could that be easily distinguished from anyone’s personal vision, especially when all you have to judge is a few fragments written in a formally religious style of acceptable phrases. That is what much of Essene writing is, and important ones among the set phraseology are also Christian ones.
The subject of the hymn sounds like a megalomaniac—someone with the God delusion common among Christians since Christ. Yet Essenes considered themselves sons of God, not in any megalomaniac conviction but because all men were, and it was everyone’s duty to live up to it by acting as a son of God should. True sons of God, those who tried to act the role, could justifiably call God father, as Jesus did, and they then will have had the title Barabbas, meaning “One who is a son of God”. But sons of God in the Jewish scriptures are explicitly angels, so any Barabbas who lived up to his title, even while alive on earth was an angel. The Essenes aspired to be angels by eschewing sex, and living near perfect lives.
They also considered themselves as priests, and priests were “servants of the Lord” (Dt 10:8; 18:7; 21:5), just as angels were. The temple was built on an ascending pattern, up to the Holy Place with its Holy of Holies, considered to be an opening into heaven on earth and the earthly home of God, where only priests—if uncorrupted, tantamount to angels—could tread. With their rejection of the corrupt temple priesthood, Essenes saw that Herod’s built temple was worthless because God dwelt within them all—etched in their hearts, as Jeremiah had it. They were priests destined to be angels in fact. In the Jewish scriptures and the Dead Sea Scrolls, angels ministered to God who sat above them on the heavenly throne, while in the Self-Glorification hymn, the author pictures himself on the throne amidst a council of angels. Is it megalomania or a simple extrapolation from life on earth as leader of the Essenes to life as the leader of the same people in heaven? The leading angel in heaven is Michael, and Michael is God sitting on a throne of power. Essenes were angels on earth, and their leader would become the heavenly leader on earth, Michael, but Michael on earth was God Himself incarnated as His messiah. The leader of the Essenes, their Nasi, was potentially the messiah on earth. The one who was in the post at the last days when the End of Time came would actually be the Messiah! The Self-Glorifgication hymn is not at all necessarily megalomaniacal but is pure Essenic logic. Nor was it considered blasphemous, though when the author of it died ignominiously, some seem to have decided it was, for the scroll was deliberately screwed up and damaged in ancient times.
What is in the hymn? “Who is like me among the angels?” “Angels” is elim, literally gods in the scriptures, so a pointed echo of “Michael”, “Who is like God”. No angel is like Michael. He is the top angel, the archangel of the Jewish nation, the power of God, indeed as “angels” is elim, he is the top God, Yehouah. He is God. No one else can be like him. In his incarnation on earth, he is the top Essene, the Nasi, so each Nasi has to be treated as if he were the messiah. In the hymn, the hero is the companion of the Holy Ones—the Essene saints on earth who become angels in heaven. He is the “friend” or “beloved” of the king, where the king plainly means God. Here is another title, Theophilus or Bogomil! God’s beloved in the Jewish Scriptures was David (Dwd) which means “beloved”, but Solomon was called Yedidya, or “Beloved of Yehouah”, and he sat on “the throne of God” (2 Sam 12:25).
Suffering Servant
Besides the self-glorification, though, is the confession of suffering and affliction that has to be endured, apparently echoes of the suffering servant of Isaiah 53, the most “despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows, familiar with grief”. The obvious, and generally accepted inference is that here is a personification of the Jewish nation, though it was more often personified as God’s daughter or betrothed who suffers because she is unfaithful. The servants of God in heaven were angels, on earth priests who were akin to angels when they remained faithful servants. The Essenes considered themselves to have been faithful servants who had suffered wrongly, and some of this chapter of Isaiah is possibly an Essene interpolation, and the suffering servant a personification specifically of the Essenes. Knohl thinks the hymn is not a personification but is the actual experience of an Essene leader about thirty years before the crucifixion of the Christian Jesus. We read of a Poor One lifted up from the dust to the eternal height:
…to the clouds he magnifies him in stature and he is with the heavenly beings in the assembly of the community…
The assembly of the community refers to the Essenes themselves who are considered heavenly beings, and they too are lifted up…
…those who stumble on earth he lifts up without charge and everlasting might is with their step, and eternal joy in their habitations, everlasting glory without end, forever and ever…
Is the Poor One the leader, or simply the whole group personified? As the assembly of the community has also been lifted up, the Poor One mentioned in the singular could be the leader. The Essenes aimed to be perfect, to be angels on earth, and Jesus, if he was one, had exacting standards on a par with this. It was better to pluck out an eye than to risk lusting, or whatever else, and thereby not entering heaven. Could Essenes who tried to be perfect be considered to stumble? Humility was important to them. However perfect they thought they might be, they realized that they lived in the imperfect world, and simply could not be perfect outside of heaven until the day when God merged the two. Until then, they would stumble, but simply had to try harder! Then they would be rewarded in heaven. The Essenes distinguished themselves from “All Israel”, the nation of ordinary Jews, who obviously stumbled, and were even outright sinners. But even these could hope for God’s mercy if they tried. And when God lifted up the Poor One from the dust, He simultaneously cast down “the haughty spirit” leaving “no remnant”. If the Poor One is singular because it is the Essene Nasi, who is the singular haughty spirit, how can a singular “haughty spirit” be cast down with the possibility of leaving a remnant? The “haughty spirit” is plainly a personification of haughty, arrogant, people, enemies of the Essenes, not humble people like the Essenes themselves who were the Poor Ones. Those cast down “without a remnant” were utterly destroyed, but here they are inconsistently represented by a singular “haughty spirit”. Likewise, then the Poor One is more likely to have been a personification of the Poor, meaning the Poor in Spirit, the Essenes, whose spirit was poorness, than a singular person, their leader, though he too was included, and perhaps sometimes stood for the whole group.
Knohl also contrasts the general atmosphere of the thanksgiving hymns with that of these messianic hymns, in that the former presume affliction, grief, groaning, sorrow, lamentation, and the hope of better things, whereas the messianic hymns are of an end to sickness, affliction, sorrow, groaning, and so on, and peace appearing, so the “beloved ones” were to raise their voices and sing in praise of the king of glory in the congregations of God and the tents of salvation. It seems that the good time had arrived, and Knohl takes it to reflect a reality extant when the hymn was written. In fact, it seems to be a future present not an actual one, but that is not to say that it did not reflect some actual time of peace and prosperity. Knohl concludes that it indeed did, and it was a period when the persecution of Essenes must have ended, at least pro tem, and that was in the time of king Herod.
When Was it Written?
Josephus says the Essenes were favoured by king Herod, and Knohl surmises that one Essene Nasi wrote this hymn in that period when things were looking up for Essenes. Later, this same man was excommunicated by Hillel, the Nasi of the Pharisees for blasphemy. Then he was killed in Jerusalem and his corpse left in the street for three days. After that, his followers thought he had risen and ascended to heaven. From this rejection, humiliation and death arose a messianic expectation of suffering that remained strong at the time of Jesus, a few decades later, and gave Christianity a base for some of its legends. One might have thought, though, that the earlier events would have given any later putative messiah a good idea of what not to expect, and indeed what to avoid. The evidence that Jesus had any personal expectations of suffering are slim.
Perhaps more likely is that elements of the stories of Jesus and the earlier messiah were merged after the messianic expectations of Jesus were spoilt by his crucifixion. The prophecy of his own death is a three-fold tale—a fairy-tale motif that shows it is likely to be mythical—lacking conviction and coherence because Jesus’s closest companions do not know what he is talking about. This incomprehension is a crude device to allow the prophecies of suffering to be added with no consequences for the actual events that happened. In fact, Jesus was plainly expecting the whole world to end, so that everyone would die and the righteous among them would be rased up into eternal life. The rest would be judged as wicked and would suffer the second, and permanent, death in a lake of boiling sulphur. The end of the world did not happen—proving, incidentally, that Jesus was not the messiah—and the personal prophecies of suffering replaced the actual citation of Hosea 6:2 that it would. The ghoulish story of the dead rising in Matthew was meant to show that the dead had risen as Hosea prophesied, a necessity for any true messiah.
The evidence Knohl offers for his thesis is compatible with the origins of Christianity suggested here. The Essenes were indeed in favour when Herod began to rebuild the temple. Herod’s palace in Jerusalem was just south of the Jaffa Gate in the western part of the Upper City. The Essene quarter of the city was just to the south with egress from the city via the Essene Gate built by Herod, the excavation of which was reported in 1989, by B Pixner, D Shen and Sh Margolit. Its location was confirmed by the discovery of graves like those at Qumran in Jerusalem (B Sissin, 1988).
