Christianity
Virgil, Menehem Nasi of the Essenes and the Son of God, the emperor Augustus
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, 6 February 2008
The Oracle of Hystaspes
At the time of Christ’s birth, the king of the Kittim (Romans) was the emperor Augustus, a man who considered himself the son of God—Julius Caesar having been made a god. In 44 BC, when Julius Caesar was murdered, his will made his niece Attia’s son, Octavian, his adopted son and heir. Octavian took the name Caesar after his new father, and sought and gained divine honours for him. As Julius Caesar was divine—a god—Octavian was the son of a god, and he took upon himself the title, divi filius, or “Son of God”, and put the title on the coins he had minted after about 40 BC. Octavian was not unchallenged, however, and a decade of civil war followed in which Octavian vied with his main rival Marcus Antonius, Mark Antony. Octavian ruled the western empire and Antony the east, including Egypt and Syria, where he famously associated with the Egyptian queen, Cleopatra. Eventually, the eastern rulers were defeated by Octavian at the sea battle of Actium in 31 BC. Antony and Cleopatra fled to Alexandria and died by suicide.
Israel Knohl (The Messiah Before Jesus) makes the interesting supposition that the Oracle of Hystaspes is concerned with these events, which it describes. Several people early in Christianity speak of the Oracle of Hystaspes—Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Lydus de Mensibus, Aristokritus and Lactantius, and their quotations from it are all that remain of it. They said it was Persian. It prophesies the arrival of a saviour, the overthrow of evil as embodied in the Roman empire, and the return of world rule to Persia. However, it seems primarily to have concerned the Jews and was a pseudepigraph written by a Jew, though it has genuine Persian allusions (J R Hinnells, Man and His Salvation, Eds Sharp and Hinnells, 1973). Hystaspes was an ancestor of Cyrus the Great of Persia to whom Jews owe their salvation in the biblical “return from exile”. It shows the closeness of Judaism with Persia, and suggests that an original Persian source was used for it.
Justin Martyr, in the middle of the second century AD told us the Romans would kill anyone who read this prophecy because it foretold the end of the Roman empire. Justin, supposedly apologising but apparently intent on martyrdom, stated (Apologies 1:20) that “this whole system of incorruptibles will be destroyed by fire”, and (Apologia 1:44) that evil demons [the Romans] proclaimed death “against those who read the books of Hystaspes”. He admitted that he and his Christian friends enjoyed reading it!
Paul the apostle, according to Clement of Alexandria (Stomata 6:5:30), quoted from this oracle and recommended it. It helps us understand why the Romans did not think a lot about Christians. He wrote that Paul, the Christian apostle to the gentiles used to recommend that his followers should:
Take Hystaspes, read, and you will find the Son of God described much more luminously and distinctly, and how many kings should draw up their forces against Christ, hating him and those that bear his name, His Faithful Ones…Miscellanies 6:5
Lydus de Mensibus spoke of “the Chaldaeans of Zoroaster and Hystaspes”, identifying Chaldaeans with the Magi as the Holy Ones of Zoroaster, and equating Hystaspes with the Persian prophet. They sound like Persian philosophic or theologic schools.
Aristokritus tries to show that Pagan writers agree with the Christians. He identifies Hystaspes as king of the Persians or Chaldaeans. Hystaspes received a revelation of the divine mysteries of the saviour’s incarnation, a prophecy to be fulfilled after 6000 years.
According to the Magi, for three thousand years in succession, the one of the gods rules, and the other is ruled [Ahuramazda and Ahriman]. For the next three thousand they fight and war, and break up one another’s domains. But finally Hades is to fail, and men will become happy, neither needing food, nor casting shadows.J H Moulton, Early Zoroastrianism
It is the Persian and Jewish extent of the Time of Long Dominion—the history of the material world—explained in Psalms 89:5 as “a thousand years are with the Lord as one day, and in six days God made the universe, and rested on the seventh”. So, in parallel with the creation, the world will end after 6000 years—or 9000 to allow a millennium each for the three sons of Zoroaster who are Saoshyants.
Lactantius quotes from the Oracle of Hystaspes frequently (Divine Institutions 7:15,18; Epitome 73) often without being clear that Hystaspes is his source, though the context and content leaves little doubt about it. He says Hystaspes was a king of the Medes and reported a prophecy that the pious and faithful in the Last Age would “implore the protection of Jupiter”, and would be separated from the wicked whom Jupiter would destroy. Lactantius was a Christian and takes these statements as confirming that God would destroy the world. Lactantius included a detailed apocalyptic vision with several important non-biblical elements, the calamities to be expected. Scholars judge that these must have come from the Oracle of Hystaspes because elements like those do occur in Iranian works.
Among them is the eschatological fire to be experienced by everyone, righteous or wicked, but which only the righteous survive. Though the belief is incipient in Christianity, as a reading of the gospels shows, what emerged is that first there is a Judgement, and then the wicked are cast into the flames. Disastrous flooding is also mentioned in Lactantius, the result of three years of continuous rain. Of course, such a flood occurs in the Jewish scriptures but with a promise that it will never again happen. Disease is another manifestation of the tribulations of the End. God sent plagues in Zechariah and Revelation, but disease and disaster are signs of the End caused by the Evil Spirit in Zoroastrianism. Oddly, this list of calamities or woes is not certainly original to Zoroastrianism, in that it cannot be traced to the Gathas. Purification by fire and the coming saviour are attested, but not the state of the world at the time. Doubtless they were, elsewhere in the Persians sacred texts that were destroyed, but the evidence we have is Plutarch (Isis and Osiris 46), his source being Theopompus.
The dualism of Persian religion saves God from any responsibility for human suffering. All of it is caused by the Devil. The Good Creation, static, ordered and perfect was spoilt by the Devil creating motion via time, and with it corruption and disorder, or entropy as we now understand it. Devils and demons rejoice in their final acts of destruction, but, as long as human beings are mainly on the side of Good, the evil spirits are doomed. When fire, flood and disease are among a catalogue of disasters, the original source is likely to have been Persian, and the final apocalypse is the ultimate battle of Evil against Good. Then God will send His Son to save the faithful and destroy the impious.
Who was this saviour, if the Oracle of Hystaspes was originally Persian? Was it Mithras, especially as he appeared to the Romans? The Oracle of Hystaspes is not known in the east. Alexander’s Macedonians deliberately burnt all the Zoroastrian texts when they torched Persepolis. So the book that survived in the west perhaps did so via Mithraism as it was practised in Anatolia, a heavily Persianized colony for 200 years. The idea fits the warrior god described in the Mithra Yasht.
Even better, of course, are the Saoshyants, who are specified as saviours, but are sons of Zoroaster or Zoroaster reincarnated, not sons of God. Followers of Zoroaster, in the east, are also metaphorically his sons, and Zoroaster was the founding priest of a school, so the meaning was likely to have been that the Saoshyants were meant to be members of the Zoroastrian priestly school. As the Saoshyant, in Persian tradition, offered the final Hom ceremony, he had to be a priest. How then was he a warrior? The problem is the same in Christianity where the Jewish tradition they inherited is that the saviour was a son of David, a warrior, yet Jesus was gentle (or was until the US fundies solved the problem by making him into Rambo!). The problem existed already in Judaism, as the Essene works show, and they solved it by expecting two messiahs, a warrior and a priest. Zaehner went further, offering evidence that Zoroastrians saw kingship and cultus as brothers, and the priestly and the princely saviours of the Essenes seem to be a reflexion of that Persian tradition.
An argument against Mithras as the saviour is that Mithraism, at least in the west, was never considered as subversive by the Romans who evidently were suspicious of all apocalyptic cults as being against the Roman ethic. Christianity was considered as subversive, a cause of the so-called persecutions, because they considered the world order—the Roman world order in the west—as wicked and doomed, and the Oracle of Hystaspes has the same suggestion. Mithraism was a stabilizing influence in Rome, and so the emperors favoured it. Like Islam, submission was the central principle, and Mithraists were models of social conformity. The sect sought to assist the soul to rise above the world, and so no divine cleansing of it was expected or necessary. Mithraism does not seem compatible with a politically catastrophic concept of world salvation as Hystaspes envisioned, whereas the idea that the son of God was a Saoshyant was supported by three strong arguments:
- It is central to Zoroastrianism that there would be an ultimate saviour, the Saoshyant, at the apocalypse,
- Romans and Persians were enemies in the east, and so Zoroastrian oracles labelling Rome as a manifestation of Ahriman make sense,
- The person and work of the saviour were known in the west from works like the Oracle of Hystaspes and Syriac texts.
The link between the Persians and the west was the people of the lands that were originally Persian but became Greek then Roman, mainly Anatolia and Syria, but the people in Roman times who existed across the boundary were the Jews. Jews, who were Syrians and whose state had been set up by the Persians, were scattered everywhere and expected by many Romans to favour the Persians.
The Greek king, Mithradates Eupator, tried to resist the Romans in the first century BC, and could have used the anti-Roman sentiments of the Oracle of Hystaspes in his propaganda. Indeed, he seemed to present himself as a saviour, but it is unlikely Eupator originated the Oracle. The origin of it is to be found in the reactions of Persians to the Macedonian conquest. Under these circumstances, Persian propaganda against the Greeks and Macedonians—westerners—could be expected. A hypothetical proto-Hystaspes seems to have been composed before the second century, and was edited in succeeding generations after then to keep it topical. Some time in the late first century BC, probably in Anatolia, it was redacted by a Jew, and became more or less what we have now.
A True and a False Prophet
The oracle prophesied two kings, the first whose rule was intolerable, and who meditated “new designs in his breast”, among which was to “change the name of the empire and transfer its seat” of government. The second was even more terrible. He would destroy the first, call himself God, and son of God, and would come out of Syria. Christians who are obsessed with prophetic books, believing them to be some sort of truth and a proof of God, have made every effort to identify these two kings, but have failed. They are inclined to look for the kings in contemporary events, imagining that they will, like the Essenes, be able to see in these prophecies signs of the times, and especially that the end of the world is nigh!
The first king seems likely to have originally stood for the Persian empire, and the second Alexander the Great who destroyed Persia. A Jewish redacter towards the end of the first century BC, saw that the allusions almost fitted the current situation in the Roman empire, and tweaked the text here and there to make it fit better. The edited version fits Octavian and Antony respectively. When Octavian revealed Antony’s will after the latter had divorced Octavian’s sister, Octavia, it emerged that Antony had expressed the wish to be buried in Alexandria, with Cleopatra. Octavian insinuated, and the Senate concurred, that Antony planned to move the capital of the empire to Alexandra, if he had emerged as the victor in their rivalry, and been able to unite the empire under his rule. Dio Cassius (Roman History 50:4:1) confirmed that Romans feared Antony planned to move the capital to Egypt, and Antony’s coins of the period also suggest it. Romans were outraged and increasingly backed Octavian in the civil war. In the Oracle of Hystaspes, the first king’s plans matched Antony’s. The second king, who destroyed the first, fits Octavian, who took the title divi filius.
Hystaspes adds that the second king would be a false prophet who would bring fire from heaven, an accusation that brings in Revelation where the same imagery is used. The basis of Revelation is previous legendary history, probably preserved by the Essenes because of their interest in prophecy. They will have copied books like the Oracle of Hystaspes with added comments some of which which subsequently will have been incorporated into the main text. Thus the comments drawing attention to the parallels of Persia and Alexander with Antony then Rome, and Octavian will have been read by later less scrupulous or more ignorant authors as part of the original text. The mixing up of eras and legends has made the end product less clear than it once was, but Knohl seems to have found parallels that seem hard to ignore. In Revelation 13, two beasts are described, matching in some respects the two kings of Hystaspes. The first beast had seven heads and ten horns, but one head was gravely wounded. Everyone in the world worshipped this beast. The second arose from the earth, with two horns like a lamb but with the voice of a dragon. It made fire come from heaven and persuaded people to make an image of the first beast and worship it. The description is that of the false prophet in the Oracle of Hystaspes.
The second beast, speaking like a dragon but with lambs horns was doubtless originally Alexander, but the first century BC author saw close similarities between this beast and Octavian Augustus, who had adopted the sign of Capricorn, the sign of his conception, as symbolic of his divinity, and put it on his coins. Capricorn represented the ANE storm god of winter who fertilized the parched soil. One instance of this god is Yehouah, the Jewish God and Oannes or John, identified with Ea, the Babylonian water god. Suetonius and Dio Cassius say Augustus’s mother, Attia, had spent a night in the temple of Apollo where she had dreamt she had had intercourse with Python, the serpent or dragon associated with Apollo at Delphi. The story had impressed Julius Caesar, Attia’s uncle. Apollo was, of course, the sun god, the fertilizing sun, whereas the dragon is its opposite the destructive winter sun of the north or summer sun of the ANE. After his victory over Alexander at Actium, Augustus built a new temple to Apollo, who had allegedly fought on his side, on the Palatine Hill, with a statue of the god in the emperor’s likeness. Coins were even minted in Asia with Augustus represented as Apollo. Enemies of Augustus suggested he was not Apollo but the dragon, and nor was he the oracular dragon of Delphi, but a false prophet. A Yarbro Collins sought to show (The Combat Myth in the Book of Revelation) that the author of the original myth of Revelation, a first century AD Jew of Asia Minor had seen Augustus in this light, but wanted to demonstrate it was wrong and the true prophet was the messiah of the Jews. The author of Revelation, John, if it was he, adapted the earlier author.
The second beast of Revelation persuaded the whole world to worship the first beast, but now this beast was not Antony, the first king in the readacted Hystaspes, but something all together bigger than the earlier two beasts, the Roman empire, worshipped in the image of its emperors, as R H Charles showed. The beast’s heads were the actual emperors thus far, dating the redaction, and one, the first, Julius Caesar, was mortally wounded, threatening the life of the beast itself, but it recovered. This dates the redaction to the rule of Galba in 69 AD when the Jewish war was being fought, the original purpose of it being anti-Roman bitterness and propaganda. Not only did the heads, the emperors, represent the beast, the empire, but Augustus had statues of the goddess Roma, erected in temples built in his honour. So, it was perfectly correct in Revelation to say that images of the beast, the Roman empire, in the form of the goddess Roma, were made to be worshipped. The older Oracle of Hystaspes was used as a vehicle to parody Augustus and the Roman empire as dragons opposed to the true God and Son of God of the Christians.
The Oracle of Hystaspes described how a great prophet would come and turn men back to God. In the context suggested by the Persian name of the title, this prophet must have been the Saoshyant, an incarnation of Zoroaster, but the idea was passed on to the Jews who preserved it when Alexander destroyed Persia as an independent state. Lactantius, in his version of the Oracle of Hystaspes, notes that the false prophet, the wicked son of God, overcame the true prophet, and left him unburied for three days before he was lifted up to heaven. As Jesus was, for Lactantius, the true prophet, Augustus was again the false one.
The Two Martyrs
The same indignity occurs in Revelation (Rev 11:3-6; 7-9; 11-12) where two witnesses perform the same miracles as the one true prophet of the Oracles of Hystaspes, are slain, lie for three days in the streets of “a great city, which is allegorically called Sodom and Egypt, where our Lord was crucified”. Is this a separate incident from either the death of Jesus or the one described in the Oracle of Hystaspes? It seems to be, for here were two witnesses, matching the Essene tradition of two messiahs, a princely one and a priestly one. The tradition of Zechariah (4:11,14) is of two messiahs, (“two anointed”) described as two olive trees, and Revelation 11:4 describes the two witnesses as two olive trees.
The two witnesses of Revelation were killed off by a beast from “abyssos”, meaning the depths of the sea or the depths of the earth. The second beast, Augustus, of Revelation 13 comes from the earth, but the first beast is from the sea. Again, it is not now Antony, but the empire, so either interpretation of “abyssos” suggests the witnesses were killed by Romans. The author of Revelation added, “where our Lord was crucified” to the earlier source, thereby making the great city “called Sodom and Egypt” into Jerusalem. Was Jerusalem ever regarded as Egypt, even if it was the metaphorical Sodom? Possibly the “great city” was the Essene camp at Qumran.
The situation of the story of the two witnesses in Revelation 11 is set in the first two verses, which mention the temple, its altar, worshippers and the outer court. The temple, its altar and worshippers were to be measured but not the outer court given over to the nations. Augustus’s soldiers went into Judaea when Herod died to quell a major revolt lasting five months and only put down in August. The soldiers entered the court of the nations, plundered the treasury and torched some administrative buildings or storerooms. They did not enter the Holy Places, perhaps under order from Herod’s son, Archelaus, against whom the revolt was directed. Even so, the damage done was was the basis of the allegation in the Oracle of Hystaspes that the false prophet would try to destroy the temple. Thus, this historical event matches the allusion in Revelation 11:1-2 to the spatial and temporal situation of the subsequent two-witness story.
R H Charles and other eminent scholars concluded long ago that Revelation made use of one or more earlier Jewish sources. Chunks of the book are full of Semiticisms suggesting a likely Aramaic source. It seems reasonable to imagine Jews escaping from the suppression of the revolt and fleeing to Asia Minor, where many Jews already lived, and Persian influence remained marked. There they harboured a hatred of Augustus and Rome. As A Yarbro Collins suggested, some devoted themselves to anti-Roman propaganda, and their hatred of Rome became a source of early Christian converts.
Quintillius Varus, the governor of Syria, took two legions into Judaea to suppress the uprising. Naturally, the governor and military leader stood for the emperor, which is why Augustus is said in the Oracle of Hystaspes to have come from Syria. Varus crucified 2000 rebels and others were enslaved. These events are mentioned in the pseudepigraph, the Assumption of Moses, where the mighty king of the west personally does every wicked deed, though it was really done by his lieutenants.
The tradition of two martyrs or messiahs seems emphatically Essene, as it is alluded to widely in the Qumran literature, so it does not seem outrageous to look for historical evidence of the death of two Essene leaders about this time. If they died in the uprising on Herod’s death, they must have been active in Herod’s reign. This is just when the messianic hymns were written according to palaeography, and they describe someone with the power of royalty rather than of ritual and the sacerdotal. But, Essene tradition necessitated a priestly twin.
The Book of Daniel has in it prophecies of beasts that sound similar to the ones in the Oracle of Hystaspes and in Revelation. Daniel was written about 165 BC and refers, under the guise of prophecies of beasts, to the Seleucid kings oppressing the Jews at the time. What is interesting is that it too has allusions that look directly to be to the Essenes, described as “saints”, the people who are perfectly holy. The fourth beast of Daniel “made war with the saints” and defeated them (Dan 7:21), and we also find:
He shall wear out the saints of the most high.Dan 7:25
He shall destroy mighty men and the people of the saints.Dan 8:24
The anointed one shall be cut off and shall have nothing, and the city and the sanctuary shall be destroyed.Dan 9:26
This last reference to a messiah was not observed upon by Jewish commentators, a surprising fact unless it was not there. Jerome, however noticed it and took it to mean Jesus. It suggests it is a late interpolation, and, if so, then the less notable references to saints could also be. These then seem like first century interpolations acceptable to Christians as successors to the Essenes, in fact or in principle. The same might be true of the suffering servant passages of Isaiah 53:3-4, 9, 12. They are so closely similar to the descriptions of the author of the messianic hymns, it has to be considered whether scriptural passages were made to refer to him by interpolating verses. The Essenes of Qumran seemed to have had a copying industry, so after the death of the Essene leader, considered a notable man by his followers, references to him could have been written into the scriptures which thus seemed to prophesy him. Then other allusions in Daniel, notably the one like unto the son of man who sat on a throne in heaven and would come on the clouds would have been seen to refer to him, and in this form, he could mythically return to destroy the beast that had seemed to destroy him—Rome.
If these ideas of Knohl are right, then there was an Essene leader who died a generation before Jesus to whom similar legends had been attached. These legends and expectations could therefore have been attached to Jesus as a successor to the earlier hero by his own followers, or even by later Christians who knew of the earlier tradition. Maybe the two amount to the same thing, later Christians attributing the earlier traditions to Jesus in ignorance.
The gospel Jesus is a Galilean by upbringing though a Judaean by birth, yet the New Testament itself disparages the idea that a messiah could be a Galilean. Messiahs did not come from Galilee. It was not part of Judaea, had not been Jewish by religion until the people were forcibly converted in the previous century, just as the hated Idumaeans, of which Herod was an example, were, and Galileans were considered as unsophisticated yokels. The band of rebels founded by Judas the Galilean were not necessarily Galileans because the name came from the founder not from the place of birth of the membership. Judas might have began with a band of Galilean men, but he eventually operated in Judaea, and then it is fair to assume his bandits were not particularly Galilean. In any case, Galilean meant “provincial” generally and need not have meant the particular province called Province, Galilee. It was a pejorative word like heathen or pagan, implying yokel. It is possible Judas was involved in this rebellion against Archelaus, though he is not noted by Josephus for another ten years when Archelaus had to give up the monarchy. Anyway, Jesus was described as a Galilean, and had a messianic outlook from somewhere. Knohl’s evidence is that it was from the Essenes. As the Essenes were also rebels preparing for a holy war, the likelihood that the Galileans were linked with them cannot be escaped.
In many details, the gospels are inconsistent about Jesus’s own conception of his messiahood. In the fourth gospel, written last and many years into Christianity, Jesus is confident he is the messiah, and even God. This Jesus is much more like the author of the Self-Glorification Hymn than the self-effacing man of the synoptic gospels. Matthew and Luke contrive, by adding their birth narratives, to announce the messiahship of Jesus long before he could have been aware of it personally—as a human being, that is—on the occasion of his entry into the world. By the time he is an adult beginning his mission, it is forgotten by everyone, including his mother. In Mark, which has no birth narrative, God personally announces who Jesus is when John baptized him, but no one else heard the divine voice, we have to believe, or they forgot about it instantly. Jesus has to remind his chief assistant, Peter (Mk 8:27, 29-31), but hereafter, if Jesus saw himself as the son of Man of Daniel, he never let on, always speaking of the son of Man in the third person, not the first.
If Jesus knew he was the messiah, the synoptic gospels suggest he wanted to keep it a secret. Scholars, even Christian ones like Rudolf Bultmann, have explained this by denying that Jesus knew he was the messiah. It was his burden, though he was not aware of it for most of his ministry, these Christian scholars thought. Yet keeping his messiahship secret in a country occupied by a hated and a ruthless enemy made sense. A messiah was a king, and the Romans could not tolerate any rival to Caesar, whether the Caesar was Augustus or Tiberius. Jesus and his disciples could have believed he was the messiah, but seen the sense of keeping it dark until the time was right to reveal it.
R Bultmann and G Vermes, to name but two top scholars, can see no tradition of a dying messiah in Judaism up to the first century BC. A prospective messiah could predict death and resurrection for himself and everyone alive at the End Time when God destroyed the wicked world, and when the wicked world did not go but the messiah did, memories could have adjusted the prophecy from the end of the world to his own end. Besides that, though, the Dead Sea Scrolls as elucidated historically by Knohl, testify to legends of death and resurrection, and the event can be traced to the death of Herod. The Essenes in the first century AD did have a tradition of messiahs who had died and been resurrected. They rationalized it by reference to the scriptures, possibly inserting verses appropriate to their own leader. One who was “despised and rejected by men” yet would be glorified to a throne in heaven was an Essene tradition.
It is plain in the Self-Glorification Hymn, and the Oracle of Hystaspes says the great prophet of God arose “after the third day”. In Revelation, the two martyrs arose after three and a half days, a reflexion of the time, two times and half a time of Daniel, but the original tradition must have pertained to the time the spirit remained with the body, which was three days, a Persian tradition. So, the Oracle of Hystaspes, with its three days, was original. In the case of the two martyrs of Revelation, they too were left for three days in the street, no doubt because the tradition of three days was widespread. The spirit had the ignominy of being attached to a body open to decay, savaging by carrion dogs and birds, and to the inquisitive eyes of curious onlookers, before it could depart. It is possible, once Jesus realized that he must die, that he likened himself to the earlier two Essene martyrs, or his disciples did subsequently.
Christians, devoid of honesty because they think what they have been told by other Christians in their lives is sufficient for truth, will always disparage any attempts to get historical explanations for the events recorded, or misrecorded, in their holy books. Israel Knohl is aware of it and firmly points out that whether or not Christians accept plausible reconstructions of the history surrounding the foundation of Christianity, there is simply no getting away from the plain evidence of the Dead Sea Scrolls that Christian language and beliefs in such contradictions as simultaneous glorification and suffering already existed among the Essenes in the decades preceding the initial Easter events of the Christian religion. Except for Christian struthiomimic behaviour, the fact is easily demonstrable that much of what was believed to have been singularly Christian is not. It is only not now well known because believers in religions are not to be offended, even when they believe what is demonstrably false, so false religious belief cannot be plainly exposed in public and especially not in schools. So when Christians allege that this or that historical detail pertaining to the Essenes and Christian origins is wrong or unproven, they might sometimes be right, but that does not dispose of the indisputable similarities between Essene and Christian beliefs even if Christians will never accept any dependency. Historical reconstructions at this distance can never be precise, but we can be certain we are trying to build them from the proper material rather than ignoring it for fireside stories given us when we we children, albeit with the empty reassurance that they carry God’s imprint of verification.
A Period in Favour
The author of the Self-Glorification Hymn portrays himself, as he is writing in the first person, as the “beloved of the king” where the context is clear that God is king, and His angels are his sons. The ancient practice was to regard the local god as the tribe or city’s true king, the human king simply being the god’s regent on earth. God in the Jewish scriptures sometimes is called king but “beloved of the king” does not appear, though “beloved of God” does. Similarly, angels in the scriptures are sons of God but never sons of the king. It suggests a deliberate ambiguity in the writing of the Self-Glorification Hymn, and Knohl suggests that, while God was intended as the king, the verses were meant to be read as if they meant the local king on earth, and his sons too. The local king was Herod. Here was an Essene leader favoured by Herod, and treated as a courtier being on a par with the king’s sons, the royal princes. Josephus has Herod favouring the Essenes, but some of the Qumran archaeology indicates they fell out of favour before Herod died. What could have been the cause of this apparent change of fortune?
Well, the temple was being constructed from about 20 BC, and Herod needed Essenes, who were skilled, hard working and above all priests, to build the Holy Places of the temple. When this work was done, ordinary labourers would have sufficed. Moreover, the Essenes secretly hated Herod, and the king’s spies might have had some intelligence about this, putting the notoriously paranoid Herod on his guard. So, Essenes had a reputation as builders while Herod was building the temple. Curious then that Jesus was allegedly a builder, the Greek tekton (compare “architect”, “chief builder”) of the New Testament meaning builder rather than carpenter, though carpenters were also builders, of course.
So, what was Herod’s court like? Persian customs were still followed. The king’s court consisted of a core of senior counsellors called “the friends of the king” or “the king’s beloved”. It came from the practice introduced by Darius the Great of having six special counsellors or princes called “king’s friends”. Alexander’s generals accepted the same habit in Hellenistic courts like Herod’s. The king’s friends were also the senior court of law, so king’s friends were usually judges too. The author of the Self-Glorification Hymn writes:
Who associates with me, and thus compares with my judgement?
Here was a man who knew the earthly court of the local king, and pictured himself in the same seat in God’s court in heaven.
When Josephus explained why Herod favoured the Essenes, it was not because he wanted builder priests to build Holy Places but because an Essene called Menehem had prophesied his future success though he was yet still a boy. If true, it must have been in the sixties BC, but stories like this were de rigeur for great men in the Hellenistic world. What is important is that Josephus tells us that Menehem had a reputation as a prophet, and the Essenes did indeed claim to continue the Jewish prophetic tradition. Menehem indicated his prophecy to Herod by addressing him, a private citizen, as “king of the Jews”. The young Herod was confused, but Menehem explained his vision, leaving Herod, who had had no such thoughts until then, unimpressed. Later when Herod had power over Palestine, he called Menehem to him to ask how long he would reign. The Essene refused to be other than vague, saying twenty to thirty years, which left Herod happy enough, so he kept Menehem among his circle of friends, and held Essenes generally in esteem (Josephus, Antiquities 15).
Herod was seventy when he died, and Menehem must have been over ten years older, and must have been already about sixty when Herod began to rebuild the temple. Essenes retired at sixty, according to their own customs, and the Nasi retired at fifty—the reason why people could say to Jesus “You are not yet fifty” (Jn 8:57). It seems safe therefore to reject the prophetic tale as Hellenistic romance and accept that Menehem, the king’s friend, was a younger man, and even younger than Herod himself. Unless there were two—or more—Menehems!
Why wouldn’t Herod have trained the official class of priests, the Sadducees, to build the holy places? Well, it is unlikely that the noble families who were the Sadducees would have wanted to be trained as common working men, but, more important, the Sadducees were loyal to the royal family of Hasmonaeans whom Herod had displaced. He had married into the old royal family, but was still loathed by their supporters, and Herod could not trust them. The Essenes were sons of toil whom he could win over by a few favours and use to his own advantage. As far as the Essenes were concerned, the Hasmonaeans had persecuted them, as they had most people at some time or another, so they were glad to be shot of them. Knohl sees the second of the messianic hymns to be a eulogy of the period of peace and propsperity that Herod brought about. Herod was a hard man who had stopped the civil wars in Palestine that had been raging on and off for a century, and had brought in a type of “New Deal” under which the landless could be employed on grand public projects, building castles, palaces, cities and ultimately the temple itself.
The hymn speaks of “casting down the lofty assemblies of the eternally proud”, and “casting down the haughty spirit”, broad sentiments no doubt, but with a particular reference to the Hasmonaeans and their Sadducaean supporters whom the Essenes loathed. In contrast, it praises God for lifting up those who stumble, those who are poor and in the dust, thanking Him that “wickedness perishes”, “oppression ceases”, “deceit ends”, “light appears”, “joy pours forth”, “grief disappears and groaning flees, peace appears, terror ceases”, “iniquity ends”, “affliction ceases”, “injustice is removed”, and there is “guilt no more”. Perhaps this is an idealized vision, but it is paired with the Self-Glorification Hymn suggesting a unity, plausibly meant to reflect the prosperity of the Herodian era after centuries of calamities, especially, so the Essenes thought, for them.
Yet what is curious about the whole scene, if it is correct, is that the Dead Sea Scrolls show that the Essenes hated the Romans, and were convinced they would be the agents of Roman destruction. Herod was a Roman puppet who ostentatiously demonstrated his loyalty to Rome by building modern cities like Caesarea and Tiberias, named after Roman emperors, Augustus Caesar and Tiberius, Augustus’s successor. Yet the Essene leader, Menehem was a “friend” of Herod. Odd? Not really because the Essenes were a secret organization. Menehem was effectively a mole awaiting the day of God’s vengeance:
These are the rules for the teacher in those times with respect to his loving and hating. Everlasting hatred for the men of perdition in spirit of secrecy… and meekness before him who lords it over him to be a man zealous for the law and its time, the day of vengeance.1QS 9:21-23
The pacifism of the Essenes was only a provisional pacifism which would end on the day of vengeance.Israel Knohl, The Messiah Before Jesus, 2000
Like modern born-again Christians, the Essenes were patiently working and waiting, ready for the signs which would signify the arrival of the day of God’s vengeance—transmuted by Paul into the absurd Rapture. On the day of God’s vengeance, Essenes would rise up in holy war against God’s adversaries who were, of course, theirs too, then they would be joined by the hosts of heaven, arriving at the last minute like the cavalry, to secure the world against evil. It is obviously what Jesus himself was expecting in the Garden of Gethsemane. Until that day, Essenes were pious monks simply evangelizing and recruiting devotees with the promise of everlasting bliss in heaven, but otherwise scratching a living from the parched land and from trade.
Rejection and Public Humiliation
In the Mishna, a Menehem is paired with Hillel, as joint religious leaders in Herod’s time. Hillel was the Babylonian liberal Pharisee, usually thought of in conjunction with Shammai, a strictly conservative Pharisee, but the Mishna says Shammai succeeded Menehem. Is this Menehem the Essene one? He is not mentioned in Rabbinic works as the author of any law or epithet, and nor does he appear among Pharisaic sages in the tractate Avot (Mishna Avot 1:1-12). The inevitable conclusion is that Menehem was too notable to ignore but was not a Pharisee. It leaves it possible or even likely that he is the Essene Menehem of Josephus. Knohl affirms that generations of Jewish scholars since the sixteenth century have thought it so. Moreover, Babylonian Talmud Hagiga 16b confirms that Menehem “went about the king’s business”, just as Daniel was described as doing when he was in the court of the king of Babylon (Dan 8:27)—remember it was actually written in Hellenistic times. The Jerusalem Talmud however noted that Menehem “went out”, asking “Where did he go?”. By way of an answer, it relates (Jerusalem Talmud Hagiga 2:2 (77b)) that Menehem and 80 pairs of Torah scholars dressed in golden armour were debarred from the God of Israel. They were excommunicated. Menehem and his 160 scholars left in high dudgeon, their “faces black as pots”.
The trouble with this tradition is that it was not officially written down for 200 years, so there is good reason to doubt the detail in it. Would Menehem, an Essene leader, have been in the least concerned that Pharisees had declared them excommunicated, and what scholars walked around in golden armour, even on ceremonial occasions? The word meaning “armour” was altered to one meaning “silken robes” in the third century AD, presumably because of the absurdity of scholars wearing armour, whereas courtiers could reasonably have been dressed in silk, though it seems also unlikely that 160 other Essenes were courtiers besides the leader. Maybe “golden armour” is a metaphor for the scholars’ righteousness, particularly militant self-righteousness. The excommunication declaration for the 161 outcasts was that they were to…
…write on a bulls horns that you have no part in the God of Israel.
Knohl thinks “write on a bull’s horns” (Midrash Bereshit Rabba 2:4) was a mockery of the Essenes’ referring to “the horn of the messiah”—the Essene leader—which was to be raised up. So, rather than any meaningful excommunication, this looks like a public humiliation of the Essene leader and his senior followers, presumably invited to parade officially in such finery as they possessed, only to be mocked for their beliefs by the main Jewish sect, the Pharisees. That is why they left with black faces. It is more likely to have been the occasion, the Holy Places having been built and Herod tiring of Essene religiosity, when he rejected them from his confidences, making the Pharisees his favoured sect.
The words meaning golden armour were possibly chosen with punning intent because of the Essenes’ vision of themselves as God’s heavenly army on earth. The 80 pairs signifies a military unit like a platoon, adding to the irony, if that is what it is. It seems absurd to imagine that any Essenes would parade in public in armour, even if they had it. It is all part of the sarcastic write up of the event, which will have happened several years before Herod died, once the Holy Places had been built and consecrated. Even so, J Derenbourg and S Lieberman thought the Menehem who “went out” was really the Menehem in the band of Judas of Galilee, who led the Sicari in the Jewish War. These two are confused in the midrash to the Song of Songs Zuta, but the Talmudic references generally cannot apply to the later rebel. That is not to say there is no basis for the confusion. The Galilaeans and the Essenes could have had a relationship like the Sein Fein and the IRA. Galilaeans were the military wing of the Essene sect—the Sicari.
Knohl points out the puzzlement of scholars that Mishna Tractate Hagiga, devoted to ceremonies in the temple during festivals, contains a passage (Chapter 2) about knowledge forbidden to the observant Jew, apparently irrelevant but which immediately precedes the only mention of Menehem in the Mishna, the one in which he is paired with Hillel. This “irrelevant” passage ends:
Whoever takes no thought for the honour of his maker, it were better for him if he had not come into the world.
If Menehem was the author of the Self-Glorification Hymn, and had fallen out of favour with Herod, he matches the one who “takes no thought for the honour of his maker” in Pharisaic eyes. Pharisees would have thought God’s honour offended by anyone who described himself sitting in heaven on a throne of power in the council of angels. In the Talmud, Menehem “went forth into evil courses”, a description of the same delusion. So Mishna Tractate Hagiga 2 begins with the warnings about forbidden things because Essenes, and specifically Menehem, had explored these things with the result that Menehem ended up dishonouring God. Finally, the verb “to go out” in Hebrew has the meaning of turning heretical.
Having been publicly mocked and rejected by the Herodians, the Essenes had to withdraw again to their desert camps at Qumran, but not many years later Herod died, the Pharisees rose up, and doubtless Essenes joined them against the now common enemy. Menehem had read the runes once more and had decided it was opportune to test the times, believing that the war between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness was about to begin. Though they had been rejected by Herod and the Pharisees, they firmly believed they remained in favour with God.
What is curious is that Hillel described himself using biblical passages in hardly any less an exaggerated way than Menehem. He used Exodus 20:25b about himself (Tosefta Sukkah 4:3):
In every place where I cause my name to be remembered, I will come to you and bless you.
and Psalms (Leviticus Rabba 1:5):
Who is like the Lord our God, who is seated on high, who looks far down upon the heavens and the earth.
So, the Pharisees can not really have been offended that Menehem did the same. It makes the whole episode look political, a Herodian use of his Pharisaic friends to discard his Essenic ones. The messianic pretensions of Menehem—and potentially any Essene leader—offered a handle for the accusations. To claim to be a messiah was not per se blasphemous, but to claim to be God was. The distinction was not clear in Menehem’s case where the messiah was apparently on a par with God, but plainly it has no small bearing on later Christian claims, and particularly the blatant self-deification of Christ in the fourth gospel.
The rebellion involved people in high places, so it ought not to be surprising that a disgraced courtier like Menehem could be involved. Josephus does not specify Menehem but he speaks of named leaders and others, several messianic claimants among them, so the revolt was not centrally organized but a broad many-centred uprising of discontented subjects. The immediate cause was a consequence of a false report that Herod was dead—the chopping down of the golden eagle he had placed over the gate of the temple. Josephus blames the outrage on to a bunch of Pharisees led by Judas and Mattathias. The possibility has to be considered that Christian redacters of Josephus have tarred Pharisees with an Essenic brush. Pollio and Sameas had urged the Pharisees to support Herod, and they had done, but then we read in Josephus that they refused to take an oath of loyalty to him in 20 BC and again in 7 BC. On both occasions, Herod was uncharacteristically forgiving, but it was Essenes who could be forgiven because of their refusal to swear oaths after their own initial oath to the order. Moreover, around 20 BC, Herod needed the Essenes, and later the acts of Judas and Mattathias sound more Essenic than Pharisaic, the Pharisees being much more inclined to moderation and diplomacy that the Essenes. Christianity had emerged from Essenism, and Christians wanted to denigrate the Pharisees, so had cause to meddle with Josephus.
Whether Essenes or Pharisees, Herod, almost dead, judged the case himself and sentenced the ringleaders to burning, and the others to less painful deaths. An eclipse of the moon reported by Josephus fixes the date precisely as 13 March, 4 BC. Herod’s eventual death occurred at passover, when the pilgrims were stirred up by agitators and the rebellion began in earnest. Archelaus sent cavalrymen against the rioters and killed 3000 of them, apparently quelling the riot. Then he left for Rome, and the rebellion exploded again. Roman soldiers barracked in the Tower of Phasael emerged to police the crowds but were assaulted by missiles thrown from the roofs of the temple chambers. In retaliation, the Romans set the buildings on fire. This was when they entered the court of nations and ransacked the temple treasury, the occasion that fits the story of the two martyrs of Revelation.
Menehem
The Gospel of John is closest in tone to the Self-Glorification Hymn and there is another link—the promise in John at the Last Supper of “another paraclete” who would “convince the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgement”. Note that Jesus called this paraclete “another” one, so Jesus considered himself a paraclete. The “other paraclete” was therefore a new Righteous Teacher to replace Jesus. Paraclete is Greek. Does its meaning give us any clues as to what Jesus meant by it? Formally, it was a council for the defense in a court of law, but this was hardly the meaning here. The Septuagint gives paraclete as the translation of a particular Hebrew word, nahum, “to comfort”, so Christians today speak of the Comforter to be sent by Jesus, and solve the problem of the absence of any such comforter by claiming it is another name for the Holy Ghost, probably because John (Jn 14:17) specifically calls the paraclete the “spirit of truth”, and also because the Holy Ghost suddenly begins to appear a lot in Luke-Acts, but besides which he, or it, hardly appears at all anywhere in the bible. The “spirit of truth” is an important concept to the Essenes to judge by the Scrolls (eg 1QS 3:13-4:14) where it is equal to the metaphorical light, an aspect of righteousness, the Persian arta. And, by another of the strange coincidences that Christians habitually ignore, “comforter” in Hebrew is menehem! The leader of the Essenes in Herod’s time seems to have been a Menehem, which is paraclete in Greek and “comforter” in English, a word which, to the Essenes, conveyed a meaning of truth and righteousness. A Geiger and H Gressmann (Messiah, 1929) had already noted that paraclete meant menehem but concluded that it referred to the later Menehem who led the Zealots in the Jewish War.
What seems likely is that here is another title, perhaps but not necessarily stemming from a personal name, as Caesar did. Even more remarkable is that Menehem is a name used for the messiah. It is a title meaning messiah in the rabbinic literature. Knohl cites Bab Talmud Sanhedrin 98b, Jer Talmud Berechot 2:5; 5:1, Lamentations Rabba 1:16 (1899 ed), Lamentations Midrash Zuta (1899 ed, 73), L Grünhut, Yalkut of R Machir Bar Abba Mari on Proverbs (1967, 103). The leader Jesus promises to lead them after his death seems in reality to have been James, described as the Brother of the Lord. Menehem, the Essene courtier of Herod was a paraclete, Jesus was another, and he was followed by James. Here is a succession of Teachers of Righteousness.
Rudolf Bultmann (Gospel of John, 1971) had noticed the implication of Jesus’s promise—that he was one of a chain of redeemers. He promised a successor, and he too had succeeded someone else. In the gospels, Jesus seems to be the successor of John the Baptist, and, ignoring the implication of the birth narrative of Luke, that John and Jesus were exact contemporaries, bar six months, tradition has it that John began his own mission about the time that Herod died. So there is a continuum of Menehem, John the Baptist, Jesus and James the Brother of the Lord, successive leaders of the Essene brotherhood. B J Capper(“With the Oldest Monks”, JTS, 1998) sees John as based upon an Essene tradition written in Jerusalem. Incidentally he agrees with the view of these pages that the upper room, where the Last Supper was held, was Essene owned. It was effectively a safe house.
Jesus did not see himself following the fate of Menehem, at least at the outset. But as events turned against him, he must have begun to see things in the same way, and could hardly have done anything else once the expected miracle in Gethsemane did not happen. The disciples who remained alive after the Roman punishments will then have drawn on the earlier tradition, and it is the mingling of the two that produced the current story, in which Jesus is made to be aware from the outset that he would be a type of suffering servant like Menehem. The later Menehem who led the Zealots might have succeeded James, and the tradition cited by Knohl that yet another Menehem messiah was born when the temple was destroyed might continue the tradition further, or suggest that the continuation was expected. This Menehem was later snatched away by the wind, an expression used in 2 Kings 11 for the ascension of Elijah (J Frenkel, 1981), and so signified an ascent to heaven.
The Son of God Text
Much of the magic of Christian belief depends on the birth narratives, for in them Jesus is unequivocally announced as divine. Yet the story then proceeds as if no one knew anything of the birth miracles, plain and open as they were. R Bultmann could not see that anyone knew any of it, nor could they have behaved as the way they then did, if they did know it. Few scholars seriously accept the birth narratives as history—or rather no scholars do. Scholarship cannot seriously entertain fairy tales, even when the fairies are called angels. These are Hellenistic romances, added because a singular birth was expected of Greek demi-gods, and this was a Greek world. Yet some of the phrases found in Scroll 4Q246, dubbed “the son of God text” because it speaks of a “son of God and son of the most high” who would be “great over the earth”, the very words of the angel Gabriel in Luke. In the scroll, this man is a king who would bring peace to the world after a period of conflict and slaughter between strong kings, Syria and Egypt being mentioned, reflecting a pre-Roman original situation but one easily adapted, as we have seen to the current situation in the reign of Augustus. After the period of war and slaughter, “the people of God arise and make everyone rest from the sword”. God will uphold the kingdom these people will bring and make it everlasting.
Palaeography dates 4Q246 to about 25 BC, but such dating cannot be more accurate than about half a century, and it is most probably a copy of an older document, even if edited. The original could easily have been written before Pompey arrived on the scene in the first half of the first century BC, when the Ptolemies of Egypt and the Seleucids of Syria had been intense rivals. The Jews had been in the direct line of fire, even willingly getting embroiled under the Jewish dynasty of the Hasmonaeans (the Maccabees). Knohl thinks some editing did occur in this document to make it fit the situation when Augustus became the sole Roman emperor. A big clue is that 4Q246 speaks of the kingdoms of the king being like “comets that you saw”. The reason is that the games held in honour of Octavian in 44 BC were accompanied by a prominent comet visible for a whole week. Julius Caesar had been enrolled in the pantheon of Roman gods in 42 BC, and the comet, as described in Octavian’s memoires, was considered the soul of the divine Julius Caesar approving of his heir. Octavian took the title son of god, and when he had secured the empire for himself in 27 BC took the title Augustus, effectively, “the Most High”! It was a divine title, and altars were set up to Augustus the God in some Roman provinces.
Knohl thinks the Qumran scroll has been edited to fit these circumstances. In particular, it says the great king would be the “son of the great lord” and “by his name shall he be surnamed”. While this description might have been applied to others in the Hellenistic age, it is particularly apt in its application to Augustus, who did not have the name of the great lord Julius by birthright. Coupled with the mention of comets in this context points to Augustus. Jews familiar with the idea of Daniel’s son of man coming on the clouds of heaven could have taken Augustus to be him. Not, though, for the author of this document who wanted to show all these allusions are of a false prophet, who would be followed by the true one, the true people of God then arising. The false son of God was the herald of the true one, and this myth repeated is what Christianity is built on, John the Baptist, for example, becoming the false prophet when he became popular as the messiah in rivalry to Jesus in the first century. The three synoptic gospels announce Jesus as the son of God, immediately disputing the claims of Augustus and his successors, Mark did not elaborate on it, but Luke and Matthew thought it needed demonstrating, so added their birth narratives. Luke must have had a source like 4Q246, and he used it for the words of Gabriel. As 4Q246 was written in Aramaic, either Luke could read Aramaic, or he already had a Greek translation of it.
Essenes were pious and strict Jews but had formulated practical rules to permit legal interaction with gentiles which must have made them feel more comfortable among them than Jews like Pharisees, more conscious of uncleanliness for having made many additional laws as a wall around the actual law itself. Essenes could retain their religious practices without fear of transgressing the additional laws or of abandoning the whole lot to become Hellenized and apostates. They were more free to interact in practical ways as a consequence, and were more likely to have been merchants and worldly businessmen than Pharisees. They would have known more about the gentile world, and might have been ready to translate their works into Greek for non-native Jews.
Virgil’s Eulogizing of Augustus
Did the Essenes know about Roman poetry, and the propaganda of Augustus, and could any such knowledge have fed back to Qumran? Virgil’s (70-19 BC) Fourth Eclogue written in 40 BC was amazingly messianic—Christians call it the Messianic Eclogue—and it prophesies a child to be born will rule a “new age” of peace. He surrounds the prophecy with echoes of the “end of days” in the Jewish scriptures. The imagery is remarkably in agreement with elements of Isaiah, including references to a virgin and a serpent, and parallels with the passages which speak of a child who would be the Prince of Peace, and would make the lion rest with the lamb. It is no surprise that the Christian fathers Lactantius and Augustine and the medieval Church took it as prophesying the birth of Christ.
If Virgil is not influenced by Jewish visions, he is influenced by the source of them in Zoroastrianism. Virgil foresaw the birth of a divine child, at first thought to have meant the child of the union of Mark Antony and Octavia, Octavian’s sister, but their only child before they divorced was a girl. Octavian emerged from the civil war in absolute rule of the empire and Virgil decided that he meant Octavian or rather the son of Octavian and Scribonia. After all, he was a son of a god, and Virgil made it plain in the Aeneid, where the Golden Age was brought about by Augustus.
Virgil dictated his Fourth Eclogue to Asinius Pollio (76 BC-4 AD), consul in 40 BC, and one of Virgil’s patrons. But Pollio was a chum of Herod. In that same year, Herod had been expelled from Judaea by a rival, Antigonus, supported by the Parthians, and had fled to Rome for help. Mark Antony and the Roman Senate declared Herod the rightful king of the Jews. As one of two consuls, sort of US Secretaries of State, Pollio was involved in this, and ended up befriending Herod. Herod’s sons, Alexander and Aristobulus, were educated in Rome and lived in the Pollio household while they were there. It suggests that the Herodian court was familiar with what was happening in Rome, and particularly whatever concerned Pollio, such as Virgil’s work. Menehem must therefore have known of the poems eulogizing Augustus as a god and saviour. Menehem must have been outraged by it, as all believers still are even today when someone else claims the rights they have apportioned to their own favoured spirit!
Augustus was depicted as a ruler with a divine nature, fusing the earth with the kingdom of heaven.Israel Knohl
It was just what the Essenes themselves believed, and the only question is whether it was coincidence, or, if not, who copied from whom. It seems unlikely that Essenic influences reached Virgil, even if not impossible, but seems more possible that Essenes, seeking signs as ever, saw in Augustus’s claims, signs they identified with prophesies like the Oracle of Hystaspes, of their own redemption, and Menehem saw himself as fitting the signals for the redeemer. And all of it several decades before the Christian crucifixion.
