It is not healthy when experts set up an establishment with its own rules of acceptance, a scientific freemasonry from which others are excluded.

Who Lies Sleeping?

Menehem and the Son of God 3

Rejection and Public Humiliation
Menehem
The Son of God Text
Virgil’s Eulogizing of Augustus

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 in fact. 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 puzzlemenmt of scholars that Mishna Tractate Hagiga, devoted to ceremonies in 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-Glorifcation 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. This “new age” has. 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 lian rest with the lamb. It is no surprise that the Christian fathers Lactantius and Augustine and the medieval Church took 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.