The difference between a used car dealer and a Christian is that the used car dealer knows he’s telling lies.

Christian and Essene Common Features 4

Jesus and the Righteous One
Epilogue

Abstract

The Essenes held assemblies and congregations, words translated as “church”. Jesus says, “tell it to the church” (Matthew 18:17) before there was a Christian church. We infer that Jesus was an Essene. Essenes also had bishops, deacons, elders, priests, disciples, scriptures, gospels, epistles, psalms, hymns, mystery, allegory, and so on, long before Christianity. Both communities used the same phraseology. Christ and his apostles had nothing to originate with respect to doctrines, precepts, church polity, or ecclesiastical terms. The Essenes and Christians could not have existed at the same time as separate institutions, they were too similar. The latter must have emerged from the former. There are differences, particularly those indicated in Christian documents, though some were later changes by the gentile Church. Others are genuine because Nazarenes were a variety of Essenes. Notes on the common features between Essenes and Christians

Jesus and the Righteous One

Jesus was a highly repected man whose prophecy that the kingdom of God was nigh kept his followers agog and expectant for many years after his death. As the immediacy of the kingdom receded, a corpus of teaching and narrative lore was needed to retain the interest of those who were still loyal and to attract new converts. Where did this all come from? Jesus the Nazarene has remarkable similarities with the Essene Teacher of Righteousness. Did some confusion arise between the two?

The Teacher of Righteousness is referred to in the Manual of Discipline and the Damascus Document. In the Manual of Discipline the Teacher is associated with “the time of the preparation of the Way in the wilderness” by “the teaching of the miraculous Mysteries” (cf Isa 40:1-3 which is used in the description of John the Baptist). He is commanded to be “zealous for the Law and the day of vengeance” conjuring up explicit images of the Zealots. In John 2:27, Jesus has “zeal” and, in Acts 21:20, James’ followers are “zealous for the Law”. In the Damascus Document, the Teacher is to “walk in the Laws” until the “standing up of the messiah of Aaron and Israel in the Last days” where standing up can be synonymous with coming, return, rising or even resurrection. In the Damascus Document the messiah (singular) of Aaron and Israel will (or did) “atone for their sins” (cf Hebrews).

There is a reference in a scroll fragment to the “putting to death of the Righteous One”. Compare this with the passage in James 5:6 which says:

Ye condemned the Righteous One. Ye put him to death though he doth not resist you.

This fragment echoes other themes of, and the style of, James’s epistle calling for patience and restraint. Even the language including the use of words like tongue and vipers are closely similar. Indeed, the “tongue” imagery of James 3 is used to attack lying adversaries and the tongue is described by the identical, though common enough, expression, “the stumbling block”, both in James and in the scroll fragment. This is beyond coincidence. In James 2:20-24 the “Man of Emptiness” knows not that “a man was justified by his works” and “faith without works is dead”, a plain contradiction of Paul’s message that faith alone brings salvation, now considered to be the essence of Christianity. James is an Essene document only slightly edited by a Christian.

Other fragments also suggest that the Nasi, the Prince, of the Community was put to death, though it could be interpreted that the Nasi put someone else to death. The context is that of that revered quotation from Isaiah—”a rod shall rise from the stem of Jesse and a branch shall grow from his roots” referring to the Messiah. Elsewhere a messianic figure will overthrow the evil generation. This fragment possibly refers to a crucifixion. Though the word is not complete the meaning seems to be confirmed by a subsequent command “Let not the nail touch him”. If these fragments are not referring to Jesus but to a leader of the Essenes who was crucified on an earlier occasion the whole of the gospel story is cast into doubt as a rehash of the earlier event.

The Scroll scholar, A Dupont-Sommer, has summarised the remarkable similarities between the Teacher of Righteousness and Jesus Christ.

Both were martyred prophets subsequently revered by their followers as the Suffering Servant.
Both preached penitence, poverty, humility, love of one’s neighbour and chastity.
Both prescribed observance of the Law of Moses.
Both were the Elect of God and the Messiah, the redeemer of the world.
Both were opposed by the priests, the Sadducees; were condemned and murdered.
Both seemed to found a church whose believers thought he would return in glory, whose central rite was a sacred meal presided over by priests and whose members held goods in common and believed in brotherhood.
Both will be the supreme judge at the Last Judgement.
Both apparently predicted the fall of Jerusalem.

Did the Essene Teacher of Righteousness who died over a hundred years earlier become the model for Jesus Christ after the crucifixion of Barabbas?

Dupont-Sommer examines the second part of Isaiah, often termed Deutero-Isaiah, which was long believed to have been written during the Babylonian exile 200 years after the first part. Here appears the account of the “Suffering Servant despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows” who has “been wounded for our transgressions” yet by whose “stripes we are healed”. Christians have taken this as prophesying Jesus, but Dupont-Sommer argues that it is a direct reference to the Teacher of Righteousness added to Isaiah as late as the intertestamental period. Dupont-Sommer urges a re-examination of other Old Testament passages in Daniel, Zechariah, Psalms and the Songs of the Servant of Yahweh in Deutero-Isaiah believing them to be all possibly inserted references to the Teacher of Righteousness.

If this is true it is easy to see how the followers of Barabbas transformed him into a reflection of the Teacher of Righteousness after his crucifixion.

Epilogue

Theodor H Gaster, one of the original editors of the Dead Sea Scrolls offers us this warning:

In order to get this whole question into the right perspective, it should be observed that just as many ideas and phrases in the Dead Sea Scrolls as can be paralleled from the New Testament can be paralleled equally well from the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament—that is, from the non-canonical Jewish “scriptures” that were circulating between 200 BC and 100 AD—and from the earlier strata of the Talmud. Moreover, many of them find place also in the ancient doctrines of such sects as the Mandaeans of Iraq and Iran and the Samaritans, so that even if they have not come down to us through Jewish channels, we can still recognize in them part of the common Palestinian thought and folklore of the time. Accordingly, to draw from the New Testament parallels any inference of special relationship is misleading.

Now Gaster might have been a leading scroll scholar but this warning is baloney. He is trying to do what Jews and Christians usually do—deflect attention from the huge similarities between the Essenes and the Nazarenes, that are unquestionable for any objective viewer. He is hoping to give the impression that there are no special common features between the Essenes and the Nazarenes, by suggesting that these features were common everywhere, so the Christians were no different from the rest and had nothing unusual in common with the Essenes.

Many particular examples have been given here and there are more. If we were to take Gaster literally, the Jews of the time were much more Christian than Jewish, and modern Judaism is not Judaism. If that is indeed the case—and it might be—the conclusion must be that the Essenes were much more typical of the Judaism of the time than the Rabbis have subsequently cared to admit, and they were instrumental in spinning off much of the Apocrypha, Pseudepigraphy, and the beliefs of the Mandaeans, Samaritans and the early Talmudists. It is far from impossible that much of this is true.

The Essenes had a much greater influence on the world than has ever been acknowledged because they were forced to spallate into many factions that went under different names and evolved on different routes until their common origins were lost, the original sect having gone extinct. Gaster’s warning actually highlights the remarkable truth. The Essenes made an astonishing impact on the world, and they were the direct inheritors of the religion given to the Jews by the Persians in the fifth century BC!

Page Tags: Christians, Essenes, Proto-Christians, Scroll Language, Early Christian Documents, Zadokite, Gentiles, Jesus, Common Features, Christianity, Christians, Qumran, Messiah, Apocalypticism, Kingdom, Scrolls, Righteous, Righteousness, Teacher, Righteous One

Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.