Propensity is probability with intent—it exerts an influence on events as if it were a physical field like an electric or gravitational field.

Who Lies Sleeping?

Similarities and Differences between Jesus and the Essenes 1

Jesus and the Essenes
Summary of Fundamental Similarities
Agreed Similarities I
Both Jesus and the Essenes:

Abstract

The objective of Jesus as the head of the Nazarenes was exactly what Christians have always said it was. He was trying to convert the sinners of Israel before the End. What has come to us of his attempt has come from some of his converts. He was a professional Essene, but preaching to the masses. The people who recorded Jesus’s doctrine had only a partial knowledge of it. He had no time to explain to them the finer points of Essene theology. His object was to have them repent and be ritually purified by baptism, ready for God’s Appointed Time, which would be soon! The Essenes had exactly the same aim. The differences are only apparent, because we have only an incomplete idea of the views of both Jesus and the Essenes, and the church has made its own changes later. What we do know overlaps far more than can be explained by accident.

Jesus and the Essenes

The notable student of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Professor Bent Scholar, has compiled a list of comparisons between Jesus and the Essenes (JHC-JDSS 9), which, is not a “non-debatable consensus”, but is his own selection, based on insights developed and defended in lengthy monographs by international experts. It is “the consensus among the most prestigious Qumran specialists”. He means, all his best friends agree on it. Bent explains that experts are not embroiled in controversy over the discoveries in the Judaean desert. Curious then that many people have the impression they are hiding something.

Anyway, we are to believe there is a consensus, it is among the best specialists, and nothing is being concealed. Bent Scholar refers to eleven of the best specialists, and guess what? Eight of them are professional Christians! One other was a professional Jew. The other two had non-religious professions but we are not told whether they held religious views. Professional devotees of the modern Hebraic religions are hardly likely to get themselves sacked by saying that their discoveries render their professional beliefs untenable. Even they are not stupid enough to saw off the branch which supports them.

Professor Scholar tries to be a liberal in his interpretations of the discoveries but, though he disparages both ends of the spectrum of opinions about Jesus’s relationship to the Essenes, the Christian fundamentalists at one end and absolute skeptics like myself at the other, he betrays his own prejudices in many ways.

Why should institutions for men to live devout lives essentially segregated from the world, and particularly from the other sex, not be called monasteries? Bent Scholar objects to Qumran being called a monastery because it “transports Christian ideas” to pre-70s Judaism. Does he object to Tibetan monasteries being given the same name because it “transports Christian ideas” to a a distant Asian plateau? His real fear is that it might seem to be admitting more about the Essenes than the “best specialists” want to concede—that Qumran was the first Christian monastery, as could arguably be the case, if Jesus were shown to have been an Essene.

We shall see similar dishonesty in the following discussion of Bent Scholar’s lists of similarities and dissimilarities between Jesus and the Essenes.

Summary of Fundamental Similarities

Scholar begins with a summary of the “numerous fundamental ways” in which Jesus and the Essenes were similar.

They were in the same small country, Judaea, about as big as Delaware or Devonshire
They were Jews
They were seriously religious
They were deeply conservative, basing their beliefs on ancient scriptures not the world as it was
They disliked non-Jews
They resented the temple priesthood, the Sadducees
They disliked another Jewish sect, the Pharisees, but saw some good in some of them
They expected God to change the world and destroy the wicked soon—they were apocalyptic and eschalogical
They were disliked by the Romans and Jesus and many Essenes were killed by them

If we were not talking about someone believed by Christians to be the son of God, this list of identities would be sufficient to categorise Jesus as an Essene, the Essenes having existed at least 100 years before Jesus was born. It is not sufficient for Christians, who prefer to believe unbelievable myths rather than obvious truths, out of ignorance or greed. They hope to find relief from their possible discomfiture in the detail.

The wilderness was important to the Essenes and to Jesus

The scholarly consensus are fairly blind about the list of detailed similarities but over the list of detailed dissimilarities they really show their absurd prejudices. Their trouble is they are determined not to let Jesus be an Essene at any cost to truth and scholarly values. If Jesus is to be God’s revelation, he has to be unique. Professor Scholar tries to reassure doubters that if Jesus is not quite unique, it is no bad thing for it combats the worst Christian heresy—docetism, but he is still intent on stopping Jesus from being recognised as an Essene. In desperation, in the face of insurmountable odds, he will concede a marginal influence of the Essenes on Jesus, but not close association and certainly not membership, God Forbid!

It is not hard to find differences between what we know of the teachings of Jesus and what we know of the teachings of the Essenes. Both are incomplete, so, when we find something missing on either side and present on the other, the Christians thank God and chalk it up as a difference. We cannot be sure that all the documents at Qumran are Essene, and we might be reading some as Essene when they are simply a book in the library for reference or a book given to them for safekeeping by someone else. In the New Testament, we cannot know what Jesus actually taught because he did not write it down or dictate it, and tradition might have inadvertantly or deliberately distorted it. In my view, most of the narrative of the gospels has been shaded to make it appear innocent. Some, at least, of the sayings will have similarly been altered or omitted because they were too obvious.

Jesus and the Essenes both expected The End

But the main reason for the differences is precisely to do with the great concern of Essenes—the Day of God’s Vengeance. Essenes knew they were in the Last Days, but they did not know precisely when the great event would happen. At the start of the gospels, John the Baptist and Jesus knew they were in the Last Days and urged people to repent, but they also did not know precisely when the occasion would be. Jesus himself explains it in Mark 13. For reasons that are not clear, Jesus comes to think that the Last Days really are at hand. In other words, they were literally down to days, not years. The last voluntary act of his life was to go to the Mount of Olives and watch for God’s miracle. He literally thought it would happen on the night of the Last Supper. It did not! Jesus was caught and crucified.

Bent Scholar concludes that Jesus was not an Essene. This, he declares, is the consensus among scholars. He means by “scholars” those who are members of the consensus! His attitude to anyone else who dares to venture an opinion is an absolute delight. Since the 1950s, many people have written that Jesus was an Essene but they were “journalists seeking attention” or “scholars who have become confused or even insane”.

Bent Scholar is certain that Jesus did not even have any tuition from an Essene, though how he knows is anybody’s guess—revelation, I suppose—Christian scholars have such advantages over we skeptics! Jesus was influenced by the Essenes in only “minor ways”. In truth, there are so many points of coincidence in the list below that, if Jesus was not an Essene, he was brought up in an Essene school and by an Essene mum and dad.

Some scholars explain some of the points of similarity—of Christianity, not Jesus—to the Essenes, by Essenes joining the new movement after 70 AD, but this is hardly any easier to take, if Jesus and the Essenes were so disalike as Bent Scholar thinks. The Hellenists among the Nazarenes will have taken advantage of an Essene network across the Empire, and doubtless densest in the eastern provinces in which Christianity began to thrive. That many Jews did not like them is shown in Paul’s epistles and Acts.

Roman soldiers were, like the Americans in Iraq, unbearable

Jewish Christians in the Jerusalem Church will have fought alongside the Essenes and militant Pharisees against the Romans. At this point any Essenes in the wider church would surely have left to support the freedom fighters. If many Essenes died fighting the Romans in the Jewish War, it seems unlikely that the survivors would have joined what had by then become largely a gentile church. After 70 AD, any remaining will have fled to Arabia, or joined the rabbis rather than Christianity. The sects that did join the Christians after 70 AD were the sadducees and the Herodians. History and logic point to Essenes leaving the Christian Church, if they had ever joined it.

But Bent Scholar claims to have shown that the church became more influenced by Essenes after the crucifixion for several generations. The later epistles like Ephesians are more Essenic than earlier ones like Galatians and Romans. The gospels of John and Matthew are more Essenic than Mark.

The dating of Paul’s letters is sorcery not scholarship, so nothing can be said about them except that they are plainly indebted to the Essenes. The question of the gospels is straightforward to explain. Mark was not a Jew, or he was a highly Hellenised and apostate Jew, and he deliberately wrote to hide the truth not to reveal it. That in itself might show Essene influence but the gentile Christians could not be seen as associated with a rebel nation and particularly with a militant sect. Mark wrote his gospel deliberately to depict it as anodyne.

Essenes fought bitterly in the Jewish War, a war that they considered a holy war against the men of darkness, and any scholarly consideration has to take this irrefutable fact of the first century into account. Bent Scholar quotes F J Murphy as properly insisting:

Any reconstruction that does not see Jesus within first century Jewish society is unacceptable.

It is unacceptable to ignore the huge tensions in Jewish society that led up to that ferocious war, and their effects upon the embryonic Christian religion that was rooted in a hated nation.

A glimmer enters the dark recesses of Bent Scholar’s partiality. Jesus was closer to the village Essenes than to the monastic ones.

Jesus was desperately trying to convert the sinners of Israel, expecting ha-Megiddo at any minute. What has come to us of his attempt has come from some of those converts. He was a professional Essene, we would say today, but preaching to the masses. He did not try to explain to them the finer points of theology. His object was to have them repent and be ritually purified by baptism, ready for God’s Appointed Time. So, the people who told us the story were more like village Essenes. For all we know, earlier Essenes had thought the big one was coming and had made recruits before and nothing happened. The repentant converts might well have formed themselves into the body of lay-Essenes of Palestine. We don’t know, but the objective of Jesus as the head of the Essene Church was exactly what Christians have always said. Bent Scholar tells us himself:

He moves and begins to call Jews to follow him and restore the Covenant loyalty of Israel.

Bent Scholar fails to comprehend the urgency of it all—God’s Appointed Time is here—and the fact that, if God sent Jesus, he sent him as head of the Essenes! The consensoids cannot even let these possibilities enter their heads, but they are virtually the complete explanation of the differences between the Essenes of the Scrolls and the Essenism of Jesus. Let them think the unthinkable. Jesus was an Essene and try to explain the differences from:

the urgency of his situation
the desire of gentile Christians to obscure the truth
the possibility that sufficient is missing from both sets of records, or has been sufficiently obscured, that small irreconcilable differences might still remain.

What appears will be an overwhelming argument for Jesus as a man of his place and time.

Bent Scholar, expert as he is, choses to try to distinguish Jesus from Christians in what follows. It is absurd to anyone rational. All we know about Jesus has been filtered through the beliefs of a Church at least forty years old when the first gospel was written and twice that age when Christians tried to improve it. It is useful for Bent Scholar to do this because he can ignore many signs of Essenism in the early church as importations when he wants to suggest that Jesus was not influenced by Essenism.

This ignorant non-scholar, drawing on the scholarly work of scholars but not their ludicrously childish attitudes or their piously distorted faith-conditioned opinions, maintains that Jesus can be thoroughly understood. We only need to read the gospels with some insight and empathy for the people and the time and the story can be reconstructed with some veracity.

I know full well that this will be ignored by the Christians and probably by the Jews too, but it is much more likely to be true than infantile and unhistorical beliefs about demi-gods and miracles.

Agreed Similarities I

Both Jesus and the Essenes believed in the traditional God of Second Temple Judaism

For all Jews who were not apostates, Yehouah was considered the Most High God as the creator of the universe (Mk 10:18; 12:29, 32; 13:19; 1QS 3:15-20). This belief is always described as monotheistic, but it is hard to know what it means since the Hebrew God has an enemy who is just as powerful, judging by his inability to subdue him, he has his own lesser gods as messengers and lackeys (angels) and they all have to contend with the lackeys of his enemy (demons). At the same time, various humans like Moses, Enoch, the Essene and Christian saints and Jesus can take on god-like qualities, although only Jesus officially becomes one.

Both Jesus and the Essenes believed in a powerful enemy of God, the Evil One

He was called Satan by the New Testament writers and Belial by the New Covenanters. God, being all-powerful, would eventually win the struggle, although what reason he could possibly have for not ending it immediately thereby saving a lot of pain is not apparent. Jesus actually never explicitly says Satan will be defeated but the sectarians do. The nearest is Mark 3:26 when he says Satan would have an end, if he is divided, and Luke 10:18 where Jesus had a vision of Satan falling from heaven like lightning. Nevertheless, the gist of the kingdom parables is that evil will be defeated in order to create the kingdom of God. All of this is code for the defeat of the Romans and the establishment ofa theocracy in Israel.

Both Jesus and the Essenes believed in the Torah or Law of Moses

It was the will of God gifted to mankind and which they devoted themselves to, absolutely. Not even Christian scholars try to pretend any more that Jesus had abrogated the Torah.

Both Jesus and the Essenes believed in the Jewish scriptures

They particularly believed the Torah, but also the Prophets as their holy guide to behaviour and expectations. Few practising Jews other than the Sadducees would have demured, the Sadducees, however, accepting only the Torah. The big question here is, “What were the Jewish scriptures in the first century?”. The Jewish canon was not set until later by the Rabbis whose outlook was that of the Pharisees. It is quite plain that the Essenes regarded 1 Enoch, Jubilees, Tobit, the Testament of Levi and the Testament of Naphtali all as “scripture”. Jesus seems only to quote from the canonical Old Testament, but some of the epistles quote other works.

Both Jesus and the Essenes had the same particular books of scripture as favourites, Deuteronomy, Isaiah and Psalms

If this could be shown with some certainty is would be powerful confirmation that Jesus was an Essene, but the Christians will give thanks that we have such an incomplete record of what Jesus said that a proper assessment will be impossible. Our record of Essene practices are also, of course, highly incomplete, but at least what we have is probably their own. What we have about Jesus has been highly coloured by the gentile bishops.

Both Jesus and the Essenes believed in the importance of Isaiah 40:3

A voice crying, In the wilderness, prepare ye the way of the Lord.

Jesus’s followers wrote this into the gospels, saying it meant John the Baptist. Oddly, John baptised in places that could not have been wilderness themselves because there was fresh water available—oases or the Jordan river, albeit often surrounded by wilderness, whereas Qumran and its caves were unquestionably wilderness and the sectaries had to build elaborate channels and cisterns to capture the seasonal rains.

This passage in Isaiah was so important to the Essenes that in their copies of the text of Isaiah they lifted it out of its context, effectively boxing it out, as we might do in a book today. Equally, it is written in the core of their own rules, the Community Rule (1QS 8:13-14). It appears in the third verse of the earliest Christian gospel, the first being the book’s original title, and the next introducing the prophecy of God’s messiah, although Christians pretend it is the messiah’s messenger, John the Baptist. Of the myriads of verses in the Jewish scriptures, Christians could have chosen to begin their own gospel, they chose the very verse that defined the place and purpose of the Essene community. If Jesus was not an Essene, do not the Christians have to admit that the Holy Ghost was doing its best to make him look like one? Bent Scholar urges us to “ponder” whether Jesus’s followers might have been influenced by the Essenes!

Both Jesus and the Essenes believed in the institution of a New Covenant

In the synoptic gospels, the Last Supper is where Jesus starts this New Covenant (Lk 22:20 and some manuscripts of Mark and Matthew) or Covenant (Mk 14:24; Mt 26:28). It is noteworthy that even when “new” is omitted by the manuscripts, the reading becomes “the” Covenant, implying that it was a covenant that they all already knew about and not really one that was newly instituted then. In short, it was the New Covenant of the Essenes, one that was “new” relative to the Old Covenants and for the Essenes when they founded it but not “new” at the Last Supper. The Qumran sectarians called themselves the New Covenanters, entering into the New Covenant when they joined ((CD 6:19) and regarding their community as the Everlasting Covenant (1QS 3:16).

Of course, the idea of a New Covenant comes from Jeremiah 31:31-34 where the prophet speaks of a new covenant which God writes on men’s hearts. The Essenes were the people who developed the idea of a New Covenant into a living community of New Covenanters long before the putative Last Supper. Yet Bent Scholar again “ponders” whether Jesus was influenced by the Essenes. Fatuously, he concludes it unlikely because this passage influenced many New Testament writers, proving that it was a popular idea at the time.

This is scholarship? The New Testament writers he refers to were, amazingly, all Christians and therefore all New Covenanters, if that is what Jesus was. The very word translated “Testament” in New Testament can equally be translated as “Covenant”, and in the light of the Scrolls, one might conclude it should be translated as “Covenant”. If Jeremiah’s passage was popular at the time it was because the Essenes made it popular and though there was no copyright law in the Torah, it seems unlikely that anyone could come along, take all the main doctrines of another group and pretend to be something else. The Christians were only able to do it because they took Essene doctrines into the Roman Empire and subsequently the true Essenes were wiped out in revolutionary defeats by the Romans.

Both Jesus and the Essenes called themselves the Poor

In the sermon to the multitude, in Matthew 5:3ff and Luke 6:20f, the Poor are offered the kingdom of God—or heaven. In Matthew, they are even called the “Poor in Spirit”, not those suffering from depression but those with the Spirit of Poorness—they see a spiritual benefit in poverty. This expression baffled everyone until it was found in the War Scoll (1QM 14:7). In the War Scroll the Poor win the cosmic battle at God’s intervention. Bent Scholar acknowledges the “uniqueness” of the term “the Poor Ones” and so thinks it conceivable that Jesus “inherited” it from the Essenes. In fact, this is an astonishing and quite conclusive agreement especially since Paul the apostle to the gentiles collected money for the Poor Ones in Jerusalem, the Jerusalem Church, and the Jewish Christians written of by the Church Fathers as heretics from Christianity called themselves the Poor Ones or Ebionim.