If society lets any considerable number of its members grow up as mere children, incapable of being acted on by rational consideration of distant motives, society has itself to blame.

John Stuart Mill

Similarities and Differences between Jesus and the Essenes 3

Jesus and the Essenes
Supposed Differences I

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
Supposed Differences I

Jesus’s group was open while the Essenes were exclusive

Jesus taught publicly while the Essene teachings were secret. Bent Scholar considers this a major difference between the two societies, yet it is simply explained, and in a way that is Christian. Jesus and John the Baptist, as Essenes thought the Last Days were upon them. What were Essenes to do when they were convinced the Last Days were not just a theoretical concept in their arcane interpretations but had actually arrived? The portions of the book called by Vermes, the Messianic Rule (1QSa) gives the precise answer. All Israel had to be summoned to those offering atonement for the Land—the Promised Land, the country of Israel—and told the precepts of the Covenant! The Essenes would become the salvation of Israel. Plainly Jesus and John the Baptist were following this rule and summoning All Israel. All Israel meant all Jews including sinners and apostates. As for secrecy, Jesus deliberately taught in parables, remember? you Christians.

Jesus taught love while the Essenes taught hatred

Bigoted as cardinals to a man, they cannot see that the two groups were identical. It is simply that Jesus addressed his message only to Jews and, in the words attributed to him, did not succinctly express hatred of gentiles while the Essenes did. Both believed in turning the other cheek to enemies, as long as they were Jews. Bent Scholar quotes Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount (Mt 5:44), a composed speech. Jesus was only addressing Jews because he tells them he came to fulfil the law and the prophets—gentiles had no knowledge of these matters and were not subject to them. So, when he says love your enemies, he meant love your Jewish enemies because you are Jews and hope to be saved. He did not mean “love your gentile enemies” because he plainly does not love them. He tells the Syro-Phoenican woman he would not throw the children’s bread (salvation) to the dogs (gentiles).

This outlook is exactly that of the Essenes in the Last Days. They hated the wicked and kept separated from them but accepted that God had chosen the Jewish people, and they had God’s promise of salvation when the time came—they had to be reminded, even though normally Essenes were extremely secretive. Bent Scholar blithely ignores the Messianic Rule and quotes the everyday rules that the New Covenanters lived by in the Community Rule. No one denies that Essenes normally separated themselves from the ungodly. Yes, and they prayed that God would destroy the followers of the Devil. Do Christians differ? The wicked will burn in everlasting torture in hell, according to them. What is the difference? It is just what Jesus taught, yet Bent Scholar tries to pick it out as a difference.

Bent Scholar harps on about the Sermon on the Mount pretending that it showed a lenient attitude by Jesus to Romans, presumably because Jesus ’s message was for gentiles too. It is nonsense. It is pure expediency. His followers were in no position to refuse a Roman who made him carry his backpack. If it meant anything, it simply meant, “Don’t do anything silly. Bide your time”. A simple understanding of the situation of the Jews and Jesus’s expectations explains it as not inviting premature trouble, not as being extra matey with fascistic oppressors. Bent Scholar highlights a similar situation in the writings of Philo, who claimed that the Essenes were pacific, possessing no weapons. For that matter, Josephus also said Essenes were peaceful.

Does any pattern occur to Bent Scholar or his consensoids? No? Then let me suggest that all these writers and the Christian ones were being careful so as not to invite Roman retribution on the Essenes, or, in the case of Christian writers themselves, because they were still close enough to be regarded by the Roman authorities as the same—see Acts, where a centurion considered Paul a seditionist.

Bent Scholar favours the interpretation that those who “hate their enemies” (Mt 5:43) were the Essenes. It is surely so, but the explanation is the same. The Essenes in normal times hated their apostate and sinning fellow nationals. I conjecture that the Sermon in Matthew is exactly that mentioned in the Messianic Rule when the precepts and statutes of the Covenant are read to the Called of Israel. Jesus is saying that no Essene should any longer hate the sinners and publicans but should love them as fellow Jews of God’s promise who, if repentant, might be with them in Paradise in a few days time. He is certainly not referring to gentiles who had to approach God’s kingdom cap-in-hand.

In Matthew 5:46, Jesus even says that merely loving those who love you back is no better than publicans—Jewish collaborators—who do the same. He doesn’t say no better than gentiles, who do the same, showing that he speaks only of Jews. In the next verse he mentions gentiles but quite disparagingly, even gentiles will say, “Hello”! Jesus had no thoughts of loving gentiles, despite Christian distortions. No Jew will have thought it wrong to hate gentiles. Leviticus (19:18) had the rule, “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thy self”, but gentiles were not the neighbours of the Israelites. In Leviticus, God had just thrown out the Canaanites, with their idolatrous habits, that He hated, or abhorred. If God hated or abhorred them, why shouldn’t His people?

Jesus was not concerned with ritual purity and taboos but Essenes were

Bent Scholar immediately tells us that Jesus declared all foods clean (Mk 7:19) when no honest “scholar” will deny that it is a patent interpolation, irreconcilable with Acts of the Apostles where the apostles know nothing about their Master’s famous declaration. In the section of Mark Bent Scholar quotes (Mk 7:1-8;14-23), Jesus appears to be defying the cleanliness taboos of the Jews, but his own explanation proves that they were pursued, presumably by Herod, and he was justifying an expediency, not redefining law.

In contrast, Essenes were obsessive about purity as the Scrolls show extensively. The trouble is that once more, the changed circumstances are not considered. These were the Last Days when God’s soldiers, His Elect, the Essenes, would have to engage the sons of Darkness, the Romans, and their Jewish helpers. The rules of the normal communities did not apply, and Jesus explains it in Mark. Read it, you scholars! Jesus is telling men fleeing their enemies, “Don’t bother about cleanliness and food taboos as long as you are pure in heart”. It is not a permanent abrogation of the law but a practical expedient. Some of his followers were concerned that they were unable to practise the law in the difficult circumstances of being fugitives. Jesus tells them that, when such problems arise, God’s righteous do not have need to worry, as long as they stay pure of heart. The scriptural examples he choses to explain his pragmatic decision show the circumstances the Nazarenes were in (MAG-THJ 192).

Bent Scholar cites a pseudepigraphic psalm but it fails to illustrate his point. The psalm says that God would test all and declare the Elect pure but reject the impure hated ones. That is exactly what Jesus was saying to his men because they had been selected already as the pure ones. In the circumstances, but not in general, the need for strict cleaving to the law was lifted.

Bent Scholar asserts, with no reasons, that Essenes would have been appalled by Jesus’s exhortations for people to tear out eyes and limbs (Mk 9:42-47) lest they lead to sin. My own guess is that this is part of an Essene litany akin to those described in the Community Rule. The sequence is certainly bizarre and is conducted as call and response. What views do the “scholars” have? If ever this should turn up in a fragment, they would simply say it had been inserted by an ex-Essene follower. Scholarship? If Bent Scholar is correct that purity demanded stone vessels not pottery ones then the specification of stone vessels in John 2:6 suggests that Jesus’s followers at Cana were sticklers for purity, not grubbers in filth, as Christians were for centuries in the mistaken belief that dirt was godly.

Jesus associated with the unclean but for Essenes it was anathema

Either Bent Scholar is a fool or he is dishonest. Most preaching Christians are one or the other. Since he is a self-proclaimed scholar we cannot assume he is a fool. He cites 4Q174 as proof that the Qumran community hated the unclean. The fragment is talking about the perfect unpolluted sactuary that God would build for His people in the Last Days. It is heaven on earth. The Essenes, as many of their hymns show were not arrogant, they were extremely humble, knowing that however hard they tried, it would take God to make perfection on earth. Nevertheless, they saw it as their destiny to start to make the world a bit more like heaven and eventually, they thought heaven and earth would merge. So, they had to try to be as pure as they could in anticipation of heaven.

It did not mean that when they thought the kingdom was nigh, they would not try to save others of the House of Israel. That was their purpose. Indeed, the Qumran Essenes considered people not places as holy. The Holy Spirit resided in the community not in an empty room in the temple. When John’s gospel says that Jesus spoke of the temple of his body, it is a clever way of avoiding the charge of threatening to destroy the temple, but it draws upon the Essene idea that people not buildings are holy. Nor did the Essenes keep themselves isolated in ghettoes as, Bent Scholar claims. They explicitly provide for the accommodation of travellers and their provisions are just those that Jesus expects when he sends out his disciples.

Jesus associated with gentiles but for Essenes it was anathema

Bent Scholar says that Jesus even commended the faith of a centurion, a Roman. The story is quite at odds with Jesus’s command to his disciples only to go to the lost sheep of the House of Israel (Jews), which even Bent Scholar does not dispute as genuine. It is the most substantial of the so-called minor agreements between Matthew and Luke and is altogether so strange few will question it as a late addition to both gospels. In one of his ubiquitous footnotes, Bent Scholar recognises that Jesus may not have included gentiles in his call, so why should he have gone around commending them? In particular, why would he have commended one of the occupying soldiers of an unwanted foreign invader?

And how does this centurion, the equivalent of a modern major, approach Jesus, a despised native of a disgusting colony? “Beseeching him!” Whoever writes it sees it as unconvincing and has the officer giving his own explanation that he is used to giving orders. Quite. And all this for what? His batman! It is farcical. Incidentally, the servant had palsy, showing it is copied from the miracle of the paralysed man in Mark. Palsy or paralysis is Essene code for an apostate from the law of Moses, so the servant must have been a Jew.

Bent Scholar says the Essenes had strict rules which prohibited any commerce with gentiles when their rules were precisely the opposite in purpose, to allow commerce, by strict regulation, between the righteous and the Sons of Darkness. The internal evidence of the documents and the known exile of the Jews in Babylonia, together with the existence in Mesopotamia for over a thousand years of a sect closely akin to the Essenes, the Qaraites, suggests that the sect might have been founded in exile, as an alternative, or parallel school to that of Ezra. The purpose of the Damascus Document seems to be to offer ways in which the separated Essenes could live alongside foreigners in an acceptable way, without corruption or pollution. These, therefore, are not major differences, as Bent Scholar pretends, but explain how Jesus felt able in his mission to mix with unclean people while not getting neurotic about it.

Jesus mixed with women but for Essenes it was anathema

Essenes were extremely concerned to keep themselves pure but the Messianic Rule required them to summon All Israel when the time came. It meant that, despite their concern for purity, some Essenes had to take it upon themselves to summon them. The Essene absolute requirement for meekness and humility meant that the only man who could do the missionary work was the Master himself. Essene humility was perfectly expressed several times in the gospels as “the first shall be last and the last first”. It was the first therefore had to become the last. He had to humble himself and suffer the pollution of the ungodly to offer them a last chance of salvation. John the Baptist did it, then Jesus.

Bent Scholar says Jesus and the Essenes were at the opposite ends of the spectrum with regard to women. He cites Luke, the Syro-Phoenician woman and the woman from Samaria. Bent Scholar sees his image of Jesus, not the one really present, even in the gospels. In Mark’s gospel, the first one, women have no significant role. They could be removed from the story without affecting it. Later gospels import more and more women, Luke’s being the women’s gospel. It is full of women of no consequence, introduced incidentally. There is a good reason why the gentile evangelists wanted to introduce women into a story about men. The first gentile converts were predominantly women! The gospel writers increasingly pander to the need to have women in the story because the congregations were female. Roman men spent their time in all male groups worshipping Mithras. It simply would not have done for the gentile bishops to try to sell Christianity as another all male brotherhood in origin, even if they had changed the rules to admit women.

The other side of this particular coin is that the Essenes were not implacably opposed to women, any more than Christian monks are. They based themselves on scripture beginning with Eve and so they mistrusted women, but as Josephus said, they realised you had to have them for the procreation of the human race. Josephus tells us that there were two types of Essenes, those who lived apart—like the sectaries at Qumran—and those who had commerce with others on a regular but regulated basis. These were the Village Essenes, who married and even attended the polluted Temple. The chief of the Qumran sectarians was apparently the head of the whole order, so it would be absurd if he did not relate with Village Essenes, including women, if only for the purposes of grading and instruction. Women certainly visited Qumran because their graves have been found there.

Bent Scholar’s extreme case simply has no substance, and his quotation that Jesus recognised women as of equal humanity to men is sheer romance—he does not even treat his mother with respect, and is also rude to the Syro-Phoenican woman. As for the Samaritan woman, it appears in John’s gospel, a late, highly refined and historically quite untrustworthy work, and the actual relationship of Essenes and Samaritans has yet to be properly understood. It should be noted that Samaritans were a sect of Judaism, a sect disliked by the Pharisees, but possibly of some affinity with the Essenes. The situation is ambiguous, but it cannot be assumed willy-nilly that, if Jesus, were an Essene he would have had nothing to do with a Samaritan woman.

Jesus had a reputation as a wine bibber and a glutton but Essenes were ascetic

If Jesus had this reputation it is strange that his most devout followers are all killjoys. It is a reputation they forget, if it is true, and Bent Scholar only devotes four lines to it. It is, of course nonsense and built really upon very little evidence (Mt 11:19; Lk 7:34). This single passage defines Jesus as a glutton and drunkard out of his own mouth. Plainly, it is a distortion of the Eucharistic meals which Jesus offered his converts, the messianic meal of the Essenes.

Based on the wedding feast at Cana, Bent Scholar also says Jesus loved a good party—presumably because he used his god-given powers to make himself and his pals twelve firkins of wine out of water. Could anything be more puerile? Essenes used symbolic wine called “New Wine” in their rituals. Really it was blessed water. That was the miracle—blessing the water and thereby making it into “New Wine”—a miracle that Essenes probably did on a daily basis. It is the origin of the Eucharistic wine of the Christian churches, and its sacramental holy water.

Essenes were not interested in missionary work but Jesus was

The Messianic Rule tells the sectaries that All Israel had to be summoned. How can anyone summon anyone else without going out to tell them? This part of the rule for the Last Days shows conclusively that the Essenes were interested in getting converts even if it was only in the few months before the destruction of the world. In fact, the exhortation in the Damascus Rule is quite analogous to the Sermon on the Mount (CD 2-6), and obviously served the same purpose. It was an address to new recruits. If we were to believe the classic authors alone, the Essenes only replenished their numbers from misfits fed up with the world. There might have been quite a lot of them but even they probably needed a recruiting sergeant.

Bent Scholar tries a pretty crude distraction by saying that the Essenes only recruited priests—in the early days. The point is that Jesus and his followers thought they were going to be the last of the righteous in this corrupt world. Whatever the first Essenes did is totally irrelevant. It seems that B F Meyer understood the Messianic Rule, being quoted as writing that the Essenes “appealed to pious Jews to join Israel”, except that the document says All Israel, so includes impious Jews too, though they would not have been saved unless they sincerely repented and were baptised.

Almost certainly, Essenes, in normal conditions, would have been happy simply to attract people fed up with life’s vicissitudes, and the products of Essene marriage. Essenes saw their duty as a duty to God not some obsession with growth for its own sake. These, however, were not normal conditions. They had to try to persuade Jews to join the ranks of God’s army of saints. This is rather different from normal missionary work. This was the last chance saloon for God’s Chosen People. Surely this is what Christians believe except that they take Jesus to be a one off. He was. Roosevelt was the one-off President when the war began and Jesus was the one-off Nasi when the kingdom began—as he thought.

Jesus spoke simply but the Scrolls are abstruse and sometimes in code

This rather illustrates these Christian scholars’ powers of self deception. They seem quite unaware that Jesus also spoke in code called parables. His parables according to the first evangelist in chronological order, Mark, had to be deciphered to his disciples, which necessarily means they were incomprehensible to everyone who heard them. Do these “scholars” ever read their bibles?

The truth is quite evident. Judaea was an occupied country and both Jesus and the Essenes had to be circumspect. They wrote and spoke for the initiated—in the gospels, those that have ears to hear. Jesus’s code was one of allusion that Jews would understand but gentiles or thoroughly apostate Jews would not. Bent Scholar, the scholar who disparages journalists, and even calls other scholars mad or confused, doesn’t even realise that the gospel we have has been digested and interpreted several times before it got into English. That is why much of the Nazarene, or Essene, code has, actually, disappeared making the interpretation of the parables seem unnecessary. Besides that, parables have been added that are not Jesus’s parables, but merely moral stories and difficult parables have been turned into miracles. What Christians will not accept, but which is true, is that the gentile bishops deliberately interpreted pericopes about Jesus how they wanted them.

Bent Scholar is naïve enough to say that Jesus’s message was “pellucidly clear”. He probably thinks the story of Humpty Dumpty is “pellucidly clear” too. It is pellucidly clearly about a silly fat egg sitting on a wall and getting broken when he fell off. It is, isn’t it kiddies? Well, no. It is written in code. It is a parable. But it has been turned into a fairyland fantasy by Christians who found it too offensive for modern children. Originally, “the forty doctors and forty wrights couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty to rights”. Why? She was a little fat thing because she was pregnant! It was a game with a moral for young girls who had to throw themselves over backwards without showing their ankles. The Christian gospels are like this. They have been reduced to nursery tales, and the people, scholars or otherwise, who believe them in this form are thumb-sucking infants. Remember poor Humpty Dumpty when you read your bibles, you Christians. It will remind you that there is something real behind it.

On the other hand to pretend that the Scrolls are all abstruse is propaganda. Bent Scholar, recognises this in a footnote, a popular technique of his. He resolves his sins of omission by using footnotes that will save him from being totally dishonest. Here is an interesting quotation: The “Essenes wrote only for the learned and initiated in their own closed group”. A bit like Bent Scholar and his consensoids in scholarship.

Bent Scholar ends by telling us that Jesus spoke more like a Rabbi and actually quotes the Golden Rule of Hillel a member of the party Jesus was supposed to have been the enemy of, the Pharisees. Are we to believe that Jesus was a secret Pharisee? Jesus, according to Bent Scholar recommended collaboration with the Romans, just as the Pharisees did. Why don’t the Christian churches disband and invite everyone to become Jewish proselytes? Jesus was never plotted against by Pharisees because they were too cautiuous about what God’s intentions might have been, but they still didn’t like him. Messiahs were ten a penny and they all caused trouble. The age of prophesy was over. And the Pharisees were correct and Jesus was wrong. We still have no sight of the kingdom of God.

Jesus, not the Essenes, was famous for healing miracles

The Qumran sectaries were not interested in healing, Professor Scholar says, but he realises he is on tricky ground talking about Jesus’s miraculous healings, and has to argue that at least some seem historical. Well, they were and they weren’t. They were healings all right but not healings of physical ailments, but what all Christians should recognise them as, metaphors for spiritual healings.

The Essenes were noted by Josephus as healers and many still say the name Essene comes from a Semitic word for healer, as Bent Scholar notes in a footnote! Essenes were healers all right, like Jesus, but like him they wanted to heal the spiritual sickness of Israel, ready for entry into God’s kingdom. Nevertheless, they were noted as doctors of medicine too, using “stones and roots”, and a fragment from cave four (4QTherapeia) is part of a doctor’s report of his rounds at a hospital for guests. Presumably, like medieval monasteries, Qumran had a hospital. If it is fair to surmise that the Feast of the Renewal of the Covenant was held at Qumran, when 4000 Essenes from all over Palestine attended, a hospital would have been essential.

Nevertheless, Jesus cannot have been any more interested in the paralysed or blind than he was in the dead. He was sent to save the living. If any Jew had already died unrighteous, there was no hope for them. He says, “Let the dead bury their dead”, doubtless meaning the incorrigible sinners who were spiritually dead, but there was still hope for the living. Jesus was winning people back to Yehouah from apostasy so that they could repent of their sins and face God’s judgement with pure hearts. When he wins people with various ailments back to God, he cures a particular illness depending on the nature of the spiritual crime. The subterfuge was based on scripture and intended to fool Roman spies, who would not have known the real nature of the cure.

Jesus did not require any prolonged initiation but the Essenes needed three years

As Bent Scholar observes, Jesus invited people to give all they have to the Poor—the Essenes, as we now know—repent and be baptised. Absolutely correct. Essenes had to give all they had to the Poor, commit themselves to daily lustrations and be carefully tested for three years before they participated in the messianic meal. To judge from the gospels, Jesus gave the messianic meal straight after repentance and baptism. Why the difference in time scale? You got it, I hope! Jesus did not think there would be three years before the kingdom started.

All we know about what should be done when the situation became urgent is what is in the Messianic Rule. All Israel had to be called and have the rules read to them. Many scrolls are missing and the relevant bits are probably lost forever, but it is hard to conceive of a sect who held lustrations in such high esteem, not preserving a token of it as an abbreviated initiation. Soldiers going to war were ritually purified, and it is assured that the Essenes regarded themselves as God’s Elect—His army. The baptism of Jesus and John is the residual lustration required for the truly repentant, in preparation for God’s Day of Vengeance. To ignore the changes necessitated by the imminence of the fateful day, is to walk around with closed eyes.

Jesus had twelve apostles with three special ones but did not have a clearcut hierarchy

Bent Scholar tells us that no links between the Nazarene structure and the structure of the Qumran Council have proved fruitful. What sort of links does he mean? My guess is that like all Christians, he will accept nothing to soil the uniqueness of the Jesus movement even if, or maybe only if, it floated out of heaven on tablets of gold accompanied by a heavenly host.

Here we have two organisations with twelve lesser councillors and three senior councillors and a Chief Officer. It is quite unlike other organisational structures in Jewry at the time. The Sanhedrin had 70 members. The Priesthood had twenty four courses. Jesus followed Essene practice. The only point at issue is whether the twelve included the three or not. At Qumran, it seems the three were separate, but we have no strong evidence that the three were not separate in the Jesus band as well. No interest was shown in most of the apostles and their supposed histories are apocryphal. It is quite likely that the gentile Christians did not realise that the three were separate from the rest and therefore included them in the twelve. The implication of 1 Corinthians 15:5-7 is that there were more than twelve apostles. Peter and James saw Christ individually, but so did “the twelve” and “all the apostles”. So, the twelve were not all the apostles, and the implication is that Peter and James were special ones. Only John is omitted otherwise the evidence might look better still.

They might not even have known the names of all the twelve, but more than twelve names appear in the four gospels. Christians identify some of them as the same, but only for the purpose of harmonisation. There is no good evidence that there were not twelve besides the three. The mistake will have began with Mark, who related the experiences of Peter, according to tradition, without properly understanding them. It is also possible, even likely, that some of the twelve were killed. Only the replacement of Judas is mentioned in Acts, but that was merely to explain a bad rumour that was circulating and had nothing to do with organisation or the replacement who is not heard of again. It is not only fruitful to link the two organisational structures, no reasonable man could not do so.

Regarding hierarchy, Bent Scholar cites two verses:

If any man desire to be first, the same shall be last of all, and servant of all,
Mk 9:35

Whosoever of you will be the chiefest, shall be servant of all.
Mk 10:44

He contrasts this with the Essenes who had strata with rules for advancement and demotion and punishment. We know the rules of the Essenes in some detail because we have some of their most important rule books. We do not have the rule books of the Nazarenes, except whatever we find by accident in the gospels. The Sermon on the Mount is a set of rules and many of them match Essene ones, but we do not have a Community Rule. Nevertheless, if the post-crucifixion Christians followed the teachings of the Master, they had punishments, as we know from Acts.

Religious experts, depend upon their faithful flocks to be ignorant. Bent Scholar’s book is aimed at “all who are interested”, really meaning the interested lay-Christian, not a prelate or theologian who would have a smug chuckle. So, he does what all Christians have done since the movement left Palestine and became gentile—he is economical with the truth. We know little about Christian punishment, partly because the movement under its leader did not last long, but largely because the gentile bishops did not want to discourage people from joining by writing about punishments. The reverse is true of the Essenes. We know nothing about how they actually lived and thought, but know a great deal about their strictness. One thing is certain, the were healthy and happy. Josephus tells us they lived to ripe ages and returned from work every day, joyful.

Josephus tells us the four grades of membership remained strictly segregated and were not allowed contact for fear of spreading pollution. Once again, we are talking about the attempts by men on earth to aspire to be angels. They felt that having advanced a grade they were a step nearer heaven. Their progress should not be hampered by contact with lesser mortals. What Bent Scholar omits is that progress depended on the deepist humility, as 1Qs 5:4-6; 25-26 testifies, and many later rules forbidding anger, obstinacy, lying, insulting, bearing malice, not caring for a fellow, interrupting and slandering. Plainly, the Essenes had strict ranks, but by failing in any of these rules they would be set back or even expelled. How does this differ from the gospel saying? Though Consensoids will not accept it, the Community Rule explains precisely what Mark meant by his perverse sounding sayings. So, when Christian scholars tell us that Jesus was warning against the Essenes’ rank consciousness in these passages, they are spouting, to use an appropriate scroll word.