Nature free at once and rid of her haughty lords is seen to do all things spontaneously of herself without the meddling of the gods.

Lucretius

Similarities and Differences between Jesus and the Essenes 4

Jesus and the Essenes
Supposed Differences II

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 II

Jesus did not follow the solar calendar but the Essenes did

There is simply not enough evidence to call this one, but if Jesus did not, he could not have been an Essene. The trouble is that the Essenes used the solar calendar for their own festivals but must have kept the lunar one too. Otherwise they would not have been able to effect any commerce with other Jews. This means that even if there were something in the gospels, say, like the date of Passover, that proved Jesus was using the lunar calendar, it would only prove he was using it to know the date of Passover followed by the Jerusalem temple, which he would have had to know, anyway.

Certain peculiarities might suggest that Jesus used a different calendar, such as the apparent disagreement between John and the synoptics over the date of the Last Supper. Was it a Passover supper or was it the day before? When did the day start for Jesus, in the morning or as the stars came out? Most people seem to think that the day for the first Christians was morning to morning, like our own in practice. The Jewish day was evening to evening. If so, Jesus was an Essene because the Essenes seeemed to start the day in the morning. In the final vigil in the Garden of Gethsemene, Jesus seemed to wait through the night, giving up as dawn approached, or at dawn, when the day ended. That would have been Essene behaviour.

Jesus wrote nothing but the Essenes wrote continuously

The terrible Day of God’s Vengeance was nigh. The time for writing anything except obituaries was over. For the next forty years, Christians, expecting Jesus to return on a cloud and begin the miracle that he himself expected in Gethsemene, wrote nothing. When people expect the world to end, they rightly conclude that putting down pernanent records is fruitless. Jesus was out there to call the Godless back to God. No Christian will disagree. He expected the world to end, within a generation, he said at first, but he plainly came to think it was a more urgent case, and eventually was captured disappointed that it did not happen when he expected it. Such men are not putting pen to paper.

It is not to say that in earlier years when Jesus was in training at the sectarian camps, he did not write, or at least copy, at lot. Some of the Scrolls discovered at Qumran might have been written by Jesus!

Jesus possessed no formal training but Essenes devoted their lives to biblical study and interpretation

Bent Scholar quotes Mark 6:2 in support of this:

And when the sabbath day was come, he began to teach in the synagogue, and many hearing him were astonished, saying, From whence hath this man these things? and what wisdom is this which is given unto him, that even such mighty works are wrought by his hands?

But the amazement of the crowds, which Bent Scholar thinks is because an ignorant man has appeared inspired by the Holy Ghost, is really because Jesus was teaching something astonishing—defiance of Rome, indeed, in the parallel passage in Luke 4:16-24, that he is the messiah! Quite apart from this, the only basis for it is the kiddies’ idea that Jesus was a simple carpenter. Yet, in the days before charlatans could get fat-cat incomes for writing crap, scholars had to earn a living. That is what the rabbis did and there is no reason to think, even if Jesus was simply a wandering teacher, that he was not trained.

Bent Scholar pretends or thinks that the question asked of Jesus in Jerusalem:

By what authority do you do these things?

simply meant, “Goodness, how did you get to know all that?” Jesus, in the gospel had just conducted a riot, breaking up legitimate traders in the temple. They were not simply asking him for his diplomas, as Bent Scholar implies. They wanted to know who gave him the right to take the law into his own hands. Legally he had no right. That was sufficient reason for him to be crucified, but Christians still maintain, “He was innocent, milud”.

Bent Scholar asserts, with no foundation in the least, that Jesus was taught in no academy and by no instructor, a prime example of pious lying. No one has any idea what Jesus did until he came out as the baptist who succeeded John. No rational man will give any credence to virgin birth stories or even stories of twelve year olds, wandering off from their parents to puzzle sages with his questions. Oh, and be quite insulting to an apparently concerned mother. But, if Bent Scholar wants to take them seriously, then they must show that Jesus was indeed prepared for his task, and lots of his relatives and friends as well as angels and shepherds must have known about it.

Jesus was alone whereas the Essenes would have supported each other

Bent Scholar acts towards Jesus like a child whose pet rabbit has run off into the undergrowth and has been left out all night. Sob. He was opposed by religious lawyers. So were the Essenes. Jesus is intermittently reclusive. So were Essenes. He was rejected. Go on? Didn’t he have throngs of people after him when he entered Jerusalem? It is all part of the kiddy-wink myth. If Jesus was rejected, it is because he failed at what he offered. No kingdom, then or now.

Scholar accuses his disciples of abandoning him at the end of his life. Is this serious? Even on the basis of the gospel story, did they have any choice? The gospels skid over the main story, but even as it stands, no sensible man was going to hang about! They did the sensible thing—a runner. One of the facts the gospel does skate over is who died with Jesus. The aim of the gospels is to focus on Jesus alone, although two more at least were hung with him. The truth is that many more will have been as well. There is no guarantee that the ones who survived were even close to Jesus. They had no knowledge of who provided the ass or who provided the room for the Last Supper. Somebody did. Yet Bent Scholar tells us Jesus was alone, with no community like the Essenes to support him. It will have been the Essenes who gave him this support and doubtless more which has been omitted because it would spoil the story of the solitary son of God battling alone against the wicked Jews.

Jesus told his supporters not to swear an oath whereas the Essenes swore solemn oaths when they entered

Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount:

Again, ye have heard that it hath been said by them of old time, Thou shalt not forswear thyself, but shalt perform unto the Lord thine oaths. But I say unto you, Swear not at all, neither by heaven, for it is God’s throne.

The Nazarene converts believe it is all right to swear by God’s name. Jesus tells them it is not, nor should they swear by heaven either. It is better not to swear at all rather than risking these prohibitions. You know what? This is just what the Essenes taught, yet Bent Scholar tells us he knows of no ban on oaths in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Let him look at CD(MsA) 15:1, which teaches precisely that a man must not swear on any name of God.

The Essenes took a solemn vow on entering the Community, but they had to swear it to themselves. They took on themselves the vow to return to the law of Moses. It was a personal commitment. The classic authors tell us that having sworn this solemn commitment they did not swear any more oaths. Jewish vows were vows to God and no one else. Someone had been criticising the Essenes for making this personal commitment instead of vowing to God. Essenes believed that an oath on God’s name which was broken, sullied God himself. Jesus, according to Matthew, says it was better not to swear at all, rather than pollute God’s name. Jesus taught exactly the same as the Essenes.

Oddly, Bent Scholar concludes from this that Jesus is teaching the exact opposite of the Essenes. Indeed, his teaching was directed against them. Not only that, but for the sake of the kiddies who think that swearing in this context is saying naughty words and calling people rude names, he points out that the Essenes did just that in the Community Rule, cursing the lot of Satan. Can you believe it? This is puerile. Swearing is making a solemn commitment before God, and only one such oath is necessary. God knows if it is broken, and that is the end of your heavenly ambitions. So, Essenes made one vow, when they joined, and thereafter had no need to swear again.

Bent Scholar now contrast the ability of Jesus to summarise the law into the first two commandments of the ten of Exodus, saying this would have been anathema to the Essenes who were absolute sticklers for all of the law. Considering this is the case, it is curious how many of the rabbinical interpretations they ignore or reinterpret. The point is that Jesus feared that the kingdom of God could begin instantly. If, in that instant, he could save a soul, it was his God sent duty to do so. That is why Jesus did, in the trying circumstances of the anticipated end of the wicked world, what Essenes would not normally condone. That is why as the first among the Essenes, he had to be the last when summoning All Israel to salvation. The summary of the law that could be taught while standing on one leg, according to Hillel, was to love your neighbour, your fellow Jew. When the world is about to end, all rancour should end first for those hoping to enter God’s kingdom. “Love your neightbour” was the essence of the law that could be simply taught in the last few days of worldly existence.

Jesus honoured the prophets but the Essenes re-interpreted what they wrote implying they thought them ignorant

Bent Scholar states and defends this in four lines, so he obviously thinks it feeble, which it is. The Essenes revered the prophets, and although they did think they were ignorant of the true meaning of what they wrote, it did not mean the prophets were ignorant but that God was clever and had withheld the understanding of some of his mysteries even from the prophets. The Righteous Teacher had discovered how to read the scriptures in such a way that God’s mysteries were revealed. What is more to the point than this is that there is a remarkable agreement between passages quoted from the scriptures in general between Jesus and the Scrolls. Jesus might often have given peshars on the prophets, only parts of which were remembered, together with the quotation itself, which would have been easier to remember for the less backsliding members of the Nazarenes. When scripture is quoted by the gospel writers, they often quote it incorrectly, but in a way which suits them. This was a technique used by the Essenes.

Jesus taught in parables but the Essenes just set down endless laws

Bent Scholar says that Jesus sought to free the Jews from legalism, yet elsewhere admits that he was a fully orthodox Jew committed to the Torah. These professional shepherds depend upon the Christian sheep having the memory span of an ant. All Jews were legalistic because the most holy gift of God they had was the law handed down to Moses. Jesus, as any Christian will concur, was a Jew devoted to God. It was therefore quite impossible for him to have sought to free the Jews from the law. That was the work of Satan.

Jesus was later shown as freeing people from the law so that gentiles need not be circumcised. The gentile bishops were stealing Judaism and making it applicable to the gentiles because it was seen by many as a noble religion. Many gentiles, especially women, had become godfearers, associates of Judaism who would not convert. Women were inclined to convert but their menfolk would not. They had to undergo the dangerous operation of circumcision, and most would not consider it. Christianisation of Judaism made a religion appropriate for these people and they joined in droves. No honest scholar would pretend that Jesus wanted to abrogate the law. But since the time of the first gentile bishop, few Christians have been honest to God, believing He prefers pious bleating to truth.

Jesus did not teach formal law, because the people he wanted to win back from apostasy were often simple people with imperfect legal education. There was no time to give even crash courses in the Torah and God’s requirements. He wanted the Jews to repent and be baptised, as Christians should know. This huge reduction in legal necessity for salvation was because Jesus came to think the world might end in the very next moment. It was that urgent, which is why he thought it necessary to send out disciples to the Jewish cities. He just did not have time to do it himself. The consequence of this was he had to teach his message in short memorable stories, but they were stories in code—they were parabolic messages or parables, like a parabola, they were not direct and had to be understood. They were most comprehensible to Jews because of their scriptural allusions but seemed like cosy stories to onlooking Romans.

Bent Scholar claims that Mark 4:10-12 was added by the gospel writers, reflecting later interests. In it, Jesus says that the parables held the mysteries of God and were not readily understood by those without (outside):

Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God: but unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables: That seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand; lest at any time they should be converted, and their sins should be forgiven them.

You could say the same about the whole set of gospels, it being purely arbitrary what is considered original and what is added. It is certain, as Bent Scholar concedes, that Jesus wrote none of it. Everything we read about Jesus was therefore what the “post-Easter community” wanted future generations to know about him. When it suits Bent Scholar that a saying is originally Jesus’s, he quotes it. When it suits him to say it is merely the disciples or the early church speaking, he ignores it. The end of Mark 7:19:

This he send rendering all meats clean,

it suits him to accept, though it is a glaring interpolation. These two verses in Mark explain too clearly that parables are not nursery stories for infant Christians. That is too much. It could not have been Jesus who said it. Yawn!

Jesus did not believe in fate but the Essenes did

It is hard for a skeptic like me to make anything of this, coming from a Christian. If God had a plan which Jesus followed, how did he not believe in fate? Three times in Mark, Jesus predicts his own death. Isn’t that a belief in fate? These people really do talk a load of tripe, apparently without even realising it, because they have divorced Jesus so thoroughly from the historical world that none of the rules of Nature even apply to the way he thinks. Or, perhaps they are just stupid.

Jesus believed in the resurrection of the dead at the End Time but there is no clear evidence that Essenes did

Josephus says Essenes believed in the immortality of the soul, comparing it with Greek beliefs. Bent Scholar quotes 2 Macabbees 14, seemingly as being “not (?) clear evidence” that the Essenes believed in bodily resurrection. Judas dies with his bowels hanging out and calling upon God to resurrect him, evidence that the Hasidim believed in resurrection. The Essenes were the Hasids, staunch believers in the Jewish theocracy.

Bent Scholar dismisses passages in the Scrolls, which suggest a belief in resurrection, as ambiguous and metaphorical. This one is fairly clear (Vermes 1QH14 10-15):

Thou hast purified man of sin… that bodies gnawed by worms may be raised from the dust to the counsel [of thy truth]… that he may stand before Thee with the everlasting host and with [Thy] spirits [of holiness], to be renewed together with all the living and to rejoice together with them that know.

There is no disagreement necessary between a belief in resurrection and the belief in an immortal soul. It is after all what the Christians are supposed to believe. If anyone is to be resurrected to life then notionally the soul must be returned to it. The soul therefore lives while the body is dead. Heaven is perfect and God’s kingdom on earth is heaven on earth. It too is perfect. The Essenes were trying to bring it about by aiming to act perfectly. But a perfect world has no corruption. It is therefore difficult to see how the Essenes could not belief in resurrection.

Quite apart from the gnawed bodies, the passage quoted says that the man who is free of sin will stand before God and his everlasting host and will be renewed. It is resurrection. All Jews other than the Sadducees believed in the prophets and undoubtedly Jesus and the Essenes did. Hosea promises a general resurrection on the third day. Are we supposed to think that the Essenes ignored this bit of scripture. Unfortunately, their commentary on Hosea is almost destroyed and the relevant part is missing.

Jesus never mentioned the names of the angels but Essenes had to remember them and had an extensive angelology

This is pretty fatuous. Christians are usually keen to warn we critics of Christianity that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Whatever Jesus might have had to say about the names of angels has not come to us, but it does not mean he had nothing to say. His followers were extremely interested in angels and they appear all over tha place in the birth narratives and at the empty tomb. More angels are mentioned in the New Testament than in the much larger Old Testament. Doesn’t that show that Christians had an unusual interest in angels? Jesus plainly believed angels were important and would appear in hosts at the end of the wicked world. Luke mentions the name of the angel Gabriel, but Michael, who is eschatologically important is not mentioned in the gospels although he is named in Jude and in Revelation. The reason is that his job was given to the risen Jesus as the one like unto a son of Man of Daniel returning on a cloud. The Jesus who returns will be Michael!

Jesus was a martyr and prophesied it but the Teacher of Righteousness was not

Christians are particularly sensitive about the Righteous Teacher because there are clues that his career was remarkably like that of Jesus. My own argument is not that Jesus was the Teacher of Righteousness who founded the Essenes but he was probably one of his successors as the Righteous Teacher, having a senior rank among the Essenes. Somebody had the task of summoning Israel and reading in their ears the requirements of holiness before the world was renewed and the wicked were destroyed. My guess, based on what we know of Essene humility and that of Jesus, is that only the holiest man could undertake such an important task. John the Baptist did it until he was imprisoned and then Jesus.

If Jesus prophesied his own death, it was only as part of the general renewal that everyone had to experience, but only the righteous would emerge to be resurrected. Later, Jesus became the sole subject of this general story he told to assure the faithful. Not just Jesus but every righteous person would be raised on the third day! This obvious scriptural fact has been willfully ignored by the pious liars for two thousand years.

Jesus was liberal about observance of the sabbath while Essenes were sticklers for it

Essenes would not even help an animal out of a pit on the sabbath, so this passage seems to be directed at them.

What man shall there be among you, that shall have one sheep, and if it fall into a pit on the sabbath day, will he not lay hold on it, and lift it out?
Matthew 12:11

But an examination of the original piece in Mark shows this part about the animal in the pit is missing. It is also absent from Luke. Plainly, then it is a later elaboration by Matthew or an editor. Not one of the passages in which Jesus is considered cavalier about the sabbath carries any conviction when studied.

This curing of a man with a withered hand is certainly a distorted parable. The episode of plucking which precedes it is the real case and that is explained internally as an expedient, which even Essenes would have respected, based as it was in scripture. Matthew’s interpolation would have been strong evidence that Jesus disdained the Essene sabbath observances, had it been original. It is derived and the incident that suggests it is a distorted parable not a real incident.

Bent Scholar wants to consider this interpolation as original because, it was on a matter which did not concern the later church. He says it was an intra-Jewish debate about sabbath laws. No! It was a Christian justification for avoiding the sabbath laws. The gentile Christians wanted to prove that the strict Jewish sabbath need not be followed by their godfearing converts. Matthew, or an editor, therefore put this bit of Essene law into Jesus’s mouth. It seemed an ideal example of the absurdity—to the pagans who would be reading Matthew—of Jewish sabbath observance. It is one of the more obvious instances of the way, the later Christians avoided the central beliefs of Jesus himself. They need hardly have bothered because most of the beliefs of Jesus recorded in the gospels are ignored by Christians anyway. This is the one exhibit out of all that has been presented, that Bent Scholar considers “astounding!”

Jesus considered himself to be God’s son but the Righteous Teacher did not

Bent Scholar tells us that Honi the Circle Drawer also considered himself God’s son. He was called by Josephus, a “righteous man”, denoting that he was an Essene. All male Jews were God’s sons and it seems likely that anyone with a particular holy calling might have used the explicit expression. In the Psalms of Solomon the righteous men who are saved by God are all Sons of God. Probably the terms “righteous” and son of God or Barabbas are synonymous. The Essenes might well have considered themselves as sons of God, and therefore addressed God as Abba. The evidence of Acts of the Apostles is that Barabbas was a title but it has been distorted into various similar names in a Malapropish sort of way, but deliberately for sure. Christians were trying to distance themselves from the strong and persistant rumour that Jesus was Jesus Barabbas, crucified as a seditionist. So they had to change the occurrences of Barabbas to Barsabas, etc.

The Essenes prayed at dawn and dusk and had an extended metaphor of light and dark for good and evil which Bent Scholar denies that Jesus had

Bent Scholar knows these things. Curious then that “light” occurs almost as often in the New Testament as in the Old Testament, even though the Old Testament is much bigger. Any concordance will show that light especially but darkness also appears in the New Testament and often with the fearful meaning of the Essenes. If the usage is not as intense as it was for the sectarians, it is probably merely an historical development rather than a product of revelation. Curious too that Jesus’s followers are fond of using light and darkness comparisons. Jesus himself, according to Matthew’s account of the Sermon on the Mount (Mt 6:22-23), uses the light and darkness metaphor beloved of the Essenes. If not Jesus, was it then Paul who was the Essene, for Paul sounds thoroughly Essene when speaking in 2 Corinthians 6:14-18? Or maybe Peter was the Essene infiltrator. He prayed at dawn in Acts. But Jesus several times prayes all night, so must have prayed at dusk and at dawn. We saw that in the parable of the Unjust Steward in Luke, Jesus called his audience, the Sons of Light.

Jesus taught about the coming kingdom of God but the Essenes never used the expression

This last is a highly dubious assertion which even Bent Scholar himself has to virtually contradict by offering quotations from the Scrolls which say, “the kingdom shall be to the God of Israel,” and “an awesome God in the glory of your kingdom” and “God” and “His kingdom”. Not, though “the kingdom of God!” On this criterion, Matthew’s Jesus had nothing to do with the Jesus Bent Scholar is talking about. He does not use the “technical term” the kingdom of God just as the Essenes apparently don’t. Matthew calls it the “kingdom of heaven”, but it is Jesus who says it. Bent Scholar actually quotes one scholar who maintains on the basis of the Gospel of Thomas that the term Jesus habitually used was simply “the kingdom”. If that is true, the question arises, what kingdom did Jesus mean? The obvious conclusion is that Jesus was being deliberately parabolic in these references. The kingdom of God was the kingdom of the Jews.