Christianity
Nazarene
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Tuesday, November 16, 1999
The Call to All Israel in the Last Days
Scroll scholar, Yigael Yadin, thought that Jesus was the leader of a schismatic faction of the Essenes, an Essene who advocated revision of the Community Rule. It is not so. There does seem to be a distinction between the Essenes and the Nazarenes—the Nazarenes seem less exclusive—but the philosophy of the Nazarenes was Essene philosophy. The Essenes recognized that in the last days all Israel must be told of the coming visitation and have the chance to repent and enter the kingdom. The Essenes allowed for the recruitment to the elect of the simple of Ephraim, those who had been misled by the Pharisees who seek smooth things, as described in the Nahum Pesher:
This concerns those who seek smooth things, whose evil deeds shall be uncovered to all Israel at the end time… the simple shall support their counsel no more… Many shall understand their iniquity and treat them with contempt because of their guilty presumption. When the glory of Judah shall arise, the simple of Ephraim shall flee from their assembly. They shall abandon those who lead them astray and shall join Israel.
Besides pointing to the expectation that all Israel will join Israel at the end time, this passage illustrates that the Essenes had contempt for the Pharisees as well as the unclean Sadducees. The Essenes disdained them because they presumed to do God’s will in building walls around the law and taking easy options in placating the foreign oppressors rather than aiming to evict them.
The Rule of the Congregation also orders that in the last days:
all the congregation of Israel shall join the Community to walk according to the law of the Sons of Zadok the Priests and the men of the Covenant… they shall summon them all.
When the whole congregation of Israel had been summoned—women and children too—they had the statutes of the covenant read into their ears that they may no longer stray, implying that there was no time for the usual three years of initiation—simply being told the rules would have to suffice as long as the simple had sincerely repented. Thus, at the end time all Israel would be called to enrol into the elect.
The Essenes evidently had the same idea as John the Baptist and Jesus—to warn all Jews that their time was nearly up, and that they should repent if they wanted to enter the kingdom. Neither Essenes nor John the Baptist or Jesus regarded anyone of the congregation of Israel as irredeemably lost to Belial, but note that their message was addressed only to Jews—all Israel or the congregation of Israel—the Jews were God’s chosen people and they alone were called, not foreigners.
The duty of the elect was to try to take as many of the chosen as possible into the coming battle for the kingdom. Jews were needed as soldiers of the sons of light, and any Jew could have a favourable outcome in the kingdom of God no matter what sins they had committed as long as they sincerely repented. The Essenes were no longer exclusive at the end time. The New Covenant made with the elect was a covenant to ensure there were enough righteous Jews to preserve the old covenant and ensure that the chosen people had the chance to repent and enter God’s kingdom.
This suggests the following Essene practices at the end time. When the diviners of the signs considered the end time was nigh, a Nasi was sent out into the community to test the mettle of the simple of Ephraim. He took on the role of Elijah. Elijah was the prophet who triumphed at Carmel over the prophets of Baal and founded a community of monks there. Some Jews regarded Elijah as an angel who visited earth then returned to heaven whence he would return to announce the Judgement day, others as a perfectly holy man who overcame death because he had not sinned. Essenes would have seen these as being the same thing. They believed that by behaving perfectly—as God wanted—they would become angels. In so doing they would be forming heaven on earth and facilitating the coming of the kingdom of God.
On Elijah’s return, he would raise the dead but meanwhile, though he had been returned to heaven, it was his wont to wander the earth at intervals assisting the poor and humble and instructing scholars and sages as a sort of Jewish Orpheus. The apparent absence of God that the priests of the Ezra school had produced compared with the times when God seemed to be present, led to a desire for an intermediary or messenger between the Chosen People and their God who could go before the face of God and plead for the people. The men sent out by the Essenes to convert the simple like John the Baptist seem to have been regarded as serving this function of Elijah. They were sent to herald the coming of the Day of Vengeance of God when the archangel Michael would come with his heavenly hordes. In the Orthodox church Elijah is a saint.
As Elijah, the Nasi, the Maskil, told the Simple of Ephraim of the imminence of the kingdom and called them to repentance. This safeguarded the Essenes as a whole while allowing God to show whether the auguries were correct or not. Cryptic A 4Q298, the Maskil’s Address to the Sons (children) of Dawn, is the personal coded script of the Maskil, concealed from the eyes of others. The Children of Dawn are those who are not properly initiated—not yet Children of Light—but sincerely hope to be so. In normal times they were novices, but in the days before the End, they are all Jews who sincerely repent, are baptized and join the Elect before the terrible Day of God’s Vengeance arrives. Stephen J Pfann, of the Center for the Study of Early Christianity explains:
It is the responsibility of the Maskil to teach all members of the community… He must leave the community premises to teach them. The small size of the scroll (4Q298) permitted it to be safely carried (or hidden) while travelling. The use of the esoteric script (aside from the title) protected the scroll’s contents from being read by anyone except the Maskil and other elite members of the group. In case the scroll was stolen or lost, the legible title made it possible for the scroll to be returned to its rightful owner (s)…
All Essene teaching was mystical knowledge, and so secret, even if it was freely revealed to the repentant ones in the Last Days. The Maskil’s little scroll was therefore coded, just as Jesus often coded his speeches, but it could be the scroll which the Sermon of the Mount tries to reconstruct. Unfortunately only eight minute fragments exist but they urge the audience to listen, to seek strength, modesty, humility, truth, righteousness and kindness, and suggest that they have chosen the path of knowledge and of life. The themes of these few tiny fragments remarkably match some of the themes of the Sermon on the Mount.
Not only the Essenes used veiled ways of saying things, at about this time. No society had been as rife with spies than the Roman Empire since the days of the Persians, and so Philo of Alexandria, in On Dreams, had to write his criticisms of Rome circumspectly. Modern students of Philo have noticed that he seems strangely obscure or ambiguous, mixing up politics with with an analysis of the meaning of the soul! His discussion of the soul was natural enough to those who knew educated Jews were interested in such matters, but those in the know—the Jews—could see his veiled criticism of Roman imperialism. Comments about a Roman Prefect (the rank of Pilate in the gospels) were veiled as a discussion of Babel which ended with innocuous reflexions again on the soul.
It is too intricate a mixture to be merely a question of style. Philo seems conscious of the political implications of apocalyptic words, rarely speaking of a Messianic hope, and showing an apparently ethical interest, and nothing more, in the stories of Enoch. Nor does he speak much of those Jews who were expecting the end to come. Philo’s sole hero is Moses, and he mentions others little. Isaac is passed over, some say because the later Christians suppressed the parallels that existed in the Isaac tradition with that of Jesus, including the virgin birth. Perhaps Jesus was a veiling of an eschatological Isaac tradition!
The dreams Philo presents are those of politicians, and political schemes he presents as dreams. It seems to be a political work veiled as a religious one, rather as John Bunyan did in Pilgrim’s Progress at the time of the English revolution. A knowledgeable Jew knew what he was getting at, but a Roman would not understand the code Philo was using to veil his real meaning.
That was why the Essenes had to be cautious. John the Baptist was a Nasi—Jesus was his heir, the prince, the leader of a vanguard whose duty was to mobilize the rank and file. Accordingly his converts were called Nazarenes—followers of the Nasi. This explains why the followers of John the Baptist were also called Nazarenes. The Nasi might not be the messiah, that depended upon God. He was simply the leader of the congregation of Israel in the last days, but the semitic root “nsr”, meaning “protector” or “saviour”, suggests that by god’s will he would become the messiah. The sectaries identified the two because the Nasi played the role of the messiah at the messianic meal of the men of renown or repute (Essene leaders—the Council of the Community).
Whenever as many as ten members of the Community gathered for a meal they took their seats in the order of their rank, and the Priest presided. No one could touch the bread or new wine until the Priest had blessed them and taken his. But in the Rule of the Congregation, at a meeting of ten or more men of renown, the Messiah is also present and takes bread and wine after the priest but before the others did, according to their seniority.
And when they shall gather for the common table, to eat and to drink new wine, when the common table shall be set for eating and the new wine poured for drinking, let no man extend his hand over the first fruits of bread and wine before the priest, for it is he who shall bless the first fruits of bread and wine, and shall be the first to extend his hand over the bread. Thereafter, the Messiah of Israel shall extend his hand over the bread.
This is the procedure followed in the gospels for the mass feedings and the last supper. Qumran scholars consider the sacred meal to anticipate the banquet in Heaven at the End of Days. They assume the participation of the Messiah to be symbolic—he was present only in spirit. But, from the description, it sounds as if the Messiah were really there. Maybe he was! In the Qumran literature the Hebrew word Nasi, meaning “leader” or “prince” is used frequently to mean a messianic leader—not the Messiah as such but the “Prince of the Many”.
Did the Nasi play the role of the Messiah at the sacred meal of the Council of the Community? If so Nasi could be the real origin of the gospel term Nazarene. The Essenes felt that when their predictions proved correct the Nasi would be transfigured into the messiah. As the kingdom arrived, men would be transformed into angels and the first would be the Nasi who would become the archangel Michael.
The literature of Qumran describes a messianic elite who had chosen to follow Isaiah 40:3: to “make a straight way in the wilderness for our God”. They lived in desert camps waiting to be joined by a heavenly host of angels to engage in a holy war against their enemies. They were preparing themselves for the last days by living a life of extreme purity. They sought the way of perfect righteousness and the way in which the law works. Acts 9:2 calls members of the early church the followers of “The Way”!
The Meaning of Nazarene
An example of biblicists being able to write endlessly on a subject and getting nowhere with it is the literature on the meaning of Nazarene. J A Sanders cites over 20 sources, in the first two paragraphs of his short article in The Gospels and the Scripture of Israel (1994), simply bringing up to date what E Schweizer had covered exhaustively only in 1960. Christians have no desire to reach a historical or scientific conclusion about anything to do with their religion because it might not be what they believe—or, rather, unless it confirms what they believe. Their constant aim is not to clarify contentious passages when they suspect clarification will run counter to their belief. Rather they want to obfuscate. A few biblical scholars seem not to realize this. These black sheep are the ones worth reading but they rarely have successful careers.
The biblicist consensus is that the title of Jesus, “Nazarene”, explained in Matthew 2:23 is a geographical reference. They think the Aramaic represented by “nasraya” converts quite naturally into the Greek “nazoraios”, the same as “nazarenos”, meaning “of Nazareth”. So far as Sanders is concerned, the door is now closed on this because it “can no longer be seriously questioned”. There is indeed no doubt what the author of Matthew intended to convey by it, but there is a great deal of doubt remaining about what it meant, so we have to suspect Sanders’ honesty as well as the author of Matthew’s. Matthew aimed to answer a criticism to the effect that Nazarene meant that Jesus was already a member of a sect called the Nazarenes. If that were so, it would cast doubt on the originality of everything he said or did. Matthew therefore wants to scotch the critics, and explain the surname as meaning simply that he came from Nazareth in Galilee[†]Nazareth is still an unknown place despite the machinations of Christian and Zionist “archaeologists” and “scholars” over recent years. The claim of an inscription dated to 132 AD is false. There is a fourth century AD inscription referring to temple priests being resettled around that date, and mentioning a place nsrt. But Constantine’s mother had toured the “Holy Land” by then and discovered all the places missing in the gospel stories! A thorough examination of the archaeological evidence for Nazareth is The Myth Of Nazareth: The Invented Town of Jesus, by René Salm at http://www.nazarethmyth.info/. None existed before 70 AD at the earliest. Nevertheless, Catholics and Zionists, united in the commercial realities of religion, and its propaganda and tourist value, have built a splendid visitor center, devoted to Mary next to the Church of the Assuncion in Nazareth, making the claim that it has been revealed as a small farm occupied by several related families!.
Christians are called Galilaeans in the gospels and Nazarenes in Acts. Jesus spoke of his converts mainly as disciples. The Greek speaking Christians outside Palestine did not know what “Nazarene” (nazoraios or nazarenos) meant and their bishops did not want them to know. In an attempt to explain it innocently, the gospel writers describe Jesus as “of Nazareth” (apo Nazaret) in Galilee, but the gospels as ever are far from consistent. “Jesus of Nazareth” is never mentioned by Paul, and even in Acts Paul is made to prefer the expression “The Way” rather than admit directly that he is a Nazarene. Alfred Loisy, the heretical Catholic priest, excommunicated by the Church, confirms that the word “Nazarene” was that of a sect unrelated to a city of Nazareth. The word meant something that gentile bishops had to deny.
Matthew uses nazaret, nazara and Nazareth for Nazareth and twice uses nazoraios for Nazarene in his gospel. Mark uses nazaret once for Nazareth and nazarenos four times meaning Nazarene. Luke uses Nazareth four times in the birth stories but later uses nazara once for Nazareth and he uses nazarenos twice and nazoraios once for Nazarene. John uses nazaret twice for Nazareth and then prefers nazoraios for Nazarene. Luke in Acts of the Apostles uses Nazareth for Nazareth once then uses nazoraios. No other New Testament book refers to Nazareth at all! Overall nazara is used twice, nazaret is used four times, Nazareth is used 6 times, nazarenos is used 6 times and nazoraios is used 12 times.
The Greek form, nazoraios, might be derived from nazoriya, the Aramaic equivalent of nozri, the word used for Christians in Hebrew—Yeshu ha Nozri being Jesus the Nazarene. Accordingly, Christians said that nozri meant someone from Nazareth. But the Hebrew for Nazareth is nazrat and a person from Nazareth is then a nazrati. The name nozri lacks the final letter “tav” in nazrat so it cannot be derived from it. The Aramaic words behind the Greek, nazarenos or nazara and nazoraios might have been respectively nazarah or nazirah, as in the Arabic, explaining the absence of the final “tav” in nozri. The trouble is that the “tav” is reintroduced when the adjective is made from the name of the town. The Aramaic for a person from Nazareth, in Aramaic the feminine noun nazarah, would have been natzaratiya, the feminine ending -ah becoming -at- when the suffix -iya is added. So, whether the name Nazareth was an original Hebrew name or derived later from the Aramaic, people from the town could not have been called in Hebrew, nozrim.
If the Aramaic words behind the Greek were always collective nouns meaning a gang or a sect then nazarenos or nazara and nazoraios might have been the plural masculine words, nazarin or natzarah. Aramaic has a masculine plural in -ah as well as the one normally seen in -in. Furthermore in Aramaic and Hebrew feminine plurals end in -th. The basis in Aramaic collective plural nouns of all the Greek forms is evident. Grammatical infelicities could have yielded the forms seen in the Greek, and perhaps the Hebrew, if it derived from Aramaic.
Nazarene seems to have been or become a pejorative term. Indeed, so it might because it was associated with a man who was called “The Nazarene”, a title embodying several noble meanings, yet he failed in his purpose and was crucified. Not long ago communism was a world threat. Nowadays, anyone calling himself a communist would be regarded as a joke and deluded. The Nazarenes must have been similar. They had a period of success but finished up failures and a laughing stock.
A disparaging reference to the Nazarenes as a sect appears in Acts when the rhetor or barrister of the Jews, Tertullus, in Paul’s trial uses it.
For we have found this man a pestilent fellow, and a mover of sedition among all the Jews throughout the world, and a ringleader of the sect of the Nazarenes.Acts 24:5
Paul seems not to dispute the accusation of being a Nazarene, indeed he “confesses” that he practises a heresy called “The Way”, an Essene description of themselves, implying that Nazarenes are Essenes.
But this I confess unto thee, that after the way which they call heresy, so worship I the God of my fathers, believing all things which are written in the law and in the prophets.Acts 24:14
Paul seems not to want to use the word, Nazarene, and it never appears in his epistles though most are considered earlier than the gospels. If Nazarene simply meant from Nazareth, some tiny hamlet in Galilee, why should the writers of the epistles have wanted to avoid it. The reason was they had not thought of pretending that Jesus came from some imaginary village. Matthew was probably the one to do that. Mark mentions Nazareth only once (Mk 1:9). Now in Mark Jesus curiously bears the definite article almost exclusively, plainly indicating it was a title, not a name. He was “the” Jesus, “the” Salvation of Yehouah. Where this definite article is not used in Mark, some scholars consider an indication that the passage was inserted. On this basis the first two mentions of Jesus in Mark 1:1, the title of the book, and 1:9, the mention of his being from Nazareth, are both interpolations. Mark therefore never implied that “the” Jesus was “from Nazareth”.
The Jewish scriptures never mention Nazareth. There was no place called Nazareth in the time of Herod the Great attested by anyone other than writers of the New Testament. Nazareth at the time could have been little more than a milestone saying “Sepphoris 4 miles”. Josephus was a Jewish general in Galilee during the Jewish War, but, in his account of the military operations there, in which he mentions dozens of places ncluding a village just a mile from Nazareth, he never speaks of Nazareth itself. The much later Talmuds also name dozens of towns in Galilee but Nazareth is not among them. Yet Luke pretends that Nazareth was more than a hamlet, having workshops, that of the carpenter Joseph at least, and indeed important enough to have a synagogue, suggesting a reasonable population.
The earliest archaeological evidence of Nazareth, discovered by Franciscans, is third century. Near the modern Nazareth, there are Jewish remains, especially natural and rock-cut tombs, from the second temple period, and some going back to the Bronze age, but the site has not been identified by name. Nazareth apparently was a necropolis, Greek for “a city of the dead”—a cemetary. Jews have an aversion to dead bodies which they consider unclean, and Romans had a profound respect for the dead, and neither thought it proper to build cities where the dead were buried. It shows Nazareth cannot have been a town or city occupied by respectable citizens. It might have been occupied by outcasts, like lepers, or bandits, and has therefore been struck out of Josephus’s account by a Christian editor who did not want it known. Whether Jesus was born there or not, to have been called Jesus of Nazareth could not have been complimentary.
No historian of Jesus’s time or of the early centuries of Christianity mentioned it. They could find nowhere with the name Nazareth until the fourth century AD, when Eusebius of Caesarea, in Onomasticon, a list of the places mentioned in the gospels, first mentions Nazareth as a real identifiable place, but he had plainly never been there to check the description of it himself. Nazareth today is set among gentle hills, not precipitous crags yet Jesus was almost thrown over a cliff at the edge of the city. Luke 4:28-30 tells a tale about Jesus infuriating the people of Nazareth who then want to throw him over a cliff. If there were such a place as Nazareth in New Testament times, it was not where the modern town is. It was chosen by the earliest Christian pilgrims, including particularly Constantine’s Christian mother, Helena, to be Nazareth, and has remained it ever since.
Origen of Caesarea (185-254 AD) lived thirty miles from the site of modern Nazareth. He too was interested in working out biblical geography, and among other things wanted to know where Luke 4:28-30 happened. He concluded that places mentioned in the gospels never existed and the gospel stories were not literally true. Even so, Origen did not doubt that the symbolism was still God-sent and remained a Christian, suffering in the persecution of Diocletian, only to be posthumously declared heretical by his fellow Christians. Never trust them. No place called Nazareth was attested by anyone other than translators of the New Testament. If the town Nazareth existed at that time, it was so insignificant that it could never have been used as a helpful description. People would have said: “Jesus of where?” Nazarene was obviously a word which people understood. The best that can be done is to leave it as Jesus the Nazarene—whatever a Nazarene was, it was not someone from Nazareth.
Nazareth is called a city (“polis”) in several verses in Matthew and Luke, all in the birth narratives. The city called Nazareth did not exist when Jesus was born but the district of Gennesaret did. From at least the time of the Maccabees, the lake had been called the Sea of Gennesaret and the region Gennesaret, yet mostly the gospels call the region, Galilee. Galilee actually means “region” or “province”. “Galilaean” would then mean “provincial”.
There are only two independent references to Gennesaret in the gospels. Luke refers to the Lake of Gennesaret while Mark and Matthew speak of the land of Gennesaret. Since Gennesaret is the region otherwise called Galilee, it is properly called a “polis” in Greek—a populated area, not necessarily a built up area. Since the birth narratives were added after the publication of Mark’s gospel, the identification of “Nazarene” as meaning “of Nazareth” seems to have come from Matthew or Luke, who took it from the local name for Galilee, which is Gennesaret—indeed a “polis”. The change was needed because some people remembered the Nazarenes as Palestinian rebels, but this explanation shows that Nazarene simply means the same as Galilaean. The bishops invented the city of Nazareth to explain the meaning of Nazarene, but it is a paper thin disguise. It means Galilaean, and Galilaeans were bandits.
The writers of the birth narratives sought to explain the description of Jesus in the Greek as Nazarene, a word of unknown meaning, by describing Jesus as “of Nazareth” in Galilee. Once the innocent explanation of Nazarene had been established, with the acceptance of the gospel accounts, Christians like Tertullian freely used Nazarene as a synonym for Christian.
The persistence of this pious lie is shown in the Revised Standard Version of the New Testament, widely accepted as being faithful to the Greek. What do we find though? Jesus is crucified above a notice saying “Jesus of Nazareth the King of the Jews”. According to the Greek, the notice read, “Jesus the Nazarene the King of the Jews”. The simple followers of the Christian faith believe that Jesus was Jesus of Nazareth not Jesus the Nazarene, so in their phenomenological philosophy, Christian leaders let it stand. It is true for the flock so it is true. Nevertheless, though it is rarely religious truth, there is such a thing as objective truth, and the translation “Jesus of Nazareth” is incorrect. If it were certain that Jesus the Nazarene really meant Jesus of Nazareth then the freer translation might be justified but, like much of the New Testament no one knows, whatever they might believe.
The Semantics of Nazarene I
Let us look at the semantics of the word Nazarene more closely. The Hebrew alphabet was purely consonantal except for some consonants which partly expressed vowels just as our “w” and “y” do. In writing no vowels were used. Even in English vowels are often unimportant. They can vary widely in the spoken word but its sense is understood from the use and context. In Yorkshire we use a full, rounded “u” sound but most English regard it as vulgar and reduce it to an “e” sound. A woman orders “better” in a restaurant and the waiter brings her “butter”. A man describing a cricket match says: “He gave it some ‘bit’ ”, but we know he is not talking about a horse. The woman wants to be recognized as upper class and the man is probably South African. Vowels vary a great deal with dialect but the speakers can still be understood.
By omitting vowels, written Hebrew could be understood without distracting regional variations of representing vowels. Archaeologists will transliterate the name of God from old inscriptions as Yahu or Yeho, for example, but these conventions do not tell us how the word was pronounced. Though we can be confident the “u/o” sound was “oo”, the “a/e” will have varied from place to place and time to time. Only later, when no one was actually speaking Hebrew in everyday life, was it felt important to put vowels in writing because, without them, no one in the synagogue had any idea how to pronounce the words. So in the sixth century AD Jewish scholars introduced vowels by copying the pronunciation of the language, Syriac, that Aramaic had evolved into. Yet, in a millennium, Syriac vowels were surely quite different from Hebrew.
J A Fitzmeyer (1970) is among several scholars who have carefully examined language usage in Palestine in the first century AD. Hebrew in the intertestamental years was almost dead but not quite, being replaced by Aramaic. Aramaic was most common, but Greek was also common, some might think surprisingly, though often as a second language, and not only among the wealthy but even among craftsmen and farmers. It seems possible and even likely that Jesus understood Greek, even if he chose not to use it. Hebrew was not widely used at all, and Fitzmayer has to allow that some limited groups might have used it—presumably some priests is meant. Fitzmayer has to contradict Josephus in concluding that some Palestinians spoke only Greek.
By the time of the gospels Aramaic was the language of Palestine even if slightly influenced by the older language. Even as a religious language, Hebrew was possibly resurrected in the third century BC. Thus nothing can be deduced with confidence from supposed variations in vowel sounds in Hebrew. Even consonants, like the sibilants (s, sh, ts, ch, dj, tz and z), were in flux. Hebrew had five sibilants but their properties were variable, even becoming “d” or “t”. Moreover even older roots already showed such changes suggesting they had occurred long ago in some instances. All of this needs to be remembered when the origins and meanings of puzzling New Testament words like Nazarene are sought.
The word “nazar” (nzr—with zayin) is to separate or to consecrate and sometimes to abstain from. All of these definitions are superlatively applied to the Essenes. To separate is the use of the word in Leviticus 15:31 where the children of Israel were told to separate themselves from uncleanness caused by menstrual and sexual discharges. The noun, nazir, literally means one who is separated or consecrated but also means a prince, in the sense of being consecrated into that office and being distinct and distinctive—though the concept of prince for nazir might be derived from the related word, “nizer”, which has the clear connotation of crown. Priests had to separate from all pollution and were, of course, consecrated. The Essenes were a priestly sect who also chose to be separate from other Jews. It seems the Essenes also called themselves princes.
The noun “nazir” occurs most frequently in the scriptures referring to the Nazirites who were spiritual role models, dedicated men and women holy unto the Lord. The vow of the Nazirite could be temporary or permanent, but the only people the bible tells us were lifelong Nazarites were Samson, Samuel, and John the Baptist. James the Just is known from other sources to have been a lifelong Nazirite, and Paul also took the Nazarite vow on occasions for reasons of penitence (Acts 18:18; 21:18-27; 24:17-18).
Practical details of the Nazirite vow of separation is recorded in Numbers 6:1-21, where the Nazirite is described as abstaining from products of the grape, allowing their hair to grow, and avoiding the ritual pollution of a dead body. If a Nazirite accidentally defiled himself, he had to ritually purify himself and begin the full period of consecration over again. The Nazirite was consecrated to God and his long hair was symbolic of it. We know from Luke that John the Baptist was a Nazirite, one dedicated to God who did not drink wine. We are not told explicitly that John wore his hair long but he is identified with Elijah and the Old Testament describes him as hairy. Jesus’s brother, James, who became leader after the crucifixion, was also a Nazirite, it is unlikely that Jesus was not. It seems Nazarenes were Nazirites.
Interestingly the word “nazar” only appears in the Septuagint in the story of Samson (Jg 13:5). His birth story has points of similarity with the gospel birth stories and the child was consecrated to God from birth:
There shall come no razor upon his head, for the child shall be called a Nazir to God from the womb, and he shall begin to save Israel from the hand of the Philistines.
Samson was also saviour. He would save Israel from the Philistines. He was a saviour messiah who died destroying a polluted temple!
The Essenes considered themselves in the same category, separated out from the sinful world. When they had to meet the sinful world of commerce, they did so only under the eye of the “mebaqqer”, or overseer—the word that is now bishop. Since the Essenes wrote of their use of new wine or unfermented grape juice at their messianic meal, it seems they were not Nazirites according to the scriptures though they regarded themselves as separated and consecrated to God. They will have seen a contradiction in the fruit of the grape being forbidden to holy men yet wine being served at the messianic banquet in God’s kingdom and deduced that God had forbidden only fermented grape products, the wine of the messianic banquet in God’s kingdom being new wine. Essene references to wine should be read as new wine and the same is probably true of the gospels. (Indeed, there is reason to think that “new wine” was really water!) Jesus was not a wine bibber. Relevant here is the meaning of nazir as an unpruned or undressed vine. In Leviticus 25:5 and 11 the vine (nazir) was to be unpruned during sabbatical and jubilee years and left to grow naturally. In Jeremiah 6:9 the remnant of Israel, a name of the Essenes, is likened to a vine, while Jesus in John 15:1 referred to himself as the true vine, meaning the natural, undressed vine, the nazir.
Even in the twentieth century, Christians in Syria would pray to a saint to be blessed with a child, vowing to dedicate the child to the saint. The child was consecrated to the saint as a nedher, in English, a Nazarite. The vow “nezer” required that the child would not have its hair cut until the age of seven, and then in the shrine of the patron saint, unless gifts were substituted. Nedher is the Aramaic word for the Hebrew, “nazir”. Why should Christians in Syria be continuing this old Jewish custom using words that go back to the time of Jesus himself? Because the Nazarenes were Nazirites.
The noun “nezer” means separation, consecration and a crown. In Exodus 29:6, explained in Exodus 28:36-38, nezer is an engraved gold plate which a priest wore over his forehead to mark him as a consecrated person. According to Numbers 6:7 and 9 the Nazirite also wears his nezer unto God upon his head. His nezer was his uncut hair. The word “nizer” is used of a royal crown in several places including Zechariah 9:16 where God, smiting the enemies of Israel, saves his flock who shall be as the stones of a nizer (crown) over His land. Psalms 89:39 and 132:18 both replete with Essene imagery and language, use nizer. Incidently, the word, “Essene”, in Josephus, is also the word for the priests’ holy breastplate, so both Nazarene and Essene seem to reflect parts of the priestly attire!
All of these words in nzr seem to come from a primitive root nadar, to vow to give something to God. Indeed a vow in the scriptures is a promise to God, not to men. The vow implies a promised gift or sacrifice. The noun “neder” thus means a vow or a votive offering, either the vow, or that offered to mark the vow. A neder is an offering for God to grant zeal for the law, and He only accepted it when the offerer had no sin in his heart. Essenes tried to be perfect (Hasid) and zealous for the law, never made oaths and regarded their vows to God as inviolable.
The Semitic root “ns” is a common word in the scriptures, meaning “to lift up”, “to bear” or “carry” or “support”, and “to take” or “take away”. It is nasa. (The title of the National Aeronautical and Space Administration seems to have been cleverly devised to have the acronym, NASA, to lift up!) It is used especially of bearing the guilt or punishment of sin. He shall “bear his iniquity” occurs frequently in the scriptures. Sin can be forgiven of those that bear it when it is taken up and carried away, so metaphorically ns can translate as forgiving sins. Jesus was reputed to blaspheme by forgiving sins. It is possible that the Essenes had this power because one scroll fragment speaks of a holy man forgiving the king’s sins to cure him of an ulcer.
There are several other fascinating word links between the names of Jesus and his followers, and the Essenes. The Semitic root “nsr” also means “protector” or “saviour”. Jesus is the Greek form of the Hebrew word, Joshua, itself short for Jehoshua, which means “saviour of God”, “God of salvation” or “God saves”. It is the same name as Isaiah but with the root words for God and salvation swapped around. Hosea, meaning salvation, was the original name of Joshua. It is properly written Osea. The Aramaic for “save us” is “osanna ”the cry of the multitude when Jesus entered Jerusalem as a king. Epiphanius speaks of the Ossenes, a Jewish sect by the Dead Sea, obviously the Essenes because of the fluidity of vowels in these languages. Essene in Hebrew is Osim, “the Saviours”. The name Jesus is clearly linked semantically with the word Essene. The Quran’s name for Jesus is Essa or Issa from the same word, Osea. It is likely that the Osim were the followers of “the saviour”, Jesus, and that Jesus or Joshua was a title.
Some scroll fragments are striking for their emphasis on salvation. We find “the children of salvation” and “the salvation of His works”. Yesha is a common Qumran word and its importance in the context of Christian origins has not been acknowledged by the Qumran experts. It appears in the Damascus Rule, “they would see His salvation”, effectively, “they would see Jesus”.
Zechariah 3:1-10 suggests that the name Joshua might have been a priestly title. It relates the appointment of the High Priest, Joshua, and proves to be very important in the testament of Mark. This Joshua was the High Priest who with Zerubbabel and the remnant of the people (Hag 1:12ff) rebuilt and reconsecrated the temple on the return from exile. Joshua was the son of Jehozadak, a man who never left captivity in Babylon and whose name literally means “God is righteous”, but might be a contraction of “Joshua the priest” (zadok) or “Joshua the righteous” or “just” (zaddik). All of it chimes sweetly with all we know about Essene tradition. Conceivably, here are links with the foundation of the new covenant. Sure enough we find in the Community Rule that the priests bless the “God of salvation” (bless Joshua or Jesus) while the initiates call out, “Amen, Amen”.
Christ is the Greek word used to translate the Hebrew “messiah” but the two words have come to mean something different. Because Christ is the divine title of Jesus the Christian God, people tend to think it has always been a divine title. It has not. The Jewish messiah was a saviour prince.
The word “nasa” yields nasi—one lifted up, an elected chief, a captain, a leader, a ruler, a prince, a king. A nasi is an official who has been lifted up, that is, chosen or called, as in Numbers 1:16 where the sentence, “these were the ones chosen (or called)”, occurs, but translated “renowned”, referring to the princes (nesiim) of the tribes. The ones chosen are the elect, those whom the Essenes considered themselves to be. Solomon is a nasi and so are any rulers of God’s people and leaders of the congregation. Though the gospels never refer to Jesus as the prince, we find repeatedly, in John, Jesus being described as lifted up. Thus, in John 3:14—“even so must this Son of man be lifted up”. John is trying to maintain that the title Nasi simply meant lifted up not prince of Israel. The Greek noun “anatole” and verb “anetello”, which pertain to rising, have the same origin and occur often in the New Testament and in early Christian writings applied to Jesus.
In the Damascus Rule we find that God called all the captives of Israel “princes” because they were lost and wanted to find Him (a pun on the word “masa”) and were men of repute or renown (called or chosen). The captives of Israel were the priests of the Essene sect, the sons of Zadok. Evidently Essene priests were called princes—they were the heirs of Melchizedek. In the Qumran literature, the Hebrew word “nasi” is used frequently to mean a messianic leader, the prince of the many or the prince of Israel, apparently one of the head priests of the remnant of Israel. The Nasi seemed to play the role of the messiah at the sacred meal of the council of the community. Significantly, in Ezekiel, nasi is constantly used for the coming Davidic prince, the messiah. The plural nesiim also means clouds or vapours, enabling the Nasi to come in the nesiim reminding us of Daniel, but logically it means “princes” so the messiah is coming not “on the clouds” but “with the princes”—the saints and angels of the heavenly host. Nasi, then, could be the specific origin of the gospel term “Nazarene”. The Nazarenes were those who followed the messianic leader, the Nasi, and were either Essenes or their converts.
Now, besides being separated and princes, the Essenes were keepers of the covenant and watchers for the kingdom, to use their own names. Here is another Hebrew word similar to Nazarene—“nasar”, which means “to watch”, “to keep” and “to protect”. The Arabic word from the same root has become nazara, to keep in view. The Arabs still call Christians the Nasrani. Watchers or noserim were employed to guard anything valuable, like a vineyard, and a watch tower would usually be built for them. The Qumran monastery had a watchtower, suggesting they thought of themselves as “watchers”. In Jeremiah 31:6 and 2 Kings 17:9 and 18:8, God is a keeper or watchman over his vineyard, Israel. The children of Israel have to keep the covenant and God’s commandments in return for His lovingkindness. The Essenes considered that only they kept this bargain properly by protecting His covenant with the people of Israel and watching for the signs of the arrival of God’s kingdom. The Essenes were also guardians of certain mysteries or secrets and significantly nasar is used in this same sense. In Isaiah 48:6, nasar refers to hidden things not revealed by God, the hidden things which the Essenes sought in the scriptures and believed they had found, according to the scrolls. Nazarenes kept the hidden things of God—the secrets or mysteries of God. Paul in Romans, 1 Corinthians and Ephesians speaks of the revealing of divine mysteries through the holy spirit. Isaiah 49:6 calls those of Israel gathered to Him in the End Days the preserved or protected of Israel—the word for preserved is “nasar”, and promises (Isa 49:8) a covenant of the people that shall “raise up” the land.
Nasar itself comes from an older root natar used in farming contexts of those who keep or guard vineyards, but is also used in the sense of keeping one’s anger or wrath, bearing malice or a grudge. In Leviticus 19:18, a favourite of Jesus (Mt 19:19; Mk 12:31), Israel is commanded:
Thou shall not take vengeance nor bear any grudge (natar) toward the children of your people, but you shall love your neighbour as yourself.
But God keeps wrath (natar) for his enemies (Neh 1:2). The Essenes believed in brotherhood towards the children of Israel but wrath towards their enemies, the gentiles.
“Naza” also means to sprinkle, as in sprinkling the blood of a sacrifice or, for the Nazarenes, the sprinkling of water at baptism. “Nasah” meaning “victory” is yet another word with an appropriate connotation. Jesus was the Victorious One.
The Semantics of Nazarene II
Epiphanius (b 367 AD) tells us that besides Nazarenes the early Christians were known as Jessaeans. David, the great king of the Jews, the model of the warrior messiah, was the son of Jesse. So it seems that the Jessaeans were simply followers of Jesus because he was the heir of David (before he became the son of a virgin). The truth is slightly more extended. The identification Jessaeans comes from Isaiah 11:1 (explained further in 10) which records:
And there shall come forth a rod (a twig) out of the stem of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of its roots and bear fruit,
a quotation much revered by the writers of the scrolls and by Christians (Isaiah like Jesus means God’s Saviour!) referring to a descendant of David who realizes all that God has promised to David (2 Sam 7:lff). A portion of a Scroll (4QFor 1:10-12) gives a mesianic interpretation to 2 Sam 7:11-14, ending with:
I will be a father to him and he shall be a son to me! This is the Branch of David who will arise with the seeker of the law and will sit on the throne of Zion at the End of Days.
The Branch of David (Jer 23:5; 33:15; Zech 3:8; 6:12) is a messianic title and is thus interpreted in the Targum of the Rabbis. Though the Targum does not see anything messianic in these passages in 2 Sam 7, the authors of the scrolls, presumably the Essenes, already saw it as messianic at, or even before, the time of Jesus. Luke draws heavily in his infancy narrative on the Septuagint accounts in 2 Sam 7 (Lk 1:31, 2 Sam 7:9; Lk 1:32-33, 2 Sam 7:13-16, in the Greek). The Aramaic fragment, 4Q246, closely prallels the account of Luke 1:32-35. Luke was therefore drawing on an Essene exegetical tradition. It stretches even as far as the woman, Anna, in Luke who is Hannah in 1 Sam 2:1-10, where she sings an apocalyptic praise (so presented in the Targum) used by Luke but probably already part of a liturgy.
The branch, then, is an alternative name for the messiah. The word “neser” (nsr), vocalized “netzer”, means “a branch”—it is equivalent to the word Nazarene. This is surely what was spoken by the prophets when we read…
…and came and dwelt in a city named Nazareth, that it might be fulfilled what is spoken by the prophets: that he should be called a Nazarene.Matthew 2:23
Matthew refers to what is said in the prophets (plural) in this passage whereas elsewhere he uses the singlar, in one place (Mt 2:17) specifying Jeremiah, but nowhere in the Jewish scriptures is the messiah prophesied to be a Nazarene. Nazareth—in the Christian sense of a place—was not mentioned in the scriptures because it did not exist or was totally insignificant. Some suggest it must be inferred from a prophetic expression, not a precise quotation, but even so what expression was it? For Sanders, E Schwiezer’s 1960 explanation that the reference is to the birth of Samson, is a favourite (Jg 13:7; 16:17). In the Septuagint, the reference is to the Holy One (hagios) of God but could be equally the Nazirite of God, (naziraios), both translations of “nzyr” in the Hebrew. Mark interprets Nazarene as the Holy One of God (Mk 1:24) but Matthew is more cryptic. In 1907, Alfred Loisy called this a pun (jeu de mots). Loisy refutes the idea that the evangelists were scrupulous about their word usage, and that they did not use the Septuagint. Judges is classified among the Former Prophets so Matthew was right to attribute his source to “the prophets”.
The reference, recognizable to messianic Jews, is to Isaiah’s “netzer”—the branch of the stem of Jesse—which gives us both Nazarenes and Jessaeans. As if to explain that the followers of the branch, the Nazarenes, are the Essenes, “neser” is used also in Isaiah 60:21:
Thy people also shall be all righteous, they shall inherit the land forever, the branch (netzer) of my planting, the work of my hands, that I may be glorified. The little one shall become a thousand and the small one a strong nation.
The Essenes would clearly have seen this as a reference to themselves and their duty to recover the land and make the people righteous. The many were given the name of the branch, whom they hope to emulate and perhaps invoke. It also shows that the followers of the branch, the Nazarenes, had the duty of building up a strong nation. To do this they had to redeem the men of the land, the simple of Ephraim and the sinners.
Since they were also interested in calendars and astrology, there is an even more amazing pun on Nazareth—“mazzaroth” is the Hebrew word for Zodiac! Since Jesus came to be seen as a sun god in the Roman Empire, and there is little doubt that Joshua was a sun god to the children of Israel, this seems significant. The punning went deep into Christian myth because such a saviour must also be a carpenter’s son (bar nasar, in Aramaic), and so, in Samaritan midrash, the Redeemer was to be a second Noah, preparing a new ark of salvation.
God’s elect were evidently keen on punning as we have seen from their interpretation of scripture and their adoption of the word Nazarene with its multiple roots. They loved punning and delighted in the many puns on their own names for themselves. Indeed, in view of their esoteric investigations into the scriptures which depended in good measure on punning, they evidently regarded words with multiple meanings via puns as evidence of God’s work and they favoured them. H Raschke in the mid-twentieth century proposed that the Essenes deliberately used the susceptibility of Aramaic and Hebrew to punning to deliver double meanings and thereby conceal real meanings. It is surely true.
The word, Essene, is apparently similar. Besides its plain reference of salvation it has several other meanings. “Osh” means a foundation and they considered themselves the foundation of heaven on earth. “Esh” meant a flame or fire, while “isseh” meant an offering by fire and they believed that the earth would be offered for purification in a refiner’s fire, representing judgement. “Hesed” meant holiness, lovingkindness, piety and purity and the hasidim were the holy ones or the saints. Essenes were interested in healing people of their spiritual ills and, in Aramaic, a healer or doctor was “assaya”. Furthermore, the Hebrew word may be “ossim”, meaning “Doers of the law” because the Essenes were strict in their observance of the Torah. Jesus refuses to allow a “jot or tittle” of the law be erased!
Supposed scholars, apparently believing Semitic grammar is as hard a science as physics, are quite lost in all this. Judith Romney Wegner claims that Nazarene and Nazirite are not the same because the roots do not have the same Hebrew consonants—Nazirite is Hebrew “nazir” (nzr, with zayin), while Nazarene (whether related to the town of Nazareth or the Hebrew root meaning “protectors”) is “n(tz)r” (nzr, with tzaddi), the middle root consonant, zayin and tsaddi, being different, and not generally conflated, she maintains. However, she then declares she is open to the possibility of a connexion between nazoraios and nezer, though they are pronounced differently and therefore evidently are conflated.
These scholars are sticklers to show that Jews were always highly literate and could tell their “zayins” from their “tsaddis”. Doubtless they are quite right in thinking thus, but they fail totally to recognize what is evident to a schoolboy—that they loved to pun. Even the rabbis did it!
The rabbis revelled in multiplicity of meanings and the playfulness of the text long before these were discovered by modern critics.Tamara Cohn Eskenazi, Old Testament Interpretation
G R S Mead, in his book on the Gnostic John the Baptist (1924), noted specifically on the passage we have analysed above:
The prophecy (Isa 11:1) about the “sprout” from the root or stem of Jesse gave rise to much speculation, helped out by that word-play which exercised so powerful a fascination over the imaginative minds of the Jews of that day.
Puns do not need the same root, but merely similar sounds. Proof is everywhere but one plain one is the names of the leader of the second rebellion—Simon bar Kosiba, or is it Kochba or Kozba? A letter found in a Murabba’at cave is signed “Simon ben Kosiba”. Yet he has always been known as “Simon bar Kochba”—Son of the star. Others that thought his adventure was insane, called him “son of the lie”—Kozba. The root words and consonants in these puns are quite different, but Jews had no trouble formulating them and using them as puns. Far from showing them as ignorant of Hebrew, it shows them as better at it than modern scholars with their degrees in ancient languages and biblical literature. “Scholars” like Wegner are talking through their hat in insisting that etymological links were always correctly maintained even when Jews were joking. Indeed, Jewish sages said every word in the Torah had fifty meanings but the last one was known only to Moses. If that is not an incitement to verbal creativity, it is hard to know what is.
The punning explanation expressed here is suggested by more orthodox commentators. Davies and Allison’s commentary asserts that word play has several ramifications in the identity of Nazarene and Nazirite:
- The Septuagint equates naziraios“ theou” in Judges 13:5,7 with “hagios theou”, and also in Isaiah 4:3, “He will be called holy” where the same equation is implied.
- Isaiah 11:1, as we have seen: “A shoot will come forth from the stump of Jesse, and a ‘branch’ will grow out of his roots”.
- Matthew used Isaiah 7:14 (in Mt 1:23) and identified the “branch” of Isaiah 11:1 with the “Immanuel” of Isaiah 7:14.
- “Neser”, the branch, was used of the Messiah in 4QpIsa 3:15-26 and the Testament of Judah.
- “nsr” might have been pronounced Nazar in the first century according to some authorities.
- Nazarene is then punned on nazirite as in Mark 1.24: “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? We know who you are, the holy one of God”—Jesus the Nazarene is Jesus the Nazirite!
The refusal of many scholars to accept or even consider such matters can only be explained politically or theologically, not scientifically. These interpretations begin to take us too close to the truth. Both Judaism and Christianity are large edifices, and to crack their weak foundations by actually discovering the truth is something that their ethics do not include. For these scholars, there is an eternity of comfortable life in obfuscation whereas the truth might render their sinecures finite.
Historical Nazarenes
From about 200 BC to 400 AD baptizing sects existed from Palestine into Arabia, Syria and Mesopotamia. They were known as Essenes (Ossaeans) Samaritans, Hemerobaptists (Daily Bathers), Masbuthaeans (Basmothaeans), Nazoraeans (Nasoraeans, Naassenes), Ebionites, Sampsaeans (Sabaeans) and Elchasaites. Thus, Epiphanius wrote that there were seven sects of Judaism—Sadducees, Scribes, Pharisees, Hemerobaptists, Ossaeans, Nasaraeans and Herodians. Hemerobaptists, Ossaeans and Nasaraeans seem to have been bathers. If minor varieties, or sub-sects, of these known ones were included, they were extremely numerous and widely popular. One or another had been set up in many places in the ancient near east around the early years of Christianity.
Though these sects had subtle differences, they all practised ritual baptism, and to a casual observer must have looked astonishingly similar. All came from the same base—the Pre-Christian Nasoraeans or Nazarenes. All had that element of the mystery religions that necessitated secrecy about their inner practices, and so they were not well known. Jesus was called “the Nazarene”, he was not “of Nazareth”, but placing his home at Nazareth, possibly a fictional place at the time, explained his title which otherwise made him a member of an existing sect, something the Church did not want to know. What was known about them was partly distorted by enemies like the Christian Church Fathers to make them seem base or heretical.
Epiphanius (367-404 AD), Bishop of Salamis, in Cyprus in 370 AD (Refutation of All Heresies 374-376 AD), who was born and lived in Palestine, adds that these various sects came out of the “Ossaeans”—the Essenes:
Only a few rare Nazoraeans are still to be found, and these in Upper Egypt and beyond Arabia, but the remainder of the Ossaeans, who used to dwell where their ancestors did, above the Dead Sea and on the other side with the Sampsaeans, no longer practice Jewish customs. They have become associated with the Ebionites.
Jerome (340-420 AD) speaks of Nazarenes as a sect distinct from the Christians. Epiphanius also notes that a sect he called the Nasaraeans—a pre-Christian and non-Christian sect—were not the same as the Christian sect called Nazoraeans. He said they lived in Gilead, Basham, and the Transjordan. They were Jews, revering Moses and believing he had received laws, but it was unlawful for them to eat meat or make sacrifices, and they disparaged the Christian books as fiction. Epiphanius called these Nasoraeans “Jews by nationality”, implying they were no longer Jews by religion.
Yet earlier patristic writers, Justin Martyr, Origen, Tertullian and Eusebius, call the original Jewish followers of Jesus, the Nazarenes. Mandaeans revere John the Baptist, who was a Nasoraean (Nazarene) meaning for them an adept in Nasoraean (Mandaean) teaching, and at healing bodies and souls. Jesus is the Nazarene, in the New Testament, while Paul is a Nazarene (Acts 11:19; 24:5). However, the patristic writers, usually indulging in polemics describe un-named cults as having the same characteristics as Essenes or Nazarenes. Plainly at some early stage, the Christians split from the original Nazarenes. Eventually the name Nazarene was discarded in favour of Christian.
Justin Martyr (100-165 AD) wrote a Socratic piece (Dialogue with Trypho, the Jew) in which his Jew asks Justin whether it is possible for a Jew who accepted Jesus as God’s Messiah, Judge and Ruler of His kingdom but observed the Jewish law as well, could be saved. Justin replies that he will be saved as long as he does not seek to persuade others that observance of the law is necessary to salvation.
Was the question put in the mouth of Trypho just rhetorical? It seems unlikely. There must have been Jews in the mid-second century who believed in Jesus as the Messiah. They were Jewish Christians and the answer implies that they thought the law was necessary though not sufficient for salvation. Though a hundred years earlier Paul had preached that the law of Moses had been abrogated, there were still Jewish Christians who did not accept what he said. Another point is how these Jews regarded God’s Messiah. Christians were seeing Jesus increasingly as a new god in his own right, but this was blasphemous for a pious Jew.
Essene belief might have stimulated the belief adopted by the gentile Christians. Essenes were pious Jews and could not have believed that the Messiah was another god. However, because they were expecting earth and heaven to unite, they saw the Righteous becoming indistinguishable from angels, just as Jesus explains. This belief system could therefore encompass the earthly Messiah becoming the same as the heavenly Messiah when God created the “yahad” of heaven and earth. The heavenly Messiah was the Archangel Michael, whose visage was like the sun, who was the Nasi of the heavenly host and who was, naturally, a supernatural being. Essenic Jews would have been able to comprehend this happening to Jesus but would have expected him within forty years to appear on a cloud and renew the world. When he failed to appear most Jews would have reverted to the law of Moses as the established route to salvation.
Hellenised Jews could have accepted the dying and rising figure of Jesus as a god, with no compunction because they were practical apostates of Judaism. They no longer practised the religion of their fathers, being far more impressed by Greek culture. By definition they were not interested in the law of Moses. Plainly then the Jews being discussed by Justin are the Jews of the Jerusalem Church.
Origen (184-254 AD) mentions Jewish believers as Ebionites (Contra Celsus, 5:61) who came in two varieties, one that believed in the virgin birth, and therefore accepted that Jesus was divine, and one that denied it because Jesus was born a man, accepting Jesus as a mortal Messiah in Jewish fashion.
Eusebius (HE 3:27) described the Ebionites as so called because of their “poor and mean opinions concerning Christ”—the name meaning “the Poor”. Again two types were described as Jews who strictly observed the Mosaic law and the Sabbath day. One type considered Jesus to be a virtuous man produced by normal intercourse. The other group of Ebionites accepted the virgin birth while denying that Jesus was God, Word, and Wisdom. They rejected Paul as an apostate from the law.
And among them some have placed the Gospel according to the Hebrews which is the delight of those of the Hebrews who have accepted Christ.
They disregarded the other gospels. However they celebrated the Lord’s days as a memorial of the resurrection of the Saviour, besides observing the Sabbath, as the law required.
Sometimes the Ebionite book was called the Gospel of the Nazarenes. S Jerome in the fourth century, in his commentary on Matthew, clumsily called this gospel the “gospel which the Nazarenes and Ebionites use” and, commentating on Isaiah, described the Nazarenes as those “who accept the Christ” yet “do not cease to observe the law”. In Epistle to Augustine, he said the Nazarenes believed in Christ, the Son of God, born of Mary the Virgin, and they say about him that he suffered under Pontius Pilate and rose again. The Nazarenes accuse the Scribes and Pharisees of making men sin against the Word of God to deny that Christ was the Son of God.
The Gospel according to the Hebrews has been totally “lost”, not a fragment existing today, another one of those Christian carelessnesses that cannot be excused by the neutral word “lost”. Here was the gospel revered by a Palestinian sect at the root of the Christian myth. It therefore had to go. The reason is plain—it contained too much truth for the Christians to tolerate. All we have are quotations from it in the polemics of the church fathers against heresy. Paul, in 1 Corinthians 15:7, says that Jesus appeared to James, who he describes, in Galatians 1:19, as “the Lord’s brother”. No account of this is given anywhere in the New Testament, presumably because the Christians wanted to play down James in favour of Peter, but it was reported to be in the Gospel According to the Hebrews.
Epiphanius speaks of the Nazarenes as having mastered the Hebrew language enabling them to read the Jewish scriptures in the original. They had the Gospel of Matthew entirely unabridged in Hebrew “as it was originally written”. It seems there was a work called Matthew’s Gospel written in Hebrew not Greek, because many Church Fathers speak of it—Papias (150-170 AD), Irenaeus (170 AD), Origen (210 AD), Eusebius (315 AD), Epiphanius (370 AD) and Jerome (382 AD). It will have been a collection of sayings like “Q”. Epiphanius has more to say in Panarion about these sectarians who “did not call themselves Christians but Nazarenes”:
They are simply complete Jews. They use not only the New Testament but the Old Testament as well, as the Jews do… They have no different ideas, but confess everything exactly as the Law proclaims it and in the Jewish fashion, except for their belief in the Christ, if you please! For they acknowledge both the resurrection of the dead and the divine creation of all things, and declare that God is one, and that his son is Jesus Christ. They are trained to a nicety in Hebrew. For among them the entire Law, the Prophets, and the… Writings… are read in Hebrew, as they surely are by the Jews. They are different from the Jews, and different from Christians, only in the following. They disagree with Jews because they have come to faith in Christ, but since they are still fettered by the Law—circumcision, the Sabbath, and the rest—they are not in accord with Christians… they are nothing but Jews….
So, they believed in resurrection of the dead and God the Creator but also proclaimed the one God and his Son Jesus Christ. They differed from Jews in believing in Christ, and differed from Christians in observing the Law, including the need for circumcision and observance of the Jewish Sabbath. Traditional Jews hated the Nazarenes for accepting the divinity of Christ, and prayed three times a day:
May God curse the Nazarenes.
Irenaeus, Tertullian and Hippolytus spoke of Ebionites rejecting the virgin birth and did not distinguish another variety that accepted it.
The Jerusalem Church led by James, the brother of Jesus, according to Acts also consisted of Jews who were normal in every respect but believed in Jesus. The Nazarenes of Epiphanius were the heirs of the first Jerusalem congregation.
The Moslems believe in a virgin birth of Jesus but still consider him a prophet—a man—not a god. Since the Moslems had their ideas about Christianity from the Christians of Arabia who were Ebionites led away from Palestine into Pella and the east at the time of the Jewish War, some Ebionites apparently did believe in the virgin birth.
Pre-Christian Nazarenes
A century ago William B Smith argued that there was a sect of Nazarenes in existence before the followers of Jesus. It now seems he was correct. Epiphanius in Heresies spoke of two types of Nazarenes. One seemed to be a sect from Beroe in Syria who were a type of Christian using a gospel related to Matthew’s—this might have been the Logia, not the gospel we know today. A similar account occurs in his book, On Heretical Fables, by Theodoret, bishop of Cyrrhus beyond Antioch, who wrote:
The Nazarenes are Jews who know Christ as a just man and use a gospel called According to Peter.
The expression “a just man” denotes an Essene saint. The others were pre-Christian Nazarenes. Both sects had similar characteristics and were identifiable with the Ebionites, the poor—a name of the Essenes. It was also the name of the members of the Jerusalem Church but that was because they inherited the name from their founders, the Essenes.
However, Hippolytus tells us of a sect which dates back to remote antiquity called the Naasseni, alleging that they alone had sounded the depths of knowledge, and were priests who followed the teaching of James! These priests, Hippolytus thought, were the first heretics, preceding the Ebionites and the Elchasaites, but, if so, they were most likely to have preceded James too. James, the brother of the Lord, handed down “numerous discourses” to Mariamne (Mary), who then passed them to the Naassenes.
In his description of the Naassenes, Hippolytus indicates that Jesus, in a non-gospel tradition, drove back the Jordan and created a celestial Jordan. They seemed to allegorize the material world as Egypt—some suspect that the Essene center at Qumran was called by them Egypt—and the spiritual world as a heavenly Jerusalem and a Euphrates of Light, or a heavenly Jordan. It is quite like the Egyptians seeing the Milky Way as the heavenly Nile. Naassenes reminds us of both Essene or Ossene and Nazarene, and the Essenes considered themselves as priests, like the Nasuriya of the Mandaeans.
Hippolytus says the Naassenes were the sect that first had a doctrine of a “Spiritual One” who is “born again” and is the “Gate” to the “Primal Adam” or “Perfect Man”. Eisenman says the Mandaeans have the same ideas, derived from the Ebionites.
Hippolytus preserves one of their hymns. It begins mournfully chanting about a lost soul, groaning and weeping in suffering, trying to find God but unable to escape from a labyrinth beyond the kingdom of light. Looking on, Jesus appeals to his father, saying: “Send me for his salvation that I might descend with the seals in my hands, that I might traverse the æons, that I might make known the secrets, that I might reveal unto him the essence of God, and announce unto him the mystery of the holy life which is wisdom”. This is considered Gnostic but its language resonates with that of the scrolls.
The Palestinian Talmud tells of three hundred nezirim who in the reign of Alexander Jannaeus (104-78 BC) came up to Jerusalem when Rabbi Shimeon ben Shetach was there. He found a way of freeing one hundred and fifty of them from their vow of Nezirut. Nezirim are obviously Nazirites and Nezirim is an excellent source of the word “Nazarene”, yet these Nezirim were over a hundred years before Jesus.
There is also tentative evidence from the traditions of the Carmelite monks, known as the “White Friars” from their white mantle. The order was founded by Berthold, a French Catholic priest who offered himself as a hostage to God during the crusades in exchange for a victory in battle. The battle won, to seek what God might want of him, he decided to go to Mount Carmel, where Elijah and Elisha, the prophets, had meditated. He was astonished to find a small colony of Orthodox monks already established there. They told him they had, centuries before, succeeded a school of Jewish Christian monks who had themselves succeeded a tribe of Jewish hermits who had worshipped on the mountain since before the time of Jesus—indeed to the time of Elijah himself! The only Jewish monks we know of are the Essenes of Qumran, whom we have associated with the name Nazarene, and many of whom would have become the first Jewish Christians. It seems likely that the Essenes or Nazarenes had a monastic community on Mount Carmel because of its association with the prophet Elijah as well as the one now recognized at Qumran.
The Nazarenes of Epiphanius were indeed a pre-Christian sect (in Aramaic, the natzariya) identifiable with the Essenes. They regarded themselves as “protectors” of the true faith of Israel, like the Samaritans of Samaria, who thought of themselves as the keepers (shamar) of the Israelite religion, as opposed to the Judaeans, just as nasar means “keeper”. The word Jew means Judaean and was pejoratively applied—not least in the New Testament—to the Pharisees whose base was in Judaea, particularly Jerusalem. The Hebrew religion after the Jewish War was preserved by the Pharisees—Rabbinism is Pharisaism—and so everyone who practised it became known as Jews and still are. The pre-Christian Nazareans, like the Samaritans also opposed Judaean traditions, believing that the Pharisees had enfeebeled the Law of Moses. They were vegetarians and opposed animal sacrifices, but were circumcised and kept the Sabbath and Jewish festivals. Plainly there was a fashion for naming sects after the region where they were strongest, but members of the sect were not necessarily natives of the region!
Within twenty years of the crucifixion they were being called Christians. Nazarenes thought the end had come and wanted to convert the whole of Israel before God’s Day of Vengeance. The apostle, Paul, extended the elect of God further still—to the foreigner. He wanted to give all men the chance to join God’s elect and enter God’s kingdom, even gentiles. Paul identified with the Essenes because they had split from the Jerusalem temple. The Essenes contrasted themselves with the temple hierarchy in the Damascus Rule. Quoting Proverbs 15:8 it says:
The sacrifice of the wicked is an abomination to the Lord but the prayer of the righteous is his delight,
which reminds us of Jesus’s discussion with the Pharisee (Mk 12:28-34). For the Essenes in the last days the split with the temple was of no further consequence. They were God’s elect and the dawn of the kingdom was nigh when the wicked and their polluted temple would be destroyed. The kingdom never came but the temple was destroyed by the Romans leaving the two traditions: the Pharisaic and the Essene. The one became Judaism and the other became Christianity.
Comments
From Vincent Cook
An entymology of the word “nazarene” based on the verb “to watch” or “to be on guard” natsar, with a tsadde as the middle consonant is a very attractive possibility, especially if it was converted into the noun “watcher” as a loan word in Aramaic. For one thing, the little apocalypse in Mark concludes with repeated admonitions “to watch” and “to be on guard” (Mark 13:32-37), making an Aramaic word for “watcher” an excellent choice for describing a sect of Aramaic speaking believers of such imminent “Kingdom of God” prophecies.
For another thing, consider the various forms that this word might take in a Hebrew influenced Aramaic—emphatic singular “the watcher” natsara, absolute plural “watchers” natsar, inconstructive plural “watchers of” natsaret, emphatic plural “the watchers” natsaraya. These forms are highly suggestive of the divergent words we find for nazarene/nasorean and nazaret/nazareth/nazara in the Koine Greek versions of the New Testament gospels.
While some scholars might object that the Greek Septuagint consistently transliterates a tsadde into Greek as a sigma and not as a zeta, it should be noted that: 1. one of the variants does use the sigma form, ie nasorean; and 2. the translation of the New Testament back into Aramaic, the Peshitta, consistently uses a tsadde for these words. The ambiguity of the final consonant of nazaret/nazareth is highly suggestive of such an Aramaic/Greek transliteration also, since the Aramaic “t” is pronounced like the Greek tau, but looks like a theta.
The oldest synoptic gospel, Mark, only uses the alleged place name once in the context of saying that Jesus came from Nazaret of Galilee. However, Nazaret in this instance need not refer to a place name, but rather could simply mean that Jesus came from the “Watchers of Galilee”, in Aramaic—natsaret galilaya. This ambiguity in translation arises because Aramaic and Greek modify different words in order to indicate possession—Greek has a genitive case for the possessor, while Aramaic has a constructive state for the posessee. If this is the case, the story that Jesus came from a village named Nazaret may have originated as a misunderstanding or misrepresentation of the word nazaret by later gospel writers.
Another linguistic oddity is that Mark prefers “nazarene” while later synoptics shift to “nasorean”. This may reflect a linguistic change going on in Aramaic at the time, where the absolute form in this case, natsarin was being dropped over the course of the first century in favor of the emphatic form natsaraya. This shift is also reflected in the later Peshitta, which spells the word n-ts-r-y.
From Mike Magee
Many thanks, Vincent, for more illuminating remarks.
