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Who Lies Sleeping?

John, Jesus and the Essenes 2

Watery and Fishy Allusions
John, Jesus and the Essenes

Abstract

Christians scholars pretend that Christianity is uniquely revealed. Honest history shows it is not. It evolved from Essenism. John and the Qumran community have striking resemblances and differences when Essene life is read from their rule book, the Manual of Discipline. The differences are enough for Christian preachers and scholars to claim no connexion, though it is plain in the deeds of John and Jesus. They were Essenes doing what Essenes were supposed to do when their prophetic readings of the signs showed God was about to end the world. John and Jesus believed it and so tried to persuade Jews to repent and be baptized before it was too late. Baptism was the mark of repentance. To distinguish the messiah from his herald, the bible says Jesus did not baptize. If Jesus had not baptized it would never have continued, yet Christians continued to baptize—and with water not spirit. Today some Christians even call themselves Baptists!

Watery and Fishy Allusions

John was sure that prophecies were being fulfilled, and so the time of the End was nigh. The New Testament tells us John had been vowed from birth as a Nazir, and this vow, his garb and diet of repentance, and his confident proclamation of the imminence of the end of this æon, or age of the world, made many think he was The Nazir or “The Neser”, the “holy one of God”. Others thought he was Elijah returned, as Malachi had prophesied (Mal 4:5):

Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and terrible Day of the Lord come.

Like the prophet Elijah, he wore a skin robe. According to a Rabbinic legend, after the fall, Adam and Eve exchanged their garments of light (’o-r) in paradise, they lost at the fall, for coats of skin (’o-r), illustrating the Jewish joy in punning. Some thought that he was “That Prophet” of promise “like unto Moses” (Deut 18:15). That Prophet was thought to be Moses returned, and John was seen by some as being Moses, just as Jesus was. Moses is shown as having horns of light, and John is dressed in skin, and sometimes is also depicted with horns like a satyr. The name, “Moses”, is the latter part of “Ahuramazda” (Oromazes), the first part being the origin of these “or” words.

Nothing suggests John made any such claims, though his deliberate choice of garb might suggest he took himself to be Elijah reincarnated, and his role that prophesied by Malachi. He was proclaiming the approach of “the great and terrible Day of the Lord”. If Jews wanted to be saved, they had to repent. John was also a wonder-worker, if the synoptics gospels are right. Jesus was thought to be John returned from the dead because of his healing wonders, implying that John had done the same.

It is curious, if it is true, that John baptized in the Jordan because the Jordan near its outlet, the Dead Sea, is slow moving and brackish. But what of his characteristic baptizing in the Jordan of all places? Theologians thought it unfit for purification. It confirms one thing—that baptism was not a purification but was symbolic. In the vision of Ezekiel (Ezek 47:1-8), the prophet is addressed as Son of Man and sees a mighty stream of holy water from the temple on Zion flowing to heal the unclean waters of the Dead Sea. Eisler conjectured this is from the original Isaiah 28:16, well known till the third century AD.

Behold, I lay down in Zion a living stone, a stone of probation, a precious threshold-stone for a foundation. Out of its hollow shall flow forth rivers of living water, he that believeth on me shall not suffer from drought.
Extended Isaiah 28:16, according to Eisler

Allegorical interpretations, of which the Essenes were the masters, made the most of this, explaining puns on stones, amd masonry, as well as fishing for men, and so on. The living water signified the Word of Yehouah, the outpouring of the spirit of God. Spiritual imaginings and material reality were never wide apart in the mind of the pious Jew of the time.

So, the proper sense of John’s motive has escaped the historian. Stirred by the exhortations, power and extraordinary conviction of John that the terrible Day was nigh, the people, as in evangelical revivals still, were filled with a penitential anguish. The baptism symbolised, not any washing off of sins, but their death to this world and their rebirth from the sacred stream with its life-redeeming properties.

He [God] will turn again, he will have compassion upon us, he will subdue our iniquities. Yea, thou wilt wash away all our sins into the depths of the sea.

Having sincerely repented and been born again, they need not fear death, for they would be reborn in the kingdom of God, and could die willingly fighting the holy war!

Now, as the rite of proselytes involved a purificatory washing, it is perhaps not surprising that some saw the procedure of John as the same, or its equivalent, and many of those most impressed by this preaching were to be Hellenized Jews, not the most pious of them. A proselyte or a “new comer” (advena) who would join the assembly of Israel, had to be baptised. This really was a baptism akin to that of the Christians, yet preceding them. It was a bath of purification and regeneration before legal witnesses. The candidate stood in the water and listened to a short discourse consisting of commandments from the Law. Thereon the gentile convert dipped completely under the water, signifying the drowning of his previous impious and idolatrous self. Then, he arose reborn a Jew, and literally so, for the neophyte could no longer inherit from his gentile relatives, or even commit incest with any of them! Its basis was:

I will sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean: from all your filthiness and from all your idols, will I cleanse you. A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit will I put within you.
Ezekiel 36:25-26

John saw this promise as applying to Jews, foreshadowing the Last Days. Moreover, John’s insistence on baptism for the Jews acknowledged that it was Israel itself which required regeneration. Physical kinship with Abraham could be no guarantee against the wrath to come. To escape the trials and terrors of that Day, they must repent, and join the true Israel. Unrepentant they were no better than heathen idolaters.

Ye out births of vipers, who hath given you a glimpse of fleeing from the Wrath to come? Make fruit, therefore, worthy of (or sufficient for) your repentance. And think not (Lk begin not) to say within (or among) yourselves: We have Abraham [for] father. For I say unto you that God is able of these stones (Aram, ’abenayya) to raise (or wake) up children (Aram, benayya) for Abraham. But even now the axe is laid unto the root of the trees: every tree, therefore, which beareth not good fruit, is hewn down and cast into the fire.
Q, Matthew 3:7-10; Luke 3:7-9

Jesus used the same expression “generation” or “out births of vipers” several times. Snakes were associated with death, living in cairns ans tombs. The vipers were the ones who would die—for good! In vain they think they will escape because they are kin with Abraham. No Christian will consider the argument here, that God needs no human help, because he could raise up children (Heb, “sons” or banim) from stones (Heb, ’abanim) if he wanted them. What of the reference to trees? In the same vision in Ezekiel (Ezek 47:1-8 is:

By the river upon the banks thereof, on this side and on that side, shall grow all trees for meat, whose leaf shall not fade, they shall bring forth new fruit month after month, because their waters issue from the sanctuary: and the fruit thereof shall be for meat and the leaf thereof for medicine.

And in verses 9 and 10 of the vision, we read, in Eisler’s rendering:

Wheresoever the river shall come, everything that moveth shall live, and there shall be a very great multitude of fish, because the waters shall come thither… And it shall come to pass [that] the fishers stand by it from En Gedi unto En Eglaim, they shall be [a place] to spread forth nets [for all fish] according to their kinds.

En Gedi and En Eglaim were two fresh water springs forming oases—the Gedi or Kid Spring and the Eglaim or Calf Spring—on the shores of the Dead Sea. The former was the chief center of the Essenes. In the Days of the End, they saw themselves as prophets who would be “fishers of men”.

Many references to this fishing of souls echoes legends of John the Baptist, and blend with early Gnostic tradition. The Mandæans, believers in the “Manda” or Gnosis, the “Nazoraya” as they call themselves, called Baptists or Subba’s by the Arabs, speak often of the “Fisher of Souls” and the wicked “fishers of men”. Mandæan traditions are hostile to Christianity and to Judaism. Their doctrines often parallel those of the Elchasaites, and some parts of the Clementine romances which preserve Ebionite traditions and legends of Simon the Magian, with whom John is brought into connection.

The Fisher figure must conjure a thought of the Babylonian fisher god Oannes, or Ea, father of Marduk the saviour god of Babylon, who rose yearly from the dead. This primeval God of Wisdom was the pre-Orphic culture god who had taught early mankind all the arts of civilization. Berossus, the Chaldæan historian priest describes six manifestations of Oannes in successive periods, revelation and saving in successive periods being fundamental to the Mandæans. Since Judaism was established from Babylon under the second Darius who lived there, ancient Babylonian myths suffused Judaism originally, and appear in Ezekiel’s visions. Oannes is the same name, at root as John. Jonah in Hebrew means Dove, the Mandæans had a class of the perfect called Doves, and the Greek Physiologus (41) has:

The Dove… which is John the Baptist.

Jonah is sometimes found as a shortened form of Johanan.

The belly of the Great Fish, as in the Jonah legend itself, was Sheol, the Underworld, the Pit. Another Great Fish, probably the same, in fact, was the monster Leviathan. Leviathan was the name the Ophites of Celsus gave to the Seven—the devourers of souls of men and animals. The Mandæan tradition has the Fisher of Souls catching the Seven in his net and destroying them. It is a version of the Babylonian myth of the Saviour god Marduk catching in his net and killing Tiamat, the primeval dragon of the deep. The Midrash Yalqut Yona relates that, when Jonah was in the belly of the Great Fish, he prayed it to carry him quickly to the Leviathan, so that he could catch it himself to make of a feast of it for the righteous. A Messianic fish banquet was to take place in the days of the End. Mistaking ancient glyphs and images without proper knowledge of the story of it was common, and led itself to many myths. Sometimes it was a deliberate reinterpretation of the image, to suit a new trend or a new religion brought perhaps by conquerors, or those who threw them off and were left with images they deplored. Images of oannes, half a fish, could have been read as a man swallowed by a fish. The god Ea or Oannes made the Assyrians repent, but when god became kineffable, the images were given a new meaning. Jonah, a man swallowed by a fish, was reborn and converted the heathen. Simple! Such a death and rebirth fitted in with Jewish messianic ideas, and these became the sign of Jonah.

A fish was a symbol of the righteous Jew—he lived his life in the waters of the Torah. The Aboth de R Nathan (40) has:

The pupils of Rabbi Gamaliel the Elder were divided into four kinds of fish: into clean and unclean fish from the Jordan and fish from the Ocean, according to their high and low descent and to the degree of their learning and quickness of their understanding.

Nor could John have been ignorant of the prophecy concerning the gathering together of dispersed Israel:

Behold, I will send for many fishers, saith the Lord, and they shall fish them.
Jeremiah 16:16

Of maassive significance in view of the early Christian preference for a fish as a symbol of their faith is this:

As the Israelites are innumerable, even so are the fishes, as the Israelites will never die out on the earth, the fishes will never die out in their element. Only the Son of Man named “Fish” could lead Israel into the Land of Promise, namely Joshuah ben Nun ( = Fish).
Berešith Rabba (97)

Joshuah in the Septuagint is always written as Jesus. The Samaritans, who accepted only the five books of the Law, called their messiah Joshuah, and gave him the title, the Ta’eb, the Returner. They believed he would be a reborn or returned Joshuah. The title Ta’eb means “The Repentent One”, or “The One Who Makes Us Repent”. The Returner is not himself returning, literally turning back, but is turning others back. The name “Noah” is a pun on the word for repent “noham”, bringing the ancient saviour from the Flood back into the picture full of watery metaphors. God told Noah to make an ark (tebah, cf Ta’eb), but he told the Ta’eb to make people repent (Aram, shuba, tubah).

The ark (tebah) saved Noah from the flood of perdition, and the conversion (shuba, tubah) will save the Penitent One (Ta’eb) and all the sons of Israel from the [flood of] perversion.
G R S Mead, The Mandæans

Among the messianic expectations was the belief that in the Last Days it would again be as in the times of Noah, as indeed we are expressly informed by Q (Mt 24:37ff; Lk 17:26ff.)

John expected the catastrophe of the End Time to be a purification by fire, for Christians, effected by the holy spirit. Previous ones had been by water and by wind. The winnowing fan of John’s declaration connects catastrophe with wind, without which winnowing was impossible—the breath or spirit of God—and, for the good, would be a blessed harvesting, but, for the evil, would be a scattering of chaff.

John points to a widespread Jewish eschatological and so messianic movement before Christianity, of which Christianity was the outcome, albeit later modified by the ignorance and opportunism of its professionals. If the gospel narrative, which is that of Mark, is to be read as history, the ease by which Jesus called and persuaded his first disciples, and their readiness to leave all and follow him to become “fishers of men”, is mystifying unless something was in the air to prime them. Besides the generally tense situation, it was John’s teaching, as the author of the fourth gospel admits (Jn 1:40). Andrew, the brother of Simon Peter or Kephas, had been a disciple of the Baptist. Christianity had in it a lot of John’s influence, notably the call to repentence and baptism. John’s disciples, supported by Mandæan traditions, however, seemed to refuse Jesus’s messianic claims.

G R S Mead thought many of the images and expressions of Jesus were not original to him, but he shared them with those that had been taught by John, and the source of these mystic, apocalyptic and prophetical ideas was the Essenes. Even in the Christian gospels, Jesus praises John as the greatest prophet, even though the least in the Kingdom of God is greater than him. Since the least in heaven ought to be superior to anything on earth, the apparently demeaning remark does nothing to counter the acknowledgment by Jesus of the superiority of John on earth. As Christians accept John as the forerunner of Jesus, many of the his eschatological and associated beliefs must be the forerunners of early Christian doctrine. It is hard not to think that Jesus knew more of John personally and what lay at the back of him than the gospels would lead us to suppose, and used his ideas and symbols.

John, Jesus and the Essenes

Luke 1:36 makes out that John was related to Jesus, being the son of Elisabeth, the kinswoman of Mary, but what this hides is that the Essenes were a brotherhood because they were all sons of God. In typical biblical fashion, John was born to aged parents who had no right to expect a son, but this hides that the birth was a ritual birth or rebirth, and the ritual parents did not need to be young to have a ritual child. They were acting in a ritual capacity, and so as a priestly father and a ritual mother. Zacharias was the priest, and Elisabeth the ritual mother (Luke 1.5-25, 57-80). John grew up in the solitudes of the desert and in the lonely places (Luke 1.80), in other words at a wilderness camp like those near Qumran.

William Barclay was willing to see John as a waif adopted by the Essenes, but Christians will not accept Jesus as another waif, and probably from a younger age, also adopted by them. Rather, he is keen, as Christian theologians always are, to distinguish the Essenes as unlikely models of Jesus. He cites Schürer (The Jewish People in the Time of Christ) as saying the Essenes were a monastic order, unlike the Pharisees and Sadducees who involved themselves in society. Curiously, these same Christians deny that monasticism began with the Essenes despite this observation. Christians cannot stand to have any precursors in anything, but are not concerned that an argument used here will refute another one there. They assume that the flocks are too docile to bother, and, of course, they are right. For anyone more critical, however, they are plainly cheats and liars.

The Essenes were indeed monastic, but it did not mean that they never emerged from their monasteries, and even if it did, Christian commentators like Barclay are aware that there was another order of Essenes who were not confined to monasteries, and had special rules to allow them to mix with non-Essenes, and even gentiles, while preserving their purity. Often they are called village Essenes but they were not confined to villages, and Christians scholars are also aware that, not only was there an Essene quarter in Jerusalem, but Essenes participated in society and even in the Jewish War, because Josephus says so. Indeed, Barclay recognizes it, but flits over it rapidly, hoping no one will notice:

They could be found in small groups in the villages and in the towns, but they found their real life and their real flowering living in communities, closely disciplined and closely organized.
W Barclay, The Mind of Jesus

The first characteristic of the Essenes was their washings and lustrations, and anyone who chose to be an Essene was put on a year’s probation before they could participate in them. Then after another two years’ probation, he was then admitted to their main characteristic, a common meal. Finally, he swore an eternal oath, the only one he was permitted to make, to submit his life to the brotherhood, but to say nothing about them to anyone outside of it. Thereafter they were subject to a rigid and ascetic discipline, holding whatever they owned, bar a few permitted personal items, in common with everyone else. Josephus wrote that no one among them suffered “the humiliation of poverty or the superfluity of wealth”. The common purse enabled them to stop the fears that afflicted all people in those days, sickness and old age, for the sick and the aged were looked after along with everyone else. Before all meals they carefully washed and undertook purificatory rites. They were sticklers for cleanliness, but not from any considerations of hygiene, but because they considered themsleves to be heavenly, or they aspired to be heavenly, and therefore perfect, and so they could not allow any ritual pollution or uncleanness about themselves for fear of excluding themselves from heaven. They had to wash off any ritual pollution before they ate, after their toilet and after contact with anyone impure, even someone lower in the Essene caste system.

The Persian foundations of Judaism seem to have been stronger among the Essenes than elsewhere, so that they still openly revered the sun, apparently as the face of God, especially praying each morning at dawn as the sun rose, and singing hymns to it. Barclay says it is “as if somewhere in their history and beliefs there had been some admixture of sun worship”. Quite so! It reminds us of the Persian reverence for Mithras, seen as the visible face of their transcendental God, Ahuramazda, which name seems to have been the origin of the founding brothers of Judaism, the first of the priests, Aaron, and the bringer of the law, Moses. They revered the law of Moses above all, and sneered at the Pharisees for wanting to protect people from it by building a wall around it of subsidiary laws meant to stop the Mosaic laws from being transgressed. Christian believers, following the Jews, accept the myth of Moses being an Egyptian, and the Israelites as having been Egyptian slaves. It was all written precisely to divert attention from the proper origins of Judaism with the Persians, and it was done when the Jerusalem priesthood and the Greek kings of Egypt, the Ptolemies, were allies in the third century BC. No one had ever heard of Moses as a leader of escaped slaves before then.

Barclay observes that there are striking resemblances and striking differences between John and the Qumran community when their normal life is read from their rule book, called by American scholars, the Manual of Discipline (The Community Rule). The striking difference are enough for Christian preachers and scholars to be able to claim no connexion! That suits them in their aim of preserving Jesus and John as unique. And, of course, no Christian sheep will ever want to check out for themselves the Essene books found in the caves by the Dead Sea and called the Dead Sea Scrolls. If they did, they would find that the Manual of Discipline is the manual of the monastic Essenes, and not surprisingly it is a strict rule that does not seem to meet the way of living of John. However, there are other sectarian books that do indeed allow people who are Essenes to mix with others, and one of the works even says it is an obligation when the signs show that the time is coming for God’s visitation, the great cosmic event they awaited. The theologians will not mention it, though. The reason is that the duty then of Israel—the name the Essenes took for themselves, as the true “Israel”—is to persuade all Jews, called in the scrolls “All Israel” to repentance so that they will be saved when God judges the world at his visitation. Now, if that is not precisely what John and Jesus were supposed to have been doing in the gospels, then words mean nothing.

Even the Manual of Discipline says clearly, in Theodor H Gaster’s translation, that the remnant of Israel (righteous Jews, the Essenes, Israel) were “to go into the wilderness to prepare the way”. It is from Isaiah:

Prepare in the wilderness the way… make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
Isaiah 40:3

The “extraordinary fact” (Barclay’s description) is that the aim of this Qumran community is expressed in the words of Isaiah used in the New Testament to describe what John the Baptizer was doing (Mt 3:3; Mk 1:3; Lk 3:4). For the Essenes, the “way” is the law that God commanded Moses to deliver, and Jesus in the gospels insists that not a jot or tittle of the law shall pass away. It is Paul who abrogated it.

Barclay now claims that the difference was that they were preparing the way for themselves! That is the lie, for it says as clearly as possible in the scrolls that the object of the remnant was to save Israel, or as many of them as were willing to repent and be saved. The Essenes were in the wilderness doing what was commanded. They were preparing. If then, John was an Essene, and was doing what the Essenes expected, it follows that they had decided the time had come when God’s visitation was imminent. People were living in the End Time, or the Last Days before the world as it is would end and God would judge it. John had taken no individual or revealed path different from that of the Essenes who had trained him for an important and singular role—as Barclay, the desperate, but utterly dishonest Christian wants to persuade us—but had gone out into the community under orders to urge backsliding Jews to repent. Baptism was the outer ritual cleansing that went with the inner purification that comes from sincere repentance. If repentance is not sincere, then the pretence is valueless, because no unrighteous Jew could enter the kingdom of God anyway. God knows His own!

The Christian apologist wants to depict the Essenes as selfish, whereas the proto-Christian, John, and his successor, the Christian God, Jesus, were different. In fact, both were doing what was expected of them, and what is recorded truthfully in the gospels. They were trying to persuade unrighteous Jews to take a last chance of salvation. Christians have been doing it ever since, but the Day of God’s Vengeance has still not come, and few Christians would get past the judge, if it did. They have utterly lost the plot, and will not be corrected.

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Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.