One unerring mark of the love of truth is not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built on will warrant.

John Locke

John, Jesus and the Essenes 3

Essene Baptism
The Three Snares of Belial

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!

Essene Baptism

Ritual cleansing with water was, for the Essenes, a constant reminder of what was far more important—being internally pure, morally pure, pure in spirit. Of itself, it was worthless, so that no unrepentant man can be…

…cleared by mere ceremonies of atonement, nor cleansed by any waters of ablution, nor sanctified by immersion in lakes or rivers, nor purified by any bath. Unclean, unclean he remains so long as he rejects the government of God, and refuses the discipline of communion with him. For it is only through the spiritual apprehension of God’s truth that man’s ways can be properly directed. Only thus can all his iniquities be shriven so that he can gaze on the true light of life. Only through the holy spirit can he achieve union with God’s truth and be purged of all his iniquities. Only by a spirit of uprightness and humility can his sin be atoned. Only by the submission of his soul to all the ordinances of God can his flesh be made clean. Only thus can it be sprinkled with waters of ablution.
Manual of Discipline, T Gaster, Trans

Christians came to think that baptism washed them free of sin in some sort of magic way. It shows how they have always sought to evade the proper interpretation of the Essene based religion they adopted. Of course, it is easier the Christian way, but they cannot seem to realize that it is not easier, if it is the wrong way. They will not be saved by false practice, however hard they practice it. They think that truth is whatever they as Christians happen to think and say at any particular time, utterly failing to realize that truth has to be won by hard work and dedication. It does not come perfectly formed with the words “I believe”. They do not need to study the Dead Sea Scrolls to know this. Their supposed God says it clearly enough in their own holy books, but, naturally, they do not want to hear it if it is too hard. Better to believe what Paul said. “Faith suffices for everything.” Certainly, the Essenes believed themselves that a good man will be rewarded by God by being sprinkled with the Spirit of Truth as if it was a sprinkling of purifying water, but being good was hard work, not just believing.

No one is to go into water to attain the purity of holy men, for men cannot be purified except they repent their evil.

It is precisely the ethical precept of John and then Jesus, and the bible is unequivocal about it, unless you prefer to believe, as a Christian, that Paul is more important than the man who was God in human form. That is just what Christians do. They believe Paul with his false but easy message, and ignore Jesus, John and James who say as clearly as the nose on your face that you have to sincerely repent of your past sins and work hard at actually being and especially doing good. It is because Christians prefer to ignore the hard work that they are hypocrites. They think they can saunter through the broad gate—and surely they can as it is the Devil’s gate—but their own God said the right gate was narrow and hard to find.

So, instructed by the Essenes who had decided that the End was nigh, John embarked on his mission of seeking repentance from ordinary Jewish sinners. The Lord God was coming to the earth to judge it for its past sins in His dreadful Day of Vengeance. Those who wanted to enter God’s kingdom had better be sure thay qualified. They had to have lived a spotless life of righteousness or they had better repent and show they had done so sincerely by being born again into their new sinless life by baptism. Most of the gospel parables are illustrations of this repentance in expectation of the coming of God, but there is little doubt that God’s kingdom was a Jewish one, with righteous Jews, God’s Chosen People in charge, and other nations, if worthy, coming in supplication.

Apologists will argue that the symbol that John used to signify the act of repentance, baptism, was something Jews had never experienced. Ever desperate to make John and especially Jesus uniquely revealed, they make up whatever they like that suits their argument. Barclay writes:

Never in history had a Jew been baptized.
The Mind of Jesus

Baptism was something not for Jew but for a gentile. When a gentile came into Judaism as a proselyte, he was baptized, washed and cleansed of the evil of his gentile ways. Yet a Jewish encyclopedia, sub voce, “Baptism”, has:

Ritual purification by total immersion in water (tevilah). In the Second Temple Period baptism was practised by many pietist groups and sects.
Eds, R G Z Werblowsky and G Wigoder, The Encyclopedia of the Jewish Religion (1965)

Why then do Christians “scholars” lie about it? Because they have to maintain the pretence for the benefit of their flocks that Christianity is uniquely revealed. And an honest approach to history shows unequivocally that it is not. It evolved from Essenism, and its evolution is given in the historical deeds of John and Jesus. They were Essenes doing exactly what Essenes were supposed to do when they concluded from their prophetic readings of the scriptures and the signs of the times that God was about to end the world. John and Jesus obviously elieved it, and so they acted accordingly. They tried to persuade Jews to repent and be baptised before it was too late. That multitudes of Jews did shows that baptism was not as unthinkably absurd as Christian the apologist makes out.

Baptism was a mark of repentance. What then of Jesus coming for baptism? What need had he of a baptism which was the mark of repentance? What need of repentance had Jesus, as an Essene, someone who kept himself righteous and ritually pure anyway, and considered by Christians as sinless. Of course, as an Essene, it ought not to have been peculiar for him to turn up for a ritual immersion, since he already had several a day, but it surely was a significant act. There was one serious act of folly that all Jews were guilty of. It was allowing the land of Judah to be occupied by a foreigner. God’s own land had been tainted by the pollution of the foreigner, and all Jews, His Chosen People, were responsible for allowing it. So even Jesus had to repent of this sin. Moreover, Jesus was the succesor to John, and the baptism will also have been the ceremony of succession, whereby one Essene leader “anointed” his successor. Essenes disdained the use of oil except medicinally, and seemed to use baptism instead of anointing as their way of designating the heir.

Mark describes John’s baptism as “a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” (Mk 1:4), and says that Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan (Mk 1:9). Luke also describes John’s baptism as “a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” (Lk 3:3) but is clear that Jesus is the senior of them. Matthew says John came with the summons to repentance but instead of it beiong explicitly for the remission of sins, it is because the kingdom of God is nigh (3:1). Ofd course, it is the same thing because whatever modern Christians might contrive to think, sinners cannot live in heaven. They have to sincerely repent first, so only righteous Jews, whether through a lifetime of right living or through repentance and baptism, can get into God’s kingdom. Matthew refuses to allow the thought that Jesus could be a sinner to come into view. Furthermore, John at first refused to baptize him, but Jesus insisted that all righteousness must be fulfilled (3.13-15). What could that have meant? It meant that Jesus was not fully righteous either, and needed to repent himself of some sin. It was the sin of allowing God’s land to be ruled by unclean and ungodly gentiles. John does not mention the baptism of Jesus by John at all. It is another illustration of the subtly evolving Christian message as the gospels get older and more Christianized.

Late works, such as those by Jerome make out that Jesus was baptized simply to please his mother. It suited the church to spread the idea of a family-man Jesus, to appeal to Roman housewives and maidens, but it does not hold water. The Essenes were a brotherhood, and Mary was a ritual mother, if she is not a pure invention of the early gentile church. She scarcely has any role in the earliest gospel, and where she appears is treated off-handedly, suggesting that whatever anyone remembered about the words of Jesus about his mother were not complimentary. And again, the reply of Jesus to his mother’s suggestion he be baptized by John, in the lost gospel cited by Jerome, is not at all Essene. Essenes had to be unusually humble, and this Jesus is arrogant. That is Paul and the early Church talking, not the Essene:

Wherein have I sinned, that I should go and be baptized by him? unless perhaps this very thing that I have said is a sin of ignorance.
Jerome, Dialogue Against Pelasgius

Another work by an anonymous writer cites the lost Preaching of Paul:

Christ, the only man who was altogether without fault, both making confession respecting his own sin, and driven almost against his will by his mother Mary to accept the baptism of John.
Tractate on Rebaptism

Now, it ought to seem fantastic to any Christian that Christ’s mother, knowing her son was literally a son of God, should want him to go and repent of his sins and be baptized to prove it. But would any ot them think about it? Justin Martyr makes Jesus the second Adam, bearing the first Adam’s sins, in an early argument of the need for redemption from original sin, but since Jesus was God and was going to be crucified, Christians tell us, in atonment of mankind’s sins, it still seems odd that he needed to repent and be baptized too.

We know that he did not go to the river because he stood in need of baptism, or of the descent of the Spirit like a dove; even as he submitted to be born and to be crucified, not because he needed such things, but because of the human race, which from Adam had fallen under the power of death and the guile of the serpent, and each one of which had committed personal transgression.
Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho

The Christian view is that Jesus identified himself with the sin and the sorrow of mankind. Barclay explains:

These Jews came to John as sinners. They came because a sense of sin drove them, and because they were made to feel as never before their need of God and their need of the forgiveness of God, and it was precisely with sinful men that Jesus identified himself. He made, as it has been put, “common cause with all men in life in the mortal dilemma”.

It is all a bit wet, but if the sin is the one that the Jews had actually committed in letting God’s land be overtaken by a Roman emperor, and indeed that many Jews collaborated with this usurper of God’s role, then there was a sin that Jesus could identify himself with. Inasmuch as Jesus was a Jew, and Judaea was God’s Promised Land, meant for Jews, and regarded in the Jewish scriptures as God’s betrothed, he had sinned. The chosen wife of God had been ravaged by another, and Jews had allowed it. That is certainly how the Essenes of Qumran saw it, and why they made preparations for winning God’s land back from the enemy, the Romans. Jesus was their leader in this venture, and had repent of the sin, and be baptized to show his “common cause” with all Jews.

The Jewish proselyte baptism is a rebirth, and we have suggested that the same is true of the Essene ceremonies whereby the holy men are born again into a new and pure life. Curiously a variant text of Luke instead of reading:

Thou art my beloved Son, with thee I am well pleased,

it reads:

Thou art my beloved Son, today I have begotten thee.

It says quite clearly that the ceremony was a rebirth in which the repentant person, Christ, was reborn as a Son of God, as a Bar Abba in Aramaic, or Barabbas in Greek rendering of the Aramaic! Righteous Jews like the monastic Essenes themselves who lived carefully isolated lives to stay pure and unblemished by sin, and Jews who repented of the sins of their past and undertook to be baptized to signify it, became Sons of their Father, God. They became pure. They were angels on earth simply waiting for the Mount of Olives to split open and God and his hosts to arrive and end the world.

In Justin Martyr’s account of the baptism, he adds:

And then, when Jesus had gone to the river Jordan, where John was baptizing, and when he had stepped into the water, a fire was kindled in Jordan.

Indeed it was, for the coming of the kingdom of God meant that the Romans had to be expelled from Judaea. It was a fire that lasted for a century.

The Three Snares of Belial

The Damascus Document, in an interpretation of Isaiah 24:17: “Fear, and the pit, and the net, are upon thee, O inhabitant of the earth”, refers to three particular sins which concerned the Community, the “Three snares of Belial”. They were wealth, polluting the Temple, and “fornication”. Fornication included improper marriages such as taking more than one wife or marrying a niece. The Damascus Rule speaks of a spouter who married again while his first wife still lived, whereas the principle of creation is:

Male and female created He them.
Gen 1:27

This is the same principle expounded by Jesus and yet it is quite alien to normal Jewish law which bases itself on the commandments brought down by Moses and not on Genesis.

The Damascus Rule forbids marriage between uncles and nieces on the grounds that the law of Moses prescribes only that:

You shall not approach your mother’s sister; she is your mother’s own near kin.
Lev 18:13

The law quoted here forbids nephews and their maternal aunt marrying, so that there is no specific Mosaic law against uncles marrying nieces, and the Pharisees even took it to be worthy. The Essenes asserted that laws of incest true for men were true for women also. If an aunt could not marry her nephew neither could an uncle marry his niece.

Another complete scroll, the Temple Scroll, echoes the Damascus Rule in forbidding a king of Israel from marrying his niece. Since the only dynasty for which this was common practice was that of the Herodians, the scroll must refer to them. If so these scrolls must date from the time of Herod, the period of the gospels. This is the sin which Herod Antipas committed and which John the Baptist condemned. It must also negate the good terms Josephus said were shared by the community and the Herodians.

Though fornication is one of the three snares of Belial, the early characters of the Old Testament were unselfcritical fornicators. King David had many wives. How was this to be justified? The Qumran Community did so by arguing that the Law had not yet been revealed to them or had not yet been fully revealed. They could not live according to standards that God had not yet provided. Paul, showing familiarity with Essene reasoning, uses a similar argument in Galatians 3 and Romans 4 to back up his rejection of the Law. Abraham could not have been restricted by a Law which did not exist yet he remained good because of his faith. Thus, Paul cunningly and evidently deliberately uses the Essenes’ own argument to maintain that faith is superior to the Law. The evidence is that Paul had been trained as an Essene.

Finally for the sectaries the temple was polluted. Those in charge of it, the Sadducees, profaned it with their wealth, their disregard for the Mosaic law against sleeping with a woman who was menstruating and their acceptance of gifts from foreigners. Acts 15 and 21:25 depict James, the leader of the Jerusalem Church, as objecting to people indulging in blood, fornication and food or things sacrificed to idols—expressing concern at the pollution of the temple.

Besides John’s views on fornication, the three snares of Belial help us to understand Jesus’s outlook. He also identified wealth with sin so that it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. He rages at the pollution of the Temple and refuses to allow divorce. Acts 15 and 21:25 depict James, the leader of the Jerusalem Church, as objecting to people indulging in “Blood”, “fornication” and “food or things sacrificed to idols”—the latter expressing concern at the pollution of the Temple by offerings from abroad.

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Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.