The famous Victorian paleontologist, Richard Owen, was a remarkable man of considerable genius, who suffered only from becoming an expert.

Who Lies Sleeping?

The Kingdom of God 2

The Mission of the Disciples
A Speech for the Kingdom
Receiving the Children
Forbid the Children Not
Rewards for the Loyal
God’s Kingdom not of this World
The Mount of Olives
Signs of the Apocalypse

Abstract

Jesus took up the same message as John the Baptist. It was the same message. Faith was not sufficient to enter the kingdom as theologians later claimed. Jews who wanted to be amongst “the Righteous” had to repent. He made no claim to be the messiah but simply continued John’s call to the misled Jews—they should repent in preparation for the coming kingdom—the time had come, the kingdom of God was near, repentance was needed. Christian scholars writing decades before the Dead Sea Scrolls noted that Jesus’s teaching of the kingdom of God had intensive elements from Persia. The kingdom was a technical term Aryan priests and theologians used for the eschatological end. God’s kingdom was on earth, though it would have been cleansed and renewed by God’s holy fire, but only the messiah and righteous Jews could bring it about. Salvation was the gift of God but it had to be earned by righteousness or sincere repentance. What Jesus meant when he spoke of the kingdom of God.

The Mission of the Disciples

The signs of the times are portentous. The kingdom of God is imminent. Jesus gets concerned that many Jews will not hear his message before the kingdom dawns. He will be unable to reach all Jews before judgement day and he decides to speed up the recruitment process by sending out disciples.

The fashion in which the disciples were sent out is revealing. They followed the practice of the Essenes who always succoured brother travellers passing by. Jesus tells them to carry only the minimum with them—though they were allowed a staff, as were the Essenes largely for defensive and hygienic reasons—and to depend upon voluntary assistance. Josephus in The Jewish War writes:

They carry nothing with them on a journey except arms as a protection against brigands. In every city there is one of their order expressly appointed to attend strangers, who provides them with clothing and other necessities.

The message is the urgency of repentance for the coming of the kingdom:

And they went out, and preached that men should repent.
Mark 6:12

and Matthew states it explicitly:

And as ye go, preach, saying, The kingdom of heaven is at hand.
Matthew 10:7

The message, in Luke 10:9, repeated in 10:11, is:

The kingdom of God is come nigh unto you.

In Matthew 8:22 and Luke 9:60 the urgency is such that Jesus says:

Let the dead bury the dead.

It was too late for funereal nostalgia, too late for the physically dead to repent. The living had to be persuaded to repent. Then as the Righteous, they would be resurrected into everlasting life. Jesus expected the kingdom of God to come with a vengeance at almost any time soon. His message was urgent! That people can still be waiting 2000 years later proves their gullibility and the power of the priesthood to control people’s thoughts. As an Essene, Jesus knew the signs of the times—those times! They told him that the day of judgement was nigh! Then! He was wrong but is still believed now!

The warning to those who did not welcome or listen to the messengers, even whole households or cities, was severe:

It shall be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrha in the day of judgement, than for that city.

Jesus is saying that at the appointed time of God’s vengeance the judgement on cities which reject the disciples will be worse than the Old Testament judgement on Sodom and Gomorrha. If they did not listen and repent, then that was their punishment.

Jesus’s message was specifically for Jews and not gentiles. Jesus’s command (Mt 10:5-6) was not to go into the way of the gentiles or into any city of the Samaritans but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. Luke’s creation (Lk 10:1-16) of the mission of the seventy—which he bases on the mission of the twelve in Mark—is a Christian invention to retrieve the situation and include gentiles. Luke was writing for gentiles and finishes up cursing Jewish cities because of their failure to repent and praising gentile cities like Tyre and Sidon. In Matthew 11:20-24 this cursing happens in a different context casting doubt on it.

However, comparing Mark 6:11 and Matthew 10:15 with Matthew 11:22 and Luke 10:14, shows that Tyre and Sidon should really be Sodom and Gomorrha. Indeed it is clear even within Luke (Lk 10:12 and Lk 10:14). A gentile has altered the original comparison in Mark of the faithless cities with Sodom and Gomorrha to one with the gentile cities Tyre and Sidon to make it sound as though Jews were less worthy than gentiles. It is patently nonsense because the Jewish yardstick for sinning was the law of Moses. How could a gentile repent of sins of which he was not aware? So the woes on the cities seem like edited Nazarene tradition—a bewailing of hard-hearted towns that had rejected the disciples. It therefore all belongs when they return.

Matthew glaringly contradicts himself in Mt 10:8 and 10:10. In verse 8, the disciples were to deliver their message freely as it was received, but, in verse 10, the implication is that they should be paid. Jesus as an Essene would have expected no payment, nor accepted it, but only food and shelter. He was an Ebionite, one of the poor. Paul it was who taught that missionaries should expect to be paid. It has been the justification of every evangelical quack ever since—and don’t they get rich!

The anointing with oil in verse 6:13 is probably wrong. Essenes did not use oil which they considered defiling, though they would have used ointments to cure physical ailments. These people were not physically sick but spiritually sick, though Mark thinks or pretends they were physically sick. Spiritual sickness is cured by repentance and baptism not by oil. The evangelist changed the sacrament by baptism into anointing with oil to maintain the pretence that physical ilnesses were being cured.

Mark has Jesus dispatching the twelve to preach when elsewhere in his account they show little understanding of Jesus’s message. Either they are not as stupid as Mark depicts them or they were not sent out in this way. The twelve is Mark’s convenient way of indicating the selected twelve but it does not come from the original tradition where it would have been simply disciples. Disciples, not the twelve, were sent out to the surrounding villages to garner support.

In Matthew, Jesus’s mission speech goes on for another 26 verses after it ends in Mark, but some of it turns up in Mark’s mini-apocalypse in his chapter 13. Mostly it is not genuine Nazarene tradition but Christian additions. However, we find (Mt 10:23):

Ye shall not have gone over the cities of Israel, till the Son of man be come,

which—if the Son of man meant Daniel’s one like unto a Son of man—means the appointed time of the Lord was due soon. And then we find:

Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword,
Matthew 10:34

which can only be interpreted in a non-peaceful sense since Jesus plainly says so! In Luke 12:51, it is toned down to a division, but Luke says also:

I am come to send fire on the earth; and what will I if it be already kindled.

Freely rendered Jesus is saying, “I didn’t start the trouble, it had already started”.

A Speech for the Kingdom

Jesus makes a speech for the kingdom in Mark 8:34-8:38, urging people to join him if they wanted to save their lives. Apparently anachronistically he says:

Let him take up his cross.

If the cross here meant the cross of the crucifixion, then the expression must have come into common usage after the crucifixion. Who would have understood it beforehand? None of the moronic disciples say at this point:

Er, what is this “take up your cross” boss?

What is more likely is that Jesus spoke of the baptismal cross mark made in sanctified water upon the forehead of the Righteous according to Ezekiel’s prescription (Ezek 9:4). Interestingly, Luke has:

take up his cross daily,

supporting the link with the Essenes and baptism because the Essenes believed in daily lustrations. Jesus must have said:

take the cross of repentance and be baptized.

The expression, “and the gospel’s”, is omitted in all three other gospels and must be a late addition to Mark. Moreover, Jesus would never have put himself in the foreground by using “my” and “I”. Such passages are Christianized. Jesus the Essene would have considered everything God’s, even the words in his own mouth. The euphemism “son of man” was intended to avoid “I” and we can be sure too that “my” would also have been avoided. At stake was the everlasting life of the kingdom. A man saving his physical life would lose everlasting life, but those willing to give up his life for God would gain everlasting life.

If it reflects Christian experience rather than the original tradition, it implies that Christians had lost their lives for their faith even at the early date at which Mark wrote. Many Nazarenes died during the Jewish War, but earlier they had died in the temporary liberation of Jerusalem.

If the passage has any basis in Nazarene tradition, it seems to be a rallying speech in Essenic language urging the Nazarenes not to fear for their lives in the coming battles, since the kingdom was nigh and their reward would be everlasting life.

“Adulterous and sinful generation” is an Essene expression. Here Jesus unmistakably uses “son of man” in the messianic sense of Daniel. In Mark though it is not absolutely clear that he means himself, though the other synoptics leave no room for doubt. Jesus would have believed that the Daniel figure was the heavenly messiah, the archangel Michael, leading in his heavenly hosts, as the Essenes believed. The role of the earthly messiah, himself, was to capture the city of God from the heathen.

The use of “his Father” implies that Jesus expected to become the archangel Michael, the one like unto Son of man, but it is possibly a Christianization. Originally it was probably simply God, though the Essenes might have understood that the earthly and heavenly messiahs became the same when heaven and earth joined.

Receiving the Children

For whosoever shall give you a cup of water to drink in my name, because ye belong to Christ, verily I say unto you, he shall not lose his reward. And whosoever shall offend one of these little ones that believe in me, it is better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the sea.
Mark 9:41-9:42

Jesus had no special interest in children, that is, in immature adults. When he received a child in Mark 9:36-37, conceivably he dramatized his saying by using a child as a prop, but the little child is simply a personification of the children Jesus was interested in—the Children of Israel. The child was not a gentile child—Jesus was not sent for gentiles. Jesus is simply pointing out that any one of the Children of Israel can receive God. The conditions were that they should repent sincerely and be baptized. Mark sees that it ties in with the rejection of precedent and includes it here though it might not have been here originally but in his instructions to the disciples departing on their mission of recruitment. This is where Matthew puts it (Mt 10:40-42).

Mark 9:37 has been Christianized by making Jesus and his name central. Originally it was more modest. He was deliberately playing down his role as Nazarene leader:

Whosoever shall receive one of such children receiveth not this son of man but God alone.

And since he was giving the disciples instructions for their mission, he was really saying to them:

When you recruit someone, make sure they understand that God is leader of the Nazarenes not me.

The narrative in Mark is interrupted by the insertion of Mark 9:38 to 9:40 but continues in 9:41. Mark 9:41 has been changed because originally it referred to baptism, and Mark wanted to distinguish Jesus from John the Baptist. Originally it read:

For whosoever shall mark them in baptism with the cross of water in God’s name, because they belong to Him, they shall not lose their reward.

But anyone abusing a Nazarene convert (“these little ones who believe in me”) will be lost to the coming kingdom. Nonetheless the vigorous words used seem to be threatening. In other words he is saying to the disciples:

you don’t have to wait any longer to mete out appropriate treatment. The End Time is now. If you punish those who are attacking you then it is God’s will.

Forbid the Children Not

Mark 10:13-10:16 is the famous passage, much loved by Christian illustrators, in which Jesus says:

suffer the little children to come unto me.

Unfortunately the children referred to by Jesus are the Children of Israel not kiddy-winkies, though the saying might have arisen from an occasion when little children were present.

The original reference was too explicit for Mark, who had made the Jews the enemy of Jesus, and he changed it into a homely little episode. Luke 18:15 eliminates any possible confusion by turning the children into infants. But the meaning is transparent—it is a re-wording of Jesus’s perennial message that he had come only for the children of Israel. As we have seen, the kingdom was of this earth, and included righteous gentiles coming in supplication to the Jews. But only righteous Jews could bring it about. This is crystal clear in Matthew 18:10-14 where a warning not to despise these little ones is followed by the parable of the lost sheep. The little ones and the lost sheep are the simple of Ephraim of the scrolls—lapsed and sinful Jews, but Jews nonetheless and entitled to the chance of God’s mercy as His chosen of the covenant with Abraham.

The original would have read:

Suffer all the children to come; forbid them not; for of such is the kingdom of God. Verily: Whosoever is not one of the children shall not enter therein, save who the Lord taketh unto him and blesseth.

Jesus was not excluding gentiles from the kingdom, if they were righteous, but they came in the second phase to pay tribute to the Most High in Jerusalem when the kingdom was set up. In the Talmud the same idea is expressed:

into the Jerusalem of the world to come they only may enter who are appointed thereto.

Thus the little children of this passage were not children but children of Israel—adult Jews wanting baptism into the sect. The baptismal litany of the primitive church included the call: “What forbids?” prior to the baptism echoing Jesus’s injunction: “Forbid them not”, confirming that the passage concerns entry into the kingdom via baptism.

At the beginning of this passage, Jesus rebuked the disciples for turning away potential converts. It must have happened early in the ministry when some disciples might have regarded Hellenized Jews as undesirable converts. Jesus tells them otherwise.

The sense of the passage is:

And they brought backsliders to him, children of Israel who had turned away from God to the gods of the Greeks, for they now sought the kingdom of God. And his disciples rebuked those that brought them. But when Jesus saw it, he was much displeased, and said unto them: “Suffer all the children to come; forbid them not; for of such is the kingdom of God. Truly: Whosoever is not one of the children shall not enter therein, save who the Lord taketh unto him and blesseth”.

Rewards for the Loyal

Mark has had to include what were surely extremely popular stories among the slaves and poor citizens of the Roman Empire who were such fertile soil for the growth of Christianity. But he, or an editor, sees the problem introduced by his inclusion of Jesus’s categorical denunciation of wealth. Mark (Mk 10:27) has an undoubtedly genuine saying which came to him in isolation—“with God all things are possible”—and wants to use it as an escape clause—a let out for wealthy Christians who would not give up their wealth. So he has the disciples, who are patently aware that righteousness is the way to get into the kingdom, absurdly saying: “Gosh! How do you get into the kingdom then?” To which the answer is the saying Mark wishes to use, a paraphrase of Job 42:2 and Jeremiah 32:17, respectively: “Lord, Thou canst do all things” and “Lord, There is nothing too hard for thee”. His problem is solved—God can find a way to get the wealthy into His kingdom, after all, but it is plainly contrived.

Mark (Mk 10:29—31) concludes with the equally patently genuine speech of Jesus telling the repentant followers who abandon everything for the battle for the kingdom that they will be rewarded a hundred times over. The words after hundredfold to the end of verse 30 are Mark’s pious construction, as few scholars will disagree.

Mark 10:31 also evidently circulated as an isolated saying because it appears in various settings in the different gospels. In its previous setting it seemed a possible rejection of Essene rules of precedence but it is not. If it circulated as a separate saying, whatever its origins, it seems to have been taken to mean that the normal hierarchies of earth would be reversed in the kingdom. That seems to be the sense of it used as a conclusion to these tales. Here it did not refer to individuals but to the Essene order as a whole, the poor and the meek who expected to be honoured in God’s kingdom.

God’s Kingdom not of this World

On entering Jerusalem, the gospels tell us, Jesus is immensely popular. The Pharisees observe:

Look, the world has gone after him.
John 12:19

He is widely acclaimed as a king, the heir to the throne of David and now Jesus does not refute these acclamations according to the gospel writers. Beginning the descent from the Mount of Olives we find people shouting (Lk 19:38):

Blessed is the king that cometh in the name of the Lord!

Even after the crucifixion the disciples express (Lk 24:21) their former hopes in the same terms:

We had hoped that it was he who would deliver Israel,

and meeting the resurrected Jesus they still believe it, asking (Acts 1:6):

Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom of Israel?

All of the expectations of the Jerusalem crowds were of a restored Jewish kingdom, a new kingdom of David and Solomon on earth, a Jewish state strong enough to expel the invaders and establish a new world order.

But the clergy tell us that the disciples were mistaken. It was never Jesus’s intention to introduce a Jewish kingdom of God on earth, and cite John who says Christ taught:

My kingdom is not of this world.

They ignore that Jesus himself, explaining to the apostles how they should pray, tells them in Matthew and Luke to say the Lord’s prayer:

Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.

The prayer was for God to inaugurate the messianic age of God’s kingdom on earth. It clearly says in earth yet the argument of the gospel writers is that the kingdom referred to is not of this world but in heaven, and John has Jesus himself saying so (Jn 18:36). Jesus’s followers did not understand this because they were certifiably stupid and, following Mark’s lead, the gospel writers go to some trouble to depict the apostles as complete morons even though they had been personally selected by Jesus. This is manifest rubbish. We can be sure that the apostles, as well as the Jerusalem throng, knew exactly what kingdom Jesus meant. And the deceitful Christian interpretation is plainly refuted in the principal prayer of Christendom.

The word commonly translated as ”daily” in the Lord’s Prayer is ”epiousios”. Even the Christian apologist, Origen, thought ”epiousios” was made up. In some of many scholarly articles trying to make sense of it, the authors believe it best conveys a future sense rather than ”daily”. This is best expressed as ”forthcoming” and ties in much better with the prayer’s eschatological implications. In Essene symbolism, bread was eternal life or immortality, so the ”forthcoming bread” prayed for was eternal life in God’s kingdom. And the Christian prayed for it today!

The Mount of Olives

Having entered Jerusalem because they had captured it, having defeated and driven out the Romans giving the Nazarenes yet another meaning as the “victors” from nasach, the disciples are beginning to get anxious. Having taken the city and cleansed the temple they—and Jesus too—were expecting God to begin to act. So far nothing. Mark uses their anxiety to give Jesus an excuse for making his long apocalyptic speech to hide the tragedy of the defeat of the Nazarene guerrillas. Mark makes the reason for this his prediction that the temple would be destroyed, but it must really have been an explanation of the signs of the End Time. The disciples were not concerned about the temple but that the day of the Lord had arrived with no appearance of God’s miracle. They were impatient and asked Jesus to review the signs for them. They wanted reasons to feel encouraged. Jesus would have been explaining why he had come to the conclusion that the day of the Lord was due.

The association of the mount of Olives with the speech describing the apocalypse is not coincidental. In Zechariah 14:4 the prophecy is that the miracle of God inaugurating the kingdom will occur on the Mount of Olives. Jesus and his band would have spent time each day waiting and watching there. Indeed that is what they are doing when Jesus is arrested. At some point, probably the first occasion, the band arrived at the Mount of Olives and Jesus made a speech describing what was expected to happen in the cosmic conflict for the kingdom. On another occasion, the final trip to Olivet, with the Romans back in control of the city, it was an impassioned speech appealing to God to respond to their act of faith in capturing Jerusalem. Mark uses bits of both and also possibly bits of the speech made when Jesus first took the city because there is a further reference to the fig tree.

The Mount of Olives is of apocalyptic importance to the Essenes because it lies in direct line between Jerusalem and Qumran. The prophet Ezekiel saw God leave the polluted city of Jerusalem (Ezek 10:19) and hurry away to the east directly over the Mount of Olives (Ezek 11:23). Later God returned along the same route (Ezek 43:2). The Essenes, who seemed to regard this as history not prophecy, deduced that the New Jerusalem must be to the east, beyond the Mount and they founded it at Qumran, as far east as you could get without crossing the Dead Sea, and conveniently close to several springs in the limestone that bubbled out into the Dead Sea allowing plants to grow. On God’s return, the Mount of Olives would split asunder as Zechariah describes, God sending his power along the east-west axis of the New Jerusalem to the Old Jerusalem.

Olives of the Mount of Olives seems to be a misunderstanding and mistranslation of an Aramaic proper noun meaning the Most High—Elion, the same root as Allah. Because it was a proper noun, it was not translated into Greek but some readers nevertheless took it to be a Greek word—elaion, an olive, and so thought that was the name of the mountain (Olivet). Now the Mount of Olives is not very high. The name Elion therefore does not refer to the height of the place itself. It is obviously called the Most High because of its association with the Most High God.

Signs of the Apocalypse

Mark 13 is one long, long discourse by Jesus known as the little apocalypse. It has been put here to pull a veil over a tragic event which cannot be told—the Roman counter attack on Jerusalem in which the legionaries from Caesarea on the coast arrive and savage the Nazarenes and their admiring throng into submission in a few hours. Mark hints at the counter attack with his gloomy prognostications but no more. He obviously could not be explicit. He either has to omit the counter attack altogether or disguise it as something else.

An apocalypse is a prophecy of the end. Often it is disguised history written to encourage oppressed people who could not write openly for fear of further persecution from their oppressors. It is coded history with a moral message—the encouragement that God would bring them through their crises. The historical prophecies of the prophet proved true—naturally, they were actually history—so then should their victory and their salvation at the hand of God with which the apocalypse ended. The Book of Daniel is the best biblical example. It is a history of the Jews from the exile until the time of the Seleucid Greek king Antiochus Epiphanes in the second century BC.

The author of an apocalypse writes history as if it were a prophecy by pretending to be from an earlier time. Here Mark writes the apocalypse as if he were Jesus. Even then the imagery is necessarily obscure. It is not surprising that an apocalyptic sect like the Essenes took to believing that all scripture was coded and that they began to use code among themselves in everyday life, as Jesus did with his parables. The parables therefore are an extension of the idea of apocalyptic writing—both apocalypses and parables are allegories, both might get slightly garbled in transcript making them harder to decipher, but both are unmistakable in form.

Mark must have had an Essene explanation of the signs of the End Time possibly Peter’s, and he combined it with snippets of the history of the years between the death of Jesus and the time when he was writing. In reconstructing the Essene discourse, the history has to be omitted and what remains checked against Essene teaching.

Since Jesus’s expectation of the arrival of the kingdom was never fulfilled, Mark had to improvise with what he knew had happened while cutting out what he knew had not happened. Mark begins the serious business of apocalypse writing by issuing warnings in the name of the Christ that Christians will be persecuted and divided. Dissension in the Christian camp, we know from the Epistles, occurred. The famine, which scourged Palestine in the forties, and the Jewish War are similarly prophesied. But such is the stuff of apocalypses—it could have been said by Jesus in the general sense that the approaching day of the Lord is preceded by such happenings.

Jesus expected God’s miracle at any moment because he had cleansed the Jerusalem temple. Quite what he expected to happen afterwards is not clear, but the miracle would have followed the prophecy of Zechariah. He expected the cosmic battle to begin and continue for forty years reflected in warfare and tribulations on earth. Then the sons of light would have their victory and the gates of the kingdom would open. If he was writing less than forty years later, Mark might still have believed this. In any case he would surely have begun Jesus’s discourse with him explaining the Essene idea of the cosmic battle as we find in the War Scroll. It would act as a suitable veil for the unacceptable truth that the Romans fought the Nazarenes as insurgents, and defeated them.

The bulk of Mark 13:9 to 13:13 is late but there are elements here such as the idea of strife within families that might have come from Jesus’s speech based on scriptural ideas of the End Time. Parts of it are poetic and hint at a hymn of encouragement during Roman official oppression. Verses 9 and 10 are definitely late additions. In other gospels verse 11 is part of Jesus’s speech to the disciples beginning their mission and perhaps that is where it belongs, Mark having plucked it out and used it here because he needed material. Betray in verse 12 should be deliver.

The second half of Mark 13 is clearly genuine Essene tradition provided that some qualification in terms of righteousness is introduced. Verses 14, 15, 16, 19, 20 and 24-27 reflect Jesus’s speech. Verses 21-23 might be another indication of early divisions in the gentile church but might also be a reference to other false messiahs like Simon Magus, known by Mark, and particularly Bar Kosiba who claimed to be the messiah in 132 AD and was followed by Jews and Nazarenes alike, an insertion by a later editor.

In Mark 13:14, the abomination of desolation spoken of in Daniel 9:27 was the pollution of the temple with an image of a pagan god (Zeus) under Antiochus Epiphanes. The Emperor Caligula almost repeated the crime when he ordered his own image to be erected in the temple in about 40 AD. King Herod Agrippa I persuaded him to change his mind. Mark and his readers would have known this and interpreted it nevertheless as fulfilment of Jesus’s prophecy.

Jesus himself had witnessed the abomination of desolation. It was a similar misdeed by Pontius Pilate who allowed the legions to display their standards in Jerusalem at the start of his prefecture. Josephus does not say they went into the temple, but the relevant parts of Josephus’s works have been censored by clerics. Pilate was certainly being provocative because he brought in his troops by night, so when the citizens found out in the morning it was a fait accompli. For the legionaries, their standards bearing Caesar’s effigy were gods, and, if it was the tenth legion, they carried banners depicting swine—an even viler depravity. Any graven image in God’s house was an abomination to a Jew, especially if it stood for another god. The Essenes must without doubt have regarded this provocation as a sign of the times.

Mark uses the circumlocution “where it ought not” when he meant temple. He refrained from using the word temple as being too vexatious since he was writing about the time when the destruction of the temple was a bone of contention, but adds a note to draw the reader’s attention to it. (It was not Jesus’s aside because he was not expecting what he said to be read.)

Mark has no obvious reference to a provocative act but in Luke 17:37 in a passage that ends another apocalyptic speech by Jesus (or the same one misplaced) Jesus says: “Wheresoever the body is, thither will the eagles be gathered together”. Though a paraphrase of Job 39:29-30 Jesus is plainly meaning the standards of the Roman legions which were called eagles. The eagles here and in Job are plainly not eagles but vultures, which is just how the Nazarenes, indeed most Jews, will have seen the Romans.

It was probably Pilate’s profane act which led the Essenes to conclude that the appointed time had come, and everyone had to flee to the mountains to become barjonim. In Matthew 24:28 the quotation about the eagles seems totally misplaced being apparently bizarrely associated with the coming of Daniel’s one unto the Son of man, the glorious messiah. In fact however it is used as a closing bracket, effectively referring back to the abomination of desolation which is the opening bracket (Mt 24:15) of his lengthy description of the day of the Lord.

Mark 13:15 and 13:16 seem cryptic but are fully reconstituted in Luke 17:26-32 and are apparently part of Jesus’s speech. The reference is to the flood of Noah and the destruction of Sodom when God rained judgement on the people, only the elect being spared. In one case, the flood, it was sensible to take refuge on the roof and in the other, fire and brimstone, it was sensible to take refuge in the mountains and not to look back! Verses 17 and 18 seem to be historic, referring to famine and war in Judaea.

Mark 13:19 is anticipating the end of the world. It echoes Daniel 12:1 where appears the archangel Michael who the Essenes associated with Melchizedek and perhaps the messiah. Verse 20 is obviously Essene—note Mark’s use of the Essenes’ name for themselves, the elect, with the explanation “those he had chosen”. Verse 21 to 23 are Mark’s composition, though the Essenes must themselves have been concerned with false prophets and messiahs.

The remainder becomes purely apocalyptic with few appended phrases or historical material. Verse 26 recalls Daniel 7:13:

Behold there came with the clouds of heaven one like unto the Son of man, and he came even unto the ancient of days, and they brought him near before him. And there was given him dominion, and glory and a kingdom, that all the nations, peoples and languages should serve him: his dominion is an everlasting dominion which shall not pass away, and his kingdom that which shall not be destroyed.

In Daniel, the one like unto the Son of man receives the kingdom to replace a world crushed by a mighty and cruel king depicted as a beast with iron teeth. This expresses perfectly the core of Jesus’s message—a Jewish kingdom of God would replace Rome as the world power forever. The rulers of the new kingdom are the saints of the Most High which means the elect, the Essenes. Mark goes on to explain this in verse 27. The clouds of this passage might well be translated princes (nesiim).

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Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.