AW! Epistles
From Dr Margaret T
Abstract
Monday, 09 August 2004
I have the following comments on: AskWhy! on Essene Life and Beliefs - Christianity Revealed
Is there any evidence that Joseph, Jesus’ father was a scholar living partly in the world and partly in the monastery? Also was Mary a nun at Qumran? After all nazareth is not mentioned in any Roman document or map. This would make it feasible for Nazarite or Nazarene to be pertinent. Also what of Mary of Magdala she is often depicted wearing the black of the Nazarene nun? If the wedding at Cana was part of the essene code to inform those in the know that Jesus and Mary were married and later had 3 children, Damaris, Justus often held by his mother in paintings, and later Joses is there evidence in any of the scrolls? I imagine the Pope’s brigade probably bought them to hide the evidence which was common in 1st century circles?
I like to go back to the earliest sources to avoid later accretions to these myths, and the earliest gospel is acknowledged to be Mark. Joseph is invisible in this book, and my conclusion is that Jesus, like many Essenes, was taken in by the order as a waif. He therefore had no father, and his mother might indeed have been rejected by respectable society because she had had an illegitimate child, whether voluntarily or by rape—it did not matter how to the Jews of the time. Of course, if she had been raped by a Roman, or had sexual relations with him voluntarily, she would have been particularly scorned. I assume that the mother would also have been taken into the order. So, I think it likely she was a nun, whether at Qumran or some other Essene camp. Take a look at:
http://askwhy.co.uk/christianity/0315TheMarys.html
You also seem not to have looked at:
http://askwhy.co.uk/christianity/0230Nazarene.html
http://askwhy.co.uk/christianity/0290VirginBirth.html ff.
I think it is quite wrong to imagine that Jesus was married, to judge by the Scrolls. The senior Essenes were celibate and remained chaste, so far as we can tell, for deeply religious reasons, unless they were homosexuals, as Morton Smith’s discovery might imply. They were like modern Catholic priests and monks, and the village Essenes were like ordinary pious but not professional Catholic Christians. Books like The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail have popularized this marriage myth, but it has no merits in my reading of the evidence, assuming Jesus to have been an Essene—which I am convinced of.
I take the wedding at Cana to have been an Essene, and perhaps an originally Jewish ritual, in which God marries Israel (the land and the people, whence the many personifications of Israel as the betrothed maiden and the unfaithful spouse in the Jewish scriptures.
http://askwhy.co.uk/christianity/0380BrideIsrael.html
God remains faithful to her but she does not to God, and at the time of the Roman occupation she was “betrothed” to a foreign power—whence the metaphor or parable used by Jesus of “whoever God has joined together, no one can put asunder”, a defiance of Rome in fact! The hierogamos or sacred marriage had a long history in the ANE, and it seems unlikely to me that the Jews did not have the same ritual. It was dropped after the Jewish wars by the rabbis, who also dropped most reference to messianic movements. The Christians retained it in diluted form as the marriage of the Church to Christ.
It would not surprise me though that the idea of Jesus marrying was an early heresy used by mainly secular authorities to give their regimes kudos, as The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail argues. You will need to read more of the pages.
Thank you. Do hope you are recovering. I have to disagree, but that is part of enquiry. You see, Prince Michael of Albany has all of the truth, in family records. Jesus as the David had to marry, to continue the family tree. Yes I have looked at the other sites!
You are right that enquiry entails disagreement, but the disagreement must be based on sound evidence not merely be opinion, if it is to be anything other than squabbling. I cannot see what this Prince and his family has to do with whatever the Essenes were doing around the time of Jesus. What is plain, though, is that Jesus denied that he was of the line of David (Mark 12:35-37) on the grounds that a father (and also therefore an ancestor) could not call his son lord, and be respected. The father in Jewish society was always the lord over his sons and successors.
The evidence I present overwhelmingly shows Jesus was an Essene leader, and Essene leaders did not marry. In any case, the idea that there was a Jewish royal line 1000 years after David is absurd, and David was, in any case, like his father Solomon, a myth. Judaism did not begin until 417 BC when the Persian minister Ezra dedicated the temple.
Jesus was almost certainly a waif and an orphan who never knew his father, which is why Joseph never appears in the earliest gospel (Mark). He was invented by the bishops who wanted Jesus to be a family man to suit the earliest gentile recruits, not a member of a brotherhood. Jesus satisfied the crowd in the cited passage in Mark that the Jewish leader need not be of the line of David. They were evidently satisfied that Jesus was in the right mould.
Perhaps you have been too swayed by the faulty but fascinating romantic history of Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln. It is quite common for rulers to claim origins with the gods. The Romans did it, and the Greeks, so what is more likely than that the Gothic kings of the post-Roman empire did the same?
