ESSENES

From Philosopedia

Some of the jars containing scrolls that

were discovered by a Bedouin boy in 1947

ESSENES

The Essenes were members of a Jewish sect that was born of the ferment of ideas in the few centuries before the time of Jesus, when, according to Joseph McCabe, “the imperialist-military movements led to a very wide mingling of cultures.” Josephus mentioned them in his Jewish War, and some have speculated that Josephus might have been an Essene. What Josephus tells of their doctrines and practices “has a singular resemblance to the manner of life which the Jesus of the Gospels recommends,” McCabe notes, implying that many so-called Christian ideas were not original. For example, the Essenes lived in monasteries. They went about Judaea in pairs, healing the sick and exhorting men to virtue. They were vowed to celibacy and poverty, carried no money or change of garments, and had to avoid oaths. Their preaching laid great stress on peace and justice.

Thomas DeQuincey contended that the early Christians were Essenes, and the fact that, while they must have been a prominent feature of the religious life of Judaea, they are never mentioned in the Gospels raises a suspicion that the Christians of the second generation tried to suppress knowledge of them. Inasmuch as the Essenian sect goes back to at least 100 B.C.E.

The implication is that the philosophy of love preached by Jesus was not the Word of God but, rather, the view of the Essenes.

Further, there is evidence of Persian and Hellenistic influences in the sect’s thought. In 1997, Stephen J. Pfann, director in Jerusalem of the Center for the Study of Early Christianity, told a conference of several hundred scholars that the bitter contests over the scrolls had been resolved, that the caves in which the scrolls had been found had now passed from Jordanian to Israeli control, and that it was now possible to concentrate upon interpretations of the desert sect and its impact on both Judaism and Christianity. According to Pfann, in about 30 B.C.E. the Maskil, the leader of a strict and ascetic Jewish sect known as the Essenes, wrote some notes to instruct a two-year novitiate before he could be accepted as a full-fledged Sons of Light and allowed to enter the community. Ordinarily, written notes were not made lest they fall into the “profane” hands of the Sons of Darkness. Pfann reported that

• The Essenes held sacred sessions every night to study sacred texts and find their meanings. They believed they were called into the wilderness to discern divine revelation in the Torah. So the early stages of their discussion was recorded in code until a final version was prepared by the Maskil. He was the visionary. He floated between heaven and earth. He sought revelation in nature, in the movement of the sun, moon, and stars.

Freethinkers’ interest in the scrolls is focused on the findings by John Allegro. He has charged that the Catholic Church deliberately suppressed parts of the Essene texts. As of 1995, the Dead Sea Scrolls had not been fully made public and, again, the implication was that powerful vested interests are adamant in wishing to keep them secret lest it become obvious that Jesus was simply another Essene, nothing more.

A 1998 work, Hershel Shanks’s The Mystery and Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls, disagrees with Edmund Wilson’s earlier assessment, that the most important of the scrolls foreshadowed Christian doctrine. Wilson found that the Qumran sect was “more than Bethlehem or Nazareth, the cradle of Christianity.” Shanks disagrees, holding that “Jesus is not in the scrolls,” that the scrolls are Jewish, not Christian, documents, and that their value lies in revealing that “we had not previously known about the situation of Judaism at the dawn of Christianity.” According to Shanks, the Scrolls show there were several Judaisms when Christianity was born. One was Christianity, the other Rabbinic Judaism.

Richard Bernstein, writing in The New York Times (1 April 1998), found the Shanks view

• arresting, even shocking to some. We can be thankful to Mr. Shanks for illuminating the documents that produced it, even as we wish he had given us fuller explanations of the scholarly and theological debates that the discovery of the scrolls has always entailed.

(See entries for John Allegro and for Edmund Wilson, author of The Scrolls from the Dead Sea (1955).)

{CE; The New York Times, 27 July 1997; RE}