Jesus and the Essenes

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In the Gospel of Luke, an angel appears to the Virgin Mary and announces: “And now you will conceive in your womb and bear a son and you will name him Jesus. The Gnostic belief that matter and creation was evil was also vigorously combated by Christians who saw this as an affront to the intentions of their good creator God.

The Dead Sea Scrolls reveal, if anything, that Christianity was not a unique spiritual and religious phenomenon, but had much in common with the Essenes. Since the classical sources of Josephus, Philo, and Pliny represented the Essenes as a secretive, initiatory community given to the study of “mysteries” and the pursuit of esoteric practices, healing, and various forms of divination, it was not all that difficult to imagine the Essenes as playing a secret, hidden role in facilitating and orchestrating public and political events from behind the scenes.

The scrolls help us illuminate the stage when this transpired, but these movements may have existed as independent scenes rather than partners in a direct dialogue. And so, they were Jews who kept all the Jewish observances, but they would not offer sacrifice or eat meat. The Dead Sea Scrolls are the collected writings discovered in the caves near Qumran in 1946 by an Arab shepherd boy who took several of the manuscripts to a black-market antiquities dealer in Bethlehem.

The Teacher of Righteousness of the Scrolls would seem to be a prototype of Jesus, for both spoke of the New Covenant; they preached a similar gospel; each was regarded as a Savior or Redeemer; and each was condemned and put to death by reactionary factions.It was Judy, moreover, who sent Jesus “to Persia, to Egypt, yea to India, that there might be complete the more perfect knowledge of the material ways in the activities of Him that became the Way, the Truth! Drower connect the Mandaeans with the Nasaraeans described by Epiphanius, a group within the Essenes according to Joseph Lightfoot. Others follow this line and a few argue that the Teacher of Righteousness was not only the leader of the Essenes at Qumran, but was also identical to the original Messianic figure about 150 years before the time of the Gospels. Although the Essenes used a solar calendar, similar to the Julian/Gregorian (Christian) calendar used today, its purpose is not clear.

And certain features of the early Christian community in Jerusalem seem to have echos of Essene influence, as Capper has shown.

Interest in the Essenes and Gnostics alike has been stimulated by the post-war discoveries of caches of manuscripts relating to them.

Golb's book presents observations about de Vaux's premature conclusions and their uncontroverted acceptance by the general academic community. The only known literary parallels are in Essene texts from Qumran such as the Community Rule, which has similar phrases such as the "house of Perfection and Truth in Israel" ( Community Rule 1QS VIII 9) and "house of Truth in Israel. At the conclusion of his book, Joseph determines that the Essenes are “a missing link in the study of early Christian origins” (169). Pagans and Christians alike were suspicious of the Manichees’ secretive ascetic lifestyle; the pagan emperor Diocletian issued an edict against them at the end of the third century, and even after Constantine had declared that pagans and Christians should be allowed to worship whatever gods they liked, the Manichees continued to be singled out, banned and persecuted.Both the Essenes and Christians practiced a ritual of immersion by water, however the Essenes had it as a regular practice instead of a one time event.