Black Spirituality Religion : JESUS WAS AN ESSENE...

Aqil

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The Christian church, in its organization, its sacraments, its teaching and its literature is related - and in its early stages may have been identical - with the New Covenanters who were known as the Essenes, some of whom wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Some of the consequences of the new knowledge that has come into our possession with the Qumran discoveries - and which is still accumulating - is the way in which it revises our understanding of events and circumstances in the New Testament narrative. Although as yet more questions are raised than answered, they are questions that in themselves imply a changed viewpoint.

What in the past was so often silhouetted against a blank background is suddenly seen in its natural context. Although this does not mean that we are immediately able to establish a firm relationship between an event or discourse and this new context, it does mean that in many cases we can see indications clear enough to suggest that they be explored.

In taking up some of these indications we are asking the reader to remember that we are not portagonists of particular hypotheses or anxious that suggested explanations be sustained; we are eager only that there be an honest effort - diligent and responsible, but not held back by an excessive reverence for tradition - to give what is told us in the canonical scriptures its most natural and probable interpretation. What follows merely illustrates what the approach of such an effort might be.

What are we to say, for instance, in the light of our new knowledge, of John the Baptist, who the Gospels tell us was brought up in the desert, the wilderness of Judea? Can we any longer imagine him wandering about, sustaining himself somehow in solitude in the unrelieved desolation of this wilderness, and then coming forth and preaching a doctrine that is only coincidentally similar to that of the covenanters whose monastery was in the area where John was reported to have lived?

Where did John get his ideas? And his ascetic practices? And his baptism? It is true that he departed from the ideas of the Dead Sea sect, but it is also true that he had to have some ideas from which to make departures. Where else shall we look when the evidence pooints so plausibly to the Qumran monastery? That John was, in the broader sense of the term, an Essene can scarcely be doubted. In this same broader sense, were not his followers also to be numbered with the Essenes?...

Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist. Some of his disciples were drawn from John's following. Can Jesus, any more than John, be thought of as having been unconnected with Essenic communities before he decided that John's version of the Messianic faith was the one he was ready to adopt? Just as Jesus later made considerable departures from John's emphasis, had not John previously made similar departures from the emphasis of the community to which he had belonged? (We say "had belonged," but actually we are not entitled to assume that John had left his community or had been expelled from it because of nonconforming practices any more than we need assume that in establishing his own teaching, Jesus had made a definite break with John.)
 
How did Jesus find his disciples? Why were they 12 in number? Were they - or some of them - his brothers in one of the Essenic sects? How better can we account for their lack of hesitation in laying aside the matters in which they had been employed and immediately joining him? Surely, in the mission to which he felt he had been called, he needed to set up at least a simple organization, and so he used the pattern of the Essenic sects, and called to himself from his own sectarian community these men whom he knew and made them his "Twelve." Whether he himself forsook this community (and if so, when?) is a question to which we will come a little further on.

There is a story in the Gospels which tells us of Jesus disputing with scholars in the Temple when he was only 12 years old. Some commentors have thought this story more likely to be legendary than the report of an actual event. But suppose that Jesus was taken when he was a boy - as we know other boys were - to be taught by the "masters" in one of the Essenic sects? Not only would he learn the "canonical" scriptures - those that all Jews accepted - but also the sectarian writings with their special point of view. What difficulty is there, then, in seeing Jesus as an unusually responsive student who already had committed many of the scriptures to memory and who, being Essenic, was contending in the Temple against the Pharisaic scholars, who were fascinated by his use of proof-texts, and to keep him talking so that they could marvel at so much learning in one so young?

It may seem as though we are assuming too much in supposing that Jesus was brought up as an Essene. But he was certainly not brought up as a Sadducee; and in view of his hostility to the Pharisees, he is not likely to have been brought in that sect either. So it was an Essenic sect or nothing. As Jesus obviously knew the scriptures well, it is impossible that he had not been schooled. We cannot believe then, that he belonged to no sect at all. Thus, even by a process of elimination, we see the strong probability that his education was Essenic, and that his entire outlook relates him to the Essenes.

In sending his disciples on a missionary campaign, Jesus tells them that they shall go forth "by two and two," taking "a staff only, no bread, no wallet, no money in their purse" [Mark 6: 7-8]. How were they to be maintained? Where would they sleep? Who would feed them? In the past, the only answer that could be given to these questions was that there were hospitable people in Galilee who would do these things for strangers with a religious message, or else that the disciples of Jesus were unusually well-equipped with relations and friends.

What now immediately leaps to mind is the suggestion that they were expecting to be received in the Essenic colonies, which we know existed in the cities and villages, as described by Philo and Josephus. From the Damascus Document too, we learn of the "session of the cities" and that there were "camps." Since the disciples of Jesus belonged to the Essenic movement, they were entitled to hospitality in accordance to its rules.

But Jesus anticipates the possibility that they will not invariably be welcome. Not all of the colonies or camps are favorable to Jesus, perhaps because of his claim to be a prophet. (We are leaving out of account the contested question as to whether Jesus, at this point - or at any - made a larger claim than this.) In the event that the disciples were not received by the colonies, they had instructions from Jesus as to what to do. "And whatsoever place shall not receive you, and they hear you not, as ye go forth thence shake off the dust that is under your feet for a testimony unto them" (Mark 6:11). Which in itself has an Essenic flavor!
 
Where did Jesus spend his "forty days in the wilderness?" Perhaps the phrase is metaphorical. Some commentators have thought so, believing that a literal sojourn of several weeks in a deserted place was unlikely. Perhaps they are right. But we see now how they may have been only partly right. Jesus would not have had to spend these several weeks unsheltered. He could have gone to the monastery in Qumran. He could have lived for a while, as some monastics did, in one of the caves. After fasting, he might have noticed some of the stones that are so abundant in this area, and wished that they might be "turned into bread." Indeed, it could have been more than a wish; hunger brings on precisely such hallucinations. And he saw it as a temptation to believe in magic, in his power to perform a miracle, and quoted a verse from the scripture he knew so well: "Man shall not live by bread alone."

A much more controversial hypothesis may be suggested as a new and more illuminating interpretation of the expulsion of Jesus from "Nazareth" after he had identified himself as the one predicted by a passage in the book of Isaiah. We will leave to the next section the question of whether Nazareth was an actual city or a much wider area. Luke's Gospel merely says that Jesus "came to Nazareth where he had been brought up: and he entered, as his custom was, into the synagogue on the Sabbath day.")

It has usually been assumed that in the cities of Palestine at this period there was a synagogue in each city, of which all the inhabitants who wished to do so made use, both for sabbath worship and for instruction in religion. This may indeed have been the case. But we do not know. The origin of the synagogue is shrouded in obscurity. Even the name itself involves questions that it would take many pages barely to outline. In Greek - and the word synagogue is Greek, not Hebrew or Aramaic - the primary meaning is an assembly rather than a building. There is, of course, a Hebrew word that the Greek word translates. But this too, means an assembly, originally for any purpose, but eventually almost always for religious purposes...

The question that arises, however, in the context of this story in Luke (4:16-30) is whether the "general" synagogue, if such existed, was not a meeting place of the Pharisees. It was they who developed the synagogue as the word is usually construed. Did Essenes attend the Pharisaic synagogue? Or did they make their own quite independent provisions? Everything we know from the Scrolls indicates the latter. So does what we know about the Essenic sects from our other sources. If the Essenes and Pharisees observed the sabbath together, in a common place of worship, the fact is so remarkable that it would revise considerably our view of the relationships between the Jewish sects...

Where, then, did Jesus go when he went to the synagogue? Was it to the synagogue of the Pharisees? It seems hardly likely. He was sharply opposed to the Pharisees, and criticized them freely. In the light of our new knowledge, linking him so definitely to the Essenic sects, it is all but certain that he went to the meeting place of an Essenic order - indeed the very community where, to use Luke's language, "he was brought up." In this case, the "synagogue" was not a building, so designated, but an assembly, a sabbath meeting of "The Many." May we not suppose, then, that he belonged still to this community, and having become widely known as a teacher, it was appropriate that "The Many" should desire to hear him and consequently had a scroll of Isaiah delivered to him, so that he could read and expound on it?...
 
The passage Jesus chose was from the 61st chapter of Isaiah, verses 1 & 2. "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good tidings to the poor: He hath sent me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind; to set at liberty them that are bruised; to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord." This prophecy, said Jesus, when he had given back the scroll to the attendant, was there and then being fulfilled. And the assembly marveled at the excellence of his exposition. Presently, however, having warned them at he did not expect them to believe him, since a prophet is never "acceptable in his own country," he told them that he himself was the "Anointed" who was fulfilling the Isaiah prophecy...

To the assembled "Many" this was blasphemy, and they hastened to "cast him forth," even trying to throw him down headlong from a precipitous place at the brow of a hill, but he managed to escape them. Was this the rejection of Jesus by his own sect? Is it an indication of what he meant when he warned his disciples that some of the Essenic "colonies" might not receive them? And what he had in mind when lamented that there were places where he could do nothing "because of unbelief"?

As we shall see later, no matter what the case was with early Christian communities, Jesus, as the Gospels depict him, besides giving evidence of belonging to an Essenic order, also shows many signs of independence - and even of being critical of certain Essenic practices...

None of the above is set forth as assured exegesis. All that is intended is the application of our new insights to events that may become more meaningful if we can learn to see them in a clearer context. Any one hypothesis may be set up only to be knocked down by further information or clearer perception; but it then becomes possible to erect a better hypothesis, and this is what the scholars should be doing...
 
One of the most perplexing of New Testament problems is the question of how it came to be that the Jerusalem church was ruled by James the Just. What happened to the original Twelve as such we do not know, although we know something of the activities of a few of them such as Peter. Peter himself, however, although an influential figure among the Jerusalem Apostles, was less so than James the Just.

The latter seems to have had his own "Twelve," and to have arrived at the superintendency of the Jerusalem church with no association with Jesus during the time of his ministry. He is said to have been the brother of Jesus ("brother of our Lord"), but this has led to many difficulties, such as the doctrinal one of maintaining "the perpetual virginity" of Mary, and the historical one of explaining how James acquired a position that Jesus in the Gospels seemed to have given to Peter...

Moreover, we learn from the Church Father Eusebius, quoting Hegesippus (circa 160 AD), that James was "holy from his mother's womb, drank no wine nor strong drink, nor ate animal flesh: no razor came on his head, nor did he anoint himself with oil or use the bath. To him only was it permitted to enter the Holy of Holies. His knees became hard like a camel's, because he was always kneeling in the Temple, asking forgiveness for the people"...

The description here is that of a Nazarite. Why did Mary dedicate James "from his mother's womb" to Nazaritic austerities and do less than that for Jesus? Let us, since we cannot answer the question, accept the assertion. But there is a much harder question: How could James enter the Holy of Holies, which the High Priest himself was only permitted to enter once a year? Moreover, what does it mean that he kneels in the Temple, constantly asking forgiveness for "the people"? Was it because he saw in James too dangerous a rival that the High Priest Ananas had him assassinated, for which he was deposed by Agrippa II? That the community over which James presided did spend a good deal of time in and about the Temple is attested, apparently, by the story of Paul and the riot that occurred there, incited by the charge that Paul was no longer a faithful Jew...

Eusebius also quotes a lost book of Clement of Alexandria, The Institutions, in which Clement writes that "Peter and James and John, after the ascension of our Saviour, though they had been preferred by the Lord, did not contend for the honor, but chose James the Just as bishop of Jerusalem." From this it would seem that the three who had been closest to Jesus felt unequal to the situation that confronted them after his death - or that they came to feel so after a time - and nominated James to be the superintendent of the community in which they were the most natural leaders.
 

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