The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception

dawn, then work for five hours, after which they don a clean loincloth and bathe — a ritual of purification performed daily. Thus purified, they assemble in a special ‘common’ room and partake of a simple communal meal. Contrary to later popular misconceptions, Josephus does not describe the Essenes as vegetarian. They are said to eat meat.

The Essenes, Josephus says, are well versed in the books of the Old Testament and the teachings of the prophets. They are themselves trained in the arts of divination, and can foretell the future by studying sacred texts in conjunction with certain rites of purification. In their doctrine, according to Josephus, the soul is immortal but trapped in the prison of the mortal and corruptible body. At death, the soul is set free and soars upwards, rejoicing. Josephus compares Essene teaching to that of ‘the Greeks’. Elsewhere, he is more specific, likening it to the principles of the Pythagorean schools.³

Josephus mentions Essene adherence to the Law of Moses: ‘What they reverence most after God is the Lawgiver, and blasphemy against him is a capital offence.’⁴ On the whole, however, the Essenes are portrayed as pacifist, and on good terms with established authority. Indeed, they are said to enjoy the special favour of Herod, who ‘continued to honour all the Essenes’;⁵ ‘Herod had these Essenes in such honour and thought higher of them than their mortal nature required… ‘⁶ But at one point, Josephus contradicts himself — or perhaps slips his guard. The Essenes, he says:

despise danger and conquer pain by sheer will-power: death, if it comes with honour, they value more than life without end. Their spirit was tested to the utmost by the war with the Romans, who racked and twisted, burnt and broke them, subjecting them to every torture yet invented in order to make them blaspheme the Lawgiver or eat some forbidden food.⁷

In this one reference, at variance with everything else Josephus says, his Essenes begin to sound suspiciously like the militant defenders of Masada, the Zealots or Sicarii.

With the exception of this one reference, Josephus’ account was to shape popular images of the Essenes for most of the ensuing two thousand years. And when the Aufklarung, the so-called ‘Enlightenment’, began to encourage ‘free-thinking’ examination of Christian tradition, commentators began to make connections between that tradition and Josephus’ Essenes. Thus, in 1770, no less a personage than Frederick the Great wrote definitively that ‘Jesus was really an Essene; he was imbued with Essene ethics’.⁸ Such apparently scandalous assertions proceeded to gain increasing currency during the latter half of the next century, and in 1863 Renan published his famous Vie de Jesus, in which he suggested that Christianity was ‘an Essenism which has largely succeeded’.⁹

Towards the end of the 19th century, the revival of interest in esoteric thought consolidated the association of Christianity with the Essenes. Theosophy, through the teachings of H.P. Blavatsky, postulated Jesus as a magus or adept who embodied elements of both Essene and Gnostic tradition. One of Blavatsky’s disciples, Anna Kingsford, developed a concept of ‘esoteric Christianity’. This roped in alchemy as well and portrayed Jesus as a Gnostic thaumaturge who, prior to his public mission, had lived and studied with the Essenes. In 1889, such ideas were transplanted to the Continent through a book called The Great Initiate, by the French theosophist Edouard Schure. The mystique surrounding the Essenes had by now begun to associate them with healing, to credit them with special medical training and to represent them as a Judaic equivalent of the Greek Therapeutae. Another influential work, The Crucifixion by an Eye-Witness, which appeared in German towards the end of the 19th century and in English around 1907, purported to be a genuine ancient text composed by an Essene scribe. Jesus was depicted as the son of Mary and an unnamed Essene teacher, whose fund of secret Essene medical knowledge enabled him not just to survive the Crucifixion, but also to appear to his disciples afterwards as if ‘risen from the dead’. George Moore undoubtedly drew on this work when, in 1916, he published The Brook Kerith and scandalised Christian readers across the English-speaking world. Moore, too, portrayed Jesus as a protege of Essene thought, who survives the Crucifixion and retires to an Essene community in the general vicinity of Qumran. Here, years later, he is visited by a fanatic named Paul, who, quite unknowingly, has come to promulgate a bizarre mythologised account of his career and, in the process, promote him to godhood.

The Essenes depicted in The Brook Kerith derive ultimately from the ‘stereotyped’ Essenes of Pliny, Josephus and Philo, imbued now with a mystical character which endeared them to esoteric- oriented writers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. To the extent that educated readers knew anything of the Essenes at all, this was the prevailing image of them. And something of this image was retained even by more critical commentators, such as Robert Graves, who in other respects sought to demystify Christian origins.

When the Dead Sea Scrolls came to light, they seemed, on the surface at least, not to contain anything that conflicted with the prevailing image of the Essenes. It was only natural, therefore, that they should be associated with the established conceptions.

As early as 1947, when he first saw the Qumran texts, Professor Sukenik had suggested an Essene character for their authorship. Father de Vaux and his team also invoked the traditional image of the Essenes. As we have noted, de Vaux was quick to identify Qumran with the Essene settlement mentioned by Pliny. ‘The community at Qumran’, Professor Cross concurred, ‘was an Essene settlement.’¹⁰ It soon became regarded as an established and accepted fact that the Dead Sea Scrolls were essentially Essene in their authorship, and that the Essenes were of the familiar kind — pacifist, ascetic, celibate, divorced from public and particularly political issues.

The community at Qumran, the consensus view contends, built upon the much earlier remains of an abandoned Israelite fortress dating from the 6th century BC. The authors of the scrolls arrived at the site some time around 134 bc, and the major buildings were erected around 100 bc and thereafter — a chronology safely and uncontroversially pre-Christian. The community was said to have thrived until it was decimated by an earthquake, followed by a fire, in 31 bc. During the reign of Herod the Great (37-4 bc), Qumran was abandoned and deserted, and then, in the reign of Herod’s successor, the ruins were reoccupied and rebuilding undertaken. According to the consensus, Qumran then flourished as a quietist, politically neutral and disengaged enclave until it was destroyed by the Romans in ad 68, during the war that also involved the sack of Jerusalem. After this the site was occupied by a Roman military garrison until the end of the 1st century. When Palestine rose in revolt again between ad 132 and 135, Qumran was inhabited by rebel ‘squatters’.¹¹ It was a neat, conveniently formulated scenario which effectively defused the Dead Sea Scrolls of whatever explosive potential they might have. But the evidence seems to have been ignored when expediency and the stability of Christian theology so dictated.

There is a contradiction, quite apart from the geographical question, in de Vaux’s assertion that the passage from Pliny, quoted here on page 20, refers to Qumran — a contradiction which pertains to the dating of the scrolls. Pliny is referring, in this passage, to the situation after the destruction of Jerusalem. The passage itself indicates that Engedi has likewise been destroyed — which it was. The Essene community, however, is described as still intact, and even taking in a ‘throng of refugees’. Yet even de Vaux acknowledged that Qumran, like Jerusalem and Engedi, was destroyed during the revolt of AD 66-73. It would thus seem even more unlikely that Pliny’s Essene community is in fact Qumran. What is more, Pliny’s community, as he describes it, contains no women, yet there are women’s graves among those at Qumran. It is still, of course, possible that the occupants of Qumran were Essenes, if not of Pliny’s community, then of some other. If so, however, the Dead Sea Scrolls will themselves reveal how ill informed about the Essenes Pliny was.

The term ‘Essene’ is Greek. It occurs only in classical writers — Josephus, Philo and Pliny — and is written in Greek as ‘Essenoi’ or ‘Essaioi’. Thus, if the inhabitants of Qumran were indeed Essenes, one would expect ‘Essene’ to be a Greek translation or transliteration of some original Hebrew or Aramaic word, by which the Qumran community referred to themselves.

Accounts of the Essenes by classical writers are not consistent with the life or thought of the community as revealed by either the external evidence of archaeology or the internal evidence of the texts themselves. Josephus, Philo and Pliny offer portraits of the Essenes which are often utterly irreconcilable with the testimony of Qumran’s ruins and of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The evidence at Qumran, both internal and external, repeatedly contradicts their accounts. Some of these contradictions have been cited before, but it is worth reviewing the most important of them.