
Part One: Who exactly were the mysterious Essenes?
by
Damien F. Mackey
“[Marvin] Vining contends that the Essenes were the scribes in the Gospels,
the ones whom Jesus said sat in Moses’ seat in Matthew 23”.
James Bradford Pate
Why are not the Essenes, a most prominent religious group in Palestine, ever referred to in the Bible, at least under the name of ‘Essenes’?
This is a burning question repeatedly asked by Marvin Vining, an Anabaptist-Methodist, in his book, Jesus the Wicked Priest: How Christianity Was Born of an Essene Schism (Rochester, Vermont: Bear and Company, 2008).
Who were these Essenes?
And what were their origins?
Some have argued that the Essenes were the strict warrior-group, the Hasidaeans, in the Maccabean times.
“Dr. J. L. Teicher, himself a Jew and a distinguished Cambridge scholar”, on the other hand, “went so far as to argue that the Dead Sea manuscripts “are quite simply Christian documents”.” (Ahmed Osman, Christianity: An Ancient Egyptian Religion).
Likewise, Osman himself attempted to connect Jesus and his followers to the Essenes (ibid.): “The very name “Essenes” indicates that they were followers of Jesus”.
Whilst Marvin Vining will clearly show that a lot of Jesus’s teaching, and anger, were directed against the extreme doctrines of the Essenes - who could not therefore have been Jesus’s early followers - a Hasidaean origin does not seem to me to be too far-fetched at all, especially given my view that the Maccabean times overlap with the life of Jesus Christ - that Gamaliel’s Judas the Galilean, at the time of the census (Acts 5:37), was none other than Judas Maccabeus.
Marvin Vining, however, not only asks the most relevant question, but he also seeks to answer it. We read for instance in this post about Vining’s conclusion:
Book Write-Up: Jesus the Wicked Priest
Posted on November 4, 2013by jamesbradfordpate
https://jamesbradfordpate.wordpress.com/2013/11/04/book-write-up-jesus-the-wicked-priest/
Vining argues that the Essenes had the power to contribute to Jesus’ death because they had clout with Herod, according to Josephus, plus they had influence on Jewish halakah, for Vining contends that the Essenes were the scribes in the Gospels, the ones whom Jesus said sat in Moses’ seat in Matthew 23. (After all, Vining argues, did not the Essenes engage in a lot of scribal activity, since they produced the Dead Sea Scrolls?) Vining also notes that, while the Mishnah does not prescribe crucifixion, the Dead Sea Scrolls did, and so Jesus’ crucifixion was probably due to Essene influence.
[End of quote]
"... the Essenes were the scribes in the Gospels ...", a hugely significant group.
I must admit that I did not have great confidence that Marvin Vining would arrive at the correct answer, given some of his other identifications.
He, for instance, thinks that the angel Gabriel, who announced the birth of John the Baptist to his father, Zechariah (Luke 1:11-13), was actually the Jewish High Priest.
I also would not be able to accept Vining’s thesis, his book’s title, of Jesus as the Wicked Priest. Firstly, it is unlikely that a strict Jewish sect would have recognised Jesus as a priest at all.
However, Marvin Vining has, to my satisfaction at least, worked out what so many others before him have been unable to do. To identify precisely who were the Essenes, a group un-mentioned in the Bible under that name.
I do not think that I would ever have been able to reach this conclusion, which seems so obvious once it has been properly explained, as Vining manages to do.
This does not mean that I can agree with various other of the book's major conclusions - though finding it all highly informative.
Unfortunately, there are some wild conclusions (so I think) also reached in the book.
For example, that Gabriel who announced the birth of John the Baptist to his father, Zechariah, was the High Priest.
I also very much reject one of his main lines of arguments, that Jesus was originally an Essene, but split and caused a schism.
I was happily surprised to find the author so convincingly identify the group that has been such a conundrum to scholars for so long: the Essenes.
Part Two: Menelaus could well have been
the ‘Wicked Priest’
Steven A. Fisdel’s book, The Dead Sea Scrolls:
Understanding Their Spiritual Message, locates the origins of Essenism
firmly within the context of the Maccabean struggles.
In Part One, I fully embraced Marvin Vining’s well argued and convincing thesis that the biblico-historically elusive Essenes were the scribes (also known as the “Herodians”). That does not mean that I accept Vining's book in its entirety, as already pointed out. I have explained there, for instance, why I must reject his notion that the “Wicked Priest” of the Qumran scrolls was Jesus himself (see also below).
George J. Brooke, when writing his review of Rabbi Steven A. Fisdel’s book, The Dead Sea Scrolls: Understanding Their Spiritual Message,
https://www.jstor.org/stable/4193190?seq=1
says of the author that: “He locates the origins of Essenism firmly within the context of the Maccabean struggles ...”.
With this biblico-historical location I would completely agree.
But I would add to it my own chronological twist that the Maccabean period overlaps with the Infancy of Jesus Christ. On this, see e.g. my article:
Judas the Galilean vitally links Maccabean era to Daniel 2’s “rock cut out of a mountain”
(7) Judas the Galilean vitally links Maccabean era to Daniel 2's "rock cut out of a mountain"
Thus the Essenes, well identified by Marvin Vining with the biblical scribes, fit nicely into this revised scenario, this thereby answering the burning question as to why the Essenes, as such, are never mentioned in the Bible?
With that in mind, I can also accept George J. Brooke’s view (whether attributable to the Rabbi or not) that “… for [the Rabbi] the Teacher of Righteousness is probably to be identified as Onias III and the Wicked Priest as Menelaus”.
{Though I would not number Onias as III, which I believe is a fault due to an over-extended chronology}.
David Pardo has come to the same conclusion as to the identities of these two major characters of the Dead Sea Scrolls (“A STATISTICAL IDENTITY FOR THE TEACHER OF RIGHTEOUSNESS IN THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS”).
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