The Essenes and Christianity
Contradictions arise.
Pliny says that Essenes did not engage in business and would “not even dream of carrying on traffic, innkeeping or navigation, for they repudiate every inducement of covetousness.” But the Edgar Cayce readings show that the innkeeper at Bethlehem was an Essene. The Qumran literature pertains only to the monastic life of Essenes, creating the impression for some scholars that all Essenes were cloistered. But Josephus said that four thousand Essenes lived throughout the country. There was, for that matter, a “Gate of Essenes” in the walled city of Jerusalem. All firsthand commentators on the Essenes write about the communal aspect of the sect: All things were owned in common—there were no rich and no poor. Yet Zebedee was a rich man, a businessman. The readings indicate that this may have been a “front”—allowing a prominent businessman to maintain contact with orthodoxy in order to keep up with any developments in high places which might affect the Essenes. An Essene had been planted in Herod’s palace for the same reason. Moreover, all Essenes had to work at something. Zebedee could have hired a manager to run the business; but he was there working with his men when Jesus first approached. Even Mary, who certainly must have been revered by all Essenes, worked in the library while in Egypt and helped with the serving of the wedding feast at Cana. And Jesus, who was accepted as the Messiah by the Essenes even before He was born, was nevertheless known at the beginning of His ministry as the carpenter from Nazareth. Ordinarily this would have kept Him at the bottom of the social ladder, but soon His rich friends were criticizing him for associating so much with the poor.
So contradictions arise. Sometimes, however, the contradictions arise not so much from the evidence as from the personal attitudes of the people who are appraising the evidence. This is inescapable. Despite the great contributions to history made by the Qumran literature, there are still too many gaps in history and in the literature itself for the experts to put aside their debate and reach an agreement on what happened back in those days and how the events back in those days pertained to the life of Jesus. Objectivity can hardly be expected even from men of science who nevertheless hold to certain religious convictions.
In an article on the Essenes, the Catholic Encyclopedia once commented: “There have been many unsubstantiated hypotheses about their (the Essenes’) influence on Christianity. The Dead Sea Scrolls, however, show grounds for suspecting considerable indirect influence, which does nothing to destroy the originality of Christianity.” Some experts hold that the Dead Sea Scrolls actually support the originality of Christianity to a considerable extent, whether “originality” is defined as beginnings or uniqueness. A great deal of supportive evidence existed before the discovery of the Qumran literature, which can become clear by making comparisons between the Bible and the comments of those who wrote about the Essenes in their own time.
For example, both the Essenes and the first Christians held similar attitudes toward communal living, the sacramental aspect of bathing or baptism, in prophecy, in preexistence or reincarnation, in resurrection and immortality, in the casting out of devils, spiritual healing, the working of miracles, the power of prayer, in the equality of mankind, and in a kind of predestination in that all things happen in the fullness of time and can be foreseen.
The Essenes and the first Christians used the same greetings: “Peace be with you.” Several times in the Gospels, Jesus is quoted as saying this; He said it again when appearing to the Apostles in the upper room after His resurrection. The Essenes were opposed to taking oaths; Herod the Great excused them from an oath of allegiance to him, knowing he could take them at their word. In Matthew 5, Jesus says: “You are not to swear at all … Plain ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ is all you need to say.” Anything more that can come to evil.
Just as the Essenes eschewed wealth, Jesus told a rich young man to sell all he had, give the money to the poor, then follow Him. Jesus said it would be easier for a camel to enter the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. Just as the Essenes had their brotherly meal of bread and must, Jesus and the Apostles had their ‘Last Supper,’ and the early Christians called their similar meal the “agape”—the feast of love.
The list is endless.
Professor Millar Burrows, the Winkley Professor of Biblical Theology, at Yale University, and a recognized expert on the Dead Sea Scrolls, once remarked that after seven years of intensive study of the Scrolls and fragments he had not come upon any information which, in his opinion, would require any changes in basic Christian tenets. He said:
“The history of our religion is no less a history of God’s work if it is shown to be a continuous process involving contacts, relationships and development. As a matter of fact, Christian theologians have never thought of it as anything other than that. They have always been more or less aware, and increasingly so of late, that Christianity is closely related to other religions at many points and has acquired and assimilated much from other religions. It arose in the first place within Judaism and was first offered to Jews by Jews as the true Judaism, not as replacing but as fulfilling the faith of their fathers. Jesus was the one for whom Moses and the prophets looked.”
But, as Burrows points out, the theologians know this, but the average layman doesn’t. So the layman becomes alarmed when he hears informed and reputable men suggest that, because of the Dead Sea Scrolls, it is now apparent that many of the basic Christian concepts were not original with Jesus. As Burrows puts it, anybody who believes that the King James Version of the Bible is infallible simply doesn’t know the facts. This applies as well to Douay and to the ancient Greek and Hebrew texts on which present translations are based. This is something else theologians have known for a long time; the Qumran writings confirmed it. Though the editing appears to be minor, there still has been some editing, and there might have been much more.
There has been another kind of tampering. The Qumran writings establish that the Essenes treasured the Book of Enoch. The Acts of the Apostles show that the first Christians also treasured it. In the Third Christian Century, the Fathers and Apologists of the Church decided that the book was not canonical and it was dropped from the Bible. Copies of it disappeared, and it was not seen again until a British explorer found an Ethiopian version of it in that country in 1773. The book is distinctly Essenic because it is so specifically Messianic. It appears to have been written by four different authors over a period of almost two hundred years, which was one of the reasons it was not adjudged canonical. The importance of the Enoch manuscript to the Essene community is especially interesting in light of the Cayce information that suggests Enoch was one of the incarnations of the soul who would become Jesus.
In terms of the Essenic-Christian relationship, the Book of Enoch is important both for history and for content. Exegetes agree that the first sections were written in the last third of the Second Century B.C. by a pious Jew who lived in the Land of Dan near the headwaters of the Jordan in the general area that became Galilee. His opinions make him sound Hasidim, one of the pious Jews who fled north from Juda to get away from the corruption and persecution. These people were the precursors of the Pharisees. Later portions are definitely Pharisaic regarding the type of Messiah who would come; but then the writing becomes almost Sadducean, omitting references to a Messiah. The last part, written between 95 B.C. and 65 B.C., resumes the Pharisaic expectation of a Messiah, discusses Enoch’s visions, and complains about the slaying of the “righteous.” When the book is read with the Essenes in mind, it falls into place historically; out of the Essenic context, it has a tone of doubtful validity. Valid or not, the Early Fathers, by banning the book, erased from history a large slice of knowledge that would have provided an important link in the Essenic progression to Christianity.
Also banned was a companion writing, the Book of the Secrets of Enoch, of which no copies were known for almost fifteen hundred years, until five manuscripts were found in Russia and Servia. This book is even more Essenic. It tells of Enoch’s visit to the seven heavens and how God told him about the creation of the world, about the fallen angels, and gives him the rudiments of cosmology and astrology. Returning to earth, Enoch gives this information to his sons and, among other things, tells them not to take oaths. Assuring them of the coming of the Messiah, Enoch returns to heaven, and there is rejoicing among his people. The book was probably written in Egypt between 30 B.C. and A.D. 70.
When one considers how strangely these two books disappeared from circulation, one considers that it is equally strange that the four authors of the Gospels, who go to such lengths to prove the divinity of Jesus, give no attention to the years of His life between twelve and thirty. Was this intentional? Was it an oversight? Was it editing?
There has always been a portion of the sacred literature which has been withheld from the general public. In the time of Jesus, the hidden literature was known as the cabal or cabala and was oral tradition supposedly handed down from Abraham. It is known that Paul studied the cabal under Gamaliel, then president of the Sanhedrin and an advocate of leniency toward Christians. This cabal, it is said, contained some Christian references, such as the concept of a Divine Trinity. Later, when the Early Fathers were putting the Bible together around the start of the Fourth Christian Century, it is known that they agreed among themselves not to discuss in public some of the books they had read and banned because some of them were so mystical, so heady, that they could endanger the soul of the average person who could not understand them and might be led astray. Teilhard de Chardin was banned for the same reason. Perhaps there has been too much caution, with the result that Christianity has been simplified to a point of Christmas-card sweetness, which can be enjoyed comfortably among friends without the burden of corrective efforts in a world torn by war, hate, violence, extremism and injustice in every land.
Most Qumran experts agree that John the Baptist was an Essene. But if the Essenes were a monastic order, what was John doing at the Jordan? Did he leave the order? Was he dismissed? Was there about to be another division within the Essenes, as there had been numerous times over preceding centuries?
Opinions among the experts on the relationship of Jesus and the Essenes vary, usually reflecting the individual expert’s personal religious convictions. Some—the “radicals,” perhaps—say that Jesus was indeed an Essene, that He had grown up in a monastery, probably at Qumran, and that, around thirty, He either decided that He was the Messiah or was persuaded of it or merely became aware of it, and then went out to begin His ministry, His cousin John accompanying Him. Those holding varieties of this opinion feel that Jesus was certainly a holy man, a good man, a wise man, but He was not of the Divine and that the church He started was eventually influenced far more by the Apostle Paul than by Himself. Others—the “conservatives”—say that Jesus obviously was familiar with Essenic life and thought; but that certainly He, Mary and Joseph knew even before He was born that He was of the Divine, He was the Messiah, and that, as such, He would not have joined any Jewish sect but would have waited quietly at Nazareth until the fullness of His time had come to begin—to originate—what is now called Christianity. Perhaps the truth is a combination of both ideas. For many Christians, the sensitive areas would be the Divinity of Jesus and the originality of His church.
Edgar Cayce was extremely aware of these sensitivities, even in trance. In trance, he told a writer not to call her biography of Jesus “Jesus The Essene” because this would be offensive to a lot of people. Out of offense, people might refuse to give serious consideration to the possibility of an experience which in no way would have detracted from the uniqueness of Jesus as the Son of God, the Son of Man, the Savior. Cayce was equally aware of the sensitivities of many Christians on the lifelong virginity of Mary, realizing that, again out of offense, some people would refuse to give serious consideration to the possibility that the experience of subsequently having other children by Joseph in no way detracted from her uniqueness as the Chosen Vessel of the Messiah by means of a valid virgin birth.
An impressive factor about the Edgar Cayce readings is that so many of the details have subsequently been confirmed by the Qumran literature. For example, before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, no acknowledged expert in history or religion ever put forth the possibility that Jesus, Mary, Joseph, John the Baptist and other leading figures in the Gospels were associated in any way with the Essenes. The Edgar Cayce readings, however, had been producing information regarding the association for over twenty years. Soon after the content of the scrolls became known, numerous experts were quick to recognize the similarities between the Qumran writings and the New Testament. It became unquestionable that John the Baptist had been an Essene, and some suggest that he might have left the monastery after some disagreement. The influence of the Essenes upon Jesus also became clear, and again some experts suggest that He, too, might have broken with the sect over some difference in views. According to the Cayce readings, though all Essenes were not of one viewpoint, there would be nothing unusual in having two Essenes living and working outside a monastery: Jesus and John were simply carrying out their individual roles in the Divine Plan.
The consensus today that Jesus and John were at least greatly influenced by the Essenes produces further food for thought. The extent of the influence, as evidenced in comparing the Qumran writings and the New Testament, could only have resulted from intimate contact. The Bible tells nothing about John between the occasion of his prenatal presence, when Mary visited Elizabeth, and the occasion when we meet him at the Jordan. The life of Jesus between the ages of twelve and thirty is not described in the Bible. If, then, Jesus and John spent their youth as students with the Essenes, they could only have done so with the consent and the desire of their parents, since the community’s rules required that children be submitted by their parents at an early age. This indicates that Mary and Joseph and Elizabeth and Zachary would at least have been sympathetic toward the Essenes if not actual members of the sect, which the readings say they were. That the four authors of the Gospels were either Essenes or profoundly Essene influenced is also the consensus now.
Another area of confirmation is particularly specific. It is the area of astrology. In numerous readings, Cayce said that the Essenes, including Jesus, studied astrology. In 1938, during a reading for the entity who had been Josie, Cayce, in describing the type of records the entity had studied during the Palestinian Period, said, “Those same records of which the men of the East said and gave, ‘By those records we have seen His star.’ These pertained, then, to what you would call today astrological forecasts, as well as those records which had been compiled and gathered by all of those of that period pertaining to the coming of the Messiah.” Though Josephus mentions the Essene faculty for foretelling the future, he does not refer to astrology as the means, and this aspect of Essene life remained unknown.
Then the Qumran literature was discovered. Professor Burrows, in his excellent books on the scrolls, accredits Father Milik for the information “that a fragmentary document from Cave Four gives the signs of the zodiac and connects them with the months and days of each month; it also states the meaning of thunder under a particular sign.” And Professor John Allegro, of the University of Manchester, in his equally excellent study, reports this:
“We have a number of their (Essenes) works referring to the movements of the heavenly bodies, and not all their study was of purely academic interest. For them the stars and their positions could affect men’s lives, and amongst their esoteric documents we have one describing the influence of the heavenly bodies on the physical and spiritual characteristics of those born in certain sections of the Zodiac. One man will be hairy, or long-limbed, or stumpy-fingered, or, more important, be possessed of an abundance or otherwise of the Good Spirit, so that his whole being will be affected according to the sign of the Zodiac which he may claim for his own. And above all, they doubtless looked for a particular constellation which would tell them of a special birth, the coming of One for whom they and the whole Jewish world waited. We need not look far from Bethlehem to find a school of thought from which the Magi story of Matthew could have come.”
Thus the scientists fill in more of the tapestry which may one day present the complete picture of Jesus and the Essenes precisely as Edgar Cayce described it.
At present, there is no way to evaluate scientifically the nature of Edgar Cayce’s psychic faculties. Research into the psychic realm is being done at a number of important universities, and all that has been determined is that certain people do have the faculty of extrasensory perception, certain people do have the faculty of divination, certain people do have the faculty of possessing knowledge which they made no effort to acquire. That is all that has been established today. But as Father Teilhard proffered, man is progressing consistently, irresistibly, inescapably to the perfection of his world, losing ground only when he lets a lack of love and thought detour him to war, hate, violence, extremism and injustice. Each time man gets back on the track, he moves ahead. In light of this, in all likelihood the answer to all the psychic mysteries which surround us today is waiting just ahead to be discovered—or perhaps rediscovered after being stifled by cautiousness or lost by carelessness.
As things are, it would not be merely self-defensive. To suggest that the Qumran experts wouldn’t place much value on the information about the world of Jesus which was produced by the Edgar Cayce readings. On the other hand, the world of Jesus may never be accurately known until it is established where a man like Cayce derived his authority to speak.
Edgar Cayce was convinced that his authority came from God.