CHRISTIANITY is rooted in Palestine in a Jewish environment and in the historical circumstances of a plainly dated period. This assuredly requires no argument. To this time and place we are therefore bound to go for the elucidation of Christian Origins.
But it is by no means easy to relate the life of Jesus and the activities of his original followers, known as Nazoreans (Nazarenes), to the contemporary situation. This is largely due to the character of the New Testament and the paucity of external evidences about the beginnings of Christianity. To reach conclusions which can fairly be regarded as corresponding as nearly as possible to the reality entails a vast amount of analysis and comparison, the patient piecing together of a host of hints and scraps of tradition, and in particular a sympathetic involvement in the affairs of the Jewish people and detachment from considerations of Christian theology.
Because of what the Church has taught for so many centuries it has been extremely difficult for Christian scholars to undertake such an investigation objectively. Those who have embarked upon it and produced most valuable results merit the highest praise. One pioneer, Professor F. C. Burkitt of Cambridge, whom the writer was privileged to know personally, advisedly used these cautionary words: ‘We must be prepared to find the whole drama of the rise of Christianity more confused, more secular, in a word more appropriate to the limitations of its own age, than we should gather from the epic selectiveness of the Creeds and the theological manuals.’1 Such language is necessary, and should be heeded by those theologians who feel quite at liberty to expound Christianity as if it owed little or nothing to its original background of thought. The Bishop of Woolwich, to quote a recent instance, can freely employ key words like Christ and Gospel without apparent concern for their primary meaning and implications.2 Christ is the Greek translation of the Hebrew term Messiah, meaning the Anointed One, and the Gospel, from the Greek Evangel, translating the Hebrew word for Good News, was initially the information that the Messiah expected by the Jews had appeared.
It makes all the difference to our understanding of Christianity if we are enabled to apprehend that it did not begin as a new religion but as a movement of monotheistic Jews who held Jesus to be their God-sent king and deliverer. Here, in a sentence, is what it is imperative to know about the origins of Christianity. Here we have the essential clue to the activities of Jesus and his first followers which helps to compensate for many material facts which are beyond recovery. Armed with this information we can get Christianity in correct perspective, and trace clearly and simply in the light of what is ascertainable how it was transformed into what it afterwards became.
It is often said that Christianity is founded upon a person. That is true. But it is only part of the historical truth. What, so to speak, was the person founded upon? The answer is that he was founded upon an idea, a strange idea current among the Jews of his time, an idea alien to Western thought which many non-Jewish theologians still find very inconvenient, the idea of Messianism. It was Messianism which made the life of Jesus what it was and so brought Christianity into being. It was Messianism, as accepted by Gentile believers, which contributed towards making the deification of Jesus inevitable. It was Messianism which provided the spiritual impulse behind the Jewish war with Rome which broke out in A.D. 66, resulting in the destruction of much authoritative testimony about Jesus and the substantial separation of Gentile from Jewish Christianity.3
The fundamental teaching of Christianity, then, was that in Jesus the Messiah (the Christ) had come. There can be not the shadow of a doubt about this. It is the ultimate conviction on which the whole edifice of Christianity rests, the historical fact on which all the Gospels are agreed. This teaching was the gospel, underlying all the Gospels, the one thing which gave them the right to be so called. The faith of the earliest believers in Jesus was that which voiced itself in the declaration of Peter, as recorded in Mark, ‘You are the Messiah’,4 simply this without any qualification. The persuasion they had was built upon what Jesus had said and done. It was he who had given them cause to conclude that he was the Messiah, and he had done so quite deliberately. But what the Gospels do not tell us is what in the first instance had persuaded him. Unless we can discover why Jesus held himself to be the Messiah, what current teaching about the Messiah he applied to himself, we are not in possession of the key to the mystery of his life and death.
We have no right to say that while Jesus accepted the designation of Messiah he did so in a sense quite different from any expectations entertained in his time. It would be unthinkable for him to do this, firstly because being the Messiah meant answering to certain prophetic requirements which for him were divinely inspired, and secondly because he would consciously have been depriving his people of any possibility of acknowledging him: he would be inviting them to reject him as a false Messiah.
We have to take the view that Jesus believed it to be his calling and destiny to fulfil the Messianic Hope, and to do so in a manner which would conform with the predictions he accepted as authoritative. Our business is to find out the conditions with which Jesus felt he had to comply, and on this basis to follow the course of his actions. Obviously we have to divorce the issue altogether from the paganised doctrine of the incarnation of the Godhead with which for Christians it has become intermingled, since expectation did not identify the Messiah with God, and, indeed, the nature of Jewish monotheism wholly excluded such an idea. Jesus as much as any other Jew would have regarded as blasphemous the manner in which he is depicted, for instance, in the Fourth Gospel.
Taking the Gospels together, and these are the chief source of our information about Jesus, we have in them an epitome of the process by which the traditions about him grew and expanded with the changing needs and fortunes of succeeding generations of believers, Jewish and Gentile, so that Jesus as he appears in them is a composite and somewhat contradictory figure. His image is like the idol of Nebuchadnezzar's dream in the book of Daniel, part gold, part silver, part bronze, part iron and part clay. The gold is there to be extracted, but we cannot take hold of it unalloyed without knowledge of the influences and circumstances to which Jesus himself had responded. It is not enough to look back to him through the minds of much later believers not of Jewish origin: we have imperatively to look forward to him through the pre-Christian development of Messianism.
The coming of the Messiah was not something fortuitous: it was closely linked with a period of history prophetically anticipated, the Last Times or End of the Days, which would precede the inauguration of the Kingdom of God. The Messiah could not appear at any time, but only at the End of the Days, at a time of testing and great tribulation for Israel.
The conception of the Last Times drew upon Biblical predictions relating to the Latter Days and the Day of the Lord, which became combined with Babylonian and Persian ideas of a succession of Ages. During the Ages the forces of Good and Evil would contend with one another, and the struggle would reach its climax in the penultimate Age, being followed by the final Age of peace and bliss, the Kingdom of God. The Last Times would thus be the closing period of the old order, when the assaults of Evil would reach their most malevolent intensity, bringing great misery to humanity and persecution and suffering to the Elect of Israel. When these signs appeared then the Messiah was to be expected.
According to those who studied these matters, it could not be known how long the Last Times would endure, but it could be known approximately when they would begin. For this a basis of calculation had to be available, and it was found in the book of Daniel in the prophecy of the Seventy Weeks,5 later understood to mean seventy weeks of years (490 years). The Last Times could be expected to begin after the lapse of 490 years ‘from the going forth of the commandment [of Cyrus] to restore and build Jerusalem’, that is to say, after about 46 B.C. Those who believed in this interpretation, and were living in the reign of Herod the Great (37–4 B.C.), could accept that the Last Times had now begun, and that therefore before very long the coming of the Messiah was to be expected. This explains why a strong messianic excitement manifested itself among the Jews from this time onward, and why no one before this had claimed to be the Messiah.
The part of the book of Daniel in which the prophecy occurs has been dated about 164 B.C. The author is assuming the name of a man supposed to be living near the end of the sixth century B.C. From other visions of his he appears to have expected the Era of Righteousness would come not very long after his actual time. Some thought it had come in the reign of John Hyrcanus I (137–3 B.C.). We do not know much about earlier calculations, and the one to which we have referred was worked out later when the hopes entertained of the Hasmoneans had been grievously disappointed. It is after 100 B.C. that the literature we have reveals a mounting interest in the Last Times and in the advent of messianic personalities. By the first century of our era it had become quite feverish, and had engendered a state of near hysteria among the people. It was wholly in keeping with the circumstances that a figure like John the Baptist should now appear proclaiming that the Kingdom of God was at hand, and calling upon the people to repent and save themselves from the Wrath to Come. It was no less appropriate that a man like Jesus should be convinced he was the Messiah and announce that ‘the Time is fulfilled’. The calculations of pious scribes confirmed the time, but what was more the conditions of the time reinforced the calculations.
Messianism was a product of the Jewish spirit. It was inspired by the Hebrew reading of the riddle of the creation and destiny of mankind. Though some of its features did not originate with the Hebrews, they absorbed them and brought them into relationship with a great vision of the ultimate Brotherhood of Man under the rule of the One God and Father of all men. The vision was not simply a cherished ideal: it was associated with a plan for its realisation. According to this plan God had chosen and set apart one nation among the nations of the world, neither numerous nor powerful, to be the recipient of his laws, and by observing them to offer a universal example. The Theocracy of Israel would be the persuasive illustration of a World Theocracy: it would be ‘a kingdom of priests and a holy nation’ witnessing to all nations. Manifestly, according to this view, the redemption of humanity waited upon the attainment by Israel of a state of perfect obedience to the will of God. By so much as Israel failed to meet the Divine requirements, by so much was the peace and well-being of mankind retarded.
The history of Israel, seen in this light, was a prolonged schooling, national disposition to go astray having to be corrected by the infliction of appropriate punishments, conquest and oppression by foreigners, pestilence and famine, exile. Internally much depended on the guidance of rulers, priests and kings. These too were judged by whether they ‘did right in the sight of the Lord’. Their failures called for an additional activity by messengers of God in a succession of prophets.
Eventually, it began to be despaired of that the whole people could be brought to the necessary state of perfection. Hopes were pinned on an elect remnant of faithful souls, by whose obedience the redemption would be hastened. They would be the élite of the final World Order, entitled to its highest honours by their loyalty and by their sufferings in this present world. The Messianic Hope became concentrated upon the determined efforts of the pious, the Saints, to observe the Law, thus justifying God in acting speedily. If the time was greatly prolonged even the Elect might prove unequal to the strain. It was imperative for the pious themselves to search out what Divine guidance had been given to set a term to their endurance, what signs were to be expected to intimate that the End of the Days had arrived. The last stage of the evolution of the Messianic Hope envisaged the intervention of God by means of the Anointed Ones, ideal figures, a Prophet like Moses, a perfect Priest, a righteous King of the line of David. These would come in the End of the Days as God's highest appointed representatives to transform the whole world scene and usher in the Kingdom of God.
The scheme of the Messianic Hope, as outlined here, must be understood to be composite and not fully comprehensive. Many ingredients went into the framing of the Hope. Different aspects were emphasised at different times and by different groups. It was accentuated as certain historical situations arose, particularly after the return from the Babylonian Exile, and was not consciously present in the thinking of the Jewish people all the time. Concern with the coming of messianic persons was part of the later expression of the Hope, especially from the second century B.C. onward, though it was nourished on ideas and predictions hundreds of years older, not excluding popular folklore and mythology.
We may select three circumstances as contributing importantly to making the Messianic Hope the powerful influence it became in the first century B.C. One of these was a change in attitude towards the Bible. The Hebrew Bible consists of three divisions; the Law, the Prophets (Joshua to Malachi), and the Writings (beginning with the Psalms and including the book of Daniel). The divisions represent stages of acceptance into canonicity. The Law, as consisting of the five books of Moses, had binding force by the fifth century B.C., or not much later. The Prophets did not acquire their force until about the third century B.C. The Psalms and some other books soon formed the basis of the third division, which was finally settled at the end of the first century A.D. The effects of the recognition of the Law and the Prophets, with the Psalms, as a corpus of sacred Scriptures were far-reaching. It opened the way for a new development, the treatment of these books as the Oracles of God. They became subject to all kinds of interpretation to draw out of them hidden meanings and prognostications.
A second circumstance was the worst calamity which had be-fallen the Jews since the destruction of the Kingdom of Judah and the loss of the Temple at the beginning of the sixth century B.C. The new calamity was seen by pious Jews to be impending as a consequence of the attractions of Hellenism, which since the time of Alexander the Great had made increasing inroads into Jewish life and thought, fostering moral laxity and apostacy. The judgement of God must surely fall upon the nation as it had done in the past. It fully confirmed this opinion when the Seleucid king Antiochus Epiphanes (175–62 B.C.) decreed the abolition of the Jewish religion and converted the Temple at Jerusalem into a shrine of Zeus Olympius. Throughout the country there was great persecution, until resistance was organised by the sons of the aged priest Mattathias of Modim. One son, Judas Maccabaeus, led the revolt in the name of God, and after a series of remarkable successes cleansed and rededicated the defiled Temple. One of the products of this testing time was the book of Daniel. Its apocalyptic dreams and visions were to exercise a major influence on messianic thinking and prediction.
The third circumstance to which we must draw attention is Jewish sectarianism. The experiences of the nation in the time of Antiochus and his immediate successors had administered a severe shock. The people became much more devout. There was revived in them a sense of destiny, of belonging to God in a special way, which demanded faithfulness to the Law revealed to them through Moses. They saw in the victories of the Maccabees the hand of God, outstretched for their deliverance when they were obedient to his commandments. The Messianic Hope comes out strongly in Daniel, where the people of the Saints of the Most High (likened to a Son of Man compared with the Beast figures representing the predatory heathen Empires) are entrusted with God's everlasting kingdom, when all rulers will serve and obey him.6 It began to matter very much to the more spiritually sensitive that the Divine laws should be observed meticulously, and this inevitably gave rise to sectarianism, to competition in holiness. From this period three ways of life in particular are made known to us, those of the Sadducees, Pharisees and Essenes. They were minority movements, numbering only a few thousands in each case, but they were nevertheless extremely influential and gave impetus to the exposition of the Messianic Hope. Unfortunately, as regards the first two, they were also involved in a power-struggle for control of the political affairs of the nation.
From 160 B.C. we are in a new age, an age of extraordinary fervour and religiosity, in which almost every event, political, social and economic, was seized upon, scrutinised and analysed, to discover how and in what way it represented a Sign of the Times and threw light on the approach of the End of the Days. The whole condition of the Jewish people was psychologically abnormal. The strangest tales and imaginings could find ready credence. A new pseudonymous literature came into being, part moral exhortation and part apocalyptic prophecy, a kind of messianic science-fiction. People were on edge, neurotic. There were hot disputes, rivalries and recriminations.
The essence of the Messianic Hope, as we have seen, was the establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth, for which the prerequisite was a righteous Israel, or at least a righteous remnant of Israel. There must be a return to the relationship with God initiated at the Covenant of Sinai. Of this the prophecies of Jeremiah spoke, when he had said:
‘Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a New Covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah . . . After those days, saith the Lord, I will put my Law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people. And they shall teach no more every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord; for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest of them, saith the Lord: for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.’7
Here it was promised that the spiritual infirmity of Israel would be helped by the intervention of God. To become worthy of this interposition was imperative. The three movements to which we have referred, and there were others, were fundamentally responses to this conviction. The Sadducees emphasised a strict and literal adherence to the Laws of Moses and the cultivation of ethics. The Pharisees aimed at the sanctification of the whole of daily life, and formulated new rules which extended the application of the Law to cover all contingencies. The Essenes, determined to be even more faultless, formed close communities from which contamination and impurity could be excluded, and where the utmost simplicity of living and rigid discipline could overcome material and fleshly temptations.
These movements reveal in themselves how deadly serious had become the desire to merit God's intervention. We should be out of tune with the temper of the time if we did not realise this. It was the study of the manner of the redemptive intervention which now accented the advent of messianic figures. The Sadducees, proving everything from express statements in the Law, looked for the coming of the Prophet like Moses.8 The Pharisees and Essenes ranged more widely and brought into prominence the perpetual covenants with Levi and David. The prophecies of Jeremiah had further contained this promise:
‘Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will perform that good thing which I have promised unto the house of Israel and to the house of Judah. In those days, and at that time, will I cause the Branch of Righteousness to grow up unto David; and he shall execute judgement and righteousness in the land. In those days shall Judah be saved, and Jerusalem shall dwell safely. . . For thus saith the Lord; David shall never want a man to sit upon the throne of the house of Israel; neither shall the priests the Levites want a man to offer burnt offerings, and to kindle meat offerings, and to do sacrifice continually.’9
Therefore, it was held, God would intervene by means of Anointed Ones (Messiahs) of the tribes of Levi and Judah. One writer declares: ‘And now, my children, obey Levi and Judah, and be not lifted up against these two tribes, for from them shall arise unto you the salvation of God. For the Lord shall raise up from Levi as it were a High Priest, and from Judah as it were a King: he shall save all the race of Israel.’10
For the Essenes the Priestly Messiah would be the superior of the Royal Messiah, while for the Pharisees, who became disillusioned with hierarchical government, the Messiah par excellence would be the ideal king of the line of David.11 But they admitted the priority of a Levitical messianic personality to the extent that the Davidic Messiah would be preceded by a priestly forerunner in the form of the returned Prophet Elijah, whom they held to have been a priest.12
For a brief period in the latter part of the second century B.C. the greatest hopes were entertained as a result of the victories of the Hasmonean ruler John Hyrcanus I, under whom the Jews not only regained complete independence, but also a territory larger than any under Jewish rule since the reign of Solomon son of David. Not a few were ready to see in John one who combined all the messianic offices, being Prophet, Priest and King.13 But John Hyrcanus was no paragon, and his successors proved to be thoroughly unsatisfactory rulers, despotic, ambitious and unjust. Instead of the Kingdom of God there was war in Israel, and the Essenes had justification for their view that Satan had been let loose on the country.
From this time national affairs played an increasing part in the exposition of the Messianic Hope. It acquired a more personal and political colouring. The cry was raised, ‘Behold, O Lord, and raise up unto them their king, the Son of David, in the time which thou, O God, knowest, that he may reign over Israel thy servant; and gird him with strength that he may break in pieces them that rule unjustly.’14
The change of emphasis in messianic expectations caused much thought to be given to the conditions which the Scriptures indicated would prevail when the Messiah would be revealed. There would be wars and tumults, public strife and divided families, pestilence and famine, persecution of the saints, a host of tribulations. These would be the Woes of the Last Times, presaging the coming of the Messiah. As Jewish affairs went from bad to worse by so much more were messianic convictions intensified. Those who looked for signs could find them in abundance. In 63 B.C. the Romans were called upon to aid John Hyrcanus II against his ambitious brother Aristobulus. There was internecine conflict, the siege and capture of Jerusalem, with the Roman general Pompey committing the enormity of entering the Holy of Holies in the Temple. The Jews lost their brief independence, and their land became a vassal state of Rome. Once more Israel was subject to the heathen, and finally forced to accept at Roman hands a king, who, though he was a professing Jew, was of alien Idumean origin.
The reign of Herod the Great (37–4 B.C.) was from the beginning attended by disorders. Not only had he to preserve his throne by adroit manœuvre and political intrigue in relation to the struggle then going on in the Roman world, he had to govern a people intensely hostile to his regime, only too willing to see in him a manifestation of diabolical sovereignty.
Herod was an ambitious man and a clever one, brave, with regal bearing and qualities of leadership, but he was impulsive and had neurotic tendencies which the circumstances of his reign so aggravated as to convert him into something like the raging ruthless monster his apocalyptic-minded subjects believed him to be. With real and imagined plots against him he could not feel secure until he had destroyed the Hasmoneans around whom popular support could still gather. First to be got rid of was Antigonus, then the boy Aristobulus whom he had made high priest at the age of sixteen, and then the aged former high priest and king, the inoffensive Hyrcanus II. Later the Hasmonean princess Mariamne, whom he had married and genuinely loved, was executed, followed by her mother Alexandra; and to the end of his days the king's fears of conspiracy by family and friends led him on to the destruction even of his own children.
Successfully switching his allegiance from the vanquished Marc Antony to the victorious Octavian, afterwards the Emperor Augustus, Herod reached a height of political power and prestige. But as the friend of Caesar, devoted to the Romans and to the Hellenic way of life, he made himself ever more noxious to his people, who would not be placated even by his grandiose rebuilding of the Temple. They hated and feared him, and were kept from revolt only by the strongly manned fortresses which Herod constructed at strategic points and by his conversion of the country into what we would now call a police state.15 The pious attributed to the wrath of God the great earthquake in Judea in the seventh year of his reign and the persistent droughts followed by pestilence in the thirteenth year of his reign. Such calamities seemed like the plagues of Egypt, and Herod appeared as another Pharaoh of the Oppression.16 The signs seemed certainly to confirm the current interpretation of the prophecies that the Last Times had begun.
For the extreme pietists these days were ‘the Period of the Wrath’. Many abandoned the cities and took to the wilderness. Sectarian communities, like that at Qumran by the Dead Sea, flourished as fresh recruits joined them. Such communities had long existed on the eastern fringe of the country; but now they were multiplied and increased in variety, holding themselves to be the faithful Elect of the Last Times.17
Through the sources of information at our command we obtain a picture of the situation in Palestine towards the close of the first century B.C. which, if it could be put on canvas, would seem to be the work of a madman, or of a drug addict. A whole nation was in the grip of delirium. The king on this throne was a sick and gloomy tyrant. His embittered subjects feared and detested him to an extent that was almost maniacal. Religious fanatics fasted and prayed, and preached wrath and judgement. Obsessed with conviction that the Last Times had come, terror and superstition overcame all reason among the people. Self-recrimination accompanied messianic fervour. No wonder that when Herod died all hell was let loose.
At first a cry of relief went up throughout the land, and then in a moment all was tumult and disorder. Soldiers went on the rampage. Bands of brigands plundered. In the name of liberty from Rome and the Herodians various leaders set themselves up as king and readily got together a multitude of armed followers. ‘And thus’, writes Josephus, ‘did a great and wild fury spread itself over the nation, because they had no king to keep the masses in good order; and because those foreigners, who came to reduce the seditious to sobriety, did, on the contrary, set them more in a flame, because of the injuries they offered them, and the avaricious management of their affairs.’18 In punitive actions by the Romans thousands were killed in different parts of the country, and at Jerusalem two thousand were crucified.
1. F. C. Burkitt, The Gospel History and its Transmission, p. 29.
2. John A. T. Robinson, Honest to God.
3. See Part Two, Chapter 1, Messianism and the Development of Christianity.
4. Mk. viii. 29.
5. Dan. ix. 24–7.
6. Dan. vii. 26–7.
7. Jer. xxxi. 31–4.
8. Deut. xviii. 15.
9. Jer. xxxiii. 15–26.
10. Test. Simeon, vii. 1–2 (Testaments of the XII Patriarchs, edition Charles). Cp. Test. Naphtali, viii. 2–3; Test. Joseph, xix. 11.
11. Isa. xi.
12. A late commentary on the Psalms illustrates the position taken by the Pharisees. ‘To that generation (in Egypt) thou didst send redemption through two redeemers, as it is said (Ps. cv. 26), “He sent Moses his servant and Aaron whom he had chosen.” So also to this generation (of the Last Times) he sendeth two, corresponding to those other two. “Send out thy light and thy truth” (Ps xliii. 3). “Thy light”, that is the Prophet Elijah of the house of Aaron . . . and “Thy truth”, that is Messiah ben David, as it is said (Ps. cxxxii. 11), “The Lord hath sworn unto David (in) truth, he will not turn from it.” And likewise it is said (Isa. xlii. 1), “Behold my servant whom I uphold’” (Midrash Tehillim, xliii. 1.) The return of Elijah is predicted in Malachi iv. 5–6.
13. ‘(John Hyrcanus) was esteemed by God worthy of the three privileges, the government of his nation, the dignity of the high priesthood, and prophecy; for God was with him, and enabled him to know futurities’ (Josephus, Antiq. XIII. x. 7.)
14. Psalms of Solomon, xvii. 23–4.
15. ‘At this time Herod released to his subjects the third part of their taxes, under pretence indeed of relieving them after the dearth they had had; but the main reason was, to recover their goodwill, which he now wanted; for they were uneasy at him, because of the innovations he had introduced in their practices to the dissolution of their religion, and the disuse of their own customs, and the people everywhere talked against him, like those that were still more provoked and disturbed at his procedure. Against which discontents he greatly guarded himself, and took away the opportunities they might have to disturb him, and enjoining them to be always at work; nor did he permit the citizens either to meet together, or to walk, or eat together, but watched everything they did, and when they were caught they were severely punished; and many there were who were brought to the citadel Hyrcania, both openly and secretly, and were there put to death. And there were spies set everywhere, both in the city and on the roads, who watched those that met together . . . and those that could be in no way reduced to acquiesce under his scheme of government, he persecuted them in all manner of ways’ (Josephus, Antiq. XV. x. 4).
16. ‘An insolent king [Herod] will succeed them [the Hasmoneans], who will not be of the race of the priests, a man bold and shameless, and he will judge them as they deserve. And he will cut off their chief men with the sword, and will destroy them in secret places, so that no one may know where their bodies are. He will slay the old and the young, and he will not spare. Then the fear of him will be bitter unto them in their land. And he will execute judgements on them as the Egyptians executed upon them, during thirty and four years, and he will punish them’ (Assumption of Moses, vi. 2–6, edition Charles).
17. The Manual of Discipline from Qumran declares: ‘And when these things shall come to pass to the Community of Israel, in these determined moments they shall separate themselves from the midst of the habitation of perverse men to take to the wilderness to prepare there the Way of Him as was written: “Prepare ye in the wilderness the Way of the Lord: make straight to the desert a highway for our God” (Isa. xl. 3). This Way is the study of the Law . . . so as to act according to all that was revealed time after time, and according to what the Prophets revealed by His Holy Spirit.’
18. Josephus, Antiq. XVII. x. 5.