In his palaeographic assumptions, Birnbaum overlooked one particularly important fact. If a document is produced merely to convey information, it will, in all probability, reflect the most up-to-date techniques. Such, for example, are the techniques employed by modern newspapers (except, until recently, in England). But everything suggests that the Dead Sea Scrolls weren’t produced merely to convey information. Everything suggests they had a ritual or semi-ritual function as well, and were lovingly produced so as to preserve an element of tradition. It is therefore highly probable that later scribes would deliberately attempt to reproduce the style of their predecessors. And, indeed, all through recorded history, scribes have consistently been conservative. Thus, for example, illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages contrived to reflect a sacred quality of antiquity, not the latest technological progress. Thus many modern Bibles are reproduced in ‘old-fashioned’ print. Thus one would not expect to find a modern Jewish Torah employing the style or technique used to imprint a slogan on a T-shirt.
Of the calligraphy in the Dead Sea Scrolls, Eisenman concludes that ‘they simply represent a multitude of different handwriting styles of people working more or less at the same time within the same framework, and tell us nothing about chronology at all’.40 Cecil Roth of Oxford was, if anything, even more emphatic: ‘In connection for example with the English records, although a vast mass of dated manuscript material exists covering the entire Middle Ages, it is impossible to fix precisely within the range of a generation the date of any document on the basis of palaeography alone.’ He warned that ‘a new dogmatism’ had arisen in the field of palaeography, and that ‘without any fixed point to serve as a basis, we are already expected to accept as an historical criterion a precise dating of these hitherto unknown Hebrew scripts’. He even, in his exasperation at the complacency and intransigence of the international team, had recourse to the unscholarly expedient of capital letters:
IT MUST BE STATED HERE ONCE AND FOR ALL THAT THE SO-CALLED PALAEOGRAPHICAL EVIDENCE IS WHOLLY INADMISSIBLE IN THIS DISCUSSION.41
11. The Essenes
The reader by now will be familiar with the conclusions of the consensus view of the international team and, as expressed through its journals, the Ecole Biblique, as well as with the processes by which those conclusions were reached. It is now time to return to the evidence and see whether any alternative conclusions are possible. In order to do so, certain basic questions must again be posed. Who, precisely, were the elusive and mysterious denizens of Qumran, who established their community, transcribed and deposited their sacred texts, then apparently vanished from the stage of history? Were they indeed Essenes? And if so, what exactly does that term mean?
The traditional images of the Essenes come down to us from Pliny, Philo and Josephus, who described them as a sect or sub-sect of 1st-century Judaism.1 Pliny, as we have seen, depicted the Essenes as celibate hermits, residing, with ‘only palm-trees for company’, in an area that might be construed as Qumran. Josephus, who is echoed by Philo, elaborates on this portrait. According to Josephus, the Essenes are celibate — although, he adds, almost as an afterthought, ‘there is a second order of Essenes’ who do marry.2 The Essenes despise pleasure and wealth. They hold all possessions in common, and those who join their ranks must renounce private property. They elect their own leaders from amongst themselves. They are settled in every city of Palestine, as well as in isolated communities, but, even in urban surroundings, keep themselves apart.
Josephus portrays the Essenes as something akin to a monastic order or an ancient mystery school. Postulants to their ranks are subjected to a three-year period of probation, the equivalent of a novitiate. Not until he has successfully undergone this apprenticeship is the candidate officially accepted. Full-fledged Essenes pray before 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 Aufklärung, 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 protégé 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 unkn
owingly, 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.
1. Josephus acknowledges that there is ‘another order’ of Essenes who do marry, but this, he indicates, is atypical.12 In general, Josephus says, echoing Philo and Pliny, the Essenes are celibate. Yet the graves of women and children have been found among those excavated at Qumran. And the ‘Community Rule’ contains regulations governing marriage and the raising of children.
2. None of the classical writers ever mentions anything to suggest that the Essenes used a special form of calendar. The Qumran community, however, did — a unique, solar-based calendar, rather than the conventional Judaic calendar, which is lunar-based. If the Qumran community were indeed Essenes, surely so strikingly noticeable a characteristic would have been accorded some reference.
3. According to Philo, the Essenes differed from other forms of ancient Judaism in having no cult of animal sacrifices.13 Yet the ‘Temple Scroll’ issues precise instructions for such sacrifices. And the ruins of Qumran revealed animal bones carefully placed in pots, or covered by pots, and buried in the ground under a thin covering of earth.14 De Vaux speculated that these bones might be the remains of ritual meals. They might indeed. But they might equally be the remains of animal sacrifices, as stipulated by the ‘Temple Scroll’.
4. The classical writers use the term ‘Essene’ to denote what they describe as a major sub-division of Judaism, along with the Pharisees and Sadducees. Nowhere in the Dead Sea Scrolls, however, is the term ‘Essene’ found.
5. Josephus declares the Essenes to have been on congenial terms with Herod the Great, who, he says, ‘had these Essenes in such honour and thought higher of them than their mortal nature required’.15 Yet the Qumran literature indicates a militant hostility towards non-Judaic authorities in general, and towards Herod and his dynasty in particular. What is more, Qumran appears to have been abandoned and uninhabited for some years precisely because of persecution by Herod.
6. According to classical writers, the Essenes were pacifist. Philo specifically states that their numbers included no makers of weapons or armour.16 Josephus emphatically distinguishes between the non-violent Essenes and the militantly messianic and nationalistic Zealots. Yet the ruins of Qumran include a defensive tower of a manifestly military nature, and what ‘can only be described as a forge’.17 As for the Qumran literature, it is often martial in the extreme, as exemplified by such texts as the ‘War Scroll’. Indeed, the bellicose character of such texts would seem to have less in common with what Josephus says of the Essenes than with what he and others say of the so-called Zealots — which is precisely what Roth and Driver claimed the Qumran community to be, thereby incurring the fury of de Vaux and the international team.
The Qumran community wrote mostly not in Greek, but in Aramaic and Hebrew. So far as Aramaic and Hebrew are concerned, no accepted etymology for the origins of the term ‘Essene’ has hitherto been found. Even the classical writers were mystified by its derivation. Philo, for example, suggested that, in his opinion, the name stemmed from the Greek word for ‘holy’, ‘oseeos’, and that the Essenes were therefore the ‘Oseeotes’, or ‘Holy Ones’.18
One theory has enjoyed a certain qualified currency among certain modern scholars, notably Geza Vermes of Oxford University. According to Vermes, the term ‘Essene’ derives from the Aramaic word ‘assayya’, which means ‘healers’.19 This has fostered an image in some quarters of the Essenes as medical practitioners, a Judaic equivalent of the Alexandrian ascetics known as the ‘Therapeutae’. But the word ‘assay
ya’ does not occur anywhere in the corpus of Qumran literature; nor is there any reference to healing, to medical activities or to therapeutic work. To derive ‘Essene’ from ‘assayya’’, therefore, remains purely speculative; and there would be no reason to credit it at all unless there were no other options.
In fact, there is another option — not just a possibility, but a probability. If the Qumran community never refer to themselves as ‘Essenes’ or ‘assayya’, they do employ a number of other Hebrew and Aramaic terms. From these terms, it is clear that the community did not have a single definitive name for themselves. They did, however, have a highly distinctive and unique concept of themselves, and this concept is reflected by a variety of appellations and designations.20 The concept rests ultimately on the all-important ‘Covenant’, which entailed a formal oath of obedience, totally and eternally, to the Law of Moses. The authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls would thus refer to themselves as, for example, ‘the Keepers of the Covenant’. As synonyms for ‘Covenant’ and ‘Law’, they would often use the same words that figure so prominently in Taoism — ‘way’, ‘work’ or ‘works’ (’ma’asim’ in Hebrew). They would speak, for instance, of’the Perfect of the Way’, or ‘the Way of Perfect Righteousness’21 — ‘way’ meaning ‘the work of the Law’, or ‘the way in which the Law functions’, ‘the way in which the Law works’. Variations of these themes run all through the Dead Sea Scrolls to denote the Qumran community and its members.
The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception Page 20