Chapter 4 : The Men of the Community, or the Essenes

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Chapter 4

Chapter 4: The Men of the Community, or the Essenes

Only Flavius Joseph and Philo of Alexandria designate the essenoi or essaoi (from the Hebrew esah’, “counsel” or “party,” and which Dupont-Sommer[47] translates as “congregation” or “men of the community,”) as a Jewish dissidence, hostile to the two sects dominating Judea and the Diaspora: Sadduceism and Pharisaism.

Hadot does not exclude the influence of the Aramaic word ossio, “doctor,” which justifies the appellation Therapeutes, or the “doctors of the soul” whom Philo takes to be an Essene sect located not far from Alexandria.

If one can judge from the manuscripts discovered at Qumran, they called themselves “Men of the Community,” “Counsel of God,” “Counsel of the Community,” “Sons of Sadoq” (or Tsadoq, Sons of the Just, or Sons of Justice). In a general way, they called themselves the “Loyal,” or the “Pious,” in Hebrew chasse (the Syrian hasaya, which means “pious” or “holy,” is phonetically similar to “Essene”). “The eastern door of Jerusalem, which overlooked the country of the Essenes, conserved the name Bab Essahioun, which seems to recall the name of this mysterious community.”[48]

According to Qumranian texts from a later date, the Essenes formed the sect of the “New Alliance,” a formula that Marcion — in all probability inspired by the Christian Jew Saul — would translate as “New Testament” so as to oppose it to the ancient one, and with a success that cannot be denied.

In two centuries of existence, Essenism — the expansion of which followed the Diaspora — did not fail to borrow from diverse streams and to embrace many doctrines. Philo speaks of the “Therapeutes” from Lake Mareotis. In certain texts, the Men of the Community identify themselves with the ebbyonim, the “poor,” because there was good reason to reproach the Judeo-Christian sect of the Ebionists, who were close to or rivals with the Nazarenes, and who seemed to oppose themselves to the rebym, the “many,” a term used by Saul/Paul to designate his disciples.

History of the Sect

Taking exception to the hypothesis that fixes the origin of Essene dissidence under the Asmoneans Jonathan and Simon, Dupont-Sommer situates it under Alexander Jannee (103–76 [B.C.E.]) instead.

The opposition to the monarchal pretentions of the great priest Alexander Jannee incited the leader of the Essenes to withdraw into the desert with his partisans, just as Moses did.

We know through Flavius Joseph that Aristobule the First, successor to the great priest Jean Hyran, his father, would add the title of king to that of great priest. A year later, in 103 [B.C.E.], his brother Alexander Jannee succeded him and did not disavow the bold initiative: he took the title of king. Of the three great Jewish parties, only the Essene party was strongly opposed to this innovation.[49]

The resolution to leave Jerusalem and enter the desert is evoked in The Rule of the War of the Sons of the Light Against the Sons of Darkness.

Where was the community located? The historian Dion Chrysostome (around 42 to 125) speaks of Essenes living near Sodom. For Saulcy, Qumran would be Gomorrah.[50] Doresse is content to affirm: “Sodom and Gomorrah count among the places in which their colonies were established.”[51]

In the Writings of Damascus, the first master of the sect carried the title of priest. He issued from the sacerdotal family of Gemul and his dissidence derived, at the origin at least, from a power struggle in the Sadducean caste, mythically attached to Sadoq, great priest under Solomon.

His title referred back to the sacred notion of justice, to those just people or saints whom God designated as his chosen, and whom Jacob would perpetuate in Christianity. It was also a reference to the destiny of Melchizedek, a secondary biblical personage, elevated by the symbolic consonance of this name (tsedek, “justice”) to the dignity of Messiah among certain Essenes. The fragments derived from midrashim, reprized in the notes attributed to Saul/Paul, again attest to the veneration shown with respect to an alter ego of the Master of Justice.

Around 100 [B.C.E.] there developed in Qumran a Jewish sect that dissented from Sadduceanism and was hostile to the Pharisians, whom Alexander Jannee persecuted. Upon the death of the monarch and great priest, his widow, Alexandra (76–77), occupied the throne and set up her son Hyran II as the sovereign pontiff.

Upon the death of Alexandra, a war opposed Hyran II (67–63) to his brother Aristobule II. The Pharisians arranged themselves on the side of the former, while the Sadduceans chose the latter.

Around 65 [B.C.E.] the persecution of Hyran II fell upon the Essenes who had taken refuge in Damascus, the holy city of which the Hebrew name (DMS) means “sanctuary.”[52] Its mythical foundation is attributed to Seth, Son of Man (that is to say, Son of Adam), whose importance — emphasized in the Qumran manuscripts, as in the texts discovered at Nag-Hammadi — demonstrated the existence of the sects holding Seth to be the Messiah. The Writings of Damascus situated the event a little before the arrival of Pompei in Judea in 63 [B.C.E.].

Bewteen 65 and 63 [B.C.E.] a drama exploded, the eschatological consequences of which surpass the history of the Essenes: the putting to death of the Master of Justice, who was, according to the Commentary of Habacuc, “the priest that God had placed in the (House of Juda) so as to explain all of the words of his servants, the prophets.” Is it Onias the Just, put to death in the camp of Hyran II, as suggested by Dupont-Sommers? (According to J.M. Rosenstiehl,[53] the ancient kernel of the Apocalypse of Elie dates from the epoch of Hyran II. A king who is not anointed persecutes the virgin Tabitha, who is the Community of Qumran, but the Anointed One, the Messiah, comes to deliver her and leads her to terrestrial paradise. The return of Henoch evokes that of the Master of Justice.)

Whatever the case, the Qumran texts thenceforth opposed the veneration of its victim, the “Last Priest” or the “Messiah of the Spirit,” to the execration of the despot or the “Impious Priest.” Philonenko sees in the martrying of Esaie a transposition of the history of the sect and the sacrificial execution of its Messiah.[54]

When Pompei seized Jerusalem and razed the Temple in 63 [B.C.E.], the Essenes propagated the rumor of a just punishment inflicted by God on the Judeans, guilty of the death of the Messiah. This scenario, which colored anti-Judaism with anti-Semitism, would in the Second Century enter into the romanesque elaboration of the death of Jesus.

Little by little, the Men of the Community regained the region of the Dead Sea, not without leaving important colonies in the cities of the Diaspora and in Damascus, the sanctuary city in which the legendary biography of Saul/Paul situated the ilumination of the prophet and his revelation of the Messiah.

The invasion of Parthes, which ravaged the Qumran region between 40 and 38 [B.C.E.], and an earthquake ruined a secular community of which the numerical importance was attested by the architectural developments of the buildings, the development of culture, the irrigation system and the cemetery, in which [both] men and women reposed.

The tolerant attitude of Herod (37 [B.C.E.] — 4 [C.E.]) favored the Essenes’ freedom of movement. They furrowed the roads that, from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea, ran parallel to the Jordan River. Here they manifested an important Baptist movement. Is it necessary to see an evolved Essenism, stripped of its elitism, or the perpetuation of the teachings of the Messiah called Dunstan/Dosithee, crucified, in the Nazareanism implanted in Judea, Galilee and Samaria well before the Christian era?

From 4 [B.C.E.] on, the guerrilla war against Rome provoked a new flow of people into Qumran. It is more than probable that a faction of Essenism furnished doctrinal weapons to the Zealot movement. At Masada there were Essenes for whom The Rule of the War of the Sons of the Light Against the Sons of Darkness syncretized eschalatological combat and national[ist] warfare.

In 68, Qumran was devastated by the Decima Legio Pretensis, the elite military horde sent by the Romans to crush the Jewish insurrection. The development of Essenism was not broken; beginning with the divine punishment that fell upon Jerusalem and the Temple, which they never ceased to execrate, the Men of the Community showed themselves on the great day of the diaspora to be who they had always been: Messianic Jews expecting the imminent return of their Kyrios, their Savior; enlightened ones whom the Greeks at the beginning of the Second Century called chrestianoi or christianoi, that is to say, quite simply Messianists and not, as the historians have falsely suggested, disciples of a unique Christ.

Contrary to what Renan affirms, Christianity is not an Essenism that succeeded; it is nothing other than the ensemble of Essene sects, encircled by the general term Judeo-Christian, and opposed to Pharisaism.

Spared from Roman repression, the Pharisians tightened their ranks, fell back upon a rigorous canonicity concretized by the Talmud and its commentaries. They fought two heresies: the nosrim or Nazarenes, preoccupied with the reform of Mosaic law, and the minim or Gnostics, “those who know,” in whom the range of the dualists was extended, opposing the Good God and YHWH to the Simonian doctrine of individual salvation through the creation of self.

Monachism and Ecclesiastic Organization

Essenism evolved a great deal in two centuries. If its archaic form of the monastic type had not disappeared from the hermitages and Coptic monasteries founded by Pacome and Macaire around 251, under the persecution of Dece, then the doctrine would have taken more modern colorations that were expressed by Ebionism, Nazareanism, the Epistle attributed to Barnabas, the teachings of Saul/Paul, nay, the Elchasaitism of the Homelies of Peter attributed to Clement, not to mention the Henochians, Melchisedechians and Sethians.

The excavations at Qumran have extracted a square building, flanked by a tower that was perhaps intended to watch for the return of the Messiah, who was put to death around 63 [B.C.E.].

[In the building there was found] a system of feeder channels (a torrent at the beginning), seven bathing pools endowed with stairways and several round basins, reserved for the baptism of neophytes and purifying ablutions.

Dedicated to the cult and to meetings, this monastery did not shelter the members of the Community, who were lodged in the neighborhood. A meeting hall served [as a place for] the reading and exegesis of biblical texts, rewritten and revised without scruple by the sectarians, who were convinced that they were the only ones to hold the truth. Did not they praise their Christ for having revealed to them the meaning of the Scriptures, thus elevating them to the status of chosen by God, saints, “perfect ones”?

Here [in the monastery] were also celebrated the sacred banquets of “Holy Communions,” ritual meals of bread and wine (or water) by which the faithful communed with the presence of God (the Catholic eucharist would be inspired by it, as well as by the symbolism of the Flesh and the Blood, borrowed from the Phrygian cult of Attis).

According to the estimates, the average population of Qumran increased to around 200 people. Its autocratic system was founded on agriculture, abandoned to the care of neophytes, while the Perfect Ones devoted themselves to the praise of the Savior, the singing of hymns and the exegesis of sacred texts. Flavius Joseph estimated at 4,000 the number of Essenes repatriated to Alexandria (where Philo knew them by the name “Therapeutes”), Damascus, Greece, Asia Minor and Italy.

The cemeteries have delivered up the skeletons of men and women, probably the wives of the converts assigned to labor activities, who had been accorded the right to marry with the goal of procreating. They interred their dead with their heads facing north, which was different from other Jews, whom they considered to be nonbelievers: they judged themselves to be the only representatives of the true Israel. In the same execration, they dismissed the Sadduceans and the Pharisians, who were deemed guilty of spilling the blood of the Messiah. Refusing the sacrifices made under the egis of the Great Priest, they called for divine vengeance upon the Temple, the object of infamy rebuilt by Herod.

As for Jerusalem, they nourished the ambition to deliver it from the Jews who, by their doctrines, had impiously profaned the holiness of the place. Among many attempts effectuated in this regard, there was the tumult stirred up by Theudas/Thomas and his 4,000 “poor people” (ebbyonim) who participated quite well in the Essene spirit.

The apportionment of time equally distinguished them from their coreligionists. The only true observers of Mosaic law, they claimed to hold their calendar to be a divine revelation. Different from the Judean calendar, theirs was solar, not lunar.

According to the indications that Ezechiel advocated, the year was divided into four trimesters and into months of 30 or 31 days, with the result that festivals fell on fixed dates. Easter echoed Wednesday 14 Nizan, two days before the Easter celebrated in Jerusalem.[55]

Such is the calendar to which the evangelical novel of Joshua/Jesus referred, and would later be adopted by Catholic orthodoxy when — appropriating the control of time in its turn — it would arbitrarily anchor at a zero point the beginning of the Christian era.

The Essenes replaced the sacrifices of the Temple with the sacrifice of the body: mortification extinguished the fire of the desires and stoked the ardor of the spirit, to which their miserable existence reduced itself. Their frantic asceticism nourished the ordinary misogyny of patriarchal peoples and pushed it to the state of neurosis. The Qumran manuscripts include a poem against women, the source of all the troubles and perditions of man.[56]

The Rule of the War proscribes sexual relations and excludes from the [ranks of the] Enlightened Ones the woman, the young man, and the impure, understood to be he who has ejaculated.[57]

A much more recent text, issued from Damascus, tolerates the makeshift of marriage, but with the sole goal of procreating and perpetuating the sect.

Scorn for women runs like a counter-point through all of the partitions of Christianity. The Essene or Nazarean Saul/Paul only tolerated their presence in the ecclesiastical assemblies on the condition that they keep quiet; the Marcionites, Elchasaites, Montanists and Catholics all treated them like they were impure beasts. To support [the idea] that this is quite ordinary, according to the prejudicies of the times, would be ignorant of the facts that, at the same time, the schools — nay, the sects — recognized in women and love that which excites the invaluable privilege of creating life and saving humanity. This was the case with Simon of Samaria, certain Naassenes and the Barbelites.

No doubt Pliny the Elder was right to paint a portrait of the Essenes that little accorded with a “people without women, without love, without money.” Love was travestied by the adoration of God and clannish solidarity. As far as the absence of money, which was the result of an autocratic economy, it was (as among the Ebionites) a voluntary poverty; much latter, its fantasm would haunt the collectivist and millenarian dreams that — taking root during crises of economic and social transformation — would demand a return to an egalitarian, fraternal, disinterested Christianity, which would be a cathartic prelude to the reign of the holy.

Essenism is the True Original Christianity

In the Eighteenth Century, the erudite Bernard de Montfaucon stirred up a polemic on the subject of the Therapeutes as described by Philo of Alexandria. To Montfaucon, they were a Christian sect, which he proved with serious argumentation.[58] His critics retorted that other Jewish milieu presented the same singularities. Both were right: the Therapeutes were both Jewish and Christian. Until the beginning of the Second Century, the only form of Christianity — that is, before Marcion took exception to it in the name of a Greek Christianity — was inscribed in the framework of a reformed and anti-Judean Judaism.

Essenism united all of the traits of primitive Christianity: it was baptist, believed in a Messiah, founded the Churches and was marked by the duality of roads, Light and Darkness, nay, by the duality of the Demiurge and the Good God.

* * *

The Sadduceans and the Pharisians appealed to baptism as a ritual of purification, but among the Essenes it did not retain the value of a spiritual engagement and a communitarian rite of initiation. Thus a hymn proclaims:

It is by the humility of his soul with respect to all the precepts of God
that will purify the flesh
when one sprinkles it with holy water
and he will sanctify himself in running water.[59]

Symbolically, water purifies the body of its natural impurity, washing it of sensual passions, exonerating the body of its material gravity and elevating it towards God in the ascendant movement of the spirit. Baptism remains without effect if it is not accompanied by a conversion of the heart. The doctrine of Saul/Paul gives to baptism the same spiritual meaning, inverting the baptismal conception honored by certain Alexandrian Gnostic sects, for which water meant the return to the maternal matrix and re-birth in the heart of the welcoming community.

The current state of studies does not permit us to conjecture if a Dosithean or Nazarean influence existed [in Essenism], but undoubtedly certain Essene traits proceeded from Samaritan freedom with respect to Judaic orthodoxy.

The Messiah

The doctrinal system of the Men of the Community shared with the Book of Henoch I the lineaments of the Gnosticism and Messianism that would dominate the Jewish Christianities and the Hellenic Christianities up to, nay, beyond the Second Century.

In this system, the angels, the Princes of Light, confronted the fallen angels, the Princes of Darkness, the “guilty ones” or syzygies that opposed Michael and Raphael, Belial and Satan.

The theory of the Son of Man (Adam) is expounded in the Ascension of Henoch. When Henoch questions the angel who accompanies him about the Son of Man, “Who is he? From whence does he come?” the angel responds: “It is the Son of Man who possesses justice, who will reveal all of the secret treasures because the Savior of Spirits has chosen him.”

The angel specifies that the Messiah is “engendered by Justice,” which is a reference applicable to the Essene Master, such as Melchizedek, his paredros [divine associate] or alter ego.

As the Son of Man was incarnated in the Master of Justice, he will return in the traits of a new Messiah, whom Henoch’s parables name the Chosen One, according to the tradition inaugurated by the stanzas on the Servant of YHWH in the Book of Esaie (42, 1).

Thus Philonenko[60] emphasized that there exists a veritable Christology in the Qumran texts. It reaches such precision that people have supposed that in certain writings — such as the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs (the discourses on God, by the twelve sons of Jacob, to their children Ruben, Simeon, Levi, Juda, Issachar, Zabulon, Dan, Mephtali, Gad, Aser, Joseph and Benjamin) — there are interpositions of Greek Christianity, nay, Catholicism. Therefore, comparing the manuscripts found at Qumran and the revised versions, Philonenko picked out a number of them (minus interpolations), most often concerning the word Christos. Here was a Messiah ready to assume the role of the name emblematic of Joshua/Jesus.

Essene Christology evolved from a primitive conception to a modern vision of the Christ. The most ancient texts evoked two Messiahs: one, sacerdotal, indicator to the faithful of the road to sanctification; the other, royal, leader of Israel to victory over the goyim. Forty years later, a single Messiah was expected: the Master of Justice, the Chosen One, the Kyrios chosen by God to reveal the “New Alliance,” the Novum Testamentum of which Marcion would later speak).

The wait had begun many years before the Christian era. While the Rule Annex (1 Q. Sa 2/11-12) speaks of a time when God “will have engendered the Messiah,” the part devoted to Benjamin in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriachs clearly evokes the coming of a unique Messiah, the reincarnation of the Master of Justice.[61]

Thus, we too will arise, each in our tribe, adoring the King of the Heavens who appears on the earth under the form of a humble man; and all those who believe in him will rejoice in him. And then, when all have arisen, some for glory, others for shame, the Savior will at first judge Israel for the injustices committed against her; when God takes on flesh as a liberator, they will not believe in him.[62]

We recall that it is a question here of a text unearthed at Qumran that does not include any subsequent interpolations. It is difficult not to discover in it the source of the mythical person called Jesus and the essentials of the doctrine by Saul/Paul. Amplified by the midrashim, completed by the particular communitarian practices and modern polemics, and adapated to the Greco-Roman mindset, the speculations arising around the Essene Messiah who was tortured to death around 63 [B.C.E.] would sketch out the scenario of a syncretic Messiah issued from Joshua, transposed during the Zealots’ war under Tiberias, rather than from Jacob and Peter, the heroic witnesses and disciples of the Kyrios who had guided their acts and died crucified.

The secret name of such a Messiah formed the stakes in a long struggle in the milieu that had been penetrated by Jewish eschatology. Each Essene community or Church produced its own proofs and testimonies with a view towards ratifying agreement with its Christ.

Grotto #4 at Qumran surrendered an Aramaic text, the terms of which entered into the composition of the future Joshua/Jesus:

He will be great on the earth and will make peace and each will serve him. He will be called the Son of the Great God and by this name he will be called. He will be saluted as the Son of God and we will call him Son of the Most High and his kingdom will be an eternal kingdom.[63]

He will be the celestial figure of the Son of Man announced by the Book of Daniel, “the Chosen One in the presence of the Savior of Spirits.” “The Light of the people,” he will possess the spirit of wisdom, science and strength, three qualities that would find themselves in the Logia, the remarks attributed to Jesus (in the Second Century).

A number of traits anecdotally attributed to Jesus in the evangelical novels abound in the Qumran writings. The apocalypse included in the Testament of Joseph nourished the legend of a virginal birth: “And I saw that in Juda was born a Virgin wearing a linen robe and from her emerged a lamb without blemish.”[64]

Manuscript labeled 1 Q H 6, 12 imputes to this Christ-Lamb a vocation that is no longer nationalist, but universal, according to an overture that the Church ordinarily attributed to the school of Saul/Paul: “All nations recognize your truth and all people glory you.”

Moreover, the Master of Justice appeared in the manner of the future Joshua/Jesus as a suffering Messiah and the founder of churches: “God wanted it that, in his sorrows, the Master of Justice build his glorious Church and, although the Hymns of the Master of Justice do not explicitly present his sufferings as capable of expiating the sins of the others, it is a fundamental doctrine in the sect and one finds in the Songs of the Savior (which figures in the Book of Isaiah and inspired Qumranian hymns) that that the Savior ‘was pierced because of our rebellions, crushed because of our iniquity [...]. He is full of the sins of the many and he has interceded for the sinners’ (Isaiah, 3, 9, 12).”[65]

Another function of the Master of Justice attributed to Joshua/Jesus and to Saul/Paul: announcing the Good News, which in Greek is the Evangelion, the Gospels (Evangile).

The Qumranian hymns stipulate that God gave him the mission to be “according to His truth he who announces the Good News (in the time) of His Goodness, evangelizing the humble ones, according to the abundance of His mercy (and watering them) at the source of holiness and consoling those who are contrite of spirit and the afflicted” (XVIII, 14–15).

The hymn inspired by the “Songs of the Savior” in Isaiah:[66]

The spirit of the Savior YHWH is in me,
Because YHWH has anointed me.
It is to announce the Good News to the humble that he has sent me
To bandage those who have a contrite heart [...]

Nothing is missing from the ensemble of fundamental materials that, through re-writing and revision, ended up in the texts of the Hellenic Christianities and Catholicism, even the New Testament that Marcion would brandish like a weapon against the old [testament].

Dupont-Sommer did not fail to reveal it:[67] Essenism (or at least an Essene party that was perhaps that of Saul, opposed to the parties of Jacob, Peter [and] Thomas) wanted to be the sect of the New Alliance, otherwise called the New Testament (Hymn, V, 23; Writing from Damascus).

R.H. Charles, who has already studied the Books of Henoch, which was part of the Essene canon, remarks that the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs is “a product of the school that prepared the road of the New Testament.” He goes further, emphasizing that the famous Sermon on the Mount attributed to Jesus “reflects in several passages and goes almost as far as reproducing the same phrases from our text.” Charles adds that Paul seems to have used it like a vade-mecum.[68] Dupont-Sommer reveals the following, among other examples, in the Manual of Discipline: “I will not render retribution for evil to anyone,” and there are even recommendations of the apostolic type: “They practice the truth in common and humanity, justice and right, and love of kindness and a modest conduct in all of their ways.”[69]

Regarding Saul/Paul, Teicher has collated a great many analogies between the fragments of his letters and several Qumran manuscripts (according to his thesis, the manuscripts are late and express the opinions of Judeo-Christianity and, in particular, that of the Ebionites).[70]

Nevertheless, the divergences between rival groups inscribed themselves on a common foundation, but the cleavage seems to be of a political — not to say, strategic — nature. The Essene Churches of the Ebionite or Nazarean type that claimed for themselves the opinions of Jacob, Peter and Thomas, nay, those of John the Essene mentioned by [Flavius] Joseph, conserved a relatively firm, elitist, perhaps esoteric structure, whereas the schools propagated by Saul appealed to the rebbim, to the “many,” and thus affirmed themselves to be exoteric and populist.

The Essene Churches

The Church of the Master of Justice wanted to be present in the whole world, universal, a term that translates the Greek word catholicon. The Church was built by them to “serve as an impregnable refuge for the Chosen Ones during the war that, at the end of time, the forces of evil will conduct against them.”[71]

Hymn VII (8–9) reveals the origin of Cephas, “rock,” “stone/Peter” [pierre] who — adjoined to the Zealot and Essene, Simon — would end up in the wordplay that would found the Church of Rome (“And on this stone/Peter, you will build your Church”). Sure enough, one can read in it the following:

You have founded on the rock [rocher] my edifice
And the eternal assizes serve me as a foundation
And all my walls have become a strengthened rampart
That nothing can shake.

The Church is the community, the Assembly: “The source of justice and the reservoir of power [...] It is to those whom he has chosen that God will give them as eternal possessions. And he has accorded to them by sharing in the lot of the saints and, with the Son of the Heavens, he has reunited their assembly, that of the counsels of the community.”[72]

Alongside the Pharisian synagogues of the Diaspora, the Essene Churches organized themselves in a relation of hostility and concurrence. Whereas the synagogical assemblies drew their unity in a Pharisaism endowed with a spiritual center, the holy city Jerusalem (of which the Temple guaranteed the orthodoxy), the Essene communities — devoted to the untiring recasting of the sacred texts — decreed the end of time, speculated on the imminence, nature and name of the Messiah, and constituted rivals churches, fecund with new doctrines. Three centuries would be needed for ecclesiastical monarchism to end up in the supremacy of the Bishop of Rome, contested up to the Seventh Century and [all the while] imposing the universality — the catholicon — desired by the Master of Justice, the “Just Messiah.”

The Manual of Discipline renders precise the method of organization in effect: “In all places where there are ten people from the party of the Community, there will not lack among them one who is a priest. And each according to his rank, they sit before him.”[73]

As among the Pharisians, the first places were reserved for the old ones, prebyteroi, that is to say, far-sighted people [presbytes], priests. One of them, called “the inspector of the many” (the rebbim of the faithful, with respect to the “perfect ones”), would become the chief, the archon, (in Greek) the episcopos (bishop). He is invited to carry himself like a shephard, like a pastor, which is a title that around 140–150 would inspire a Judeo-Christian novel attributed to Hermas, in which the author precisely deplores the discord [zizanie] among the diverse Churches of Rome.

At the end of the Second Century, certain churches obeyed a collegiate leadership, a counsel of archons; others adopted the monarchal form privileged by the politics of unification.

When Marcion provoked the rupture with Jewish Christianity, he attempted to found unified churches that he aimed to would be under the control of Rome, federating the churches that were favorable to Saul’s school and that rejected the communities that chose to place their legitimacy under the patronage of the Zealot heroes, Ebionites, Nazrareans, Jacob, Peter, Thomas, and Clement, the partisans of which treated Paul like a false prophet. It is still the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs that justifies the number of the companions of a Messiah whose name, unknown to Mermas in 140 [C.E.], would begin to impose its revelation: Joshua/Jesus, he who “saved, saves, will save”; an infinitesimal battle in the multitude of sects that bordered and confronted each other in Alexandria, Antioch, Corinth, Colosee, Odessa, Rome...

A Dualist Tendency

The Jewish, Sadducean and Pharisian orthodoxies abominated all dualisms that, suspiciously revoking the unity of YHWH, threatened the State and the national mystique. On the other hand, the Samaritans, often reticent with respect to the imported Judean God, never made mysterious their attachment to the plural God, El-Elohim, nay, the Divine Father/Divine Mother dualism.

Essenism did not totally extirpate the Samaritan influence from its heart. The Jewish Gnosticism attested to by the Books of Henoch (themselves combating other Gnostic tendencies) was perpetuated in the diverse primitive Christianities — which were Jewish like the Elchasaitism of the Homelies of Peter (around 110), Judaist like The Pastor of Hermas (around 140) or Hellenized and anti-Semitic, like Marcionism — as late as the second half of the Second Century, in which only the popular development of the New Prophecy or “Montanism” would be exhausted.

Dualist thought manifested itself in Essenism in diverse ways. No manuscript from Qumran implicitly expounds the idea that two Gods can exist. Nevertheless, it is not excluded that certain currents accredited the syzygy of the Good God and the Demiurge, present in Cerinthe, Marcion, the Naassenes, the Sethians, the Barbelites and many other sects, Christian or not.

The Arab historian Shahrastani (Seventh Century) affirms that, in the Fourth Century, Arius borrowed his doctrine, according to which the Messiah is the first angel of God for the Magharians, “who lived four hundred years before Arius and were known by the simplicity of their way of life and their serene abstinence.”

Who were these Magharians, whose existence dates back to the First Century before the Christian era? Their Arab name leaves little doubt; it means “people of the cavern or the cave,” because — Shahrastani makes clear — they hid their sacred texts in caverns.

There is nothing surprising in the fact that the doctrine of the Angel-Messiah (the angelos-christos) was originally Essene, since it was shared by the [various] Christianities and predominated up to the historization of Jesus, undertaken in the second half of the Second Century.

Beyond that, the Arab historian explains that the refusal of an anthropomorphic YHWH induced them to impute the creation of the material universe to a Demiurge.[74] Thus it is not impossible that the concept of a God who is good and the inaccessible double of a God who created the bad world, which Marcion in his hatred of Judaism would identify with YHWH the Bloody, was imposed upon certain Essene Churches and defended by Marcion.

Without crediting Essenism in general with a position that was also perceived as a scandal by Pharisaism (and much later by the monarchal current — a God, a Bishop — to which the chiefs of the Christian communities would attach themselves), dualism expressed itself without ambiguity in the doctrine of the two roads and even in the [image of the] “couples” or syzygies still attested to by the Homelies of Peter. The struggle between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness dominated the thought of the Community. Because God “disposed for man two spirits [...] the spirit of truth and the spirit of perversion” (Rule of the War).

In each generation, the Sons of the Prince of the Light and the Sons of the Angel of Darkness confront each other in a war from which the saints, the pure ones who renounce the flesh and possess knowledge, gnosis, will emerge victorious.

Due to the privileges that it accorded to knowledge, Essenism belonged to Jewish Gnosticism (which would be perpetuated in Kabbalistic investigations).

“You have given me the intelligence of your faith and the knowledge of your admirable secrets,” declares Hymn VII (25). Gnosis is nothing other than secret knowledge. But from its essential root grows a great diversity of options and choices (which translates the Greek word hairesis, heresy): dualism; the refusal or surpassing of religion; monotheism; salvation for the individual, for a community, for a Christ; rational, mystical or magical approaches to the Logos. Gnosis implies the primacy of knowledge over pistis, faith, and the secret, the Apocryphon, an apocryphal text that the Church — as part of its seizure of language and meaning — would identify with “false, falsification.”

The esotericism of the Essene groups proceeded more easily in the cities of the Diaspora towards an exotericism that was more apt to concur with Pharisian proselytism. Such was, no doubt, the tendency of the school of Saul/Paul. Esotericism itself borrowed from different sources [voies]. The secret Gospels (Apocrypha) and the Hermetic remarks of Jesus (Logia) did not proceed from the same churches that — according to a manuscript from Grotto 4 at Qumran, studied by S.T. Millik[75] — inferred from the morphology of individuals born under certain zodiacal signs their belonging to the cohort of the “spirits of Light” or the horde of the “spirits of Darkness.” (Such speculations are found in the Christian astrology of Bardesame, but also in divinatory magic, in the spirit of quarrels over predestination, and in the art of recognizing sorcerers and sorceresses in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.)

Towards a Judeo-Christian Syncretism

The thesis, accredited by the majority of historians, of a prophet named Jesus — who founded a church with dogmatic theses, but who in fact issued from the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Centuries, after a long and painful childbirth — underestimates the marginal character of these religious speculations by occulting, in the particular milieu that are concerned, the profusion of messiahs, sects, schools and communities.

Dosithee, the crucified Samaritan Messiah; the Master of Justice, put to death by the Judeans; Melchizedek the Just; Henoch guided by the Sons of Man; Barbelo, who welcomed sperm so as to save the world; Naas, the Ophis-Christos or Serpent-Redeemer; Hermes Three Times Great; Seth, Son of Man with the head of a horse or dinkey; Abaraxas with ophidian legs and cockscomb, saver of souls threatened by the Archons — so many Christs among whom Joshua/Jesus, whose name secretly means “God saved, saves, will save,” would later carve itself a place in the form of an angel sent by God.

And, among the four or five thousand Essenes of whom Flavius Joseph speaks, what a scramble [embrouillamini]! Partisans of Jacob the Just, Simon-Peter, John the Essene, Jochanaan called John the Baptist, Theudas/Thomas, Saul known as Paul (following Marcion), Cerinthe, Zack/Clement and many others who commented upon and adpated the biblical texts by taking extracts from the midrashim, sometimes translated into Greek, of which the majority had disappeared but in which it was possible to become aware of a text that had been poorly accepted by the Church and that illustrated the passage from Judeo-Christianity, or Essenism, to a Hellenized Christianity ready to extinguish its Judaic roots: the Didache.

In the current of the First Century, among the non-Pharisian Judaicized milieu (Essene or Samaritan), a moralizing pamphlet entitled Doctrine of the Two Roads circulated; its wording indicates its origin.

Re-copied, revised, developed and Hellenized, around 140–150 it ended up in a version that its last redactor gave the title Didache Kyriou dia ton dodeka apostolon tois ethnesin (“Teachings of the Savior addressed to strangers to faith through the medium of His twelve apostles”).

An analysis of the various states of the text and the strata of rewriting has permitted us to extract the oldest kernel of the Didache. It was inspired by the Manual of Discipline and it makes clear “the disciplinary order that imposes itself on the community.” The Superior Ones are called episkopoi kai diakonai, bishops and deacons. The moral comportments are hierarchized according to the “two roads.” Also covered are baptism, fasting, prayer, and the sharing of bread (much later called the eucharist).

The second great revision dates from 140–150 and is thus contemporaneous with the hostility adopted with respect to the original Judeo-Christianity. The text, known under the title Didache or Doctrina apostolorum, was honored in the Greco-Roman churches that, in the Diaspora, had separated themselves from the Jewish and Christian churches issued from Essenism. It is contemporaneous with the Pastor (still Judeo-Christian) attributed to Hermas of Rome, the Homelies of Peter attributed to Clement (on a basic Elchasaite text contemporaneous with Trajan), and the Epistle attributed to Barnabas (around 117–130, according to Erbetta).[76]

A trinitarian doxology would be added in the Fourth Century, due to polemics against Arius.

For a long time held as canonical, the Didache would finally be excluded from the Catholic Scriptures. A modern version of Judeo-Christianity, it took exception to the Judaic sacrifices and rituals, especially circumcision, which it spiritualized and interpreted symbolically. The name of Jesus appears in it, but under traits particularly embarassing to the future Catholic orthodoxy: in the manner of the Master of Justice, he carried the title of Servant of God, and in addition he is perceived as an Angel-Messiah, an angelos-christos, according to the traditions of the time and notably in agreement with the Epistle attributed to Barnabas, in which Jesus is none other than the biblical Joshua.

From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org

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The Resistance to Christianity — Chapter 4 : The Men of the Community, or the Essenes

By Raoul Vaneigem (1993)

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Author : Raoul Vaneigem