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ESSENES
ESSENES
The Easenes had hereditary prayers to the sun, as well as the usual Jewish sacred books ; they liad purificatory rites of diti'erent sorts or degrees, and utterances of the prophets. By diligent study of these, some of them learned and protessed to read the future. And their predictions, says Jos., were rarely belied ; indeed he gives several instances up and down his history of the fulfilment of their pro- phecies {liJ II. viii. 12). They also had compositions of the ancients from which they chose out what- ever benefited soul and body ; and they inquired after such roots and peculiar stones as would w ard ofl' tlieir distempers. The regular books and dogmas of the sect, as we have seen, they took jath to carefully keep, as also the names of the angels. These names, of course, were powerful weapons against evil demons, with a belief in which they must, like other Jews of the age, have been imbued. The stones and roots were the ordinary magic remedies against diseases.
This IS the sum of what Jos. has to say about the Essenes. Hippolytus in the 9th Book of his Refutation vf Heresies, % 18-28, substantially copies out Josephus' account in the BJ ii. eh. 8, here and there adding Christian touches in a way which proves that he was not loth to assimilate them to Christians. Yet some of the information which he adds is not of this sort, but serves to intensify their Jewish complexion. Such are the statements that on the Sabbath some Essenes would not so much as leave their beds (§ 25) ; that some were so scrupulous that they would not carry a coin, de- claring it wrong to carry or look at or make an ima.'e (§ 26, cf. Mt 22-") ; that no one of them would enter a city over the gate of wliich stood a statue (§ 26) ; that others of them, if they heard any one talking about God and His law, would waylay him when alone, and threaten to slay him unless he were circumcised, and slay him actu- ally if he did not submit ; for which reason, says Hippolytus, they got the name of Zealots and Sicarii ; that others would call no one Lord (Kipiov) but only God, submitting to torment and death rather than do so. It is difficult to believe that Hippolytus had no authority for these state- ments ; which indeed might seem to be taken from Jos., since they are embedded in his long citation of that author. If so, they have been removed from all the MSS of Josephus. The same account of Jos. was excerpted by Porphyry in the 3rd cent, in his book on Abstinence from Meats, and later by Eusebius in his De Prcep. Evnng. The account given by Epiphanius of the E. is late, confused, and of little value. It is clear that, even if the majority of the E. were cultivators and voluntarily poor, that did not prevent some of their number from occupying important posts in the court and camp ; for we hear of one Simon * the interpreter of Archelaus' dream (Ant. XVII. xiii. 3), and of John the strategus, and of Menaliem the friend of Herod. Nor did tlieir gospel of peace and their prejudice against arms, as reported by Philo, prevent them from taking part in the final stniugle against the Romans. Jos., more- over, iTii]ilies that they were constantly moving about from city to city ; and we can only suppose that the object of this travelling was to preach their tenets and secure recruits. We should like to know if the sect was not mainly recruited from Greek-.^peaking Jews, but on this point Jos. tells us nothing. In his autobiog. ( Vita, 10) he implies that as a youth he had tried the discipline of this sect, aa also of the Pharisees and Sauducees, and this inner acquaintance with them entitles his account to our entire credit ; but just because he and his countrymen knew the sect so well, he omits to inform us about so essential a point as in
what language their books were written, and what tongue, whether Greek or Aramaic, they ueaaUy spoke among themselves.
Some writers, impressed with the fact that Jesus constantly inveighed against the Pliarisees and Sadducees, but never against the members of the third of the three great Jewish sects, who yet must have everywhere confronted Him, have in- ferred that He and John the Baptist, His pre- cursor, were Essenes. The silence of the Gospels about the E. is certainly remarkable ; and there are many striking traits in common between the E. and the earliest Christians. These are the following : —
1. The community of goods and voluntary poverty. 2. The art of prophecy. In the earliest Church, as we know from Acta and from the DiJach^, there was a rej,'ular order of propliets.
3. The teaching about the future life, and about a hell. These tenets, however, were equally found among the Pharisees ; nor does Jos. support Hippolytus in the latter's statement that the Essenes believed in the resurrection of the liesh, though the picture of the Islands of the Blest implies as much, and answers well enough to the Refrigerium of later Christian belief. As to the teachmg of future punishment, we also And it in Philo.