The reclu.se Bannus, with whom Jos. as a young man spent three years as a disciple, resembled the Essenes. For he lived in the desert, wore garments made of the bark of trees, and lived on anything he found growing about, washing himselt often day and night with cold water by way of purifica- tion. However, Josephus' context rather implies that he was not one. An almost certain reference to the E. is contained in an eloquent pa.ssage of Philo's, from the same treatise in which his longer description of the sect is preserved.
Even in our own day, he writes, there are fltill men whose only ffxiide in Ood ; men who live by the true reaBon of nature, not only theniaelveti free, but tilling their nt^i^jhlMjura with a ■pint of freedom. They are not very numerouH indeed. But that ifl not Htranf^e. For the highest nobility is ever rare ; and then these men have turned aside from the vulgar herd to devote Iheinselvea to a contemplation of nature's verities. They pray, if it were powible, that tnoy may reform our fallen lives ; out. If they cannot, owing to the tide of e\nls and wrongs which ■ur^'es up in citiea, they flee away, lest they too be swept off Lbeir feel by the force of its current. And we, he continues, if we hod a true zeal for self-improvement, would have to track them to their nla^-es of retreat, and, halting as suppIianU before them, would fjeseech them to come to us and tame our life, frown too Aerce and wild ; preaching, instead of war and slavery and untold ills, their gospel of peace and freedom, and all the fulnea of other blessings.
The Therapeutw of Alexandria, of whom Philo has left so striking a description in his tract iJe Vita Contemplativfi, in many ways resembled the Pal. Essenes ; but were, as was natural in an Egyp. sect, more addicted to contemplation. Here is not the place for a detailed comparison between them and the E. ; nor is it possible to review the numerous theories which have been framed with regard to the origin of the E. It, however, deserves to l>e remarked that ace. to the evidence of Jos.
* B.g. Ant, znil. i. 5 : t«9i r^tirrtvrif k<iflt irifi Ttrfituurx'i^** T»> kp46^Ui ifTU, Cf. Philo, II. 4ri7 : wXriUet irwip rirpiuurx'^'t- It is not likely that their numlH-rs were the same at the veiy bea. of our era as in a.d. 70. Again Jos. writes ^B7 ii. viii. 4): t#,<
tH^mSlt {ia«v#<> nlpfrtWTM T»tT' iimwiwratvau r» r*fi' s^rcTf. Cf. Philo (11. 468) : «t«cjrr«r«4 Ji«i r«« Iri^it Ji^i»imfMi**f rmt
they arose just at the time when the friendship between Lacedaimon and .lerus. was at its highest. Areus the king of Sparta had written as early as B.C. 309-300 to Onias the high priest in these terms ; ' It is found in writing that the Spartans and the Jews are brethren, and that they are of the stock of Abraham' (1 Mac 12='). And in B.C. 144 Jonathan the high priest, in renewing the relations of his country with Laceda;mon, reminded the Spartans of this long-standing friendship based on ancient kinship. Is it possible that the E. sect was partly an outcome of this contact with the Peloponnese — an attempt to imitate on Jewish soil, and in a re- ligious and moral sense only, the Syssitia and organization of the Lycurgean polity ? That most of the Jews mentioned in Jos. as belonging to the Maccabiean period have Greek second names is good evidence of the wide diffusion in Pal. at that time of the Gr. language. And the very informa- tion proH'ered by Jos., that the E. were .Jews by race, almost implies in its context that in language tlicy were something el.'ie. So Philo assures us tli;it the holy places in which the E. met on the Sabbath were calle<i (rwa-yorya/, stjnngogues. Un- less they spoke (ireek, why .sliould this term rather than the usual one aaSfio.Tetoi' * have been employed? Friedhinder {Ziir EntsteliunffSf/e- sr/iirhte des Christenthums, Wien, 1894) has re- marked that the very circuinstaiK'e of Jos. having used, if not Philo's account, at least a Gr. descrip- tion of the sect already used by Philo, is some indication that they were a Gr. sect of Jews. Their Pythagorean regime, their belief in the pre- existence of the soul, their view of its nature and incarnation, all point the same way. The state- ment also of Philo, not repeated by .los. , that they philosophized most things in the Bible allegoric- ally or in a symbolic way with old-fashioned zeal,-t is an almost certain proof of their Hellenism. And Philo's own allegorization of the passage I)t 2311'. is, as Friedhinder has seen (p. 118), an allusion to the Es.sene probation and discipline (Philo, Legw Allerj. i. 117).
Again, Philo, when he states that the E. were taught the art of regulating home and state, and a knowledge of what things are really good and bad and indifferent, how to choose what is right and avoid the opposite courses, seems to inijily a familiarity on tncir part with Greek, especially with Stoic, moral i)liilo.sophy, inconceivable among Jews who spoke Aramaic only. But here we must be cautious, for Philo would naturally de- scribe any sect in terms of his own Gr. culture. That he twice over described this Pal. sect, yet apparently left unnoticed the purely .Jewish schools of Pal., is in any case significant, and suggests that they had a Gr. culture which inter- ested him, and leu him to couple them, as he does, with the Alexandrine Therapeutic.