Snapshots - Jesus through the Lens of History

The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Essenes

Through the mists of time come the seething, roiling, blackening clouds of political unrest. Cumulous fill with the voices of rage, pleading and simple disgust. A small group of Jews gathers itself and leaves the ancient city life of Jerusalem. They have had it! And don’t want to take it anymore! So don your desert survival gear, grab your camera and let’s go back to the first century. We are traveling into the wilderness – wild and wooly and really dry – but just twenty or so miles from Jerusalem. We are going to the caves of Qumran and the monastic group named the Essenes.

Look up from the Dead Sea and you will see about a thousand feet above you, in the cliffs, cave openings. Take a quick snapshot and then climb. As we enter a few of the more than twenty caves we notice something striking right off the bat. There are only men, boys, and no women. Hmmm.  

An elite, communal group of ultra conservative Jews have chosen to pool most if not all their personal wealth and live apart as priests. They are the righteous. They are the chosen. They are the favored by God because they are the only ones who know His will and follow it punctiliously. (I know. I know. You have probably heard this claim before, but there you go.) These Essenes are so sure of their purity they even create a different calendar, rituals and begin some interesting concepts never considered in Judaism before, like resurrection for the righteous. And they also believe in three, count them three messiahs! (We will take snapshots of the whole messiah business soon.)

    Aim your camera more closely and you will see the group diligently copying the Old Testament. These men are scribes, copying the old and adding new commentaries with their own slant on Judaism. Scrolls fill jars and tables. They are also preparing for a war between the Sons of Light (the Essenes) and the Sons of Darkness (a huge conglomerate of everyone else). The cataclysmic conflagration between cosmic forces of good and evil will continue through seven horrific battles, and is described in bloody detail in the War Scroll.  Of course, they believe the end of evil times occurs when God comes to protect the elite Essenes who will then return Judaism to the mythical golden days of David and Solomon. For more than two hundred years before Jesus their disgust grew. But it was Herod and his antics that were the final straw sending them packing into the desert. Temple politics, the defilement of values, and the worldliness of Greeks and Romans became just too gross. So they left and prayed for an apololypse!

    Now this is a really cool aside: In case you are interested, they have carefully prepared a special scroll of thin copper incised with the places where they have hidden their riches and wealth. A treasure map!

   Was Jesus, or his cousin John, Essenes? Well, they certainly knew of them, and signs suggest they were familiar with all the many and diverse disputing Jewish sects. However, there were even more influences, strange and foreign, that surrounded Jesus every day. We will need to come back with our cameras to check those out. So be prepared!