Four Key Differences between the Essenes and Jesus

1. Oil Defilement:

The Essenes regarded oil as a defilement, such that “anyone who accidentally comes into contact with it scours his person” (Jewish War 2.123, cf. Damascus Document xii.16).  Jesus urged those who were fasting not to “look dismal, like the hypocrites,” who “disfigure their faces so as to show others that they are fasting,” but rather to “put oil on your head and wash your face.” (Matthew 6:16-17).

 

2. Hierarchy:

 

The Essenes were in general very big on hierarchical ranking, especially in their separated communities. If a higher-ranking member so much as touched a lower-ranking one he had to bathe, “as after contact with an alien” (Josephus, Jewish War 2.150, cf. Damascus Document XVI.5-6 and 4Q279, Community Rule III.19-25).  This naturally also affected who the Essenes in their various rankings would sit down and eat with and who they would not (Community Rule [1QS] V.10-19).

Jesus, in contrast, rejected such ranking, insisting that his disciples had one teacher and were all brothers. They were not to put up with being called “Rabbi,” nor were they to call anyone “father on earth, for you have one Father, who is in heaven” (Matt 23:8-10). Jesus, in fact, actually subverted the very notion of ranking among his followers, by telling them that “the greatest among you should be like the youngest, and the one who rules like the one who serves.” (Luke 22:26).

 

3. Eating with Tax Collectors and Sinners:

 

Essenes were not allowed to eat from the community’s table until they had taken dietary oaths so strict that if for some reason one of them was ejected from the community, he might well starve, as Josephus reports: “For, being bound by their oaths and usages, he is not at liberty to partake of other men’s food, and so falls to eating grass and wastes away and dies of starvation” (Jewish War 2.139-143).

Jesus in contrast insisted that it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of it, that is to say, from the heart (Matt 15:11 and 1-20, Mark 7:14-23).  It was in this saying that the author of the Gospel of Mark sees Jesus declaring “all foods clean” (Mark 7:19).

Jesus’ practice of eating with the very sort of “questionable people,” the Essenes would have avoided as unclean, caused his opponents to ask his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” (Matt 9:11).  And when a sinful woman came to Jesus and wet his feet with her tears and wiped it with hair and then anointed them, he did not draw back, as the Pharisee, in whose house he was dining, assumed he would have done had he really been a prophet of God who knew “what sort of woman this is who is touching him” (Luke 7:36-48).  But Jesus did know and he still did not draw back.  This incident underscores another striking difference between Jesus and the Essenes.  There is not in Jesus even a hint of the kind of misogyny reflected on the part of the Essenes, for example, in Josephus’s report that they “wish to protect themselves against women’s wantonness, being persuaded that none of the sex keeps her plighted troth to one man” (Jewish War 2.121).

 

 

4. Keeping the Sabbath:

 

Among the Jewish sects, the Essenes were the strictest with regard to keeping Sabbath regulations, even to the point of avoiding going to the bathroom on the Sabbath (Josephus, Jewish War 2.147-148).  In contrast, we find Jesus almost continually under attack throughout the Gospels for his seemingly relaxed attitude toward Sabbath regulations. In fact, one of these occasions may represent the single instance in the Gospels where Jesus actually refers to an Essene teaching and rejects it.  The incident in question was when Jesus healed a man with dropsy in the house of a leading Pharisee on the Sabbath.  His audience in that case were the experts in the law and Pharisees.  Before Jesus heals the man, he challenges his hearers: “Which of you, having a son or an ox that has fallen into a well on a Sabbath day, will not immediately pull him out?” (Luke 14:5). The presumed answer, which Jesus’s hearers refused to give, was that none of them would, unless they were Essenes, who had a rule that “No man shall assist a beast to give birth on the Sabbath day. And if it should fall into a cistern or pit, he shall not lift it out on the Sabbath” (Damascus Rule XI).  This passage from the Damascus Document goes on to say that it is permissible to rescue a person in such a situation, so long as you don’t use any secondary extenders such as a ladder or rope. 

We may well wonder whether in framing the question as he did, Jesus was appealing to an Essene rule that both he and his hearers would have regarded as totally absurd.  Anyway, the question makes his larger point well. If it is lawful to rescue a man from a pit on the Sabbath, who could object to rescuing him from some long-term illness on that day? 

So, although books still appear making the claim that Jesus was an Essene, and shall continue to do so, we expect, in the future, they are not generally credited by scholars of Early Judaism and Christianity.[1]  One does find, to be sure, the occasional scholar with real credentials in any given generation who may say so,[2] just as one might find one who says that Jesus was married,[3] or that his story arose out of a hallucinogenic experience in the context of a psychedelic mushroom cult,[4] or that he never existed.[5]   Although the idea that Jesus might have been an Essene is somewhat less fanciful than these other examples it remains, like them, an idiosyncratic exception to a dominating consensus based on better evidence. 

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1. See, e.g., Edmond Bordeaux Szekely, The Essene Gospel of Peace, Book One (n.p.: International Biogenic Society, 1981 [orig. 1928]); Charles Francis Potter, The Lost Years of Jesus Revealed (2^nd ed.; Greenwich, CT: Fawcett, 1962) and Did Jesus Write this Book? (Greenwich, CT: Fawcett, 1965), Donovan Joyce, The Jesus Scroll (New York: New American Library: A Signet Book, 1972), Delores Cannon, Jesus and the Essenes (Huntsville, AR: Ozark Mountain, 2000), and Anne and Daniel Meurois-Givaudan, The Way of the Essenes: Christ’s Hidden Life (Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1993). None of these works warrant being taken seriously by scholars, or, for that matter, by any serious student. See summaries, e.g., in Beskow, Strange Tales, 81-91 (on Szekely), 92-95 (on Joyce), and James VanderKam & Peter Flint, The Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Their Significance for Understanding the Bible, Judaism, Jesus and Christianity (fwd. Emanuel Tov; London: T & T Clark, 2002), 329 (on Cannon). As for the Meurois-Givaudans.  Their claim is to have been eye-witnesses to the life of Jesus with the aid of the Akashic Records, which they claim they consulted “through a series of astral or out-of-body journeys” (viii).

2. E.g., Barbara Thiering, Jesus and the Riddle of the Dead Sea Scrolls (New York: Doubleday, 1992). See the summary and critique in VanderKam & Flint, Meaning, 325-29.

3. E.g., William E. Phipps, The Sexuality of Jesus: Theological and Literary Perspectives (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), and Was Jesus Married? (New York: Harper & Row, 1970).

4. John M. Allegro, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1970). See the summary and critique in VanderKam & Flint, Meaning, 323-25.

5. Robert M. Price, The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man: How Reliable Is the Gospel Tradition (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Press, 2003).