The Essenes:
St. Paul, Jesus and the Teacher of Righteousness
The Essenes have never been very well known, even to scholars. That began to change after the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Now that all the scrolls have been made available to the general public, a more complete picture of the Essenes emerges. The most famous group, those at Qumran, seem to have lived a very strict spiritual life based on the teachings of their founder, as presented in the Community Rule, also published as The Manual of Discipline. Other Essene groups, such as the Therapeutae, followed a much more relaxed lifestyle.
The information revealed by these scrolls has led to an increased interest by scholars in understanding the role the Essenes might have played in the development of both Judaism and Christianity. One scholar to investigate this is Alvar Ellegård, a scholar specializing in historical and anthropological themes and in the history of ideas.
Professor Ellegård begins by exploring the size and importance of the Essene community and presents a convincing argument that groups known by differing names are in fact simply Essenes. This leads to the conclusion that a great number of Jews scattered through the Roman Empire by the first century of the modern era were part of the larger Essene movement. This puts a very different light on some subsequent history and leads to some rather startling conclusions.
The second part of Ellegård's argument begins with the examination of the probable dates of various first century documents, including some of the letters of the apostle Paul, that are generally accepted as genuine. Also included are the letters of James, Peter and Jude. Upon examination, a most remarkable thing about these first century letters is that not once in any of them is Jesus spoken of as someone the writer knew, or even as someone of whom there are recent memories. This is rather remarkable, particularly in those letters generally assumed to have been written by three of Jesus' disciples.
Having already established the size of the Essene population throughout the Roman empire it is then easy to demonstrate that the communities to whom the letters were written were not young Christian groups, as has generally been assumed, but well-established Essene communities. It can be assumed then that they already had a common set of beliefs and expectations when Paul began his ministry to them, telling his story of a resurrected Jesus.
It seems reasonable to ask, though, why Paul would preach about Jesus to people far from Jerusalem, who could not have known him, and yet offered no details about his life? The answer is disarmingly simple - he was preaching about someone they all knew by reputation because he had been dead for nearly two centuries! In the dead sea scrolls he is never called by name, simply by a title, the Teacher of Righteousness: the man who led the Essene movement.
This leader of the Essene community was not known until the discovery of two incomplete copies of the Damascus Document in Egypt. A little more information was learned from the Dead Sea Scrolls, but they shed little light on the identity of this important leader of the Essenes. We know that he was a priest, and that he was probably the author of the spiritual guidelines for the community. And we know approximately when he came to the community. The Damascus Document states the community (presumably the Essene community at Qumran) was born 390 years after the destruction of Jerusalem by Babylon. That event took place in 586 BCE, giving the date of about 196 BCE for the beginning of the community. The document then says that this group of pious people struggled alone for twenty years until a Teacher of Righteousness was sent to them. This, then, would have been about 176 BCE.
In other writings we discover that a high priest in Jerusalem, named Jesus, came into conflict with the Greek ruler Menelaus and raised a sedition against him. He eventually left Jerusalem in about 175 BCE for the area around the Dead Sea - exactly where Qumran existed. This is as close to definitive proof as we are likely to have that this man was the Teacher of Righteousness. Plus, the Essenes believed him to be the manifestation of Melchizedek, who they believed would return again in the Last Days.
Having made that bold statement, it is important to assert that this is not to question the validity of Paul's experience, beginning with the conversion on the road to Damascus. Quite the opposite: the fact that Paul was proclaiming that the founder had risen from the dead after two centuries must have been an electrifying message to these Essenes. It proclaimed to the hearers that if Jesus (we know with virtual certainty this was the Teacher's name) has resurrected then it is possible for all believers to enjoy resurrection.
Had Christianity continued to evolve along this line the religion would have had a far different history. But early in the second century there developed a theological conflict between elements of the Essene movement, particularly between the gnostics who had a much more metaphysical and spiritualized view of Jesus and those who insisted he was a normal man in every way -- except that he happened to also be the son of God.
It was out of this conflict that the leaders of what would become orthodox Christianity felt the need to establish a biography for the Messiah as proof that he was a physical man and not just an spiritualized force. There was at that time a rather traditional manner in which the exploits of heroes were described. Various writers began to adapt those legends to the story of Jesus and the Gospels were born.
Now I realize that reading a few short paragraphs that essentially rewrite the origins of Christianity is a lot to take in. I had much the same reaction. In the last decade I had been particularly interested in the various attempts to recreate the historical Jesus. Some of them make very interesting reading, and some of them present very convincing arguments. But they are all based, of course, on the assumption that the Jesus portrayed in the Gospels existed. To rethink the entire story and place Jesus in this Essene context not only makes more sense to the rational mind, it eliminates the conflicting images found in the New Testament.
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The book that is the origin of all this material is Jesus: One Hundred Years Before Christ by Alvar Ellegård. I think this may be one of the most important books to be written about Christian origins for a very long time. Certainly the ideas presented deserve very serious discussion.
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This ground-shaking research is particularly important to the Order of Melchizedek. Edgar Cayce said that Melchizedek was a prior embodiment of the spirit later incarnated as Jesus. Cayce was almost right, along with other writers who have portrayed Melchizedek as the archetype of the Christ. But it was not the Jesus of the gospels that was a later incarnation of Melchizedek, it was the Teacher of Righteousness.