In my previous post I talked about the significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls for understanding Jesus and the milieu out of which earliest Christianity grew.  My basic point is that if Jesus was a Jew, then to understand him, you have to understand Jews in his world.  And the Dead Sea Scrolls provide us valuable information to that end.

I am not saying that the Dead Sea Scrolls are representative of what all or even most Jews thought at the time.  They clearly are not.  If the “Essene hypothesis” is right (that is, that the Scrolls were produced by members of a Jewish sect known as the Essenes) – and it is the view held by the vast majority of the experts (I am *not* an expert on the Scrolls) – then the Scrolls were produced by a Jewish sect that had very distinctive views of its own that were not, in many respects, shared by outsiders.  In particular, this was a group of Jews who insisted that the coming apocalyptic judgment, soon to arrive, would bring destruction not only to the hated Romans and the “obvious” enemies of God, but to many Jews as well, including the priests who were in charge of the Temple cult in Jerusalem.

This was not an unprecedented claim, but it was not a wildly popular one either (especially among the priests in charge!).  In terms of not being unprecedented: even a canonical prophet like Jeremiah could rail against the Temple and the sacrifices performed there, predicting that the Temple would be destroyed by God (e.g. Jeremiah 7).  So there was nothing “un-Jewish” about castigating the Temple.

But it was not widely done, because the Temple was the very center of religious life for most Jews.  God himself had ordered its construction and ordained the sacrifices that were to take place there.  And the Hebrew Scriptures see the Temple as the very center and focus of Jewish worship – not an incidental feature in the Jewish religion, but its heart and soul.  Opposing it was serious business.  And not just for religious reasons.  The Temple was also the center of social, political, and economic life in Jerusalem, the capital city of Judea.  Opposing it meant opposing almost everything the Jewish government and people embraced.

In order to express their opposition to the Temple and Jerusalem, the Essenes at Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, removed themselves and established their own community in the wilderness.  It was there that they expected salvation to come.  They removed themselves because they refused to become contaminated by the impurities of the Temple cult as it was being practiced.  And at the heart of this refusal was the Essenes’ belief that the *wrong* priest was in charge – since the days of the Maccabees, one of the Maccabean leaders had taken over the position of high priest, when traditionally the high priest was thought to be legitimate only if he came from the line of Zadok, the chief priest in the days of King David.  Moreover, they celebrated the festivals according to the wrong calendar, which invalidated the sacrifices.  And so the Essenes set up their own communities in the wilderness to preserve their own purity, to avoid contamination, and to await the redemption that God was soon to bring.

As it turns out, Jesus opposed the Temple as well, and the priests who ran it.  So doesn’t that suggest that he was an Essene?

As I’ve already indicated, I think the answer is definitely “No.”  On the surface it may seem like with Jesus and the Essenes we have a “match,” which is why soon after the Scrolls were discovered scholars made the suggestion and some sensationalizing accounts were produced arguing that Jesus was an Essene.  But serious scholars took a more sober look at the evidence and showed the problems.

The main problems are that precisely the main concerns of the Essenes were not the concerns of Jesus, and vice versa.  There is nothing at all in our historical record to indicate that Jesus cared in the least whether the high priest came from the line of Zadok or not; and he shows no interest at all in the varying Jewish calendars.  Even more significant, Jesus was not at *all* interested in preserving ritual purity and in removing himself from possible sources of contamination.

In fact, just the precise opposite–Jesus was condemned by the Pharisees for his lax behavior, for associating with those who could bring impurity, the tax collectors and the sinners, for example.  It is interesting that Pharisees condemn Jesus for a lax interpretation of the law.  The Essenes condemned the *Pharisees* for a lax interpretation of the law.  If the Pharisees were too lax, how would *Jesus* have appeared to the Essenes?  Probably way, way out of bounds.

Jesus associated with the outcast and lowly because he did not think it was ritual purity that mattered.  For him, God had very different concerns.  The kingdom that was coming would come to those that society despised, not to those who were in positions of power and prominence.  And so he associated with the low-lifes to illustrate his message.  The Essenes wanted nothing to do with those who refused to follow the law – especially the laws of purity – with utmost strictness.  Their views were at opposite ends of the pole.

BUT – I stress the adversative, BUT – in another sense Jesus and the Essenes were very similar.  They were all apocalypticists who believed that God was soon to intervene in this wicked world to overthrow the forces of evil – even the recalcitrant among the Jews, and those who were “running the show” in Jerusalem – to set up a good kingdom on earth.  And so in many respects Jesus and the Essenes (and the Pharisees, and probably others) had a good deal in common, even if Jesus was almost certainly not himself an Essene.  To understand the basic world view of the apocalyptic Jesus though, we now have invaluable data available to us in the Scrolls, which indicate the basic world view of the apocalyptic Essenes.