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In the Essene documents at our disposal, we find no specific statement that the Teacher had risen from the grave and ascended to heaven; however, the doctrine of his Parousia implies his resurrection.
Scholars have traced from its source the evolution of the central doctrine of Christianity, which is that the savior-god who dies that men may live and become immortal is himself the eucharistic bread and wine by which this miraculous transformation occurs.
Answer for yourself: Where did the New Testament derive this concept?
Among the Jews, no one but the Essences practiced this sacrament before the advent of Christianity; and Buddhism, which could have provided the only discernible elements in the Gospel not derived from Essenism, had no soter/savior whatever. While they were appropriating so much else from the Pythagoreans about Pros B.C., it is unreasonable to believe that the Essenes should have failed to adopt the heart of the mystery. In some way, they identified their food with a concept of the sacrificed deity.
However, the Eucharist among the early Essenes must have been of an impersonal nature; for we can find no evidence that before 63 B.C.E. they had any specific savior-god; and this would indeed have been incompatible in a cult established upon Jewish tradition. Nothing could be more difficult than to engraft the soter/savior upon Judaism. Before that date, the bread and wine they took so reverently must have been considered primarily as a consecrated gift.
The death of the Teacher of Righteousness, however, must have effected an almost immediate revolution in their soteriology. We learn specifically that he was "the Savior of the World . . . the sinless one who shall die for ungodly men in the blood of the covenant." He was God, the King of Heaven, appearing in the form of a man, who walked humbly among men and was seen in Jerusalem. The electrifying effect of this doctrine cannot be overstated: for instantly the age-old concepts which had grown up around Osiris-Adonis-Dionysus and the Persian Saoshyant crystallized themselves about this new god man who had also suffered the very fate of his divine predecessors. There is even a cryptic passage in which a virgin-birth seems attributed to him: "And I saw that from Judah was born a virgin wearing a linen garment, and from her was born a Lamb, without spot (Joseph, II, 74).
After the death of the Teacher, the sacramental meal of the Essenes took on a new and more potent symbolism and became for them mystically the blood and the body of their savior-god. He became their heavenly bread and the gift of everlasting life. This is the same thing we see by devotees of:
Answer for yourself: You need to ask yourself is what is ascribed to Jesus by Paul and other New Testament writers is a unique and Divine revelation or just a re-make of an older pagan ritual that finds its origin in sun-worship?
If one undertakes an in-depth study into the areas covered by our website, then it is easy for him to see and demonstrate for his own benefit the relationship of Christianity to other faiths. This similarity excludes the Sadducees since they were antithetical to the Essenes and the message Jesus taught on every point of doctrine and practice; nor do we include the Pharisees, who were similar to the Essenes only in Sabbath observation and partially in certain eschatological concepts, which their successors, the rabbis, soon abandoned. One should, however, include the Buddhists, who were the source of several important elements found in the Synoptics; and also the Pythagoreans, who were the direct progenitors of the Essenes, as were the latter of the message we find preached by Jesus in the New Testament.
If such a study is undertaken, then will find that Essene doctrine or practice reproduced the Pythagorean religious beliefs in 31 of out a possible 44 subdivisions or Pythagorean religious beliefs. What is important for our study is that the Early Church taught 34 of them! What is even more amazing is that under 15 of them the ideology of Buddhism recurs in the Gospels; and finally that the Essenes reproduced Zoroastrian religious doctrine in 6 of the categories as well.
But we must emphasize that the Gospels contains certain specific Buddhist elements: among these are the repudiation of the Sabbath, the establishment of democracy, and the abolition of oaths, secrecy, classes, and the novitiate. Most important are the doctrines, stated or implied, that the poor are holy per se, that thrift, industry, and self-reliance are of little value or actually criminal, that the indigent are entitled to alms, and that a mendicant society should replace the self-supporting communist brotherhood. In all these respects Jesus is seen as more of a Buddhist rather than an Essene-Pythagorean.
Finally, upon your personal examination, will can see that there exists a whole complex of religious doctrines found only among the Essenes and in the Gospels: these deal with eschatology, the soter/savior, the Messiah, and the Parousia. The Essenes were the first who taught the doctrine of irrevocable hell-torture for every unbeliever; who combined the concept of the soter with that of the Messiah; and who proclaimed the Parousia. All of these were reproduced intact in the Gospels and became the basic doctrines of Christianity through the Epistles of Paul.
When the Gospels portray Jesus as repudiating the fanatical Sabbath observation so holy to the Essenes, the Gospel writers portray him and his Buddhist internationalism most dramatically. Other Buddhistic divergencies developed in part from the pressure of the situation: when he began his ministry, he was convinced that the kingdom of God was immediately at hand. The time was short: he was under the fearful compulsion of creating a mass-movement immediately. Instead of making it difficult to join as had other mystery-sects like the Essenes, he invited everyone; oaths and initiations were consequently impractical; disciples were not forbidden to divulge his doctrines, but encouraged to do so; in his democratic following, there was room neither for seniority nor distinction; and he did not find it expedient to make an issue of economic exploitation. After all, in the kingdom now imminent, all the saints would be equal forever.
And we should note that although the Essenes were fanatics in their observation of the Sabbath, they did not follow the entire Mosaic Law. It is almost certain that they were vegetarians; and nothing indicates that they believed in circumcision. We know that they repudiated the Temple worship and sacrifices, and much else which was sacred to the reigning priesthood. The seeds of a classless and international philosophy were present in their ideology; Jesus simply went far beyond them.
It may be interesting to note that the Essene-Christian relationship has long fascinated New Testament scholars, among whom several Germans developed intriguing rationalist theories. Bahrdt, 1784-1792, Venturini, 1800, Gforer, 1831-38, Hennel, 1840, and van der Alm, 1863, published disquisitions in which Jesus was represented as trained or controlled by the Essenes, who, in several of the hypotheses, staged his crucifixion with or without the cooperation of the Romans, revived him after the ordeal, and so created the myth that he had risen from the grave. This is just conjecture at best. I personally feel that he was resurrected, but personal faith is free to anyone. But the fact remains that many discount his resurrection.
About 1830, Thomas de Quincey wrote an essay (Essenism and Christianity) in which he contends that no such group as Essenes ever existed, that Josephus merely mistook the Christians— whom he never mentions even oncel—for these strange persons, who were certainly not then known by that name. He argues that to assume the prior existence of a large and tightly organized group of men with teachings identical to those of the Christians would be a deadly offense against the faith: "If the Essenes were not the early Christians in disguise, then was Christianity, as a knowledge, taught independently of Christ; nay, in opposition to Christ" (Coleridge, Works, VIII, p. 136), which, he implies, is impossible and therefore a blasphemous opinion.
The significant fact is that all these and many others recognized the substantial identity of Essenism with the Gospels and Jesus long before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Since 1947, more realistic theories have appeared. Mr. Dupont-Sommer declares: "The Galilean Master, as he is represented to us in the writings of the New Testament, appears in many respects as an astonishing reincarnation of the Master of Justice" (Dead Sea Scrolls, p. 99). Mr. Edmund Wilson says, concerning the monastery at Kirbet-Qumran: "this structure that endures, between the bitter waters and precipitous cliffs, with its oven and its inkwell, its mill and its cesspool, its constellations of sacred fonts and unadorned graves of its dead, is perhaps, more than Bethlehem or Nazareth, the cradle of Christianity" (The Scrolls from the Dead Sea, pp. 97-98).
In spite of the detailed parallelism existing between Essenism and the Gospels and the portrayal of Jesus by Paul in his Epistles, it would be a serious error to believe that Jesus could have been a commissioned spokesman for the Order, a mistake which various German scholars made for his divergencies were quite drastic. The revelation of himself as the Messiah would necessarily have been a monstrous blasphemy in Essene eyes, probably as much as in Pharisaic. And the greatest treason of all would have consisted in the simple publication of their esoteric doctrines, and the application of them to himself. All that awaited was the fulfillment of the reincarnation and death of their prior Teacher of Righteousness; then the parallels would be apparent that their "Teacher" had returned. But yet, lacking was the fulfillment of the Jewish Scriptures. But conveniently, the doctrine of the Parousia, the imminent return or "coming" of the Daniel Son of Man was the remedy to that. The prophecies will be fulfilled in a second Advent. Christians express the same belief today; while the Jews look for the first coming of their "true" Messiah who will not leave them to be killed by the Gentile powers of the world, but vindicate them by the fulfillment of the Jewish Scriptures.
And beyond all this we must note again that certain elements in the Gospel are Buddhist and not Essene-Pythagorean at all, of which the most important was the substitution of a type of communism for the self-dependent community. We know that Asia Minor teemed with Buddhist proselytizers in the first century; and that almost no one could have been immune from their propaganda. We know also that the Pythagorean societies differed from the Buddhist primarily in that the former were organizations of working and self-reliant communists while the latter, living in idleness, depended upon gifts and beggary. The Buddhists therefore emphasized the importance of charity, of giving to the poor, whose rights and virtues they always proclaimed. In all this, the Gospel Jesus is far more Buddhist than Essene.
Once we admit that this element in the Gospel is Buddhist, other problems are also solved. Whereas the Essenes were a secret order with a tightly knit membership, regimented into classes, who imparted their doctrines to initiates only after prolonged discipline, the Buddhists broadcast theirs to all who would listen: and they offered to heal the sick, the halt, the lame, and the blind, and to establish a universal kingdom in which private wealth, poverty, and exploitation would be abolished forever. Christians, like Buddhists, had no barriers to membership, no oaths, no novitiates, no distinct orders among themselves, and no rule against divulging their doctrines. In all this also the Gospels and the New Testament Jesus was patterned upon Buddhist rather than Essene antecedents.
However, it is also indisputable that the Gospel, by and large, is not Buddhist, but Essene; that many aspects of Buddhism were present in Pythagoreanism from the beginning and could thus have been transmitted to the Essenes indirectly; and that, finally, many elements are therefore common to Buddhism, Pythagoreanism, Essenism, and the Gospels, such as communism, rejection of marriage and family, and the glorification of personal poverty.
We must realize that Essenism as well as the Gospels belong among those movements of social revolt which have agitated mankind some three thousand years, the appeal of which has been to the poor and the unsuccessful and which were designed to ameliorate the sufferings of, and supply consolation to, the exploited and the downtrodden. Their ultimate source was Buddhism, which sanctified idleness and mendicancy as the holy pathway to Nirvana, and which renounced labor, property, sex, and family as the only practical means by which to escape the frustration of unrequited toil. All such movements tend to repudiate the nationalist ideal in favor of a classless, international communion of the poor and the exploited. The philosophy proclaimed by Gautama, however, was so altered by the Pythagoreans as to make themselves self-supporting; but they still refused to surrender any of their labor to parents, brothers, sisters, wives, children, or relatives, and very little, if any, to the state. Such movements have always been distinguished by a fervently proclaimed brotherhood among the oppressed and a violent hatred for the wealthy and the powerful.
Many scholars have demonstrated that The Book of Enoch, The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, and other Essene documents written before or immediately after the death of the last Teacher contain a whole galaxy of concepts central to the Synoptics. Among these we may list the doctrines of:
Before 63 B.C.E., the Essenes had no savior-god; but the execution of their most celebrated Teacher provided them with this crucial necessity, precisely as the crucifixion of Jesus served the same purpose in the Christian Church.
After 60 B.C.E., therefore, the Essenes projected their second basic and original doctrine which reappeared in the Gospels and the life of Jesus: that of the incarnate god-man who dies sacrificially for the sins of the world, is resurrected from the dead, ascends to heaven, where he sits at the right hand of God, whence He (as a godman) is to return in a final Parousia to judge the quick and the dead and establish the kingdom of heaven.
On this website we have demonstrated conclusively by the chronological evolution of religious beliefs, beginning in Egypt and Sumer, and following the trail through the Aryan nations that sun-worship personified in soter/saviors of almost every Gentile nation, culminated in a religious doctrine of an incarnate-godman who dies for the sins of his followers and who offers Eternal Life to his devotees through the sacrament of eating his flesh and drinking his blood, either literally or figuratively, in a pre-mass, or as it is known today, as the Eucharist!
There is truly nothing new under the sun! These same concepts were adopted by these Essenes who had rejected Judaism in toto in the first century because of many factors; the least of which was the crucifixion of their "Teacher" and their rejection from their rightful Priesthood by the Hasmoneans a hundred years or more earlier. Simply said, in such repudiation of normative Biblical Judaism along with its Temple and sacrificial system, they generated their own "new revelations" that condemned the status-quo and elevated themselves with a hope of Divine intervention to right the wrong. It did not happen as history attests. But yet millions read their documents which found a re-print in the New Testament and believe this over the Torah which they had rejected along with the many of the Prophets. Even more, their predecessors had purposefully altered the translation of the Torah and the Prophets in Alexandria, Egypt, over 200 years earlier when they transformed a Davidic Messiah into a godman of virginous birth as had been done previously by almost all Gentile nations involved in sun-worship.
The importance of the Essenes in the history of the occident can scarcely be overstated. Had they never existed, there would have been no Christianity and therefore no Catholic Church. In that event one of the rationalistic, scientific, and exclusive cults of Persia would have become dominant in the Graeco-Roman world: possibly Mithraism, but much more probably Manichaeism. Many scholars are convinced that had either of these defeated all its rivals, Greek enlightenment would have prevailed after a bitter struggle and the civilization of the ensuing centuries as well as the life of every human being in the western world would have been totally different from what it has been during the last sixteen hundred years.
The evidence strongly suggests that Jesus had for some years been a member of the Essene community, but had developed serious doubts concerning the validity of its Judaic discipline, and, even more significantly, had become convinced that he, instead of the long overdue Teacher, was the true incarnate Messiah in his human manifestation. During this period of reorientation, he may well have come under the influence of a Buddhist proselytizer, from whom he could have adopted the missionary methods of Gautama. But since he had no following and probably no preeminence among the Essenes, he could not possibly reorganize the Community, which had become thoroughly fixed in its doctrines. His only alternative was, therefore, either to live and die in complete obscurity as an obedient member of the Order, or, combining the Essene synthesis with certain Buddhist and Torah concepts, to go forth as an individual, broadcasting the seditious tenets of the sect, proclaiming the acceptable year of the Lord, and hinting broadly that he was Himself the Messiah. In doing this, he would, of course, be repudiated by the Order; he would place his life in constant jeopardy, and his very survival from day to day would depend upon the utmost caution. In any event, he could not long continue in such a perilous undertaking. Schonfield and other scholars believe that Jesus consciously re-created the career of the Teacher of Righteousness and pursued by design a course of action which would lead inevitably to his sacrificial and spectacular death as an atonement for the sins of mankind, persuaded that in this way but in no other could he establish the kingdom of heaven. Basically Jesus had faith in a Divine intervention as had occurred with the Maccabee victory over Antiochus Epiphanies earlier in the history of Israel.
Once dead, his teachings were picked up by those who saw in his crucifixion a "fulfillment" of the Teacher's prophecies than a second Messiah would follow him. These doctrines, which were already a closely-knit synthesis of already established beliefs of the Buddhists and Pythagoreans, were later mixed with already-established pagan doctrine. Over time, after the dissolution of Israel following the 70 C.E. war, this unique synthesis of religious doctrines began to take hold; especially in the Gentile nations as they recognized such a "bridge" to their already held pagan notions which can be shown to be traced directly to sun-worship. Over all, this must be seen, in its final form as we see it today in Christianity, an almost total repudiation of Moses, Sinai, and Biblical Judaism. Jesus possessed an immense advantage among the Greeks over his predecessor, the Essene Teacher; through his absorption of Buddhist techniques and appeal, He laid the foundations for a mass-movement. And when a few zealous missionaries began proclaiming the Risen Christ, Jesus' message, his Gospel spread like wildfire in the Graeco-Roman world, which was already athirst for just this "elixir of life" (Larson, The Story of Christian Origins, 1977, p. 280-292).
What you, the reader must separate, is this. Today Gentile Christianity is a religious synthesis; but so was the Judaism of Jesus' day. Jesus, I personally believe, taught the best, lived the best, and died the best. His dedication to the improvement of the human condition was paramount before his face every day. His truth came from many sources: Torah, Moses, the Prophets, David, Solomon, Buddha, Pythagoras, etc. No one holds the patent on God's truths. Some have them; some don't. There were many voices crying "in the wilderness" of religious confusion in the days of Jesus. Jesus was just a voice in the crowd crying out for those who had "ears to hear" the message of God. God has has given His message to not just the Jews down through history. Remember Abraham who was a non-Jew? How about Noah?
What I am saying is that in the teachings of Jesus the Kingdom of God went forth as he helped people draw closer to God. His death was a catalyst that took to the Gentile world such a message. It is a crying shame that mixed with his words are those of the New Testament writes who merged this the Divine message of Jesus blatant sun-worship and idolatry and wove it together in such a way that the normal man cannot detect it. Winners write history; they also write religious works. Just look at Rome for a minute in that day and time and examine the men and their ideologies that wrote later about Jesus and made him into a sun-god. These man had a lot in common with the Essenes who also believed in a sun-godman. Jesus never, I said never, said he was this man. Millions have said that about him, but they are wrong, besides idolators. Without study you are assured to die and meet YHVH face to face and be told you "have done evil in the sight of the LORD" as were the Kings of Israel who lead the people astray. Jesus took the "best" from each "ideology" or "theology" and shared their truths as his "good news." There is a big difference though in teaching practical love, sacrifice, giving, alms, sharing, faith that acts, love in action, as Jesus did, and putting into him mouth words and doctrines of pagan origin and sun-worship he NEVER would have believed and taught as a good Jew who himself believed he was the hope of Israel and the world. The New Testament is full of them and you just don't know where these "land-mines" are located as you have been taught to read the whole thing as if "God-breathed."
I challenge you to SERIOUSLY read the websites we have provided. Yes, its a lot of material. But many, many lies have been told and ignorance reigns supreme today as falsehoods pass for truth. May your love for God compel you to hunger and thirst for righeousness........your own.......for that is what the Torah from Sinai and Moses teaches. Repentance is the remedy of sin and not a crucified sun-godman created by astrologers and Gentile star-gazers for over 6 thousand years. And the same message played again by a group of dissent excommunicated Priests in the wilderness who would later reject Sinai and create their "own Torah" to replace the one handed down by holy men of old must be exposed for what it is....sour-grapes theology.
Let me leave you with a statement I truly love by Lawrence Schiffman, in his Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls. He says that the Essene Apocalyptic is totally discredited. It is time for you, the God loving Christian, to know the same. Shalom and love in my heart for you.