Since the classical sources of Josephus, Philo, and Pliny represented the Essenes as a secretive, initiatory community given to the study of “mysteries” and the pursuit of esoteric practices, healing, and various forms of divination, it was not all that difficult to imagine the Essenes as playing a secret, hidden role in facilitating and orchestrating public and political events from behind the scenes. The idea that the Essenes influenced Jesus and the early Jesus movement had already fascinated scholars, Deists, forgers, and esotericists for well over a century. Blavatsky, however, did not invent this alleged connection. Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society, suggested that Jesus had secretly been trained by the Essenes, but left their community in order to become a travelling healer. Unfortunately, the reception history of this historical inquiry has a checkered past, for where the biblical scholar working within the evidentiary limits of the ancient evidence may hear only silence, others less constrained by such limits claim to have heard other voices. Like the historical Jesus, “the Essenes” can easily become a screen upon which one projects one’s own interests and ideological location(s), whether that be Jesus’ “hidden years,” a window into the “secret history” of early Christianity, or an historically non-existent fabrication by Philo, Josephus, and Pliny. In a previous article published on this site, "On Jesus, the Essenes, and the Anxiety of Influence," I suggested that the Essenes represent ambiguous border lines and boundaries between Early Judaism and Christian origins. Is that because the Essenes were so ideologically and sociologically different from Jesus and the Pharisees that they moved in completely different orbits? Or is it because the Essenes represented an integral component of Second Temple Judaism that both early Christians and the Rabbis sought to marginalize by omission? The Rabbis seem to have forgotten all about them. They are variously imagined as a small, marginal community, an idiosyncratic group that disappeared itself into oblivion, a thriving multi-regional network of village communities, and/or as a militant sect of apocalyptic pacifists ready to participate in great eschatological acts of violence. The Essenes represent an historical enigma within Early Judaism. See Also: Jesus, the Essenes, and Christian Origins: New Light on Ancient Texts and Communities (Baylor University Press, 2018). ![]()
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