Philo's guide to decoding the Hebrew Bible

[Ishtar]

Now, here's the good news. For YOUR purposes, first century BC/late 2d century BC is good enough. All that is necessary is to show that the Essenes' core philosophy existed PRIOR to the alleged birth of jesus. The chart you dug out of the other site seems to establish that so you should be happy. It is not necessary to stake out a position for the 3d century, which is probably untenable, when anything prior to 7 BC is sufficient to blow the jesus myth out of the water.

Well, I must admit that I was concentrating on that aspect of it and just grabbed the date off Wiki in passing, without checking it. I knew the Essenes were pre-Jesus and just hadn't worked out by quite how much. But on the tables, I put 2nd century BC - by which I meant in the 200s BC.

I don't expect "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth" from Wiki, but they do generally give the lowest common denominator of what the latest thinking is. They will say - yes, there's controversy but it looks like this is the date - so you get the impression that someone has taken a objective view after looking at all the conflicting arguments.

However, with anything to do with Christianity, I'm fast learning the hard way that this almost certainly isn't the case. I think whoever is moderating the Christian pages is a Christian - otherwise, how else could you explain all the attesting by the gospels and some of the pages of the early church fathers read like hagiographies with pictures of them with halos - and they are the only pages still using AD instead of CE.

I do contribute to the Wiki talk pages sometimes, so maybe I should go in and talk to them about it.

Arch, of course, will have a cow over than analysis...but who cares?

He won't believe you, Min. So I wouldn't bother.

Maybe it's him moderating the Christian Wiki pages?

[seeker]

This scene needs swelling music and the sound of the ocean crashing into the rocks.

Isn't that from Love Is A Many Splendoured Thing?

I think its generic to any soap opera

[seeker]

But here is the problem. The pharisees seem to emerge in the later 2d century:

Unfortunately, so do the Sadduccees:


Which leaves the Essenes

Isn't it funny how the major factions of Judaism only seem to emerge after the Maccabees?

[Minimalist]

by which I meant in the 200s BC.

Ah....I see the problem


First Century BC 0-99 BC
Second Century 100-199 BC
Third Century 200-299 BC
Fourth Century 300-399 BC

and so on.

Some people will quibble and say the century should start at 1 and run to 100 but I refuse to be that picky.

[Minimalist]

But here is the problem. The pharisees seem to emerge in the later 2d century:

Unfortunately, so do the Sadduccees:


Which leaves the Essenes

Isn't it funny how the major factions of Judaism only seem to emerge after the Maccabees?

Indeed. Politics surrounding a king? Whoever heard of such a thing.

But you know, when the founding fathers wrote the constitution they never considered the role of political parties. That little bit of mayhem only happened after the British were gone. Once the war ends the quibbling for the table scraps begins.

[seeker]

Indeed. Politics surrounding a king? Whoever heard of such a thing.

But you know, when the founding fathers wrote the constitution they never considered the role of political parties. That little bit of mayhem only happened after the British were gone. Once the war ends the quibbling for the table scraps begins.

No religious factionalism either? Maybe they never really had any doctrinal matters to fight over.

[Ishtar]

After getting my knuckles rapped by Min over the Essenes and the Dead Sea Scrolls and also being exhorted by John to “get my ass in gear over the gnostics”, I’ve decided to look into that subject area a bit further and I’ve found some interesting stuff.

In her book, The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold, Acharya S has a whole chapter on this subject. And if she is right, the actual authors (or at least original owners) of the Dead Sea Scrolls were not the Essenes, but the Zealots (or a thinking one, Min - i.e. a son of Zadok!). And then when you look into where the Zealots and the sons of Zadok sprang from and what they believed, you can almost see an embryonic mythical idea developing that could have culminated in the story of a historical Jesus that ended up being propagated by Iranaeus and chums around 200 years or so later.

Anyway, first of all, let’s make the case for that:

Pliny says that the Essenes did live by the Dead Sea, but that their settlement was near En Gedi which was dozens of kilometres from Qumran.

Golb believes that the Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection from libraries in Jerusalem secreted in caves throughout eastern Palestine by Jews fleeing the Roman armies during the revolt of 70 CE.

However, if they were deposited in 70 CE, they contain no mention of a Jesus and his followers just 40 years after the purported crucifixion. In fact, according to Dr Alan Snow: “Some modern Biblical scholars and archaeologists believe that the scrolls (the oldest dating to around 200 BC) could have been hidden in the caves as late as the Jewish revolt of 132-135 CE.”

The trouble is, there were so many uprisings/revolts/changes of power in that region over hundreds of years, it is difficult to know after which one they were hidden [that’s my idea, not Acharya’s]. And who wrote them, who originally owned them and who buried them could be a diverse bunch of people.

However, we can tell quite a lot from what's in them.

So - the texts in the Dead Sea Scrolls contain no variant of the term “Essene” and actually contain non-Essenic ideas – rather a fervent tone and warrior stance - as well as Hellenised elements that could only have been produced by Hellenised Jews.

But the tone and contents could well fit the Zealots and the Zadokites who according to Josephus, was “the fourth sect of Jewish philosophy.”

This is confirmed by the presence of the scroll “Song for the Holocaust of the Sabbath” found both at Qumran and at the Zealots’ fortress at Masada.

Dr Alan Snow says: “The authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls were Zealots and believed in the God-ordained destiny of the people of Israel.”

I’ll go on in the next post to explain how the stories and sentiments expressed within the scrolls of the Zealots could represent the feint beginnings of the Jesus story.

[Ishtar]

The Zealots were based in the largely multinational and Gentile northern kingdom of Israel, and in particular Israel’s capital: Samaria (Shomron), and also Galilee. In Matt. 26:69, Jesus is called Jesus the Galilean and said to have “come down at Capernaum” which is a settlement on the shores of Lake Galilee. Peter is also referred to as a Galilean and the name Mary Magdelene is thought to mean "of Magdala", a town in western Galilee.

Anyway, there’s some discussion about whether the Zealots were a sort of militant version of the Essenes or the Essenes were a pacifist version of the Zealots.

According to Origen, the Zealots were a branch that broke off from the Essenes, and both groups claimed to be offshoots of the Hasidic/Levitical priesthoods, which was itself zealous.

Of this confusion between sects, Baigent and Leigh said that in their search for the ‘historical’ Jesus, they found themselves “confronted by an apparently bewildering spectrum of Judaic cults, sects and sub-sects, of political and religious organisations and institutions, which seemed sometimes to be militantly at odds with one another, and sometimes to overlap. It quickly became apparent to us that the labels used to differentiate between the groups — Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, Zealots, Nazorenes — were neither accurate or useful.”

Acharya goes on that the zealous followers of Judas the Galilean were called Sicarii, named for the daggers they carried and plunged into the ‘bosom’ of victims. [Is Judas Sicarii not similar to the name Judas Iscariot? – Ish]

The Essenes, apparently, abhored such behaviour but other brotherhoods used the Zealots, and some trained and funded them. The Zealots were, in general, lower-level initiates into secret societies, while the highest level were the sacerdotal class or Magi. Apparently, if the higher level initiates wanted something done, the Zealots were the foot solders to send out.

From their contents, it is thus evident that a number of the more important original scrolls were written and deposited by “Zealots for the Law”. As such, the authors were reflecting their history as representatives of the zealousness that emanated from their God himself, who was not only a jealous but also a zealous god [the two meanings are attached to the same word in Hebrew - Ish]....

Such zealousness did not end with the Old Testament, however, as the Zealots were overtly acknowledged in the New Testament with the disciple Simon the Canaanite also being called a Zealot and with the fiery gospel Judas, who resembles the zealous Judas mentioned by Josephus. As noted however, Judas was the name of the ancestral saviour-god of Judah, as well as a number of Judaic kings and their sacrificial proxies, many of whom could be terms Zealots.”

[Ishtar]

There was all sorts of argy bargy going on, in the first century BCE, between Jerusalem and Samaria – Jerusalem priests saying that only their temple was the only one where God would accept anyone's worship, which was damned inconvenient seeing how far Samaria was from Jerusalem, as you can tell from this map:



For this reason the northern kingdom and Samaria (Shomron) was also the stronghold of the orthodox Jewish priesthood, the Sadducees (sons of Zadok or Zadokites) who had been ejected from the Jerusalem temple Sanhedrin by the Pharisees.

And so there was a rejection of Jerusalem and its temple in the northern kingdom, as those in the northern kingdom set up their own rites under the leadership of the Sadducees or sons of Zadok. These northern kingdom rites also retained much older elements of what the Yahweists in Jerusalem would denounce as paganism. According to Lockhart:

The Israelite religion of northern Palestine, so dear to the Nazerenes [Gnostic sect – Ish], seems to have absorbed much of the worship of the Syrians and Phoenicians. This older faith carried folklore and ideas and usages foreign to its southern neighbour, and the pre-Christian Nazerenes of the north are shown by Epiphanius to have had an affinity with the gnostically inclined Samaritans, and the Samaritans with the Essenes.

The northern Samaritans/Sadducees would claim that they were the true Israelites and they only accepted the Pentateuch – the first five books of the OT, i.e. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Number and Deuteronomy.

They also considered that the next Messiah (or Dositheus, Gift of God) would be born among them, and not the southern Judaic types. They would quote from Genesis 49:10:

“The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet, until Shiloh comes, and to him shall be the obedience of the peoples.”

Shiloh was the northern-most kingdom’s location for its most ancient and venerated shrine, which also at one time housed the Ark of the Covenant, according to the Bible. Samuel was raised at the shrine of Shiloh by the priest Eli.

Anyway, as we all know, the northern kingdom was conquered by the Hasmonean Aristobolus 1 in 104-103 BCE, and they all had to convert to the southern Judaism to the extent of even being circumcised.

And it was after this invasion and forcible conversion, that the Herodian outpost Qumran supposedly swelled with Samaritans/ Galileans/Zealots/Sadducees also known as “the sons of Zadok”, hence the discovery among the Dead Sea Scrolls of the Zadokite Document, also known as the “Damascus Rule.”

And there was also a “Jesus” who was a “Son of Zadok” that was persecuted during the Maccabean revolt of 167 BCE, 50 years earlier than the Hasmonean one. This Jesus, representing the northern kingdom sons of Zadok and the Greek Antiochus, was referred to as a “sage of Jerusalem”. He led the charge against the southern kingdom Maccabean Mattathias and his sons, one of whom was named Judas. All this took place in the Jerusalem temple.

As Acharya says, could this story about an event more than 150 years before the ‘historical Jesus’ was supposed to have lived, served as a prototype for the gospel drama, with a Jesus who attempted to abrogate the southern Jewish religion by introducing a ‘foreign’ influence and who was stopped by Judas in league with the traditionalists?

She goes on ...

In this story, and in the gospel tale, in fact, are contained rivalry between Israel and Judah. Furthermore, after this dethronement by the Maccabees, many of the remaining Jerusalem Zadokites/Zealots scattered, some into Syria, Galilee and Samaria, and others into Egypt where the Zadokite high priest Onias IV, “in direct breach of biblical law erected a Jewish temple in Leontopolis with the blessing of King Ptolemy Philometor," an act that evidently scandalised the Jerusalem priesthood and widened the rift.

So imo, these zealous Zadokites must be the guys who would create a Jesus from the northern kingdom, who used a Zadokite scourge whip on the temple moneylenders, who told parables about the Good Samaritan and who was constantly coming up against the hypocritical Pharisees, the southern Jewish priesthood of Judaea – stories that would be collated and canonised all over the region, apart from in the dreaded Judaea.

[seeker]

Ish -All reasonable suppositions but maybe there is a simpler alternative to consider.

By the middle of the second century Gnostic ideas had spread throughout the Greek Empire, hundreds of various sects of Gnostic groups existed. Right at this time the Maccabees were setting up a brand new religion, one which they attempted to have tight control over by writing their doctrine into a book they called the Torah and insisting that only what was in the book was important, thereby creating the Sadducees.

Meanwhile the traditional priest class who were the leftover inheritants of the Zoroastrianized magi that arrived during the Persian period and had traditionally handled all doctrinal matters became the Pharisees. Since the new religion was based on the Persian based beliefs the magi had brought with them during the post exile occupation of Judah most people still looked to the Pharisees as spiritual guides, a role the Sadducees were never able to excise.

A third group consisted of Gnostics, this group was non-traditional in the sense that they were more influenced by the later messianic cults that grew out of Zoroastrian eschatology. They were drawn to Judah because they saw the volatility of the region as a potential fulfillment if the apocalypse they thought would lead to the messiah they were expecting. they became Essenes, Zealots etc.

The groups looking for messiahs 'found' them by either making them up (remember these were Gnostics, not literalists) or simply by coming across people nuts enough to think they actually were inspired by God.

[Minimalist]

Oh, good...more history to toss around.

However, if they were deposited in 70 CE, they contain no mention of a Jesus and his followers just 40 years after the purported crucifixion. In fact, according to Dr Alan Snow: “Some modern Biblical scholars and archaeologists believe that the scrolls (the oldest dating to around 200 BC) could have been hidden in the caves as late as the Jewish revolt of 132-135 CE.”

The last idea makes some sense and is at least plausible but has one big knock on it. Philip Davies, in In Search of Ancient Israel, makes the argument that scribes and libraries did not exist in a vacuum. In many cases they were associated with a temple and/or a monarch. By 135, Judaea had neither. The description of Jerusalem as a burned out shell after 70 by Josephus is more or less borne out by Hadrian's plan to re-build the site as Aelia Capitolina to get rid of the eye-sore.

To be completely fair, someone or some group could have hidden these documents anytime between 66 and 135; 66 being when Gessius Florus following Nero's orders provoked the rebellion and 135 when the Jews were booted out of the country. The thing is, it doesn't matter what the terminus ad quem is. As you say, there is no mention of christians or jesus or any of the other trappings in the story in the scrolls and if they weren't present in 66 it does suggest that the story arose later.

That makes sense to me. In a purely self-protective sense a group of Jews (Essenes?) in the aftermath of the revolt might have been highly motivated to distance themselves from the people who had brought ruin to the country. It would seem that they were not too fond of them to begin with, according to Josephus.

[Ishtar]

Ish -All reasonable suppositions but maybe there is a simpler alternative to consider. .....

Actually, I find your explanation less simple than Acharya's, Seeker, but certainly reasonable.

However, I think the question I'm trying to find an answer for here, at this stage of the discussion, is not whether or not the made up Gnostics' stories of a Jesus are at the root of Literal Christianity (I guess most of think that they probably are, by now) but why a group of other people decided to take that story and make it political, historial and literal.

There's more to Acharya's case which I'll go into later, based on the contents of the Dead Sea Scrolls, particularly the Zadokite Document ... but just for now, what's really striking me (for the first time) is how northern the New Testament story of Jesus really is, and what a terrible light it puts the southern kingdom in, particularly the Pharisees and the Sanhedrin, and the people of Jerusalem themselves calling for Jesus the Galilean to be crucified.

The Pharisees come out of the Literalists' story really badly ... they're always made to look like hypocritical fools. In the story of the Good Samaritan, both a priest and a Levite walk by the man by the side of the road, and only the Samaritan stops to help him. They could have made Jesus say 'a man' or 'an ordinary man', stopped to help, but instead he's made to say "a Samaritan."

The fact that they used the name Jesus would not have been remarkable. They would probably have chosen that name even if the leader challenging the Maccabees had been named Fred. This is because the Jews' heroes were always called some sort of variation on that name - like Joshua or Jesus. This was so well accepted that Justin Martyr refers to the Joshua of Exodus as "the Jesus of Exodus". And the Essenes, the spirtual cousins of the Zealots and the Zadokites, were waiting for the next Jesus/Joshua.

Why they were all waiting for a new Messiah also has northern kingdom implications. The new expected age was not because it was the end of the millennium - it was more than that. All the astrologers knew that this was also the end of the astrological age of Aries and the new age, Pisces, was about to begin. Why this has northern implications is because astrology had been banned by the southern Yahweist priests - but in the north, it still continued and so it's only in the northern kingdom that you find zodiacs in the synagogue floors. Secondly, the NT story of Jesus, as you mentioned the other day, could also, at one level, be an astrological allegory, and we've already discussed this is on this board. But my point is, if that is the case, it can only have been written by astrologically inclined Sadducees or sons of Zadok, whose private army and hired assassins were the Zealots.

This is from Acharya's conclusion:

...the early contributors to the Christian version of the ubiquitous celestial mythos [astrotheitical allegory] were the Syrian Gnostics, who were attempting to create a syncretistic religion that would encompass the wide variety of cultures from around the known world. By the end of the first century CE, at Antioch, for one, the Gnostics were already involved in committing to writing the various sayings and deeds of the characters of the celestial mythos and saviour cult that been transmitted orally within the brotherhood for millennia. Eventually, as Doresse says, “in the time of Hadrian (1st century CE), Gnosticism passes over Syria into Egypt ....”

Meanwhile, in Palestine, possibly emanating out of Galilee and/or the ancient monastery on Mount Carmel, with an outpost at Qumran, the Jewish/Samaritan priesthood of Masons and astrologers, the Zadokites/ Sadducees, had been anticipating the Great Year’s end and agitating that they were the Elect, the inheritors’ of the ‘Lord’s kingdom’ on earth, which would be brought about by a ‘wondrous child’ and ‘restorer’. After the destruction of Palestine, this group and others dispersed into various other brotherhood branches, including those at Antioch and Alexandria. The new influx reignited the centuries-old internecine struggle for supremacy with each other and the Gentiles. Thus began the conspiracy to set the ubiquitous solar hero sayings and narratives in Judea, with Jews as both protagonists and antagonists.

In the middle of the 2nd century, the original Gnostic schools began to dissent from Judaizing and historicising activity, objecting that their original work was not meant to be taken literally. At the end of the 2nd century, the historicising push increased with the success of the Roman play for domination, and the canonical gospels were completed somewhat, although they were continuously reworked to agree at least superficially with other reworked manuscripts. This tinkering went on for centuries until relative uniformity was achieved with dozens of councils....

The aim of this priest craft, or course, was to create a new godman that would not only roll into one all others but also unite the lunar-stellar and solar cult priesthoods, as well as usher in the new age. As the mythical Moses had been utilised to inaugurate the new age of Aries, Jesus was created to do likewise with the age of Pisces. Thus, to the Krishna/Christos myth were added fish motifs from the Osiris/Horus myth, as well as numerous other elements of the Egyptian and other religions, such as the December 25 birthdate, which was established in the 4th century to usurp the cult of Mithra. And so it went on ....

In this effort, the largely astrological and mythological works of the eclectic Gnostics/Therepeuts were latched on to by historicisers of the second, third and fourth centuries, including Iranaeus, Justin, Tertullian, Origen, Clement Alexandrinus, Tatian and Eusebius. To the conspirators’ list can be added Ambrose, Augustine, Gregory and Jerome....Other villains in this myth making included Lactanius, Constantine, Justinian as well as all the popes including Sylvester who was pope during the Council of Nicea. Pope Innocent II created the Council of Basle (1431 – 1449) in large part of call for a book burning...

[Ishtar]

That makes sense to me. In a purely self-protective sense a group of Jews (Essenes?) in the aftermath of the revolt might have been highly motivated to distance themselves from the people who had brought ruin to the country. It would seem that they were not too fond of them to begin with, according to Josephus.

Yes agreed ... but all we can really know about the Essenes is what Josephus and a few others like Philo and Pliny tell us, which is what my tables of the other day were based on. And from that, we can see how some of their ideas were also taken and used in the development of this canonised Jesus story, sometimes word for word.

[Minimalist]

The Zealots were based in the largely multinational and Gentile northern kingdom of Israel

All mainly based, as far as I can see, on the single comment of Josephus that in 6 AD a small revolt, led by Judas the Galilean, broke out against the census taking activities of P. Sulpicius Quirinius...the one which figures so prominently in the so-called gosple of "Luke."

Possible? Yes. But in 6 AD nothing that Quirinius was doing had any impact on Galilee which was snugly under the control of Herod Antipas. Given the traditional dislike between Judaea and the other "lesser Jews" which surrounded them it seems a bit odd that someone from one of those other areas would give a rat's ass about something so minor as a census, especially since the Judaeans knew what was entailed when they petitioned Augustus to get rid of their king (Archelaus) and become a Roman praefecture.

Also, this comment from Book XVIII of Antiquities of the Jews (Chapter 1)

for Judas and Sadduc, who excited a fourth philosophic sect among us, and had a great many followers therein, filled our civil government with tumults at present, and laid the foundations of our future miseries,

could simply be Josephus, who had no more use for the Zealots than he did for the Sadduccees, trying to transfer blame for the outbreak of the Great Revolt and the subsequent disaster to the nation, to "outside agitators" a trick not exactly unknown in our own times.

[Ishtar]

So you don't think there's enough evidence for the Zealots and Sadducees being based in Israel?