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By Root 2493 0

community for Jewish mystics who sought to ascend and gain a vision of God: “But it is well that the Therapeutai, a people always taught from the first to use their sight, should desire the vision of the Existent and soar above the sun of our senses (Contempt. 11). They were severely ascetic in their diet and their primary concern was “self-control” (egkrateia, continence); they gave little thought for their physical appearance, taking care only to dress in white for their religious observances. Furthermore, they preferred chaste marriage to carnal marriage (Con-temp. 68). Philo says that on account of this, they live “in the soul alone” and can be called “citizens of heaven.” Quite possibly, they believed themselves transformed into angelic beings, even while on earth, as a result of their mystical ascents and ascetic behavior.15

In Palestine these sects had an added, political dimension. The Dead Sea Scrolls found at Qumran were the product of a cloistered group that closely resembled the Essenes of Philo’s and Josephus’ description:

The doctrine of the Essenes is wont to leave everything in the hands of God. They regard the soul as immortal and believe that they ought to strive especially to draw near to righteousness. They send votive offerings to the Temple but perform their sacrifices with a different ritual of purification. For this reason they are barred from those precincts of the Temple that are frequented by all the people and perform their rites by themselves. Otherwise, they are of the highest character, devoting themselves solely to agricultural labor…. Moreover, they hold their possessions in common, and the wealthy man receives no more enjoyment from his property than the man who possesses nothing. The men who practice this way of life number more than four thousand. They neither bring wives into the community nor do they own slaves, since they believe that the latter practice contributes to injustice and that the former opens the way to a source of dissension. Instead they live by themselves and perform menial tasks for one another. They elect by show of hands good men to receive their revenues and the produce of earth and priests to prepare bread and other food. (Ant. 18.18-22).

As we have seen, the Essenes probably formed a separate priestly group when a high priest not to their liking was appointed in Jerusalem. They eventually supported an alternate leader who taught righteously and was therefore called the “Teacher of Righteousness.” They had previously retired to the desert but with him they established their own center of priestly purity away from the center of priestly power in Jerusalem. Though they did not set up a Temple in the desert, they interpreted their communal body as the Temple of the LORD, an idea that was to be paralleled in Christianity. The Essenes were distinguishable from other protest groups of their day by their priestly character.

Resurrection at Qumran

FOR THE LONGEST time, nothing showed up in the scrolls to demonstrate that the Dead Sea Scrolls supported resurrection or immortality. This was a great problem for scholarship. Some even asserted for a while that these people were Sadducees because Josephus reports that the Sadducees believed in no afterlife, which is also confirmed by the New Testament in Acts 23:6-9.16

Immortality, as distinct from resurrection, is better attested in discussing the Essenes, but not in the scrolls themselves, only in Josephus’ and Philo’s description of them. Whether the substance of Josephus’ account is confirmed in the Dead Sea Scroll texts depended entirely on each scholar’s opinion about how much poetic license Josephus should be allowed in his descriptions. Josephus describes Essenic “immortality of the soul.” But he is translating the concept of resurrection, a notion totally foreign to pagan Romans, into immortality of the soul, which his Hellenistic audience could understand more readily.

In fact, Josephus described the Essenes in terms completely appropriate to a Neo-Pythagorean sect, with their notion of the immortality of the