The “Essenes” in the Bible

by Damien F. Mackey “[Otto] Betz rightly concludes that the Herodians mentioned in Mark are the Essene Scrolls authors”. Marvin Vining I: “Herodians” Marvin Vining, author of the controversial book, Jesus the Wicked Priest. How Christianity was born of an Essene Schism (2008), considered an insight into the subject by Otto Betz to have been crucial for his own biblical identification of the enigmatic Essenes. And I, in similar fashion, owe it entirely to Marvin Vining for his having fully identified the Essenes, who would probably otherwise have continued to remain a complete mystery to me. Vining’s important chapter 2, “Identifying the Essenes in the New Testament”, will break completely new ground as far as I am concerned. In # 13 of that chapter, “Herodians”: A Minor New Testament Name for the Essenes”, he writes, leading up to Betz (p. 28): Many scholars have contributed to the identification of the Essenes in the New Testament. C. Daniel once uncovered a key historical reference to the Essenes that unraveled a great many mysteries. … He found that Josephus recorded the story of an Essene named Manaemos (Ant. 15.371-79). When Herod the Great was still a school boy, long before he took the throne, Manaemos predicted that Herod would become king. This prediction by Manaemos found favour with Herod, as Vining tells continuing Josephus. “And”, Josephus writes, “from that moment on [Herod] continued to hold the Essenes in honor” (Ant 154.379). The Essenes became Herod’s favorite sect, on whom he would often bestow special favors. For example, Herod excused them from an oath of loyalty (Ant 15.371). It is reasonable, then, to conclude that the common people would have nicknamed the Essenes the “Herodians”. That the Essenes were the “Herodians” already opens up for us a whole new vista. Thus Vining continues (pp. 28-29): …. We now have good reason to believe the Essenes were called Herodians. How does that help us? The Gospels of Mark and Matthew contain references to the Herodians (Mk 3:6; 8:14-21; Mk 12:13 // Mt 22:16), and these passages answer a great many open questions. Otto Betz (a leading Dead Sea Scrolls scholar with whom I had the honor of corresponding before he died) commented that New Testament scholarship has always had difficulty identifying the Herodians, for it was assumed that they must have been political delegates of King Herod. … But who: Herod the Great? Herod Antipas? Herod’s dynasty? None of these interpretations ever made sense. The Herodians we find in the Gospels appear to be a priestly sect in league with the Pharisees against Jesus. The Herodians’ interests were not merely political but religious in nature, primarily so. Like the Pharisees they were concerned with what Jesus had to say about the Torah and the prophets. The new identification of the “Herodians”, as Essenes (and there is more to come, see II:), will marvellously enable Marvin Vining to explain one of Jesus’s seemingly most obscure parables, “The feeding of the multitudes” (Mark 8:14-21). P. 29”: “[Jesus] phrased a warning to the disciples in what seems to my generation’s eyes just about the most esoteric parable that Jesus ever gave”. Vining, after recounting this parable, will proceed on p. 30 to tell of how the meaning of this parable had long “baffled” him, with no commentator on it being helpful. “Only when I read the fine work of Yigael Yadin, who published the Temple Scroll found in Cave 11, did I finally discover the accurate interpretation. Here follows Vining’s account of it: Yadin found a passage in the Temple Scroll that dealt with rituals accompanying the Feast of Milluim, a time of ordination, a dedication of the priesthood during the first seven days of the month of Nisan (Ex 29; Ez 43:18-27). According to the Temple Scroll, the Essenes had modified the Torah’s procedure for cleansing of the altar during the Feat of Milluim (11Q19 XV, 9-14; cf. Ex 29; Ez 43:18-27). Instead of offering up twelve baskets of bread for each of the twelve weeks of the Holy Presence in the Temple, as did the Pharisees, the Essenes altered their ritual. On each of the seven days of celebration, the Essenes gathered a basket of bread together with a ram, as a waive offering. Thus when Jesus warned the disciples to “beware the leaven of the Pharisees and the Herodians”, and then, in that corresponding order, reminded them of the number of baskets gathered after his two feedings, (a sympathetic association: Pharisees = twelve baskets, Herodians = seven baskets), he was referring to the respective rituals of each for the Feast of Milluim. Jesus saw himself as the “bread of life” (Jn 6:33-35), who, as God’s Son, could offer eternal life. He was both the single sacrificial lamb and loaf of bread the disciples needed (Mk 8:14), by whom they and the multitude had all just been consecrated priests of the new era. The miraculous feeding of the multitudes was an ordination from God. …. II: Scribes On pp. 32-33, Marvin Vining will write of what he describes as “the cornerstone for this entire restoration”: In James H. Charlesworth’s Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls … a chapter written by Otto Betz offers an additional correlation between the Essenes and Herodians by bringing forth another passage in which they are mentioned, Mark 3:6. In so doing, Betz confronts me with a stunning revelation that appears in chapter 7 (section 73). That one piece of scholarship is the cornerstone for this entire restoration, as you will eventually see. For now it is enough that we confirm that the Essenes were called Herodians in the Gospels, where they are in league with the Pharisees against Jesus. This is easily done, for Mark records that Jesus antagonized two Jewish sects in the synagogue, the “Pharisees and Herodians” (3:1-6). The latter sect, the Herodians, were singled out for their extremely rigid observance of Sabbath laws, a characteristic trait of the Essenes (War 2:143-49). Betz mentions a parallel situation to this incident found in Matthew…. where Jesus cited and ridiculed a statute peculiar to the Scrolls, the prohibition against rescuing an animal fallen into a pit on the Sabbath (Mt 12:11; cf. CD XI, 13-14). Betz rightly concludes that the Herodians mentioned in Mark are the Essene Scrolls authors. With this knowledge, we are immediately able to assess Jesus’s relation with the Essenes. We are given solid biblical evidence that Jesus directed much of his preaching against the Essenes, just as he did his other well-known spiritual enemies, the Pharisees. Clearly the Essenes/Herodians were opposed to Jesus, as we expected to find given their vast differences in doctrine. But this is just the beginning. Though now entirely confident that the Herodians of the Gospels were the Essenes, Vining must yet come to terms with the meagre references to the Herodians as opposed to the historically well-known Essenes. He commences on p. 33: The Herodians are very seldom mentioned in the Gospels, so seldom that it seems unreasonable to believe they were the popular Essenes that Josephus, Philo, and other historians record. Could the Herodians have been a derogatory nickname the Gospel writers used only on occasion? It seems so. This opens the way (his # 14 “A Door is Opened”) for Marvin Vining to identify the Essenes by the name by which they are more frequently known in the Scriptures: A parallel citation to Betz’s synagogue incident, Mark 3:1-6, is found in Luke 6:6-11. The two groups in league against Jesus are not called Pharisees and Herodians, as in Mark’s version; Luke calls them Pharisees and scribes (Mk 3:6 // Lk 6:7). A little faith that the citations are indeed parallel, that they refer to the same event and persons, and we have just uncovered an unbelievably valuable prooftext. The Essenes/Herodians must have been the same New Testament group as the scribes. What a door has just opened! Now that the biblical identity of the Essenes has been fully established, this may be a good opportunity to return to Josephus’s tale (considered in I:) of Herod ‘the Great’ and Manaemos. According to my reconstruction of this Herod, he was a Phrygian. Hence it is somewhat unlikely that he would have had contact with an Essene when Herod “was still a school boy”. There may be a different underpinning to this story. It calls to mind the account in Matthew 2 of the encounter between King Herod and the Magi, seeking the “infant king of the Jews”. It is notable, now, that King Herod enquired of the scribes, that is, the Essenes (2:4): “[King Herod] called together all the chief priests and the scribes of the people, and enquired of them where the Christ was to be born”. Here we have the key elements of Matthew’s account: King Herod; a boy who would be king; and the Essene scribes, who were very Messianic in their outlook. The Essene scribes would immediately have been able to inform Herod that the Christ was to be born (v. 5): “At Bethlehem in Judaea”, based on the prophet Micah (5:1). Perhaps Manaemos was one of their number, who stepped forward at the critical moment to provide the king with this biblical information. Whether King Herod rewarded with favours the scribes for their assistance in this most pressing matter, we cannot say at this stage. Marvin Vining will go on to develop this identification wonderfully and convincingly. This is a must read. There are other parts of his book, albeit interesting, that I would not endorse – some of which I would vehemently disagree with. III: Meaning of the name, “Essenes” In his # 16 “Etymology: the Essenes are “the Pious”,” pp. 37-39, Vining arrives at what is probably the true origin and meaning of whom we call “Essenes”: … we must seek the etymology for the name Essenes in … the historical writings. The English Essenes comes from the Latin Essenei, which was used by Pliny the Elder. In the Greek, the order is called Essaioi by Philo, and Essenoi by Josephus and an early Church father, Hippolytus. Epiphanius, also an early church father, described two divisions of Essenes, the Nazareans … in the north and the Osseaens in the south (Proem I 3.1-5; 19.1.1-3). Scholars have determined that these writers are all referring to the same group by examining their common doctrine, location, and similar characteristics. But the etymology still remains an enigma, for the name Essenes held no intrinsic meaning in Latin of Greek. It seems reasonable to conclude, therefore, that the name had meaning in the original Semitic, which has probably come to us as a transliteration, such as Sadducees, meaning descendants of the Zadokite priests. If we are lucky, a word will pass meaningfully from one language and alphabet to another. … Why create confusion where none exists? If we place some faith, as we must, in the scholastic integrity of those who have gone before us, we see that Josephus and Philo were trying to translate as best they could from the original Semitic. …, Clearly the Essenes derived their name from and were known as the “holy” or the “sanctified”. Within the same word-field, it is not difficult to imagine that they were known as the “pious”, sometimes translated in the Bible as the “faithful ones” or “saints” (I Sam 2:9a; Ps 30:4a). It is the last derivation that finally allows us to translate back into the Semitic. The work has already been done. Nearly a hundred years ago, an excellent scholar named Ginsburg collected more than twenty possible derivations from various scholars and concluded that the most logical was the Aramaic hsa, whose plural is hysn, the equivalent of the Hebrew hasid, usually translted as “the pious”. … Several nineteenth-century scholars had independently arrived at this conclusion – most notably Emil Schürer – and it is still the reigning view. The only apparent weakness of the derivation is that hysn, the plural of hsa, never occurs in Palestinian Aramaic, but only in Syrian Aramaic, the first Yiddish, the Jewish language of the Persian exile. Yet … this is hardly a weakness. It only stands to reason that the Essenes originally drew their name from Syrian Aramaic, for it is during the Persian exile that they first emerged.