Religion: Out of the Desert

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The Three Messiahs. Scholars doubt whether the Righteous Teacher will ever be specifically identified. The important question is whether, as has been suggested, he prefigured Christ in any sense. Actually, scholars are now generally convinced that while the Teacher was persecuted and reviled ("They made me an object of contempt and reproach"), there is no suggestion that he was martyred, much less crucified. Sectarian Jews of the period expected not one but two and possibly three messiahs, i.e., anointed ones—a king, a priest and possibly a prophet. The Essenes may have seen the prophet-messiah as a return of the Teacher, but such an idea contains no suggestion that the Teacher was a figure comparable to Jesus Christ.

This is not to say that there was no connection between the Essene community at Qumran and the first Christians. John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness near Qumran at a time when the community was flourishing; he was, like the covenanters, an ascetic, living on locusts and wild honey, and proclaiming, like the Essenes, Isaiah's words about making "straight in the desert a highway for our God." It has been suggested that John had been adopted as a child and raised by the Essenes, as was their custom. "They neglect wedlock," writes Josephus, "but choose out other persons' children, while they are pliable . . . and form them according to their own manners."

John baptized like the Essenes to "repentance for the remission of sins," he proclaimed the end of the world, and though he attacked the Scribes and Pharisees as "generation of vipers" and worse, he seems not to have mentioned the Essenes at all. But on the other hand, John broke sharply with the Essene tradition in preaching the coming kingdom to the whole people of Israel, instead of withdrawing from the world like the Essenes to prepare his private salvation.

Jesus, too, proclaimed the end of the world; he used expressions familiar to the Essenes, such as "sons of light"—but on the other hand he treated the Law with un-Essene casualness, he associated with such sinners as would have had an Essene at his lustrations for days, he urged people to love their enemies while the Essenes carefully nurtured their hatred for the children of darkness, and instead of their rigid asceticism he "came eating and drinking," letting those who would call him "gluttonous and a wine-bibber."

The structure of the early church was much like that of the Qumran Community. Both had a council of Twelve, and the membership of each was known as "the Many." The Essene Twelve were to be judges at the end of the world, a role which Jesus also gave to his twelve disciples.

What the Angels Sang. The men at the Scrollery do not rule out the possibility of new finds. They hope soon to study the contents of Cave II, are never sure that Kando the shoemaker will not walk in, carrying some new revelation in a cigarette box. In the meantime, the scrolls have opened a wide new door to the study of Christianity. For the people of Qumran and the early Christians shared the same Hebraic theological tradition as well as the same language — in an era for which Aramaic and Hebrew sources hardly exist.