Luke is now off on his own tack. Impressed and conceivably at a loss, the “people” ask John, “What shall we do then?” John gives them an itinerary of the duties of zedek: righteousness toward one’s fellow. Whence Luke obtained this nugget of John’s social teaching we know not:
“He that hath two coats, let him impart to him that hath none; and he that hath meat, let him do likewise.”
Then came the publicans [tax collectors] to be baptized, and said unto him, “Master, what shall we do?” And he said unto them, “Exact no more than that which is appointed you.”
And the soldiers likewise demanded of him, saying, “And what shall we do?” And he said unto them, “Do violence to no man, neither accuse any falsely; and be content with your wages.”
And as the people were in expectation, and all men mused in their hearts, whether he were the Christ, or not. (Luke 3:11–15)
This all sounds like Paul’s general good-neighborly, Pax Romana advice. Why Paul? First of all, Luke has omitted Matthew and Mark’s references to John’s living on a wild diet of locusts and honey. This is almost certainly because Paul told his opponents who insisted on the Mosaic Law for holiness that vegetarian diets were for the “weak”; real men (Gentiles?!) knew God was not against eating flesh. Out goes Judas Maccabeus’s wilderness diet of herbs! Luke’s John does not advertise his diet, only to say that anyone who has meat should share it.
We now come to the tax collectors. Where the taxes raised were specifically for Rome, pious Jews of the New Covenanter stamp held it blasphemous to give pagans the fruit of God’s holy land. Taxes caused wars. Tax collectors were hated people. In the Pauline spirit, Luke’s John advocates the view that so long as the amounts levied were fair, God would accept the work of the tax collector. Since tax collecting in this period was simply an opportunity to extort sums for oneself (that being the “pay”), the demand was somewhat unrealistic, though that may have been the intention. God’s forgiveness would not come cheap, and was nonnegotiable.
Likewise, the reference to soldiers has the ring of Paul about it, and if these were Roman soldiers, then particularly so. Asking a soldier not to do violence was quixotic in the extreme. Paul, however, advocated the view that Roman soldiers did the work of God, keeping order. He was not at all in step with his patriotic countrymen here, who had to stop themselves from reaching for a weapon whenever a Roman soldier appeared. When Roman Senator Cyrenius and Coponius of the Equestrian Order came down from Syria to supervise a tax census over Judea in 6 CE (Herod’s son Archelaus had been recalled to Rome by Caesar Augustus), the occasion gave their unpaid soldiers an opportunity to supplement their meager income by grabbing what they could, bullying Judeans and destroying their homes, robbing, pillaging, and crucifying opponents. Galilee was in uproar, and a rising was only suppressed with great savagery. Luke omits such incendiary “anti-Roman” facts.
To ask a soldier to be content with his wages and not to accuse people falsely would undoubtedly have been an otherworldly Godsend for the people, but to ask it of a soldier would, historically and realistically speaking, have been regarded as something of a sick joke. In Luke’s account of the taxation period, where he mistakenly places Jesus’s birth (see my book The Missing Family of Jesus), everything is sweetness and light. Joseph and Mary make their way to Bethlehem as good citizens—having no Roman citizenship they still had to pay—and their sole obstacle is an inn too full for comfort. In cleaning up the history for Gentile audiences, Luke did all but give the couple a kindly Roman escort. Luke took the Pauline view; indeed, to do anything else would have made his Gospel a seditious document and its holder liable to execution.
THE ESSENES AND JOHN
John doubtless had a message of righteous conduct suitable for a penitent, but it is doubtful if he expressed it like this. There is one detail, however, that bears comment. That first injunction: that a man with two coats should give to he who had none, and if he had meat, he should share it, suggests not only a sense of social justice (zedek), but a whole attitude to life, where material welfare was deemed secondary to spiritual welfare. We find precisely this attitude in an account written by Josephus of a Jewish sect called the Essenes. Hear this from the eighth chapter of Josephus’s second book of Jewish Wars:
These men [Essenes] are despisers of riches, and so very communicative as raises our admiration. Nor is there any one to be found among them who hath more than another; for it is a law among them, that those who come to them must let what they have be common to the whole order, insomuch that among them all there is no appearance of poverty, or excess of riches, but everyone’s possessions are intermingled with every other’s possessions; and so there is, as it were, one patrimony among all the brethren.
They have no one certain city, but many of them dwell in every city; and if any of their sect come from other places, what they have lies open for them, just as if it were their own; and they go in to such as they never knew before, as if they had been ever so long acquainted with them. For which reason they carry nothing at all with them when they travel into remote parts, though still they take their weapons with them, for fear of thieves. Accordingly, there is, in every city where they live, one appointed particularly to take care of strangers, and to provide garments and other necessaries for them. But the habit and management of their bodies is such as children use who are in fear of their masters. Nor do they allow of the change of shoes till be first torn to pieces, or worn out by time. Nor do they either buy or sell any thing to one another; but every one of them gives what he hath to him that wanteth it, and receives from him again in lieu of it what may be convenient for himself; and although there be no requital made, they are fully allowed to take what they want of whomsoever they please. [my italics]
And truly, as for other things, they do nothing but according to the injunctions of their curators; only these two things are done among them at everyone’s own free will, which are to assist those that want it, and to show mercy; for they are permitted of their own accord to afford succor to such as deserve it, when they stand in need of it, and to bestow food on those that are in distress; but they cannot give any thing to their kindred without the curators.
It should be noted that the Essenes had priests among their number. Some of them worked as stewards for an order that numbered some four thousand, according to Josephus. It remains something of an open question as to whether John was, or had been, of their number.
There is a telling detail that links the Essenes’ extraordinary piety (hesed) to the picture we have of John. The Essenes practiced ritual washing for purposes of purification:
And as for their piety toward God, it is very extraordinary; for before sunrising they speak not a word about profane matters, but put up certain prayers, which they have received from their forefathers, as if they made a supplication for its rising. After this every one of them are sent away by their curators, to exercise some of those arts wherein they are skilled, in which they labor with great diligence till the fifth hour. After which they assemble themselves together again into one place; and when they have clothed themselves in white veils, they then bathe their bodies in cold water.
The purification was a privilege of members fully admitted; neophytes could not be “partakers in the waters of purification” until they had observed sect discipline for a year.
So striking is this linkage between cold bathing and the Essenes that for many years scholars presumed that on the basis of this link and because of the exclusive and self-exalting character of the community documents of the Dead Sea Scrolls that the authors of those documents must have been Essenes, and the whole conception of Qumran-Essenes-Dead Sea Scrolls sprouted and grew. It was quickly presumed that because the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in some of the caves of Wadi Qumran on the western side of the Dead Sea, and since archaeaology showed there had once been a small settlement and cemetery at Qumran, then there must have been an “Essene monastery” there. The idea of the “monastery” appears t
o have come in part from the imaginative world of Dominican monks engaged by the Catholic Church’s École Biblique to translate the texts. They knew of numerous monasteries in Palestine with libraries of old texts and put two and one together and came up with a mystical sect of unorthodox monks somewhat addicted to ritual bathing. Tourists to Israel are still told about the “Essene monastery” at Qumran. It seems to suit the authorities: a convenient but unproven theory.
Josephus puts the Essenes in towns and private homes, with stewarded agricultural land, not in the Judean wilderness. I wonder whether a stone-built community of anti-Herodian, anti-Sadducee messianic holy men ready at the first significant trump to join a messianic war against “Belial” and all his minions would have been tolerated by Herod the Great, or any of his family, for more than the time it would have taken them to lay a second course of stones.
According to Josephus, an Essene called Simon was an advisor to Herod the Great himself. Hardly a spiritual renegade, Simon the Essene was given to famously accurate prophecy. Perhaps he advised Herod concerning Matthew’s “Christmas” Magi reported to have visited Jerusalem most probably in 7 BCE, inspired by the famous messianic Star Prophecy (Numbers 24:17, 19).
Philo of Alexandria, the Baptist’s contemporary, also puts the Essenes in towns, but maintains they preferred villages on account of the dissolute types to be found in towns and cities. The outsider, as regards Essene whereabouts, is the Roman historian Pliny. Pliny, who died amid the volcanic ash that smothered Pompeii and Herculaneum in 79 CE, wrote a voluminous classic, the Natural History. The Natural History (5:18:73) refers to Essenes on the western side of the Dead Sea, inland a little, near En-gedi. En-gedi is some twenty miles south of Khirbet Qumran:
By the western shores [of the Dead Sea], but away from their harmful effects, live a solitary people, the Essenes, wonderful besides all others in the world, being without any women and renouncing all sexual desire, having no money, and with only palm trees as companions. Their assembly is born again day by day from the multitudes, tired of life and the vicissitudes of fortune, that crowd thither for their manner of living. So, for thousands of ages—strange to say —a people, in which no one is born, is eternal, so fruitful for them is the repentance of others for their life! Lying below [infra] these was the town of En Gedi, once second only to Jerusalem in fertility and groves of palm trees, but now like the other, a ruin. After that, Masada, a castle on a crag, itself not far from the Dead Sea, is the end of Judaea.
En-gedi was destroyed in 40 BCE during the conflict that brought Herod the Great to power. Since it was rebuilt by the time of the Jewish Revolt, Pliny’s information presumably derived from Roman surveys made around John the Baptist’s lifetime. Stephen Goranson of Duke University has made the interesting observation that Pliny’s reference to the “fruitfulness of their repentance” is rather suggestive when seen next to the account of Matthew 3:7–8 of John’s attack on Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bring forth therefore fruits meet for repentance. . . .”
Pliny tells the charming story of the Essene community’s numbers being perpetually replenished over the generations by penitents (tam fecunda illis aliorum vitae paenitentia est). The fruit of that repentance was a community that enjoyed a kind of “eternal life,” which itself rather justified the Essenes’ abstention from sexual desire!
Could it not have been the case that a body of New Covenanters had at some time taken refuge among Essenes, as may be implied by Pliny’s account, when under pressure, secreting their “library” nearby?
Josephus speaks of Essenes being tortured by Roman soldiers, presumably for interrogation purposes. I speculate of course, but could it not have come to the Romans’ attention that Essenes were hiding more radical countrymen among their number, on the basis that they had made full repentance of all sins and were thus eligible for their own washing for purification? Thus you could have at Qumran, or further down the coast, an Essene community of some kind becoming, in the tumult of war, a temporary refuge for unarmed eschatological radicals who owed their inspiration to the Teacher of Righteousness, the Damascus Document, the Manual of Discipline, and sundry works and prophetic commentaries, some of which, anyway, would not have been alien to what we know of the sympathies of the Essenes. We seem to find such openness to the repentant of different and conceivably more radical backgrounds in the accounts of Jesus (whom we know had Zealots in his entourage); may we not also see such a situation with regard to John, perhaps a sometime Essene who had left the community proper on receiving his call in 29 CE?
Proponents of the Essene-Qumran theory take Pliny’s statement as support for their advocacy of Qumran as an Essene base, even though the archaeology at Qumran hardly adds up to a town, more like a trading post. While the debate will doubtless rattle on, the fact seems to be that the Dead Sea Scrolls material does not accurately reflect the spiritual priorities of the Essenes, as Josephus describes them. Nor does the word Essene feature in any of the scrolls; one might consider that a significant fact. Nevertheless, as I have suggested, more radical bodies may have left or stored their writings in the caves near to an Essene base in desperation, or in hope that the Essenes themselves might not have suffered persecution. One can certainly imagine an Essene keeping a blind eye to such a scenario.
Why some scholars are so keen to force the issue seems to be a deep matter. It may arguably have something to do with (a) a desire to keep the nonbiblical Dead Sea Scrolls material in the “sectarian” bracket, and therefore no serious challenge to modern Judaism and broadly accepted Jewish history, and (b) a desire to keep the dangerous idea at bay that the New Covenanter material may represent an authentic “proto-Christian” messianic movement and even, as Eisenman believes, the works of “primitive” Jewish “Christianity” itself as against a “heretical” attack on it, instigated by Paul, which gave birth to the Orthodox and Catholic-Gentile Christian traditions. The Dead Sea Scrolls are still political hot potatoes, something you can tell by the hysterical level of invective that surrounds deviance from mainstream opinion since their first reappearance to the angry world of 1947.
While Josephus’s account gives us little to identify the Essenes with the legal puritanism and messianic fervor of the New Covenanters, there is a flavor to be gleaned from his presentation of Essene living that does not seem out of place with what we know of John, or, for that matter, of Jesus.
Philo of Alexandria’s glowing account of the Essenes is less philosophical than Josephus’s. In his Quod Omnis Probus Liber Sit (“Every Good Man is Free”; 12:75–87) the Jewish philosopher Philo makes it clear that Essenes advocate social equality, loathe anything that renders people covetous or makes them want to get ahead of their fellows, and insists that the Essenes, which he takes to mean “holy ones,” draw most inspiration from the Law:
. . . and leaving the logical part of philosophy, as in no respect necessary for the acquisition of virtue, to the word catchers, and the natural part, as being too sublime for human nature to master, to those who love to converse about high objects (except indeed so far as such a study takes in the contemplation of the existence of God and of the creation of the universe), they devote all their attention to the moral part of philosophy, using as instructors the laws of their country, which it would have been impossible for the human mind to devise without divine inspiration.
Now these laws they are taught at other times, indeed, but most especially on the seventh day, for the seventh day is accounted sacred, on which they abstain from all other employments, and frequent the sacred places, which are called synagogues, and there they sit according to their age in classes, the younger sitting under the elder, and listening with eager attention in becoming order.
Then one, indeed, takes up the holy volume and reads it, and another of the men of the greatest experience comes forward and explains what is not very intelligible, for a great many precepts are delivered in enigmat
ical modes of expression, and allegorically, as the old fashion was; and thus the people are taught piety, and holiness, and justice, and economy, and the science of regulating the state, and the knowledge of such things as are naturally good, or bad, or indifferent, and to choose what is right and to avoid what is wrong, using a threefold variety of definitions, and rules, and criteria, namely, the love of God, and the love of virtue, and the love of mankind. (vv. 80–83)
One has no difficulty in seeing either John or Jesus at home, at least for a time, among such persons.
We may, I think, imagine a certain fluidity of movement among individuals who turned away from the corruption surrounding the Temple system of formal religion. Sincere seekers might go from one group to another, following their destiny; thus practices and ideas might be found outside of their source bodies. For example, one might today like some of the ideas of Freemasonry without joining a Lodge. Or one might have once been a member and since “moved on,” keeping to some insights that were personally meaningful. One might keep up a “working relationship” with the system, drawing on it in times of need. The Essene system, while being closed in terms of membership, did not “lock up” their members in closed communities; they traveled from place to place with a mutual cooperative system that seems to have functioned in a manner analogous to Freemasonry.
One thing we find in no account of the Essenes, however, is any enthusiasm for, or reference to, messianic solutions to Israel’s woes. This must be significant. However, what we have in the early first century is a widespread reaction to the Herodians and their chosen priests. This reaction was explosive and took a number of forms. In practice there was bound to have been interaction as well as mutual hostility between groups on points of doctrine. One is reminded of the invective spat on the “Judean People’s Front” by the “People’s Front of Judea” in Monty Python’s satire on messianism, The Life of Brian (1979).
The Mysteries of John the Baptist Page 11
