Scholar: The Essenes, Dead Sea Scroll 'authors,' never existed

Ofri Ilani ^ | March 13th, 2009

[TaraP]

Scholarship suggesting the existence of the Essenes, a religious Jewish group that lived in the Judea before the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, is wrong, according to Prof. Rachel Elior, whose study on the subject will be released soon.

Elior blasts the predominant opinion of Dead Sea Scrolls scholars that the Essenes had written the scrolls in Qumran, claiming instead that they were written by ousted Temple priests in Jerusalem.

"Sixty years of research have been wasted trying to find the Essenes in the scrolls. But they didn't exist, they were invented by [Jewish-Roman historian] Josephus. It's a history of errors which is simply nonsense," she said.

In his book "The Jewish War," Flavius Josephus describes the Essenes as an ascetic, mystical religious sect that lived in abstinence from worldly pleasures, including sex.

The Essenes are commonly believed to have written the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were discovered in a Qumran cave in 1947 and are considered the most significant archaeological discovery of the past century.

The scrolls consist of numerous religious documents including preserved copies of the Hebrew Bible, untouched from as early as 300 BCE.

Many scholars claim that the Essenes were the first Christians, or were related to John the Baptist and to Jesus Christ. Prof. James Charlesworth, a senior Bible scholar who also specializes in the Dead Sea Scrolls, Josephus and the Gospel of John, believes John the Baptist lived among the Essenes for at least a year and drew some of his central ideas from them.

[SunkenCiv]

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[theFIRMbss]

>I think you mean Anatoly Fomeko




Yeah! That is the guy!
I don't know what's more fun, that
or hollow earth things . . .

[Zionist Conspirator]

You know what’s weird (and yet not at all unexpected)? If the Bible mentions a person or a group “scholars” automatically assume a skeptical attitude and refuse to consider the person/group as historical until it is “confirmed” by being mentioned elsewhere. But if any text other than the Bible mentions a person/group . . . well then, it’s absolute truth and to deny it is heresy!