Essenes
546
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144
EPISODES
117
PODCASTS
Search complete. 546 mentions across 144 episodes found for "Essenes".
Sep 25, 2026
S90GUEST
It's all the same tripe.
StephenHOST
right right and so you know greg braden talks about uh forces of good versus forces of evil this is why he advocates so much for the war scroll because he basically says that and by the way the war scroll is a dead sea scroll um i'll pull this up real quick and i'll just i'll just show you how much he talks about the essenes uh greg braden And the Essenes were basically a mirror image of a Pythagorean cult.
StephenHOST
If anyone's read Book 13 of Antiquity of the Jews, you can see that Josephus is describing the third sect that is next to the Sadducees and the Pharisees of the Second Temple period.
StephenHOST
And ultimately...
StephenHOST
the Essenes believed in sons of light versus sons of dark, which Pythagoreanism also talks about the same thing.
StephenHOST
And where I'm getting at with that is that Greg Braden advocates and venerates these people so much because he believes they're all going to be destroyed in the end.
StephenHOST
And so what I'm starting to realize just from research and rereading it over and over and over again, really taking a step back and scanning the whole, the whole layout of things is that the Dead Sea Scrolls are presenting themselves to have one battle, a final battle, And where wickedness will be judged and destroyed and, and, and it brings in this kind of like new era by man for the people by man.
S90GUEST
right that's the trick yeah
Brian ChappellHOST
The Pharisees were even those who said, but we're not going to approach life as though it's somehow some separated order that we can live apart from ordinary interactions with people.
Brian ChappellHOST
They weren't like the Essenes Who would go in extremism and live out in the desert and try to live their faith apart from people.
Brian ChappellHOST
The Pharisees said we're going to live our faith among people.
Brian ChappellHOST
And when the Zealots another party of Jews said what we really need to do is bring out the weapons and fight the Romans the new oppressors.
Roger FergusonHOST
A cave is a location, not a canon list.
Roger FergusonHOST
The Qumran community is often associated with the Essenes described by Josephus, Philo, and Pliny the Younger.
Roger FergusonHOST
That connection is serious and plausible.
Roger FergusonHOST
It should not become a claim that every scroll came from one sect or that every Essene lived at Qumran.
Roger FergusonHOST
Jewish world names connected communities, not one identical lifestyle.
Roger FergusonHOST
Now we can meet the groups people often flatten when they read the Gospels.
Roger FergusonHOST
Josephus described Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes, and a later revolutionary philosophy.
Roger FergusonHOST
The New Testament shows priests, scribes, elders, synagogue leaders, tax collectors, zeal for revolt, and ordinary people who may not belong to any named party.
Joan TaylorGUEST
They needed the border [laughs] to be secure.
Joan TaylorGUEST
Um, so when Herod was established, he, according to Josephus, he gave the speech that he, he was put there by God, and he used, it seems, accord- again, according to Josephus, we have to just trust Josephus here, um, the prophecy by an Essene, um, predictor called Menahem, who looked at Herod when he was a boy and said he would be a future king.
John NelsonHOST
Wow.
Joan TaylorGUEST
And it seems like the, the Essenes were very good and adept at scripture, at scripture interpretation-
John NelsonHOST
Mm
Joan TaylorGUEST
... and they reached in at a passage in Genesis probably and, and managed to interpret it to mean that, um, Herod, even though he wasn't Judean, he wasn't Jewish himself, his m- mother was a Nabataean and his father was Idumaean, um, he was destined to be king of the Judeans.
45 MINS LATER
John NelsonHOST
Yeah, yeah.
Joan TaylorGUEST
Um, you can think of all sorts of reasons why Jesus didn't marry.
Kipp DavisGUEST
And it was occupied for like about 150 or 200 years between about 150 BCE and, you know, up to the time of the first Jewish war.
Kipp DavisGUEST
Occupied by who? So most scholars saying that it was occupied, and this is what I think too, occupied by a group who would have identified themselves most closely to the Essenes, which were like a Jewish sect, a group who had a particular idea about the expression of Judaism, and this group congregated.
Kipp DavisGUEST
They gathered at this site.
Kipp DavisGUEST
Now, exactly what the site itself is, there's a bit of conjecture there.
Kipp DavisGUEST
So they had this tendency to interpret everything through this lens of asceticism, right? Like this is, oh, it's like a monastery where people come and, you know, they live communally for the rest of their lives and they observe these rites of purity and ritual.
Kipp DavisGUEST
But in preparation for the last days when God is going to come back and wipe out all of Israel's enemies and establish his kingdom.
Kipp DavisGUEST
And that's generally true in the broad strokes, but whether or not this is a permanent dwelling place or Was it kind of like a retreat center where people would come and go, spend a period of time there, not necessarily your entire life? Was it something like that? Was it more of a facility for the production of pottery and manuscripts that was operated by this group of Essenes? So there's still...
Kipp DavisGUEST
Some questions about exactly what they were doing there.
Joseph MacchioHOST
So, yes, he had to fulfill all of these roles that we mentioned before.
Joseph MacchioHOST
He inherited the mantle of Enoch and the mantle of the Essene teacher, the teacher of righteousness.
Joseph MacchioHOST
Yes.
Joseph MacchioHOST
So James, his brother, also bore a mantle from the Essene tradition because he's called in the New Testament James the just or the righteous.
Joseph MacchioHOST
And people say, oh, I
Stephen MacchioHOST
guess he was a righteous man.
Joseph MacchioHOST
No, no. It's a title.
Stephen MacchioHOST
It's a title.
MariyaHOST
And so even as a child, he was extremely wise beyond, beyond his years and beyond anything really, that people in his immediate vicinity were used to.
MariyaHOST
Now, of course, we know that he was brought up close to and had direct ties to the Essene community, to this secret community of scholars and scholars.
MariyaHOST
sort of spiritual folks and who maintained a lot of the ancient knowledge and to great pride to deepen it with theirs.
MariyaHOST
And even still, even despite all of the innate abilities that Yeshua came with, despite the fact that he was surrounded by a very nurturing community, despite the fact that he was curated by Spirit from the day of his inception, essentially, not even prior to that, right, if you think about it, his initiation journey was spiritual.
12 MINS LATER
MariyaHOST
As I was traveling with Yeshua, let's set first things straight.
MariyaHOST
There is a part of Yeshua's life between ages 12 and 17 that I have not yet studied.
MariyaHOST
That was the time when he spent a lot of his hours studying with Essenes.
MariyaHOST
As of right now, I am unaware of what he learned there.
Melissa GordonHOST
I'm seeing scribes, thousands and thousands of years old scribes, long beards, the whole thing.
Melissa GordonHOST
I'm getting for some of you the Essenes, like you could have even been there like at the time of Christ.
Melissa GordonHOST
I know this is sounding, but I'm telling you guys, I'm seeing that.
Melissa GordonHOST
I'm seeing a lot of like alien stuff too.
Herman PoppleberryHOST
Josephus is our main narrator.
Herman PoppleberryHOST
and he names three schools of thought, Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes.
Herman PoppleberryHOST
He also describes a fourth, the fourth philosophy, tied to Judas the Galilean around 6 CE.
Herman PoppleberryHOST
Four, not
Herman PoppleberryHOST
Four.
Herman PoppleberryHOST
And the thing that gets lost constantly is that most Jews belong to none of them.
Herman PoppleberryHOST
This wasn't a country of Pharisees and Sadducees with a few Essenes off in the desert.
Herman PoppleberryHOST
The vast majority of people were farmers, artisans, laborers, and they weren't card-carrying members of anything.
SoniaHOST
I was thinking about in the time of Jesus, the overarching philosophies or ideologies that were present in that area at the time.
SoniaHOST
You had the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Essenes, the Zealots.
SoniaHOST
They had found their own ways of reconciling the state that Israel was in and how they were going to respond to that.
SoniaHOST
And so no matter how you cut it, the zealots were always going to think this is time for a military takeover.
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