02.  THE NAZARENE - ESSENE BASE

Let us begin by rectifying a typical Christian error in calling Jesus, the Christian prophet, Jesus of Nazareth.

Jesus was raised at the ecumenical, family-oriented Essene community at Mount Carmel and after Herod's death, when the family returned from Egypt, we are told that told they settled in "Nazareth". But in those days there was no town called "Nazareth". It was simply a cooperative village of Essene "Nazarenes" near Mount Carmel, the headquarters of the entire Essene movement.

Thus, the term "Jesus of Nazareth" was originally "Jesus the Nazarene", and a "Nazarene" is a "Northern Essene" associated with Mount Carmel. Which is why in the New Testament Book of Acts, the early Christians are referred to as "the sect of the Nazarenes."

They were Jews, of course, preparing for the coming of the Universal Messiah, the Prince of Peace.

We would therefore expect to find some evidence of a valid original Christian belief system if we explored the Essene cosmological beliefs.

WHO WERE THE ESSENES?

Flavius Josephus, a scholar born at Jerusalem in 37 A.D., was the greatest historian of the Jews in that period and had a first-hand knowledge of the Essenes. He decared that the Essenes had existed for "countless generations".

Philo of Alexandria, perhaps the greatest Jewish philosopher, named the Essenes as "the most ancient of all the initiates" with a "teaching perpetuated through an immense space of ages".

So we know really little about their origin, but there is said to have been was a great re-manifestation of the Essenes by Moses at Mount Sinai. The Essenes themselves describe that event in one of their most important texts: the Essene Book of Moses.

There is a joke often told about Moses in which God gave Moses fifteen stone tablets with the commandments when he was coming down the mountain. It was heavy load, for there were fifteen of them. He stopped at a given point to speak to his people.

"People of isreal," he declared,  "God has given me these fifteen" ...then just five stone tablets slipped from his arms and shattered ... he recovered quickly and continued "hum, I mean, ten tablets of the law."

Well, this joke is not far from the Essene truth.

Actually there were only two stone tablets involved in the Commandment transition.

It is told that the Essene Communions were inscribed on a stone tablet. It was hoped that all the Jewish people would follow the way of life described on that tablet. But when Moses descended Mount Sinai and met with the people, it was clear that the majority were not ready to follow the esoteric Essene teachings engraved on that tablet.

Moses again climbed Mount Sinai and asked God for an easier set of teachings for the masses who were not ready to receive the inner-circle Essene teachings.

God apparently responded by giving Moses the famous Ten Commandments on a second stone tablet. Moses kept the esoteric Essene Communions for "the Children of Light," for only they could understand them. 

These "Children of Light" were the predecessors of Jesus the Nazarene.

The ancient scholar Philo believed that Moses trained spiritual "elect" Jews who maintained a vegetarian diet and refused to participate in animal sacrifice and idol worship.

A third and most important concept that began to separate them from mianstream Judaism, opening the door to the theoretical Christian world of Peace was acceptance of only correct scriptures and a rejection of traditional texts which were called false pericopes.

Jesus, it is claimed, gave instances of these false ideas and presented a general rule to govern the decision with regard to what God actually declared and what was false.

Jesus, it declares in the Essene text, insists that  "any scripture which advocates violence or cruelty toward any form of life is 'counterfeit,' not from god."

One must remember that we are speaking about customs and beliefs present among some Jews at that time, not Judaism today.

Having established the Essene base in a general way for readers, let us now consider the similarities of Essene beliefs to Avaivartika thought.