CITE (there are others)
I won’t parade my ignorance of Middle Eastern archaeology and ancient history by debating the factuality of the claims but as somebody who’s read a lot of popular histories and articles on the Essenes and their times, I can’t help but find this theory really interesting and am curious to see his evidence.
Of course it’s going to be hard to topple an expert of the validity of Edgar Cayce, who I’ve honestly seen cited in papers on the subject.:dubious:
Well, if you won’t parade your ignorance, I’ll have to parade mine. Doesn’t Josephus mention them? That would be in the same time frame as the scrolls, wouldn’t it?
Elior claims that Josephus invented the Essenes. The problems I see with this theory are that (1) Pliny and Philo also mention them; (2) Why would he do that? Elior says he was inspired by Sparta (?); (3) The scrolls mention a small group of people living communally - why, if the scrolls are from priests in Jerusalem?
There is a big problem with Dead Sea Scrolls studies. There was a clique that controlled access to them for decades and their great leader absolutely insisted that the Qumram site was an Essene community rather than a Roman fort that it had been previously known to be. One of John Romer’s TV programs had him totally demolishing the claim that Qumram was anything other than a Roman fort. He goes into the whole Essenes were male only while women were buried at Qumram issue and such.
(Among the absurdities of the Qumram was an Essene community claim is that this must be the commune that Josephus cites as being “beyond the Jordan” when it is in fact not across the Jordan!)
But if you wanted access to the scrolls, you had to play along. That lead to a large body of “citations” that it was an Essene site, that the Essenes wrote the scrolls, etc. Now, it can’t be “uncited”.
It’s pretty clear that the scrolls were hidden by a Jewish sect that were holing up at the fort during the first Jewish revolt. The road the fort is on also leads to Masada and we all know what happened there.
Now, just because there wasn’t an Essene community at Qumram, doesn’t by itself mean that the Essenes didn’t write the scrolls. Given what little we know about them and the esoteric nature of some of the scrolls, there might be some sort of relation. But, to me, the key is the copper treasure scroll which describes caches spread out all over the place. That doesn’t fit with a group that had only a few communes in out of the way places. It has to be the resources of a very large and powerful group.
The claim that the Essenes didn’t exist, OTOH, is definitely a fringe/publicity seeking thing. While others may have copied from Josephus, it is absurd to claim that he made them up without any evidence that he did. (In fact, Josephus’s list of Jewish sects is far from complete. Why add in a fictional group when you’re leaving many others out?)
Nametag: I don’t know of any place where the scrolls themselves say the group was small. (And the copper scroll suggests otherwise.) I think the idea of being a communal group is an inference rather than something explicitly stated. (Many sects described their groups as being separated but that’s not the same as living communally by the standards of the time.)
All I know is that the Dead Sea Scroll historians are crazy.
This definitely doesn’t have to be fatal. Ancient historians get things wrong all the time, even when you really wouldn’t expect them to.
I haven’t had a chance to look it up, but I seem to remember that there were Essenes at Masada who took refuge there when their compound was given to a Roman officer, and some of the Essenes actually renounced their vows and took part in the fighting, though this may have been from a novelized account.
Heh, that Copper Treasure Scroll appears to have been created specifically to drive future generations nuts. 
Especially the Blackbeard signature!
Well, it seems that anybody off the street can come up with a new truth about the Essenes. I might as well let you in on this, before somebody else stumbles on it, and uses it for personal glory. The Essenes were the original oil barons. Rockefeller bought 'em out, but he retained the name “Esso.”;):dubious: