The apostle Paul, coming from outside Judaea, may have known little or nothing of the
Essenes, but many scholars, such as Niko Huttunen and Paula Fredriksen, have shown how his thinking was influenced by the Stoic philosophers--not surprising since Tarsus, where Paul was born, was a center of Hellenistic Judaism.
Ruben Miller, PhD, has been researching this topic of the Cayce readings for many decades and personally met and knew some of the reincarnated
Essenes to whom Cayce gave readings.
Thus, we could say that what would later lead to the practice of secular naturopathy today was the Christian practice of nature cure, dietary reform, herbalism, and hygiene beginning with the Therapeutae (
Essenes) and developing through Christianity of Europe.
The following section provides an overview of the
Essenes and describes how their beliefs compare to other religious communities of the time.
He just keeps flopping around these offbeat things like the
Essenes and Gnostics and Rosicrucians."
Such communal sharing would not have been foreign to first-century Jewish believers familiar with similar communal practices among the
Essenes (chapter 8).
Prior critical studies have noted that Josephus has Hellenized the beliefs of the Pharisees and
Essenes on the future life.
There is debate over their authorship but many scholars believe they were written by the
Essenes, a Jewish religious order.
Chapter 3 consists of a valuable discussion of utopian movements in early Judaism, most notably (but not exclusively) the
Essenes and the Therapeutae, which the author quite rightly calls "the two best examples of ancient utopian communities" (53).
In Tabor's view--much contested by others--Qumran was inhabited by the
Essenes, an ascetic sect whose members followed Deuteronomy and related moral codes literally; so literally, in fact, that when Tabor and his colleague Joe Zias retraced the directions for digging latrines, they're pretty sure they found ones dug by the sect.
We also have a much richer sense of Jesus' Jewish identity and of the complex and changing network of relationships within the Jewish community of his day, of the interplay and conflicts between the Pharisees, Sadducees,
Essenes, and Zealots, and of the ways these groups collaborated with or resisted the Herodians and Romans.