Essenes and John the Baptist
04
Dec
Among the various Jewish groups at the beginning of the Christian era
were the Essenes (Issi’im), actually two centuries earlier, implying that John the Baptist was not their founder, the so-called Qumran community, and perished shortly afterwards in the year of 68, which proves his prophetic sense of announcing the coming of the Savior, as John the Baptist preached.
In the manuscripts found in 1947, they revealed that they were a “humble people, of great knowledge, originating in Egypt”, forming a group that left the cities and went to live in the region of Qumran, the shores of the Dead Sea, were vegetarians and extremely ascetic . After the Qumran manuscript was found, many controversies arose, even though Jesus was in fact an Essene, another that some fled to India and founded communities with their principles, some of these manuscripts were inside clay jars and spoke of life of Jesus Christ and said about the importance of cures with alternative medicines and the importance of vegetarian culture.
The Essenes also advocated unity and peace, for it was a period of division among the Jews, several had contact with Jesus and are present in biblical passages.
The Sadducees were people of high society, members of priestly, educated, wealthy and aristocratic families; the Pharisees did not believe in the afterlife and therefore did not say anything about their eschatological vision (of the beginning and end) being more concerned with the Jewish rules and “laws”, the Zealots rejected the payment of tributes to the Roman empire under the claiming that such an act was a betrayal of God, among the apostles of Jesus, Simon was a Zealot and Judas, the traitor also, and also the late apostle Paul of Tarsus, refers to himself as a religious zealot (Acts 22: 3 , Gal 1:14).
Within this religious confusion, the Essenes were among other groups that went to desert areas to avoid contamination of misrepresented ideas of religion, two disciples of Jesus were followers of John the Baptist: Andrew and John, but being Simon brother of Andrew many authors claim that he was also Essene, besides being zealots
