The relation between 1 Enoch and the Essenes was noted even before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Pliny, also a geographer and explorer, located them in the desert near the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in the year 1947 by Muhammed edh-Dhib and Ahmed Mohammed, two Bedouin shepherds of the Ta'amireh tribe.
Essenes |
He identifies the figure Paul of Tarsus had a vision of as corresponding to the Essene Teacher of Righteousness, the leader of the Essenes at Qumran about 150 years before the gospels, and writes that it was Paul who created Christianity through his contacts with the sect that kept the Dead Sea Scrolls.
This etc., the establishment of which, in consequence of a confusion in the text of Shahrastani, has been wrongfully attributed to Benjamin, is identified with the Essenes by Abraham Harkavy, who shows that they were called "The Men of the Caves," because they lived in the desert.
All spiritual traditions have used Darkness Techniques in the pursuit of enlightenment: in Europe, the dark room appeared as a network of tunnels, in Egypt as the Pyramides, in Rome as the catacombs, by the Essenes in Israel and Taoists in China as caves.
Golb has been a key proponent of the viewpoint that the Dead Sea Scrolls found in Qumran were not the product of the Essenes, but rather of many different Jewish sects and communities of ancient Israel, which he presents in his book Who Wrote The Dead Sea Scrolls?: The Search For The Secret Of Qumran.
She contends (as have Lawrence Schiffman, Moshe Goshen-Gottstein, Chaim Menachem Rabin, and others) that the Essenes were really the renegade sons of Zadok, a priestly caste banished from the Temple of Jerusalem by Greek rulers in 2nd century BC.
William Edward Arnal and Michel Robert Desjardins in their Whose Historical Jesus? (1997) cites the book while comparing the different hypotheses on the "Qumranites", citing other scholars such as James H. Charlesworth (Jesus and the Dead Scrolls, 203) who judges that the Qumranites were one of the Essenes groups, and Hartmut Stegemann.