A traveler in the lands of the Bible soon learns to recognize a tell. It is a hill with a flat top and steep sides, standing a little apart from the hills around it, and it is not a hill at all. It is a city built on the ruins of a city built on the ruins of a city, each generation leveling what it found and building again, until the rubble of a thousand years has risen into something that looks, from a distance, like a work of nature. Dig into it and the layers come apart, each with its own pottery and its own coins, the newest on top and the oldest at the bottom, resting on bedrock.
The tradition of the Nazarenes of Carmel is a tell. The fellowship has received it and holds it, as the Mount Carmel page says, lightly and gratefully. This article digs into it, from the bedrock up, so that the student can see which layer she is standing on.
The Bedrock
At the bottom are the ancient texts, and they are few. The historian says there was a second order of Essenes who married. The Damascus Document gives rules for members who live in camps with wives and children. The gospels call Jesus the Nazarene, and Acts calls his followers the sect of the Nazarenes. The bishop of Salamis, three centuries later, describes an older Jewish sect of Nasaraeans beyond the Jordan who refused sacrifice and flesh, and an Ossaean sect beside them. The books of the Kings tell of Elijah on Carmel, and of the sons of the prophets who lived in community around him and Elisha.
That is all. Not one ancient text places Essenes on Carmel. Not one calls the Essenes Nazarenes. The scrolls never use the word. Every later layer rests on these stones, and none of these stones says what the later layers say.
The Mountain's Own Fame
The next layer is the mountain's fame among the nations, and it is real and old. A Roman historian records that Carmel was the name both of the mountain and of its god, that there was no image and no temple there, only an altar and reverence, and that Vespasian, before he was emperor, offered sacrifice on it and was promised success by its priest. A Syrian philosopher of the fourth century, writing a life of Pythagoras, tells how the young sage, on his way from Phoenicia to Egypt, stayed alone for a long time in the sanctuary on the summit of Carmel, the most holy of mountains and forbidden to the many, and came down so changed that the sailors who had meant to sell him as a slave treated him instead as more than human.
Modern writers have made of this story a visit by Pythagoras to the Essenes of Carmel, from whom he learned the refusal of flesh and the white garment. The philosopher who tells it says nothing of the kind. He speaks of a sanctuary, not a community, and Pythagoras lived some four centuries before anyone wrote the word Essene. What the layer does show is that Carmel was holy to everyone: to Israel because of Elijah, and to the peoples around because of its god. It was the kind of mountain on which traditions grow.
The Friars
The third layer is Christian and medieval. Hermits lived in the caves of Carmel from early centuries, and in the age of the crusades a company of them near the spring of Elijah received a rule, from which the Carmelite order descends. The rule asked them to abstain from flesh, and their cloak in time was white. Their chronicles claimed an unbroken succession of hermits on the mountain from the days of Elijah and the sons of the prophets down to their own, and some of their writers were generous about whom to include among Elijah's heirs. In the seventeenth century scholars of another order challenged the claim, the quarrel grew bitter, and at last a pope commanded both sides to silence.
Modern books on the Essenes have taken the friars' claim further than the friars did, saying that the friars learned their white cloaks and their meatless table from Essene monks who had survived on the mountain into the twelfth century. The fellowship knows of no evidence for those surviving monks. The friars' abstinence came from their rule, as it did for many orders of the time, and the white cloak has its own history. But the layer is important, because it is the first time anyone claimed a continuous community of the holy on Carmel from ancient times. The claim was made for Elijah. It would later be borrowed for the Essenes.
The Nineteenth Century
The fourth layer is where most of the tradition as students now meet it was laid down. In the age of reason, scholars rediscovered the ancient witnesses on the Essenes and were struck by their resemblance to the first Christians. Some freethinkers concluded that Christianity was simply Essenism under another name. Esoteric societies and lodges, looking for ancestors, claimed the Essenes as an early link in a chain of secret wisdom. A German pamphlet of the middle of the century presented a letter said to have been written by an Essene elder of Jerusalem, describing Jesus as an initiate of the order who survived the cross and was nursed back to life by the brethren. Writers of the new theosophical movement spoke of the Nazarenes as an ancient mystery school of Galilee, older than Moses, with its seat at Nazara. And at the century's end came the first of the modern Essene gospels, which the Modern Essene Gospels page describes.
None of these writers had new evidence. What they had was a new desire: for a Jesus who was a master of hidden wisdom rather than a carpenter, and for a lineage through which that wisdom had come down to them.
The Twentieth Century
The fifth layer is the one nearest the surface. An American seer of the twentieth century, speaking in trance, described the Essenes of Carmel as having prepared for generations for the coming of the messiah, choosing from among their maidens those who might bear him, and naming Mary among them; he said Jesus was called the Nazarene because he belonged to the Essene sect of Nazarenes in the region of Carmel. A Hungarian-born writer published the Essene Gospel of Peace. Then, two years after the seer's death, the first scrolls came out of the caves, and his followers said he had foreseen it.
The scrolls should have changed everything, and in the universities they did. But they described a community by the Dead Sea, not on Carmel, and they said nothing of Nazarenes, and so the older tradition simply grew around them. In our own day, modern orders and churches have taken up the Essene and Nazarene names. Some teach that there were two branches, children of Zadok in the south and children of Amen in the north, with a temple on Carmel and another in the Essene quarter of Jerusalem. Some go much further, into teachings the ancient sources do not touch at all. The fellowship is affiliated with none of them and speaks of them without scorn. They are the topmost layer of the tell, and we live on it too.
The Critics
The tradition has had its critics, and the fellowship has read them with gratitude. A student of biblical theology has written, sharply, that the whole picture of hidden elites passing secret knowledge down the ages, from the world before the flood through the Essenes to the lodges of Europe, is not an ancient idea at all but a modern esoteric framework laid over ancient texts, and that what it produces is not history but speculation connected by yarn. She points out, rightly, that the scrolls never call their authors Nazarenes, that the ancient witnesses never do either, and that the bishop who knew both names kept them apart.
The fellowship agrees with the diagnosis. The secret lineage is a nineteenth-century idea. We do not share every conclusion such critics draw, and some of them would have no more use for our practices than for the tradition. But they have done the student a service by showing where the bedrock ends.
What the Fellowship Keeps
We have three tests, and we apply them to every layer.
- Is it attested? Does an ancient text or an excavated stone say it? If so, we teach it as history.
- Is it marked? If it is not attested, can we say plainly where it comes from and when? If so, we may teach it as tradition, with its pedigree.
- Is it fruitful? Does it help a student live the Way, rise before the sun, keep the table, love the neighbor? If not, we let it lie, however old or beautiful.
By these tests the fellowship keeps the picture of a householders' Essene way on a green mountain: unattested, but marked, and fruitful for students with families and jobs, as The Two Branches explains. We keep the honoring of Elijah. We keep the friars' long devotion to the mountain as a sign that holy places draw holy lives.
We let lie the secret masters, the hidden scrolls, the bloodlines, the initiations in Egyptian temples and Indian monasteries, and every claim that the true teaching is locked away for those who pay or who are chosen. These fail the first two tests, and in our experience they fail the third: they make students curious about secrets instead of faithful in hours. The Way was never a secret. It was a practice, done in the open, at dawn, by people whose names no one recorded.
A Tell Is Still a Hill
A tell is made of rubble, but it is a real hill. You can climb it, stand on it, and see a long way from the top. A tradition made of many layers is a real tradition, and the student who stands on it may see far. She needs only to know that she is standing on the top layer, not on bedrock, and to dig down from time to time to remember the difference. The fellowship stands where she does, on the newest layer, and says so. Beneath us the cities go down and down, and at the bottom, on the stone, a man in the historian's pages takes a wife, and a bishop writes the name of a people who would not shed blood.