In the fortieth chapter of Isaiah a voice cries: in the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. The desert community took this verse as its charter. The Community Rule quotes it to explain why the men of the covenant must separate from the habitation of the men of iniquity and go into the wilderness, and interprets the preparing of the way as the study of the Law. The gospels quote the same verse of the same prophet to explain a man in camel's hair who appeared in the same wilderness, a day's walk from the same settlement, calling the same people to the same river for a washing of repentance.
Was John who baptized an Essene? The question has been asked since the first scroll was unrolled, and the fellowship has asked it as often as anyone. Here is where we have come to.
The Parallels
They are real and they are many. John was in the wilderness of Judea, and the gospel of Luke says he was there from childhood until the day of his showing to Israel. The desert community was in the same wilderness, a few miles south, and the historian says the Essenes took in other men's children to raise in their ways. A boy of priestly family, as the gospel says John was, growing up in the Judean desert in the first decades of the common era, would at the very least have known of the community, and might have been raised in it.
John washed people in the Jordan. The community washed daily in stepped pools of living water. John's washing, the gospels say, was for repentance and the forgiveness of sins, and the Rule says exactly that the man who refuses to enter the covenant will not be made clean by any water, for he cannot be purified unless he has turned from his wickedness. For both, the water worked only on the turned heart.
John ate locusts and wild honey; the Damascus Document regulates the eating of locusts. John called the leaders of Israel a brood of vipers and told them God could raise children of Abraham from the stones; the scrolls call the priests of Jerusalem the Wicked Priest and the men of the lot of Belial and expect God to raise up a new Israel from the remnant. John expected one coming after him who would baptize with holy spirit and fire; the Rule says God will at the end cleanse the human frame with holy spirit and sprinkle it with the spirit of truth like water for cleansing. John announced that the axe was laid to the root of the trees and the kingdom was at hand; the community expected the end within a generation.
The Differences
They are also real and also many. The community was closed; a man waited three years to enter it and was cursed for leaving. John was open; he washed anyone who came, soldiers and tax collectors and prostitutes, and sent them home to their trades. The community washed daily, each man himself, as a matter of ongoing purity. John washed once, with his own hands, as a matter of turning. The community went into the desert to be apart from Israel. John went into the desert and called Israel to come to him there.
The community had a rule, a library, a hierarchy, a calendar, and a settlement. John had, as far as anyone knows, a few disciples and a river. The community expected anointed ones of Aaron and Israel, priestly and royal. John expected one mightier than himself whose sandal he was unworthy to untie, and when the one he thought it was appeared, John seems not to have been sure. The community hated the sons of darkness. John told soldiers to be content with their pay.
And John ate wild honey, which the strict purity of the community would almost certainly have forbidden, since it came from the hives of unclean insects. A small thing. But the Rule penalized small things, and a man who ate honey from the wild was not keeping the Rule.
What the Fellowship Holds
The fellowship holds that John was not a member of the desert community when he preached, and may never have been. The differences are too deep: the open river against the closed pool, the single washing against the daily one, the call to Israel against the withdrawal from it. If John had been raised among them, he had left, and his preaching reads in part as a quarrel with them: you do not need three years and a rule and a settlement; you need to turn, and the water is here, and anyone may come.
But we also hold that John stood on ground the community had prepared. The idea that the wilderness was the place to prepare the Lord's way; that washing was for the turned heart only; that the priests of Jerusalem had failed and God would act soon through a remnant; that holy spirit would cleanse at the end: John did not invent these. They were in the air of the Judean desert, and the community had put them there, or had drawn them from the same older well. John drank and went his own way. The fellowship suspects that the community, if it noticed him, did not approve.
Why It Matters
It matters because the Way began with John. The gospels are unanimous that Jesus came to John's washing, and that his ministry began from it. If John stood on Essene ground, then the Way was planted in Essene soil, whatever grew from it afterward. The common meal of the first church, the holding of all things in common, the language of light and darkness and the poor in spirit, the new covenant, the kingdom at hand: these have their nearest parallels in the scrolls, and the simplest explanation is that the seed came through the man in camel's hair.
It also matters for the student. John's quarrel with the community, if the fellowship has read it rightly, is a quarrel the student must settle in herself. The closed pool or the open river. The daily purity or the single turning. The withdrawal or the call. The fellowship has tried to hold both: the hours and the discipline of the desert, and the open table and the open hand of the river. We do not think we have succeeded. We think the attempt is the Way.