No question reaches the fellowship more often. Our short answer, on the Questions and Answers page, is that we do not know and that the evidence does not allow anyone to know. That answer is true, and it disappoints nearly everyone who receives it, so this article gives the long one. It will not end in certainty either. But it may show the student why the question is worth asking, and why the most interesting thing about it is not the answer.
The question is really three questions, and much confusion comes from running them together. Was Jesus a member of the desert community whose library was found in the caves? Was he part of the wider Essene movement, the order of the towns that the historian says married and lived among their neighbors? Or was he, as the tradition received by the fellowship says, a Nazarene of the northern branch, raised among the Essene families of Galilee and Carmel? Each has a different answer.
The Case For
The case begins with a silence. The gospels name the Pharisees and the Sadducees again and again. They name the scribes, the Herodians, the elders, the chief priests, and one disciple called the Zealot. They never name the Essenes, though the historian ranked them with the Pharisees and Sadducees as one of the three great schools of the nation, and the philosopher counted four thousand of them. Some readers have concluded that the Essenes are missing from the gospels because they were too close to be seen: that the gospels do not name them for the same reason a family does not name itself.
Then comes the vocabulary. The children of light, the poor, the new covenant, the many, the spirit of truth, the kingdom near at hand, the way in the wilderness: before the scrolls were found, these phrases seemed to belong to the gospels alone. Now we know the desert community had been using them for a century and a half.
And then the particular parallels, which are more striking still. The Damascus Document forbids a man to take a second wife while the first lives, and grounds the rule on the words of Genesis, male and female he created them. When Jesus forbids divorce in the gospel of Mark, he quotes the same words. The historian says the Essenes avoided oaths, holding them worse than perjury; Jesus says, do not swear at all. The Rule commands that a member who has a complaint against his brother must rebuke him first himself, then before witnesses, and only then bring it before the many; in Matthew, Jesus gives the same three steps in the same order. The first community of the Way held all things in common, as the Essenes did. And Jesus spoke of those who had made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven, at a time when celibacy for God's sake was almost unknown among Jews except among the Essenes and their cousins by the lake.
Add the calendar and the upper room, which the page on the Gate of the Essenes describes, and the tradition of the northern branch, and the case can look overwhelming.
The Case Against
The case against rests on the same texts, read further.
The Damascus Document rules that if an animal falls into a pit or a cistern on the Sabbath, no one shall lift it out. In Matthew, Jesus asks the Pharisees: which of you, if he has one sheep and it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will not lay hold of it and lift it out? He asks it as a question whose answer everyone knows. The Essenes knew a different answer.
The Rule of the Congregation, which describes the assembly and the meal of the last days, bars from them anyone smitten in the flesh, crippled in the feet or hands, lame, blind, or deaf, because the holy angels are present in the congregation. In Luke, Jesus tells his host: when you give a feast, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And in his parable of the great supper the master sends his servant into the streets to bring in, in the same words, the poor and the crippled and the blind and the lame.
The Community Rule commands the members to love all the sons of light and hate all the sons of darkness. In Matthew, Jesus says: you have heard that it was said, you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say to you, love your enemies. No verse of the Hebrew scriptures says hate your enemy. The nearest thing to it in all the literature of the time is in the Rule.
And the rest follows. The community took three years to admit a member; Jesus said follow me, and they followed that afternoon. The community kept the strictest purity at table; Jesus ate with tax collectors and sinners, touched lepers and the dead, and said nothing that enters a person from outside can defile. The community ate in silence, a single plain dish and no more; Jesus was called a glutton and a drunkard. The community excluded women from its full life; women traveled with Jesus and supported him from their means. The community held the temple defiled; Jesus taught in its courts daily and sent the leper he healed to show himself to the priest and make the offering Moses commanded.
The critics of the Essene theory make two further points, and both are fair. A teacher of the evangelical churches observes that Jesus's whole mission ran toward sinners, where the Essenes' whole discipline ran away from them. And a historian of the New Testament observes that the expectation of the end, which Jesus shared with the Essenes, was shared by many Jews of the time, including Pharisees, and so proves nothing about any one school.
The Northern Branch Answer
The tradition of the northern branch has an answer to all of this. The rules of the pit and the lame and the hated enemy, it says, were the rules of the celibate Ossaeans of the south, severe and priestly. The Nazarenes of the north were gentler, married, open, healers among the people. Jesus was of the northern branch, and his differences from the scrolls are the differences between the two branches.
The fellowship has received this tradition, and the article The Two Branches sets it out with its pedigree marked. Here honesty requires a harder word. An explanation that can turn every difference between Jesus and the scrolls into evidence for a gentler branch of the Essenes cannot lose. Every parallel proves he was an Essene; every contrast proves he was the other kind. An argument that cannot lose is not evidence. It is a frame. The fellowship keeps the frame, because it is a good one to live inside, but we will not offer it to a student as proof.
What the Fellowship Holds
To the first question, our answer is no. Jesus was not a member of the desert community. The differences are too deep and too deliberate.
To the second, our answer is that he was almost certainly in conversation with the wider movement, whether or not he belonged to it. He came to the Jordan to be washed by a man who stood, as The Voice in the Wilderness argues, on ground the Essenes had prepared. He taught in a city where Essenes lived, and may have eaten his last supper among them. His hearers knew the Essene vocabulary, and he used it.
To the third, our answer is that the tradition is a tradition, held lightly and gratefully, and that no evidence now available can confirm it.
But here is the thing the fellowship finds most worth saying. Look again at the parallels and the contrasts, and notice that they are not two separate lists. They are one list. Where Jesus is closest to the Essenes, he most often turns them around. The same pit, but the sheep is lifted out. The same holy meal of the last days, but the lame and the blind are brought in. The same children of light, but the enemy is loved. The same steps of rebuke, and then, when Peter asks how often he must forgive, seventy times seven. It is as if he knew their rule well enough to answer it point by point.
If he learned from them, he learned the way a son learns from a strict and serious father: keeping the seriousness, keeping the discipline, keeping the longing for a pure people and a coming kingdom, and breaking every wall the father had built around them. That is not membership. It may be something deeper.
For the Student
The fellowship keeps the discipline of the desert, the hours and the washing and the silence and the common table, and we keep the open hand of the river. Most days they do not conflict. When they do, the fellowship's rule is simple: the sheep comes out of the pit. No hour, no fast, no silence is kept at the cost of the one who needs us.
A student who wants to test herself on this might add one question to the examination at the Evening Watch: where today did my discipline keep a sheep in the pit? Most days the answer will be nowhere. On the days it is not, she will have learned something about the difference between the Essenes and the teacher they may have taught, and about which of the two she is following.