When the historian published his account of the Jewish war in the decade after the temple fell, he wrote of the Essenes in the present tense. Within a generation no one else would. The settlement by the Dead Sea was ash. The towns of Judea were emptied and resettled. The temple on which the whole Essene hope had turned, the temple they had waited in exile to see cleansed, was gone, and the Jerusalem of their vision with it. A movement built on the expectation of an imminent divine act had instead met the Roman army.
What happened to them? The fellowship has gathered the possibilities. None excludes the others.
They Died
Some certainly did. The historian describes Essenes racked and burned by the Romans, who would neither curse their lawgiver nor eat what was forbidden, and who gave up their souls with a smile, mocking their tormentors, confident of receiving their souls again. A people who had trained for a lifetime in discipline, silence, and the contempt of the body would have been ready for martyrdom in a way their persecutors could not understand.
They Became Jews Again
Some, surely, returned to the common life of Israel. The Pharisees, who survived the war and became the rabbis, built a Judaism of the synagogue, the study house, and the home table that preserved much of what the Essenes had cared about: purity, study, the sanctification of daily life. Essene households in the towns, already living among their neighbors, may simply have joined them. Some scholars hear Essene notes in later Jewish mysticism and in the medieval sect that followed the written Law alone, and the medieval discovery of scrolls in a cave near Jericho may be how those notes were carried.
They Became Christians
Some, the fellowship believes, joined the Way. The followers of Jesus in Jerusalem had held all things in common, broken bread daily, and called themselves the poor; after the war the Christian writers speak of Jewish-Christian communities east of the Jordan called Ebionites, which means the poor, and Nazarenes, who kept the Law, honored Jesus as the prophet like Moses, and refused meat and sacrifice. These sound to us like a confluence of the Essene stream with the stream of the Way. The later church, Gentile and Pauline, called them heretics and let them vanish. The fellowship calls them cousins.
They Went Underground
And some, we believe, simply kept the hours, in silence, where no one wrote about them. This is the possibility the fellowship holds dearest, not because it is best attested but because it is how living traditions most often survive. A family that rises before dawn and faces the east. A village that will not eat blood. A reader who copies a scroll of Enoch because the old man who taught her said it was holy. Such people leave no mark on history. They leave a mark on their children.
The Long Silence
For the Western church the Essenes became a curiosity of the historians, mentioned in passing as forerunners of the monks. For the East they were a half-remembered sect. The Book of Enoch, which they had copied so lovingly, survived complete only in the ancient language of Ethiopia, where the church kept it as scripture. The Damascus Document survived in a Cairo storeroom. The Community Rule survived in a cave. The Way itself survived in the desert fathers of Egypt, who went out to the wilderness two centuries after Qumran burned to live almost exactly as the Essenes had lived, without, as far as anyone knows, having read a word of them.
The fellowship does not find this strange. A way of life that answers to something true in the human heart will be rediscovered by every generation that goes looking. The desert does not need a lineage. It needs only someone willing to go.
The Return
In the middle of the twentieth century, within two years of each other, a jar in Upper Egypt gave up the sayings gospel of Thomas and a cave above the Dead Sea gave up the Community Rule. Two libraries of the mystical way, hidden sixteen and nineteen centuries, came back into the world in the same decade. The fellowship does not read providence into this. We note only that the texts arrived at a moment when a great many people, exhausted by a century of war and the collapse of old certainties, were ready to hear them.
That moment has not passed. It is, as far as we can tell, the moment we are in. The fellowship's path of study exists to help the student who has heard the texts to do something about it.