When the historian describes Jerusalem as it stood before the Romans destroyed it, he walks his readers around its walls. The oldest of them, he says, began on the north at the tower called Hippicus, beside the king's palace, and ran south along the western side of the city, through a place called Bethso, to the gate of the Essenes, and from there turned east along the southern side above the spring of Siloam. He mentions the gate in passing, as a landmark, the way one would mention any gate. He does not explain the name. His readers in Rome would not have known it, and he seems to assume they did not need to.
A gate named for a people means that the people were near it, or used it, or both. The fellowship's history pages describe the Essenes in the desert by the Dead Sea. This page follows them into the holy city itself.
Essenes in the City
It should not surprise us to find them there. The philosopher, in one of his two accounts, says the Essenes lived in many towns of Judea and many villages. The historian says they had no one city, but many of them settled in every city, and that a member traveling from one town to another went empty-handed, because in every town one of the order was appointed to receive strangers and supply their needs. The Essenes Known by Name page tells of an Essene teacher sitting with his disciples in the temple courts a century before the Way, and of an Essene who advised the court. The desert settlement was the movement's heart. Jerusalem was where many of its members lived their ordinary lives.
And yet the scrolls speak of the temple as defiled and its priests as wicked. An Essene who lived in Jerusalem lived beside a sanctuary he considered impure, among neighbors who kept a calendar he considered false. A gate of his own, through which he could come and go without passing through the busy quarters of the city, would have been a mercy.
The Hill and the Spade
The line of the historian's oldest wall runs along the southwestern hill of the old city, the hill that Christians since the Byzantine age have called Mount Zion. In the last decades of the twentieth century, excavators working on its southern slope, in ground that is now a cemetery outside the present walls, uncovered a gate in the line of the ancient wall. It had been rebuilt more than once over the centuries, with successive thresholds laid one above another. Nearby, outside the wall, were cut ritual baths.
Some of those who studied the site identified it as the gate of the Essenes, and proposed that the corner of the city inside it, on the southwestern hill, was an Essene quarter: a neighborhood of the order's households within the walls, with its own way out to its own baths and its own needs. Other scholars find the identification plausible but unproven. The fellowship holds it as a good possibility.
The historian's other landmark has a humbler meaning, and a striking one. Bethso is most likely Aramaic for the place of excrement. The Temple Scroll commands that the place for relieving oneself be set outside the holy city, at a distance, so that the city may remain pure, and the historian describes at length how the Essenes went apart to a secluded place for this, dug with a small hoe, covered themselves with their cloak, and would not do it at all on the Sabbath. A latrine outside the walls, beside a gate bearing the Essenes' name, is exactly what their rule required. The fellowship records this not to amuse but because it is the kind of detail no one would invent, and because a people whose holiness reached into the most private act of the body deserve to have it remembered.
The Upper Room
On the same hill, a few hundred paces from the excavated gate, stands the building that pilgrims have honored for many centuries as the place of the Last Supper and of the gathering at Pentecost. The present building is medieval, raised over older remains that have never been fully excavated. But the tradition of the place is old. The bishop of Salamis writes that when the emperor Hadrian came to Jerusalem in the second century, he found the city destroyed except for a few houses and a small church of God on the spot where the disciples went up to the upper room. By that time, at least, the first community was remembered as having gathered on this hill.
If there was an Essene quarter on the southwestern hill, then the first community of the Way met in it, or beside it. Some have gone further, and the gospels give them material. On the day of unleavened bread, the gospel of Mark says, Jesus sent two disciples into the city and told them: a man carrying a jar of water will meet you; follow him, and wherever he enters, say to the master of the house, where is my guest room? Carrying water was women's work. A man with a water jar would have been a sign easy to see in a crowded street, and some have suggested that a household of men who carried their own water, in the Essene quarter of the city, would have produced exactly such a man.
And there is the question of the calendar. The desert community kept a solar year of three hundred and sixty-four days, by which every feast fell on the same day of the week each year, and by which Passover could come days before the Passover of the temple's moon. The first three gospels make the Last Supper a Passover meal; the gospel of John places it before Passover, with the crucifixion on the day the lambs were slain. Some have proposed that both are right: that Jesus kept the feast early, by the old priestly calendar, in an upper room in the Essene quarter, and died on the day of the temple's Passover.
The Weighing
The fellowship finds all of this beautiful, and we must weigh it honestly. The gate's identification is reasonable but not certain. The Essene quarter is an inference from the gate's name, not something found in the ground. The building of the upper room is centuries later than the events it remembers. The man with the water jar may have been a sign arranged in advance precisely because it was unusual, as the gospel seems to imply, and need not have been an Essene at all. And most scholars think the gospels disagree about the date of the supper for reasons of teaching, not of calendar: John wanted the reader to see Jesus die as the Passover lambs died.
What remains when the weighing is done is still a great deal. Essenes lived in Jerusalem, many of them. A gate of the city bore their name. The earliest tradition placed the first community of the Way on the same hill. Two movements that called themselves the Way, that held their goods in common and blessed bread and wine at a common table and expected the kingdom soon, lived within the same walls in the same years, and quite possibly on the same street. Whether they spoke to one another, we do not know. It would be strange if they never had.
A Gate of Your Own
The Essenes of the city kept their discipline in the middle of a place that did not share it. They had their own gate, their own hours, their own table, and they went out each day among neighbors who kept none of these things. That is the condition of nearly every student of the fellowship. We do not live by the Dead Sea. We live in cities and towns, in apartments and houses, among people who rise when the alarm rings and eat at their desks.
The fellowship suggests that the student make a gate of her own. It is the door she goes out by in the morning and comes in by at night. Going out, she pauses on the threshold and says: I go out in peace. Coming in, she pauses again and says: I return in peace. It takes two breaths. It marks the line between the hours she keeps and the world she serves, and it reminds her, twice a day, that the line is there. The Essenes of Jerusalem had a gate with their name on it. Yours has your name on it too, though no historian will ever mention it.