The Nazarenes - Essenes.org

The line at the top of every page of this site says that the fellowship honors the ancient mystical Christianity of the Essenes and the Nazarenes. The Essenes have had a room of their own from the beginning. This room is for the Nazarenes, who have waited longer for one and who are in some ways harder to find. The Essenes were described by three ancient witnesses who admired them. The Nazarenes were described mostly by people who wished they would go away.

The difficulty begins with the name. Nazarene is not one people but one word, laid over many peoples in turn, the way a single cloak is handed down a family and worn by each child in a different season. A student who wants to understand the Nazarenes must learn to ask, every time she meets the word, who is wearing it now.

One Name, Many Peoples

Here are those who have worn it, as far as the fellowship can trace them, from the best attested to the least.

The teacher from Galilee. The gospels call Jesus the Nazarene again and again, in two slightly different Greek forms, and the gospel of John says that the title nailed above his cross read Jesus the Nazarene, the King of the Jews. Whatever else the word meant, it was the name by which he was known to strangers.
The first followers. In the Acts of the Apostles a lawyer hired by the high priest accuses Paul before the Roman governor of being a ringleader of the sect of the Nazarenes. The followers called their movement the Way. In Antioch, among Greeks, outsiders coined the word Christian. In Jerusalem the word was Nazarene, and in Hebrew it never changed: the ordinary Hebrew word for Christians is still notzrim, and the Arabic word is still nasara.
The keepers of the Law beyond the Jordan. After the war with Rome, Jewish believers who kept the Sabbath and the covenant of circumcision and read a gospel written in Hebrew letters lived on in the towns east of the Jordan and in Syria. A bishop of the fourth century called them Nazoraeans and listed them among the heresies. A learned monk of Bethlehem met them and said they wished to be both Jews and Christians and were neither. By the fifth century they fade from the record.
The sect before Christ. The same bishop describes an older Jewish sect he calls Nasaraeans, living in Gilead and Bashan, who kept the observances of the Law but would neither offer sacrifice nor eat flesh, and who said the books of Moses as the temple read them were not the law Moses had received. He insists they are not the same people as the Christian Nazoraeans. Many readers since have wondered whether he was right.
The keepers of the rivers. In the marshes of southern Mesopotamia a baptizing people who honor John and wash again and again in flowing water call their priests Nasoraeans to this day. Their story is told on its own page, with the care a living people deserve.
The northern branch. And in the tradition the fellowship has received, the Nazarenes were the marrying, mountain-dwelling branch of the Essenes, centered on Carmel, from whom came John and the family of Jesus. This is the least attested of all, and the dearest to many students, and we mark it as tradition every time we speak of it.

Why They Matter to the Fellowship

The Nazarenes matter to us for three reasons.

First, they are the bridge. If the stream of the desert flowed into the stream of the Way, it flowed through people like these: Jews who kept the Law and the hours and followed the teacher from Galilee, who called themselves the poor, who held what they had in common, and some of whom would not shed blood at the altar or at the table. In the Nazarenes the two streams the fellowship loves can be seen running, for a while, in one bed.

Second, they were lost between. The synagogue came to curse them in its daily prayer, and the church came to list them among the heretics. They were too Jewish for the one and too devoted to Jesus for the other, and they were squeezed out of history from both sides at once. The fellowship has a weakness for people who fall between the categories, since we fall between them too.

Third, they remember what the later church forgot: that the Way began as a Jewish movement, in Hebrew and Aramaic, keeping the Sabbath and praying toward Jerusalem, led after the teacher's death by his own brother. A Christianity that forgets the Nazarenes has forgotten its mother's face.

What We Hold and What We Do Not

We hold that the first followers of Jesus were known as Nazarenes. We hold that Jewish believers who kept the Law survived under that name for three centuries and more beyond the Jordan. We hold that a bishop of the fourth century knew of an older sect with a nearly identical name that refused sacrifice and flesh. We hold that the Hebrew roots of the name are rich, and that the first believers, who loved wordplay as all readers of Hebrew scripture did, would have heard every one of their echoes.

We do not hold as proven that the older Nasaraeans were Essenes, that Jesus belonged to them, that Nazareth was invented to hide them, or that Carmel was their mountain. These are theories and traditions. Some are reasonable and some are not, and the pages of this room try to tell the student which is which. Where we do not know, we say so. Where others have claimed to know more than the evidence allows, we say that too, as gently as we can.

The Pages of This Room

The Name: Branch, keeper, consecrated one, and villager: the Hebrew roots that have been heard in the word Nazarene, and what each would mean if it were the right one.
Nazareth: The small village in the hills of Galilee that some have said never existed. What the spade has found, and why a real village and a meaningful name are not rivals.
The Bishop's Catalogue: A fourth-century list of eighty heresies that names the Nasaraeans, the Ossaeans, and the Nazoraeans side by side, confuses them, and preserves them.
James and the Jerusalem Church: The brother of the Lord, who drank no wine and wore only linen, and the family that led the first community until the city fell.
East of the Jordan: The flight to Pella, the villages of the family, the synagogues of Syria, and the slow disappearance of a people who would not choose between Moses and Jesus.
The Poor: The Ebionites, whose name means the poor, and the long thread of that name from the scrolls to the Beatitudes to the believers the church would not keep.
The Nasoraeans of the Rivers: The Mandaeans, a living baptizing people who honor John and call their priests Nasoraeans, and why the fellowship speaks of them with care.

The articles The Two Branches, Was Jesus an Essene?, and How a Tradition Grows take up the larger questions this room raises.