Late in the fourth century, a bishop of Salamis on the island of Cyprus sat down to write a book against every false teaching he had ever heard of. He had been born in Judea, had founded a monastery there as a young man, and knew something of Hebrew and of the land and its peoples. He was also, by the judgment of nearly everyone who has read him since, quick to condemn, slow to check, and fond of a good story. He took the number of his heresies, eighty, from a verse of the Song of Songs about the eighty concubines of the king, and he called the book the Medicine Chest, because it held, he said, an antidote for each of the serpents whose bite was false doctrine.
The Medicine Chest is not a pleasant book. But it preserves names and customs that would otherwise be entirely lost, among them nearly everything we know of the Jewish sects that stood closest to the Essenes and the first followers of the Way. The fellowship's other pages refer to it as the work of a later Christian writer. This page opens it.
The Seven Sects
Before the Christian heresies, the bishop lists the sects of the Jews. There are seven: the Sadducees, the Scribes, the Pharisees, the Hemerobaptists, the Ossaeans, the Nasaraeans, and the Herodians. The Hemerobaptists, whose name means the daily bathers, washed every day in all seasons, holding that no one could have life without it. The Herodians he takes for those who thought Herod was the messiah. The first three the gospels and the historian already know.
A student will notice two things at once. First, there are no Essenes in the list. The bishop does name Essenes, but he puts them among the sects of the Samaritans, which no other ancient writer does, and says almost nothing about them. Second, there are Ossaeans, a name that sounds like a variant spelling of Essene and that the historian's Greek comes close to. Most readers conclude that the bishop met the Essenes twice in his sources, under two spellings, and did not realize they were the same people. That is the kind of mistake the Medicine Chest makes, and it is why the fellowship reads it with a pencil in hand.
The Nasaraeans
Of the Nasaraeans he says this. They were Jews by nation, and they came from Gilead and Bashan and the lands beyond the Jordan. They honored the fathers of the books of Moses from Adam onward, and they acknowledged Moses and believed that he had received a law, but not this law: some other. So they kept all the Jewish observances, circumcision and the Sabbath and the feasts, but they would not offer sacrifice or eat flesh, holding it unlawful. They said the books that commanded such things were fictions, and that none of those customs had been instituted by the fathers. This, he says, was the difference between the Nasaraeans and the rest.
And he says that they were older than Christ.
The fellowship's teaching on the Sanctity of Life rests in part on these few lines, and we have quoted them elsewhere. Here we want only to point out how strange and how specific they are. A Jewish sect that keeps the Sabbath and circumcision but refuses the altar and the meat it produced, and justifies the refusal by saying that the text of the Law has been corrupted: the bishop did not invent that. He had no reason to. It is too odd to be a slander and too precise to be a guess.
The Ossaeans
Next in the list, and closely connected with the Nasaraeans, he says, come the Ossaeans. They too were Jews, and they came from Nabataea and Ituraea, from Moab and Ariel, the lands beyond the basin of what scripture calls the Salt Sea. They differed from the other sects, he says, chiefly in that they too rejected the books of Moses, like the Nasaraeans. In the days of the emperor Trajan, a prophet named Elxai joined himself to them and gave them a book of his revelations, and their remnant, mixed with his followers, survived in the bishop's own day under another name.
If the Ossaeans are the Essenes, this is a remarkable notice. It places them on the far side of the Dead Sea, across from the settlement whose ruins we visit, and it carries them past the war with Rome and into the second century, still a people, still remembered, absorbing a new prophet. The fellowship's page After Jerusalem asks where the Essenes went. The bishop's answer, given without his knowing it, may be: across the water, and east.
The Nazoraeans
Much later in the book, among the Christian heresies, he comes to the Nazoraeans. These, he says, are Jews who believe in Christ. Once, he admits, all Christians were called Nazoraeans; before that, for a short time, they were called Jessaeans, from Jesse the father of David or from the name of Jesus, and he believed the philosopher of Alexandria had written of these Jessaeans when he described the healers by the lake. The Nazoraeans of his own day keep the Law, the circumcision and the Sabbath and the rest. They read the Old Testament as the Jews do and know Hebrew well. They have the Gospel of Matthew complete in Hebrew, in Hebrew letters. They confess that the dead will rise, that God made all things, and that Jesus is his Son. Whether they hold that he was born of the virgin, the bishop says frankly, he cannot tell.
They live, he says, in Beroea in Syria, in the Decapolis near Pella, and in Bashan at a place called Kokaba. They are descended from the believers who fled Jerusalem before its fall. And the Jews, he adds, hate them more than they hate other Christians, and three times a day in their synagogues they say: may God curse the Nazoraeans.
He insists, more than once, that these Christian Nazoraeans are not the same as the older Nasaraeans. The names are different, he says, and so are the people.
Reading the Bishop
The fellowship reads the Medicine Chest the way one reads a hostile witness in a court of law. The accusations are often the best evidence of what the accused actually did. When the bishop condemns the Nasaraeans for refusing sacrifice, he tells us they refused it. When he condemns the Nazoraeans for keeping the Sabbath, he tells us they kept it. His opinions we set aside. His descriptions we keep, and test against whatever else we have.
And when we test them, a pattern appears that the bishop himself did not see. His Nasaraeans lived in Gilead and Bashan. His Christian Nazoraeans lived in Bashan too, at Kokaba, and in the Decapolis next door. The older sect refused sacrifice and flesh and said the Law had been corrupted; a gospel used by the Jewish believers of the same region, quoted in the bishop's own pages and described on the Poor page, has Jesus say that he came to abolish the sacrifices; and a later romance of the Jewish believers teaches that the passages of scripture commanding sacrifice were false additions. The same refusal, in the same hills, under nearly the same name, across three centuries.
The fellowship does not say that this proves the older Nasaraeans became the later Nazoraeans, or that either were Essenes. The bishop may be right that they were different peoples. He may be wrong. What we say is that the region east of the Jordan held, over several centuries, a cluster of Jewish communities that kept the Law, washed often, revered the prophets, and refused the altar, and that the first believers who fled there in the war found themselves among neighbors who already lived much as they did. The East of the Jordan page follows them there.
A Word on Hostile Books
A student may ask why the fellowship spends its time on a book written to condemn the very people we honor. The answer is that the bishop is often all we have. The Nasaraeans wrote nothing that survives. The Nazoraeans left a few fragments of a gospel and a commentary, quoted by their critics. Everything else is gone. A people who are remembered only by their enemies can still be remembered, if we read the enemies carefully and charitably, the way the Rule asks the members to rebuke one another: in truth, humility, and loving-kindness. The bishop would not have extended that charity to us. We extend it to him, because he kept the names.