Hardly a season passes without a letter asking the same question. A student has found a book called the Gospel of the Holy Twelve, or the Essene Gospel of Peace, often in a beautiful edition, often recommended by someone she trusts, and it says it was translated from an ancient manuscript. Is it real? Is this what the Essenes taught? And since some of the teachings on this site resemble what she has read, did the fellowship take them from there?
The answers are no, not in the way it claims; we do not think so; and yes, in part. This page explains all three, because the fellowship has promised its students to mark plainly what is attested and what is inherited, and these two books are where much of what is inherited comes from.
The Gospel of the Holy Twelve
The Gospel of the Holy Twelve, also called the Gospel of the Perfect Life, was published in parts at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth by a clergyman of the British Isles who had left the established church. He said it was a translation of an Aramaic gospel preserved in a Buddhist monastery in Tibet, older and purer than the four the church kept, and he said that its text had been given to him partly in dreams and visions by those who had kept it. It is divided into ninety-six chapters, which it calls lections.
It tells the familiar story of the gospels with additions. Its Jesus refuses to eat flesh and rebukes those who do. He frees caged birds, rebukes a man for beating his beast, and condemns every cruelty to animals. He speaks of God as Father and Mother. He teaches that souls return to the body until they are made perfect. At its Last Supper there is bread and the fruit of the vine and no lamb. Its editor's circle were reformers devoted to the protection of animals and the refusal of flesh, and the gospel says, with great tenderness, exactly what they believed.
No manuscript has ever been produced, in Aramaic or in any other language. No one but the editor ever saw the Tibetan original. Scholars of every persuasion regard the book as a modern composition. Students who use the fellowship's own Lections sometimes ask whether we took our word from it. We did not; lection is the old word of the churches for an appointed reading, and both books took it from there.
The Essene Gospel of Peace
Between the two world wars, a Hungarian-born writer published a short book that he said he had translated from an Aramaic manuscript in the secret archives of the Vatican, and from a Slavonic version in the old royal library of the Habsburgs in Vienna. In later decades he published further volumes said to come from the same sources and, after their discovery, from the Dead Sea Scrolls. Together they are known as the Essene Gospel of Peace.
In them Jesus teaches the sick to cleanse their bodies by fasting, by water, by sunlight, and by fresh air, and to eat only living food. He speaks of the angels of the Earthly Mother, the angels of sun and water and air and earth and life and joy, and of the angels of the Heavenly Father, of power and love and wisdom and eternal life and creative work and peace. He teaches communion with each of these angels at morning and at evening through the week, and a peace in seven parts, and the tree of life with its roots in the earth and its branches in heaven.
No one else has ever seen the manuscripts, and the libraries named have produced no record of them. Scholars regard the books as a modern work, written in the language of the health reform and nature cure movements of the early twentieth century, which their author also taught.
What the Fellowship Has Received
Here the fellowship must be most honest, because it concerns us. The teaching of the Tree of Life with its fourteen forces, the teaching of the Sevenfold Peace, the Fourteen Communions, and the Noon Peace all come to us through the Essene Gospel of Peace and the long tradition of practice that grew up around it. On each of those pages we have said that the teaching comes from later tradition, taught in the last century as Essene, rather than from the scrolls. This is the tradition we meant. We name it here so that no student need wonder.
Why do we keep teachings that come from a modern book? For three reasons. First, because we have found them true in practice, over many years and many students, and a teaching's worth is not the same as its age. Second, because they gather into a usable shape themes that really are ancient: the two spirits, the light and the dark, the peace that is wholeness, the prayer toward the sunrise, the washing in living water, the holy number seven. Third, because the alternative would be to pretend we learned them somewhere else, which would be worse.
What we have changed is the frame. We do not teach the fourteen forces as angels who must be addressed, but as forces that sustain a life and can be attended to. We do not teach the dietary and healing regimens of the books, which are for physicians to judge. And we do not teach any of it as the words of Jesus or the rule of the desert. We teach it as the fellowship's, received, tested, and handed on.
How a Student Can Tell
Students will meet other books of the same kind: a gospel said to have been copied in a Himalayan monastery by a traveler of the nineteenth century, telling of Jesus's lost years in India; a gospel said to have been read from the records of the heavens; a letter said to have been written by an Essene elder, describing how Jesus survived the cross; the trance readings of a modern seer who described the Essenes of Carmel choosing the maidens from among whom the mother of Jesus would come. The article How a Tradition Grows says more about where such books fit. Here we offer four questions a student can ask of any of them.
- Is there a manuscript? Can anyone other than its finder see it, photograph it, and test it? The scrolls and the Nag Hammadi codices are in museums. Their pages have been photographed and published for anyone to read.
- Who has examined it? Has it been studied by people with nothing to gain from its being genuine? Ancient texts survive that kind of study. Most modern ones are never offered to it.
- How was it found? If the story depends on locked archives, distant monasteries no one else can visit, or visions given only to the finder, the student should be gentle and careful.
- Does it say what its own age wanted? The ancient texts say many things no one expected, and some things we would rather they did not. The scrolls curse their enemies. Thomas is baffling. A book that says exactly what the reformers of its own decade believed, in their vocabulary, is probably a book of that decade.
A Word of Charity
None of this is said in mockery. Many good people have been fed by these books, the fellowship's own students among them, and some of the fellowship's first members came to the Essene way through them before they ever read a scroll. The men who published them may have believed what they said about their sources, or may have believed that a true teaching deserved an ancient frame. We cannot know their hearts and do not judge them.
But the fellowship has made a different choice, and we think it is the better one. Our Lections are written in the voice of the tradition and marked, on every page where they appear, as our own. We wish the authors of these books had done the same. A new wine is not worse for being new. It only needs an honest label, so that those who drink it know what they are drinking and can judge it by its taste.