FW: Was Jesus a Vegetarian? The Essenes (Jewish Cult) were!

[Guest guest]

 

Max Nelson [mnelson]

Monday, October 16, 2000 5:52 PM

Jennifer Forbes; judaismintro

Was Jesus a Vegetarian? The Essenes (Jewish Cult) were!

 

 

Was Jesus a Vegetarian?

PETA says he ate like a lamb. According to theologians, he ate them.

 

By Joshua Green

Joshua Green is an American Prospect staff writer. Posted Thursday, Oct. 12,

2000, at 4:00 p.m. PT

 

 

 

Last week, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals launched a new ad

campaign that features an image of the Shroud of Turin and the slogan " Make

a Lasting Impression—Go Vegetarian. " PETA explained in a statement that it

" chose Jesus as its new 'poster boy' because he is widely believed to have

been a member of the Essenes, a Jewish religious sect that followed a

vegetarian diet and rejected animal sacrifices. "

 

Jesus a weed-eater? It's not a new claim, but a new spin on an old one.

Vegetarianism's true believers have long held that the Garden of Eden was a

meatless paradise ( " And God said, Behold, I have given you ... the fruit of

a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat, " Genesis 1:29). They've

also claimed that the New Testament supports Jesus' vegetarianism, although

that requires you to believe that Jesus' frequent encouragement of fishermen

was symbolic, " fish " being mere symbols of " disciples, " and that he cast the

sinners out of the temple because he wanted to rescue the Passover lamb.

 

No mainstream theologian buys the vegetarians' argument because the Gospels

are fairly straightforward about the Messiah's tastes in food. " Jesus said

unto them, Have ye here any meat? And they gave him a piece of broiled fish.

.... And he took it, and did eat before them " (Luke 24:41-43). The story of

Jesus multiplying the loaves and fishes, not to mention that Passover lamb,

argues against vegetarianism, too.

 

But with this new campaign PETA foils the scholars by ignoring the biblical

evidence—and the Bible altogether—preferring sources from the fringe field

of " vegetarian theology, " who depend on coincidence, historical speculation,

and creative exegesis of the Dead Sea Scrolls and other ancient texts to

make their case that 1) Jesus was an Essene; and 2) that the Essenes

practiced vegetarianism.

 

Was Jesus an Essene? Did the Essenes practice vegetarianism? And just who

were the Essenes?

 

The Essenes were a Jewish ascetical sect that lived in the Judean desert on

the western shore of the Dead Sea during the time of Jesus. Secretive and

communal, the Essenes broke with official Judaism and retreated from the

world because they thought both " had become polluted, unclean and ungodly, "

says Marcus J. Borg, a religious studies professor at Oregon State

University and a leading New Testament scholar. " They had rigorous

understandings of purity that could only be met by separating themselves

from others, and they looked forward to an apocalyptic war in which God

would destroy their enemies. " (In that sense they were a little like the

Branch Davidians, only without the automatic weapons.) Many scholars also

believe the Essenes were the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

 

To prove Jesus was an Essene, the vegetarian theologians work backward from

John the Baptist. A few scholars have speculated that John might have been

an Essene. Indeed, he preached along the Jordan River near the Essenes' Dead

Sea settlement, he held political beliefs similar to those of the Essenes,

and lines found in the Dead Sea Scrolls echo in his preaching. For instance,

Isaiah 40:3 makes this reference to John: " The voice of him [John] that

crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the LORD, make straight in

the desert a highway for our God. " The same passage appears frequently in

the Dead Sea Scrolls.

 

So if John was an Essene—which is by no means certain—the vegetarian

theologians maintain that he made Jesus one too by baptizing him. That's

quite a stretch. So is the vegetarian theologians' second argument. The

Gospels identify the two other major Jewish sects of the day, the Sadducees

and Pharisees, as opponents of Jesus. But the Gospels don't mention the

Essenes, therefore Jesus must have been an Essene. This is what is known as

an " argument from silence. " (William Phipps used a similar tactic for

different ends in his controversial 1970 book, Was Jesus Married?) " It's a

lot of baloney, as far as I'm concerned, " says Father Joseph Fitzmeyer, a

professor of biblical studies at Georgetown University and an expert on the

Dead Sea Scrolls.

 

Then were the Essenes vegetarians? Not likely. Vegetarianism goes

unmentioned in the Dead Sea Scrolls. And since the Essenes were purists,

Borg points out, it's likely they would have slaughtered a lamb at Passover.

PETA draws its mainstream proof of Essene vegetarianism from a brief article

in the May/June 1999 issue of Archaeology, which reports that a dig of what

may have been an Essene settlement hasn't unearthed any animal bones.

 

And while PETA is right about the Essenes rejecting animal sacrifice, it

wrongly attributes this stance to compassion for God's lesser creatures.

When the Essenes split from the Jewish establishment they rejected all

rituals performed in the temple by the priests, of which animal sacrifice

was only one.

 

Assuming that you accept the " Jesus was an Essene " argument, you still have

to resolve the fundamental differences in their teachings. " Wherever there's

an overlap in subject matter, there is significant disagreement, " Borg says.

Jesus socialized with lepers. The Essenes rejected even healthy Jews. Jesus

spoke of loving one's enemy. The Essenes believed an apocalyptic war would

wipe out theirs. Jesus taught that we're all God's children. The Essenes

believed they were " children of light " while others were " children of

darkness " —a lot like a certain group of proselytizing vegetarians.

 

 

 

Related in Slate

 

 

OK, so the Lamb of God wouldn't mind ordering up a rack of Himself. David

Plotz asked a different question: Is God a football fan? A.N. Wilson

reviewed Norman Mailer's " autobiography " of Christ, in which Jesus claims to

have been an Essene. Plotz lamented the message of Disney's 101 Dalmatians:

" It is far better to torture a human being than to allow a single puppy to

come to harm. "

 

 

 

 

Related on the Web

 

For an overview of the case that Jesus was a vegetarian, To

order The Lost Religion of Jesus, a forthcoming book by Keith Akers that

attempts to make the definitive Jesus-is-a-vegetarian claim,

Read the Bible—in any of nine versions—and decide for yourself. For your

weekly source of fun-filled Jesus excitement, visit the legendary

Jesus-of-the-week site. (And if you're down with the cause, try not to

cringe at this week's photo of Jesus astride an ostrich. We're certain it's

an open-range ostrich.) Think you can devise a better campaign than the

folks at PETA? The group's open to suggestions,

 

 

http://slate.msn.com/crapshoot/00-10-12/crapshoot.asp

 

 

 

 

[Guest guest]

Robert Eisenman is Professor of Middle East Religions

and Chair of the Religious Studies Department at California

State University, Long Beach. The author of several books on

the Scrolls, he was a leading figure in the worldwide campaign

to gain access to the Scrolls and instrumental in the publication

of the Fascimile Edition of the unpublished Scrolls. A consultant

on the Huntington Library's decision to open its archives,

he was the first scholar to gain access to its collection.

 

In his book, JAMES THE BOTHER OF JESUS

Eisenman divides Palestine of Jesus's time into two power

blocks: the rulers and the populists. The rulers were the

Romans, and those who obtained power by serving their

purposes. They included the Herodian puppet dynasty; the

collaborationist pharisees; and Paul, Roman citizen and

purveyor of the Christ cult, a seductive synthesis of

familiar Greek ethics with exotic Hebrew monotheism.

The populists were the demagogues who mobilized against

Roman domination by fuelling the zealotry and

nationalism of the Jewish people. They included the early

Jewish Christians, the Qumran community (writers of the

Dead Sea Scrolls), and others (Zadokites, Essenes,

Ebionites, Rechabites...) whose delineations and

relationships will probably never be clarified. United under

the influence if not leadership of James, they formed an

" opposition alliance " against the establishment, and

launched a revolution against it in AD 66-70 that brought

about the Roman siege of Jerusalem and the destruction of

the temple. In the aftermath, only the collaborators

prospered. From the accomodationist pharisees came

Rabbinic Judaism; from the Pauline Christ-cult came

Christianity. Some of the fanatical Jamesian sects hung on

until the standardization of Christianity under Constantine,

when they were proscribed, and dispersed into a variety of

desert cults, some of which would later contribute to the

theology of Islam and most notably Sufism.

 

What about Peter?

 

According to Paul, James the brother of Jesus was the

leader of the original Jewish Christian church in

Jerusalem. Peter, who most Christians think of as the

" rock " on which the church was built, is portrayed by Paul

as a vacillating middle-man. When visiting Paul he

imitated Paul's pro-gentile stance, but when James's zealots

were around, he became a zealot and shunned Paul. At

some point he went to the Jewish-Christian community in

Rome. There, far from Jerusalem, he seems to have finally

abandoned James's fundamentalist ideology. After all,

Jamesian fundamentalism was not attractive to Roman

goyim. Then, when Jerusalem was destroyed in AD 70,

Rome suddenly became the dominant center of

Christianity. The Gospels were written, removing James

and Jewish Christianity from the story of Jesus, and fully

refurbishing Christianity as a Graeco-Roman religion.

Peter became the primary apostle and first pope.

Christianity as we know it was born.

 

The victor tells the tale

 

Eisenman peels back the layers of pro-Roman

sugar-coating in the Gospels and Acts. The Romans in

Palestine were a merciless colonialist force, their tactics

documented for us by the Jewish turncoat Josephus. Their

portrayal in the Gospels and Acts as good-hearted

moderators of the excesses of the pharisees (themselves

depicted as zealous/populist) appears to be a fiction

designed to appeal to a Roman audience.

 

see: http://www.depts.drew.edu/jhc/rpeisman.html

 

Eisenman does document that James and his followers were vegan.