'Teacher of Righteousness' is - in the absence of certainty about a particular name - the title of the first leader and guiding light of the Essenes, who (according to Geza Vermes in his 1977 book The Dead Sea Scrolls; Qumran in Perspective) led his small group to secede from Jerusalem in disgust at the double standards of the priestly establishment there, and establish their new base, as the people of the 'New Covenant', at Qumran in the Judaean desert. The official leader against whom the 'Teacher of Righteousness' rebelled was (according to Vermes) Jonathan Maccabaeus, who had succeeded his father Judas in 161 B.C., and was in control for eighteen years, until his execution in 143-142. Vermes thus places the foundation of the Qumran settlement in the decade 150 to 140 B.C. For how long after that the 'Teacher of Righteousness' remained alive is uncertain. But his influence was such that he was revered by those in the Community who came later: as Vermes puts it, "He transmitted to them his own distinctive interpretation of the Prophets and ... of the laws relating to the celebration of festivals ... Knowledge of the authentic teaching of the Prophets was the supreme talent of the Teacher of Righteousness" (pp.152, 153 and 168 of book cited).

In fact the 'Teacher of Righteousness' achieved even more than that. Edmond Szekely, in Volume 2 (published in 1974) of his three-volume edition of The Gospel of the Essenes, devotes five pages (pp.79-83) to a text - presumably fragmentary, from this title - to which he gives the heading "From the Essene Book of the Teacher of Righteousness". These five pages merit our intensive study, because there are things in them that, from the New Testament, we would normally think of as having been spoken by Jesus, perhaps a hundred and eighty years after the time of the 'Teacher of Righteousness'. The implication - which has been resisted or ignored by the mainstream Churches - is that Jesus was sufficiently influenced by, or imbued with, the message and teaching of the 'Teacher of Righteousness' to repeat almost verbatim some of his ideas. And this in turn raises the question: could Jesus have been so "influenced by, or imbued with, the [Teacher's] message and teaching" if he himself had not been an Essene, or was not at least strongly sympathetic to the aspirations of that movement?

There is also a further consideration in these circumstances. If Jesus, in his own teaching and ministry, was reliant in some degree on aspects of the Essene position, then Christianity was not a development 'out of nowhere', a 'unique revelation' entirely self-standing, as mainstream Christian theology would try to have us believe. And the more it can be shown - I tried to do this in addresses here on John the Baptist and Jesus last autumn - that the religious position of Jesus represents a natural organic growth and development from predecessors such as the 'Teacher of Righteousness' and the Baptist, the more it follows that Christianity was not something ipso facto unique, but a logical and calculated extension of ideas already current at the time.

A good place to start our analysis is the concept of the 'New Covenant'. Vermes observes that "From time to time, saintly leaders of the Jewish people, King David and King Josiah before the Babylonian exile ... and Ezra the Priest after the return from Mesopotamia", persuaded them to remember their Covenant with God with solemn vows of repentance and national re-dedication; but the promises were usually short-lived" (p.164). And he continues: "This would no doubt account for the development of an idea in the sixth century BC of a 'new Covenant' founded not so much on undertakings entered into by the community as on the inner transformation of every individual Jew for whom the will of God was to become, as it were, second nature ... It was this same Covenant theology that served as the foundation of the Qumran Community's basic beliefs. The Essenes not only considered themselves to be the 'remnant' of their time, but the 'remnant' of all time, the final 'remnant'" (pp.164-165). An important distinction must therefore be made in this case between the ''Teacher of Righteousness' and Jesus. Although, for the 'Teacher of Righteousness', the 'New Covenant' involved (in Vermes' words) "inner transformation of every individual ...", the 'New Covenant' was still to be realised in a specific place, i.e., for the Essene, in the surroundings of the Qumran Community. For Jesus, the 'New Covenant', though still the same overall concept in spiritual terms, came to have an infinitely extended setting. I think we can ignore Cruden's definition, in his Concordance: "The New Covenant is the spiritual covenant of God in Christ with his followers, frequently mentioned in the New Testament". That definition reflects over much the 'developed' theology of the Church; and Jesus' own view was much simpler.

Jesus says to the woman of Samaria in John chapter 4: "the hour is coming when neither on this mountain [Gerizim] nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father ... The hour is coming ... when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit .. God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship Him in spirit" (vv.21, 23 and 24). Jesus' view is not in any degree bounded by place, whether Jerusalem or Mount Gerizim in Samaria, or Qumran; rather, like the approach of George Fox in the seventeenth century, it exists in an entirely non-physical and inner and spiritual dimension. In this instance, Jesus has moved far beyond the physicality of ancient Judaism - which, as we have seen, was not modified in essence even by the 'Teacher of Righteousness' -, and approaches to an imaginative spiritual universalism.

Let me give some illustrative examples, before we proceed, of how, as history unfolds, earlier ideas tend to be subsumed into later ones. As regards the mid-fifth century B.C., in Rome, it came to be held later, as something of an article of faith, that Roman Law was codified for the first time into written form in the so-called "Laws of the Twelve Tables", having been oral and unwritten up to then. But undoubtedly much later came to be associated with the Twelve Tables that did not originate from them: a few written Leges Regiae ('Royal Laws') survive, and since the Roman kingship came to an end in 509 B.C., these 'Royal Laws' must date from the sixth or even perhaps seventh or eighth century B.C.

And, in England, much the same is true of Magna Carta in 1215. A. W. Holland suggested in 1926 that "in later ages [the] importance [of Magna Carta] was enormously magnified; for it was in one sense no more than an attempt to reaffirm and reconstitute the liberties, now in 1215 felt to be lost, which had been granted in a charter issued by King Henry I in the year 1100 on his accession.

Where literature is concerned, we now associate Julius Caesar with Shakespeare's 1599 tragedy of that name. But Shakespeare was dependent, to a greater or lesser extent, on earlier plays by Muret (1544), Grevin (1558), Eedes (1581) and Pescetti (1594), and those plays are now forgotten and by most unknown.

It is thus entirely understandable, and indeed something that can be paralleled repeatedly throughout human history, that ideas and imagery (for Hebrew was an image-laden and metaphorical language) originally spoken by the 'Teacher of Righteousness' should survive attributed to Jesus. And Book I of The Gospel of the Essenes provides a parallel instance where Jesus and Paul are concerned. The majority and conventional view, on the basis of 1 Corinthians 13, is that the famous "Faith, Hope and Charity" passage surviving there was first spoken by Paul; but the evidence -surely correct - of The Gospel of the Essenes is that these, words originated with Jesus. I think we have a duty now, as seekers after the truth, and in the interests of that truth, to segregate out as clearly as possible what words belong to the 'Teacher of Righteousness' and what to Jesus.

No small or trivial matters are involved in this segregation. And let me end today, in illustration of that, by quoting a few sentences from the third page (p.81) of 'The Essene Book of the Teacher of Righteousness':

"Therefore, I say unto thee, take no thought to store up worldly goods, possessions, gold and silver, for these bring only corruption and death. For the greater thy hoard of wealth, the thicker shall be the walls of thy tomb. Open wide the windows of thy soul, and breathe the fresh air of a free man! Why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they toil not, neither do they spin; and yet I say unto thee, that even Solomon in his glory was not arrayed like one of these."

Amen

Dr. Martin Pulbrook - 10th July 2011