Note 84 — THE ESSENES.

1825.—Neander, whose first instalment of his gigantic Church History appeared in 1825, now began to grapple with this mysterious brotherhood. In the introductory chapter of this history, in which a description is given of the religious condition of the world at the advent of Christ, he gives a very brief but very pregnant sketch of the Essenes. With that deep penetration, which was one of the chief characteristics of this sagacious critic, he repudiates the notion that the Essenes originated under foreign influences, and maintains that “it is a gross error to infer from the resemblance of certain religious phenomena the relationship of which is to be traced to a common inward cause, inherent in the nature of the human mind, that they have an external origin, having been copied from the other.” Hence, he submits that Essenism arose out of the deeper religious meaning of the Old Testament, that it afterwards adopted some of the old Oriental, Parsee, and Chaldean notions, and that it had no Alexandrian elements. Neander moreover most justly cautions against the accounts of Philo and Josephus, saying that they clothed the opinions of the Essenes in a garb peculiarly Grecian, which we might rightly consider as not originally belonging to them.84