The Eliminator; or, Skeleton Keys to Sacerdotal Secrets

by Richard B. Westbrook

As if to afford further foundation for this conjecture of identity of the early disciples with the Ebionites, the Greek word for this designation, “ptochos,” usually translated “poor” and “beggar,” occurs in the New Testament in a manner which often suggests that the Ebionites are meant by the designation.

“Happy the poor in spirit,” says the Sermon on the Mount; “for the kingdom of the heavens is theirs.” “The gospel is preached to them” was the message sent to John the Baptist in his prison at Macheras. “If thou wilt be perfect,” says Jesus to the young man, “go, sell that thou hast, and give to the poor.” In the Gospel according to St Luke (6: 20) Jesus actually addresses his disciples as “ye poor,” or Ebionim. Lazarus is called Ptochos, or Ebioni, in the sixteenth chapter. Paul sternly rebukes the Galatian Christians for their conversion to Ebionism: “But then, not having seen God, you were servants to those that are not gods; but now having known God, or rather having been known by God, why do you turn about again to the weak and beggarly elements?”

Nevertheless, the conclusion of Eusebius, that the Essenes or Therapeutæ were only Christians of the apostolic age, is impossible. They were of greater antiquity, and flourished when Christians—or Chrestians, whichever they may be—had never been heard of. The converse is more probable by far—that the apostles and their Ebionite followers were religionists after the form of the Essenes.

We have indicated the evident similarity of these sectaries with the Mithraic initiates, and the fact has also been shown that many of the Christians of the first centuries also observed the rites of that worship. That the astrological features of each were identical and are manifest in the story of Jesus has also been illustrated. We may now treat the final question, that of the person of Jesus himself.

It is the easiest way just now to concede his physical existence, and reject the marvels, exaggerations, and other incredibilities of the Gospel narratives. A Roman Catholic writer of great acuteness has marked out that very course. He explains his position so aptly that we will reproduce the principal features, which certainly seem in a great degree to sustain our proposition. “Where intellect sees an idea, an abstraction,” says he, “religion sees a person. This involves a superior development of the consciousness; inasmuch while intellect of itself, having neither motive nor force, could not have created, personality includes intellect and all else that is indispensable to action—namely, feeling and energy.”

He sets forth Christianity as a religion in Palestine “which consisted in the worship of a Divine Being incarnated in human form in order to redeem fallen man, born of a virgin, teaching immortality, working wonders of benevolence, dying through the hostile machinations of the spirit of evil, rising from death, reascend-ing into heaven, and becoming judge of the dead. As representative of the sun the festivals appointed in his honor were fixed in accordance with the seasons, his birth being at the end of the winter solstice; his death at the spring equinox; his rising soon afterward, and then his ascension into heaven, whence he showers down benefits on man.”

The same author indicates the Essenes as cherishing these beliefs: “Deriving their tenets from the East, they believed in the Persian dualism, regarded the sun as the impersonation of the Supreme Light, and worshipped it in a modified way.” He adds: “To the sect of the Essenes the originals of John the Baptist and Jesus must have belonged.”

“We may possess a trustworthy account of the spirit that was in Jesus,” he says again, “and yet be altogether in the dark respecting his precise sayings and doings. The condition of the world at this period being such as I have described, it was inevitable that any impressive personality whose career enabled such things, with however small a modicum of truth, to be predicated of it as were predicated of Jesus, should be seized upon and appropriated to the purposes of a new religion....

“For the masses the spectacle of an heroic crusade against the authority, respectability, and pharisaism of an established ecclesiasticism, combined with complete self-devotion, with teaching of the most absolute perfection in morals—a perfection readily recognizable by the intuitive perceptions of all—and with a confident mysticism that seemed to imply unbounded supernatural knowledge—all characteristics of the sect of Essenes to which he and the Baptist manifestly belonged,—these were amply sufficient to win belief in Jesus as a divine personage. And especially so when they found him persistently reported not only as having performed miracles in his life, but as having shown that traditional superiority to all the limitation of humanity which was ascribed to their previous divinities by rising from the dead and ascending into heaven. Familiar as they were with the notion of incarnations in which the sun played a principal part, and accustomed to associate such events with virgin mothers impregnated by deities, births in stables or caves, hazardous careers in the exercise of benevolence, violent deaths, and descents into the kingdom of darkness, resurrections and ascensions into heaven, to be followed by the descent of blessings upon mankind,—it required but the suggestion that Jesus of Nazareth was a new and nobler incarnation of the Deity, who had so often before been incarnate and put to death for man’s salvation, to transfer to him the whole paraphernalia of doctrine and rite deemed appropriate to the office.”

There appears no reasonable doubt of the relationship of Jesus to the Essenean brothers. Not only does the name itself imply a personification of that peculiar people, but he is represented as uttering their distinctive doctrines. In the Sermon on the Mount he required from his disciples, as did the Essenean teachers, a righteousness exceeding that of the Scribes and Pharisees; and the Beatitudes are distinctly of the same character. He prohibits the oath, as the Esseneans also did, enjoined non-resistance to violent assault and forgiveness of injuries, and exhorted to take no thought for the morrow, which he described as serving Mammon. He also charged against divulging the interior doctrines, comparing it to giving the holy bread to dogs and casting pearls to the swine, the latter treading the precious jewels under foot and the dogs turning to rend the giver. Indeed, the whole discourse is one which a teacher of the fraternity would deliver to candidates. “These things,” he declares, “are hid from the wise and prudent, but are revealed to babes.” When his disciples demur at his rigid tenets in regard to marriage, permitting divorce only for lewdness or false religion, he sanctions their inference that it is not good to marry. “He that is able to receive this doctrine,” added he, “let him receive it.” To the young man who desired to know the way to perfection he first gave a reproof for calling him good when there was no one so but the one God, and then commanded him to sell all his possessions and give to the poor, probably meaning the Ebionim. In the parable in Luke the rich man after death is tormented, while the other, the ptochos or Ebionite Lazarus, is compensated in the lap of Abraham. Yet except the few cases when the terms “brethren” and “disciple” are used there are few direct references to the Essenes. But he is continually exhorting against the doctrine of the Pharisees and Sadducees, and denouncing the former. Meanwhile, he nowhere fills a page in history. He has left no mark of his individual existence.