The Dead Sea Scrolls
The authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Qumran Community, Essenes, Nasoreans, and the original Jerusalem Church were all one and the same.
Freemasonry developed from this group.
The ancient settlement at Qumran was extensively excavated by the Jordan Department of Antiquities, L’Ecole Archeologique Francaise and the Palestine Archaeological Museum under G.L. Harding and Pere R. de Vaux in five campaigns between 1951 and 1956. What they found was the theologian’s equivalent to sweating nitroglycerine; the world of Christianity could blow up if the whole thing was not handled with the utmost care. But the lid could not be kept on this explosive issue, no matter how hard the Christian Church tried to do so. Those in charge of the research were not independent scholars, they had a faith to protect and an establishment to maintain. Other scholars involved with the scrolls saw evidence that appeared to change the view of Christ and the New Testament, but they were effectively silenced or discredited.
Accusations of scandal, cover-up and deliberate smothering of the truth have been met by denials and counter accusations of ‘over-active imaginations’ and ’deliberate sensationalism’. It is a fact that for more than forty years after their discovery, over half of the 800 scrolls discovered had not been published. The academic community was outraged by this unprecedented secrecy of what ought to be public knowledge and after widespread protests, led by the Huntington Library of San Marino, California, the Israeli authorities removed restrictions on public access to the contents of the scrolls in October 1991.
Various versions of biblical texts were found and all of them were over a thousand years older than the oldest surviving Hebrew tests that were produced by Aaron Ben Moses ben Asher in AD 1008.
The whole area of investigation concerning Qumran is a minefield for Christians, so many have preferred to keep away from the subject. Christianity rests entirely on the idea that on a particular day in the history a god/man absolved those members of the human race who were prepared to worship Him of responsibility for their wrongdoings by dying (albeit temporarily) under torture. Until recently the only evidence regarding this pivotal event was the three Synoptic Gospels of the New Testament, which were written long after the events they describe by people who were not involved themselves and cannot be properly identified. It is not known that the story of Jesus told in these Gospels is to a large extent a dramatic invention to wrap up his teachings in a ‘reader-friendly’ format. Analysis of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke have shown that they are an amalgam of two separate Church traditions, based on a combination of the Gospel of Mark and a lost earlier gospel now referred to as “Q” (derived from the German word ‘quelle’, meaning ‘source’). The birth story of Jesus told in Mark and Luke is know known to be a complete invention by people who had no understanding of the historical and political circumstances of the time. The events as they describe them simply could not have happened. An example of this is the way that King Herod is linked with Roman Taxation under Quirinius – when Herod had been dead since 4 BC, at least ten years before Quirinius came on the scene. (1)
Other scholars, such as Morton Smith, have detected the existence of the secret gospel with elements running beneath the four New Testament gospels, which is believed to predate the gospel of Mark. (2) This secret gospel of Jesus did exist in a written form - the scroll that the Knights Templar found. The Qumran scrolls identify a secret tradition that members had to swear never to divulge. These secrets were written down and preserved in readiness for the day when God would visit his people in the last times. (3) The early inventors of Christianity did a good job of removing all evidence about a mortal they wanted to portray as a god.
Christianity is exposed. Without Guatama, Buddhism lives; without Mohammed, Islam lives; yet without the resurrection of Jesus, Christianity is nothing. It is understandable, therefor e, that the Church takes great care in dealing with new information regarding 5this tiny moment in relatively recent history when they believe the creator of the whole universe decided it was time to become a living Jew. This leaves Christianity exposed to the light of truth.
If the whole basis of Christianity can be shown to be a silly mistake, will the Vatican apologize for the inconvenience it has caused, abolish itself and hand over its wealth and power? No. No proof could ever do this. The Church is too large and important to suddenly disappear; but equally it can never be right to hide the truth, because truth must surely be the essence of God.
Ultimately, religion is not about historical truth at all, it is about faith. Blind faith is not enough.
To put dogma above truth is no way to honor God.
The Missing Books of Maccabee
Conventional history records the Maccabean revolt as a Jewish cause with right on its side, and the raising of Jonathan Maccabaeus to the high priesthood is viewed as a popular event. From the scrolls, actually Jonathan was considered by the Hasidim (or strict Jewish establishment) to be an outrageous choice who put politics before Yahweh.
When Jonathan was murdered, his brother Simon became high priest. Simon’s illegitimate accession can be found in Psalm 110.
The Qumran Community’s views of the Jerusalem priesthood:
’The priests of Jerusalem, who will heap up wealth and unjust gain from the plunder of the people. (1 QpHab 9:4-5)
The city is Jerusalem in which the wicked priest did works of abomination and defiled the Temple of God. (1 QpHab 12:7-9)’
When Simon was murdered he was replaced by his son John Hyrcanus who ruled for thirty years; then his son, Aristobulus, briefly took over and became the first Hasonaean to call himself king of the Jews as well as high priest. The line continued until roles of king and high priest split again upon the death of Queen Alexandra in 67 BC when her youngest son Aristobulus II became king and her eldest son, Hyrcanus, became high priest.
The Roman Catholic Douai Bible portrays the Hasmonaeans as Jewish heroes – yet the King James Bible tells us nothing. The last tow books of the Douai Bible are the First and Second Books of Maccabees, scriptures totally absent from the Protestant Old Testament.
The only people who knew that the rise of the Hasmonaean high priests and kings was illegitimate were the Members of the Qumran Community who despised these false high priests and their political panderings to the Romans. Yet the Qumranians were all but destroyed in the war with the Romans in AD 66-70 and the Diaspora Jews/Christians were left to tell the story7 the way they saw it. Although the Qumranians may be lost the battle, they won the war. By burying the true Jewish story in scroll form, the message eventually got into the hands of the creators of the Protestant Bible – thanks to the early twelfth-century excavations of the Knights Templar.
The Elect of Judah
The Jews who returned from their captivity in Babylon were led back to Jerusalem by Zerubbabel, the man who otherwise might have been their king. He and his inner group, named in the Bible as Heshua, Nehemiah, Seraiah, Reelaiah, Mordecai, Bilshan, Mispar, Bigvai, Rehum and Bannah, returned to their city with their secret ceremony of the royal line of David. Following Ezekiel’s advice the most overtly Egyptian elements had been exchanged for Hebrew ones – but still it was intact. They rebuilt the Temple, and never again would their God need to punish them so harshly.
The descendants of Zerubbabel and his inner group known as the Hasidim left Jerusalem sometime between 187 BC and 152 BC.
The Qumranian’s exile was self-imposed and in their desert retreat they saw themselves as the people of the new covenant with Yahweh, the ‘elect of Judah’, living a harsh, monastic life that would become the model for Christian orders. They describe themselves as ‘the men who entered into a New Covenant in the Land of Damascus’ (Damascus is the name that they used for Qumran rather than a reference to the Syrian city.)
Large cisterns for ceremonial ablutions have been found by excavations since ritual washing was essential to the maintenance of holiness, so large amounts of water were required.
The members of the Community were divided into three groups: ‘Israel’, ‘Levi’ and ‘Aaron’. Israel meant the common membership, Levites were lower priests and Aaron designated the most senior and holy priests. Starting with an interview, the Council established his righteousness, after which a ballot was taken. If accepted, the candidate was admitted at a lowly grade for the period of one year, in which time he must not mingle his wealth with ‘the many’. The first level of Freemasonry, that of ‘entered apprentice’, used to be of a year’s duration, and in the initiation ceremony the candidate is required to bring no coins or other metallic objects. In the course of the initiation he is asked to give money, and when he replies that he has none he is told that it was a test to ensure that he had brought no coins or other wealth into the Lodge.
When the new member had been in the Qumran Community for a year he was tested on his learning of the works in the Torah; before proceeding to the status of a Fellow Craft, a Masonic brother has to be t4ested on his learning of ritual. As with Freemasonry in the past, the second stage of membership was as far as the majority got, but for selected individuals there was a third level to which the individual could pass after a further year. This allowed them to ‘draw near to the secret council of the Community’ – the secrets of Hiram Abif are revealed to the Freemason that becomes a Master Mason on being raised to their Third Degree.
The positive virtues taught in the Qumran Community were clearly laid out in the scrolls: truth, righteousness, kindness, justice, honesty and humility along with brotherly love. So similar are the three degrees of the Qumran Community to those of Freemasonry that it transcends mere coincidence.
Midrash, Pesher and Parable
The term ’midrah’ corresponds very closely to the English word ‘exegesis’ and can be defined as ‘the investigation and interpretation of the Hebrew scriptures for the purpose of discovering theological truths and instructions to be followed’. ‘Pesher’ is an interpretation of a verse of Scripture in which a given statement is considered to have meaning regarding an event or a person at the present time or in the future. So ‘midrash’ was an ongoing process for the priests and prophets of Israel seeking out instruction to improve the spiritual well being of the people and ‘pesher’ was a method of making sense of things that were happening around them. They believed that events were not random occurrences but conformed to structured patterns that could be deciphered through the studying of scripture. When they wrote down a story of a recent event, they would ensure it followed an ancient pattern.
‘Parable’, the New Testament tells us, is what Jesus the Christ used to communicate by storytelling to the unsophisticated people. ‘A figurative explanation which may contain either allegory or metaphor or both to transmit a deeper level of meaning than the surface level.’ They were also a technique of explaining complex current events in an allegorical, and therefore, secret way. It is beyond all dispute that Christianity was a Jewish cult and that all of its ‘original cast’ (Jesus, James, Simon Peter, Andrew, Judas, Thomas, etc) were people who thought in terms of midrash, pesher, and parable. The ‘second cast’ (Paul, Matthew, Luke, etc) used more Hellenistic thought processes that are closer to the way we think today. The Gospels of the New Testament were written after the destruction of Jerusalem and Qumran and the death of the ‘original cast’, These writings were created for a Greek-thinking audience by people who took the teachings that they believed to be those of their Christ, then wove a life story for Christ around them – without the benefit of any actual eye-witness testimony.
The early Church was known as ‘those of the way’ or the ‘way of God’ as a distinct sect (Acts 24:14). The Qumran Community used this same term. Both groups describe themselves as the poor, the children of light, the elect of God, a community of the New Testament or Covenant.
The Secrets of Qumran
When Essenes were first forced to leave Jerusalem, they ‘groped around’ for twenty years until a man known as the Teacher of Righteousness showed them ‘the way’ and the Community at Qumran became firmly established. Besides the Teacher of Righteousness, there were major characters who recur in the scrolls, such as ‘the wicked priest’ and ‘the liar’.
The Teacher of Righteousness was a pious, holy man and a priestly descendant of Zadok, who revealed they were living in ‘the end of days’ as predicted by the old prophets. God would crush His enemies in a final cosmic battle and usher in the new age of righteousness. It would be they who would fight the battle and would return to Jerusalem to purify the Temple and re-institute proper worship.
The Qumranians had several descriptions for themselves including ‘the Community’, ‘the Many’, ‘the Congregation of Israel’ and ‘the Sons of Light’. The man who would lead them at ‘the end of the age’, the Davidic Messiah, had such titles as “Mighty Man’, “Man of Glory’ and ‘Prince of Light’. It would be this ‘Prince of Light’ who would overcome the ‘Prince of Darkness’ and ‘the Congregation of Belial’ (Satan). A scroll entitled ‘Midrash on the Last Days’ tells how the ‘Children of Belial’ will devise evil plots against the ‘Sons of Light’. The nations will rage against the elect of Israel. God will save His people by the hands of two messianic figures. One from ‘the Branch of David’ and the other ‘the Interpreter of the Law’. (5)
There were some secret books which contained information about future events and references to certain rituals revealed by God. They had been written in coded form. These secrets were highly restricted and handed down in a long line of secret tradition, to be faithfully preserved until ‘the last days’. Father J. T. Milik identified secret scrolls used cryptic devices. One was the use of two different alphabets with arbitrarily chosen signs which replaced the normal Hebrew characters; another had the script running left to right instead of the normal right to left.
The Qumran Community were the spiritual descendants of the Egyptian kings and the antecedents of the Templars and Freemasonry. A member of the original Dead Sea scrolls team and a Nobel Peace Prize nominee, Dr. High Schonfield discovered a Hebrew code he called ‘Atbash cipher’, which was used to conceal names. (6) Before his death in 1988, Schonfield found that key words used by both the Knights Templar and Freemasonry are themselves Atbash codes which reveal hidden meaning once deciphered. For instance, the Templars were widely reputed to worship something with the curious name of ‘Baphomet’, which was never understood until it was written in Hebrew and the Atbash cipher applied to reveal the word “Sophia’ – the Greek for ‘wisdom’.
Applying the Atbash cipher to the Masonic word ‘Tajo” (pronounced “Tacho”), produces the name of the man (Asaph) who, according to a number of psalms, assisted at the building of the first temple at Jerusalem.
Noah and Enoch were the recipients of divine secrets of Heaven and Earth that had been passed down through certain initiates. There is an ancient belief that the mythical ancestors of the human race were men of superb wisdom, and there are many tales concerning Enoch and Noah as holders of divine secrets. There has long been an unexplained secret tradition attached to the name of Enoch. In Masonic literature there are old rituals associated with the attempt by Sem, Japhet and Ham to resurrect Noah. The Ark Mariners continues this tradition of the secrets of Noah.
There was once a larger body of writings attributed to Moses than have survived. (7) One that has survived is the Assumption of Moses, an Essene work. (8) It contains the following instruction given by Moses to Joshua:
’Receive thou this writing that thou mayest know how to preserve the books which I shall deliver unto thee: and thou shalt set them in order and anoint them with oil of cedar and put them away in earthen vessels in the place which He made from the beginning of the creation of the world.’
Moses was the only man to know the secrets of the Egyptian kings from firsthand experience, and he here gives instructions. This described only one place to the Jews; the rock beneath the Holy of Holies in the inner sanctum of the Temple in Jerusalem, because this was the first point of creation. We know that the Qumranians hid the main library of scrolls that they had written down themselves, plus other texts drawn in from around Judaea, in the caves behind the settlement. They followed this instruction from Moses because they believed that the ‘end of the age’ would happen in their lifetime. The Knights Templar excavated towards and underneath the ‘Holy of Holies’.
The Assumption of Moses was written during the lifetime of Jesus, and surveys Jewish history down to the Seleucid era, and through the Hasmonaean period to someone who is described as ‘an insolent king’. This reference is Herod the Great. The book goes on to describe a period of persecution, which fits the times of Antiochus Epiphanes, the successor to Herod. Then a mysterious figure, Taxo, appears. He urges his sons to retire with him to a cave, to die there rather than be disloyal to their faith. Their death is to be the trigger for the expected intervention of God in history and the establishment of His kingdom. This kingdom appears to be understood as a Heavenly kingdom, rather than one established on Earth.
An instruction from Moses to bury the secrets dating no earlier than the years of Jesse’s life, a time when the whole Community was preparing for the great battle before the ‘end of the age’. Taxo and Tacho were forms of the same name. The Atbash cipher translates Tacho to Asaph – the man who assisted Solomon at the building of the first Temple at Jerusalem and a name used by Freemason for the Grand Master.
The name ‘Taxo’ was used by the Qumranians in their scrolls to refer to the Master of the Community i.e. the Teacher of Righteousness of the last years of their existence. (9) The exhortation in the text ‘to die rather than be disloyal to their faith’ is also highly reminiscent of the third Degree of Freemasonry, which is entirely oriented to the idea of ‘faithfulness even unto death’ summed up by the words of Hiram Abif when he was threatened by the first of his attackers:
’I would rather suffer death than betray the sacred trust reposed in me.’
The leader of the Qumran Community was considered to be the spiritual descendant of the original builder of the Temple of Solomon, the man that Freemasons now know as Hiram Abif.
The Twin Pillars
Because the Roman Church falsely positioned itself as the inheritors of the teachings of Jesus and because modern Christians erroneously believe that they have some right to the high ground from which to study other groups, they look upon the Essenes/Qumranians as just one group amongst many that existed in the Holy Land at the time of Christ. This is a hopelessly inadequate assessment of the Qumran Community. Its members were the distillation of everything that was important to the Jews as a nation.
The Teacher of Righteousness was two individuals. The first at the founding of the Community and the other at the ‘end of the age’. (10) The older scrolls refer to the first Teacher of Righteousness and the later ones are talking about a later spiritual leader. Professors Robert Eisenmean and Michael Wise concluded this leader was James, the brother of Christ and the leader of the Jerusalem Church. It follows that the Jerusalem Church was the Qumran Community.
The second-century historian, Hegesippus called James, ‘a Nazirite’ and said that he interceded in the sanctuary of the Temple for the sake of the people.
According to another scroll known as the Manual of Discipline, the council of the Community consisted of twelve perfect and holy men who were the ‘pillars’ of the Community, and the two principal pillars represented the kingly and priestly aspects of creating and maintaining the ‘Kingdom of Heaven.’ This term never did mean anything other-worldly. These spiritual pillars were the descendants of the pillars of the united Upper and Lower Egypt that had come down to the Community as the legendary Boaz and Jachin. To these pious and cornered Jews, the columns represented both the kingly power of ‘mishpat’ and the priestly power of ‘tsedeq’, and when united they supported the great archway of Heaven, the keystone of which was the third great word of Hebrew desire, ‘shalom’.
The right-hand pillar is known to Freemasons as ‘Jachin’, the first high priest of the Temple. This is the priestly pillar the which for the Qumranians was the embodiment of holiness embodied in the fundamental concept of ‘tsedeq’. This word (sometimes shown spelt ‘Zedek’) stood for the principle underlying the divinely appointed order usually translated as ‘righteousness’. In English “rightness’ or ’doing good to others at all times’. This concept is fundamentally the same as the ancient Egyptian concept of Ma’at. ‘Tsedeq’ was for Canaanites a tern associated with the sun god. The Canaanite sun god was the great judge who watched over the world, righted wrongs and shone light onto the dark doings of hidden crimes. When the Jews merged Canaanite beliefs into their concept of Yahweh, ‘tsedeq’ became on of His features. The word kept its association with the light of the sun and helped become the opposite of darkness and chaos. (11)
The left hand pillar of King Solomon’s Temple was called Boaz, who, as any Freemason knows, was the great-grandfather of David, king of Israel. For the Qumranians too, this was the kingly pillar that stood for the house of David and the concept of ‘mishpat’. Translated as ‘judgement’, it signified the regular rule of Yahweh as king, so represented the divinely appointed order.
The rule of government and the dispensing of justice were connected with this pillar: it was at Mizpah (another spelling of mishpat) that Jacob erected his first pillar, and it was here that Saul was acclaimed the first king of Israel.
When these two spiritual pillars are in place with the Teacher of Righteousness (tsedeq) on the left hand of God and the earthly Davidic King (mishpat) on his right hand, the archway of Yahweh’s rule will be in place with the keystone of ‘shalom’ locking everything together at its center. This Jewish term means ‘peace.’ For the Qumranians ‘shalom’ was not a free gift – it had to be won by establishing the Rule of Yahweh.
When the Qumranians knew that the ‘end of the age’ was drawing near, the need to find the people who were fit to be these pillars became urgent, because God could not destroy the old order until the new framework was in place. Because these positions were ‘designate’ rather than immediately available, due to the Roman occupation and the false high priesthood in Jerusalem, the candidates were called messiahs; essentially, leaders in waiting.
The Qumranians had erected an imitation Temple entrance with their own copies of the pillars of Boaz and Jachin. The two pillar bases still exist outside the east door of a vestry that leads to Qumran’s ‘Holy of Holies’. These two pillars were the location for the initiation ceremony of senior members. There is a reference to ‘the secret of the pillars’ in fragment four of a scroll known as the Brontologion.
A book by the late John Allegro provides a full translation of the Copper Scroll. The word ‘Qumran’, called Qimron’ at the time of Jesus and James, meant ‘vault, arch, doorway or the like’. (12) They were the people of the pillars with the arch over it!
Freemasons say that the meaning of the word Jachin is ‘to establish’. It was the task of the priestly or ‘tsedeq’ messiah to establish righteousness in the land of Israel so the Temple could be rebuilt. The left-hand pillar, Boaz, is said by Freemasons to mean ‘Strength’. This is the pillar of the kingly or ‘mishpat’ messiah who would be responsible for the strength of the kingdom in defense from outsiders and in civil law and governmental matters. And Freemasons say that when the two are untied, ‘stability’ is the result. There could be no better single-word translation for the concept of ‘shalom’. The bottom line is that modern Freemasons use the two pillars of King Solomon’s Temple in exactly the same way that the Qumran Community and Jesus the Christ did. Fragments of a Testament to Levi, older than the version of the testament of Levi contained in the Bible refer to the Messiah expected to be a Levitical (priestly) Messiah rather than a Davidic (kingly) one. The writers expected a priestly leader alongside a civil leader, with the civil subordinate to the priestly. (13)
In Matthew 3:3, John the Baptist is described as ‘a voice crying in the wilderness’, this is in the pr4ecise form words used by the Qumran Community, and it suggested the Gospel writers had a struggle to turn scriptures around to make Jesus come out as the Messiah. Even as late as the time of the writing of Luke’s Gospel it was remembered that people held John the Baptist to be the Messiah. Luke says in 3:15:
’And as the people were in expectation, and all men mused in their hearts of John, whether he were the Christ, or not.’
The words ‘all men’ rather than ‘some men’ indicates that everybody say John as the prime candidate. John and Jesus were joint messiahs. (15) The Mandaeans of southern Iraq are descendants of the Nasorians and they claim that John the Baptist was the originator of their sect.
This evidence will frighten many Christians because it seems so alien and threatening to their belief that their Jesus Christ was the one and only Messiah.
John lived a hard life in the wilderness, eating only such permissible food as locusts and wild honey and wearing a leather girdle and a coat of camel hair. In John’s view the entire Jerusalem establishment was totally corrupt, so as he preached excoriating sermons against it; and he urged his congregation to repent and to accept the Essene/Qumranian rite of purification by baptism.
The story of the baptism of Jesus described in the New Testament is a deliberately enhanced account created by the later gospel writers to keep up the level of magical events to satisfy a Gentile audience. (15)
The idea that John baptized Jesus was an invention by Mark. John only became aware that Jesus existed when his disciples told him about a new wise teacher who had arrived from the north. The description of Jesus seeing a dove descend upon him was a standard Hebrew way of expressing the gaining of wisdom.
According to the New Testament he went into the wilderness where he fasted for forty days and nights. It does not say he left the wilderness after that fasting. The King James Bible tells us that he remained there for three years from AD 27 to 31. The term ‘the Wilderness’ is used throughout the Dead Sea Scrolls as the description of the Qumran Community. It was an inability to understand contemporary usage of ‘wilderness’ that caused Christians to imagine Jesus alone in an actual desert. Jesus was at Qumran passing through the three stages of initiation to reach the highest level of the brotherhood – each of which, you will recall, took precisely one year! Here he learned how to turn his back on the bribes of the leaders of other nations. At the last stage, after his three years, he was taught the secret technique and words of resurrection handed down from Moses.
As a gifted teacher from the line of David, John the Baptist asked Jesus if he would be ‘the one to come’, that is, the kingly messiah for his opposite pillar. Jesus answered the question with a ‘pesher’ response, ‘the blind recover their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor are given the good news’. In no way did he mean that he had done all these things; he was referring to the miracles of healing that Isaiah predicted would happen at the time of Israel’s restoration. This was a confirmation that Jesus agreed with John that the ‘end of the age’ was imminent and he was the man to help prepare ‘the way’.
Jesus’s expressed view of John:
’You knew that John was a prophet and not to expect royal garments when you saw him. But what you did not know, and what I now tell you, is that John is more than a prophet. He was the one about whom it is written, “look, I am sending my messenger before you”. He will prepare your path ahead of you.’ (16)
Many people have been confused by passages in which Jesus describes John as ‘the one to come’ and John describes Jesus with the same words. Once it is realized that the two of them were pillars in the heavenly gateway, it becomes clear that there is no conflict at all – each needed the other.
The messianic ministry of John the Baptist lasted only six years as he was beheaded early in AD 32. Josephus records in ’Antiquities’ that he was killed by Herod Antipas, who feared that John’s activities could lead to a revolt. It came as a major blow to Jesus to hear that his opposite pillar had been murdered. The Qumran Community were devastated by the loss of one pillar. Two candidates stepped forward to fill this key role. One was to become the leader of the Qumran Community, known as ‘James the Just’, and the other was his elder brother – the man we call Jesus!
CONCLUSION
The Catholics portray the Hasmonaeans as Jewish heroes – yet the Protestants clearly do not. This indicated a connection between the anti-Hasmonaean Qumranians and the seventeenth-century English establishment; something that could only have happened through a Templar/Freemasonry route.
From the scrolls we learned there were secret books that contained references to certain rituals written down in coded form, and a definite reference to ‘the secret of the pillars’.
The Qumranian Assumption of Moses instructed the Community to conceal its most precious scrolls.
The leader of the Qumran Community was considered to be the spiritual descendant of the original builder of the Temple of Solomon, the man that Freemasons now know as Hiram Abif.
The essence of the Qumranian ‘pillar’ paradigm became clear as ‘tsedeq’ on the left-hand side of the gateway and ‘mishpat’ on the right-hand, with Yahweh the keystone of ‘shalom’ locking everything together at its centre. John the Baptist and Jesus were joint messiahs for a time but after the killing of John the politics of the situation exploded.
(1) G. W. Buchanan: Jesus: The King and his Kingdom
(2) M. Smith: The Secret Gospel
(3) D. S. Russell:The Method and Message of Jewish Apocalyptic
(4) D. S. Russell: The Method and Message of Jewish Apocalyptic
(5) D. S. Russell: The Method and Message of Jewish Apocalyptic
(6) H. Schonfield: The Essene Odyssey
(7) E. Schurer: The Jewish People at the Time of Jesus Christ
(8) H. Schonfield: The Essene Odyssey
(9) Peake’s Commentary on the Bible
(10) W. S. Lasor: The Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament
(11) Norman Cohen: Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come
(12) John Allegro: The Treasure of the Copper Scroll
(13) Peake’s Commentary on the Bible
(14) K. G. Huhn: Die Beiden Messias Aarons und Israels
(15) Burton L. Mack: The Lost Gospel
(16) Burton L. Mack: The Lost Gospel
