Jerusalem: The Biography

* Such as those of the Essenes, probably an offshoot of the pious Hasidim who had originally backed the Maccabees. Josephus explained that they were one of the three sects of Judaism in the first century AD, but we learned more in the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in eleven caves at Qumran near the Dead Sea in 1947–56. These contain the earliest Hebrew versions of some of the biblical books. Christians and Jews had long debated the differences between the Septuagint Bible (translated into Greek, from a vanished Hebrew original and the basis of the Christian Old Testament, between the third and first centuries BC) and the earliest surviving Hebrew Bible (the Masoretic, dating from seventh to the tenth centuries AD. The Aleppo Codex is the oldest, but incomplete; the St Petersburg Codex is dated 1008, and it too is complete.) The Scrolls revealed differences but confirm that the Masoretic was fairly accurate. The Scrolls prove, however, that there were many versions of the biblical books in circulation as late as Jesus’ time. The Essenes were austere Jews who developed the apocalyptic ideas of Jeremiah and Daniel and saw the world as a struggle between good and evil ending in war and judgement. Their leader was a mystical ‘Teacher of Righteousness’; their enemy was the ‘Wicked Priest’ – one of the Maccabees. They feature in many crackpot theories about the origins of Christianity, but we can only say that John the Baptist may have lived with them in the desert and that Jesus may have been inspired by their hostility to the Temple and by their apocalyptic scenarios