‘jewish doctrine takes three forms’ 135
that hypothesis runs counter to the figure of ‘more than four thousand’
Essenes given explicitly by both Philo and Josephus. For Pliny, who
emphasized the great numbers who thronged to the Essenes, this was a
group to be found in one quite specific place to the west of the Dead
Sea, at a distance from the ‘insalubrious shore’. Dio’s ‘entire and pros-
perous city near the Dead Sea’ could also refer to a sizeable number, but
the regimented communities described by the Jewish sources seem likely
to have been a good deal smaller than Pliny or Dio suggested. As to
where Essenes were to be found, the evidence is very confused, for Philo
suggests in one work that they live ‘in a number of towns in Judaea and
also in many villages and large groups’, despite his insistence in another
work that ‘fleeing the cities because of the ungodliness customary among
town- dwellers, they live in villages’. Josephus not only says that they are
found ‘not in one town only, but in every town several of them form a
colony’ but he explains (as we have seen) that travellers are looked after
by other Essenes when on their journeys. Evidently Essenes were inte-
grated into wider Judaean society despite the holiness of their lives.
Hence, of course, their apparent participation, albeit on the margins, in
political life in the Hasmonaean and Herodian periods. Hence too, per-
haps, the existence in Jerusalem of a ‘gate of the Essenes’, which suggests
a sizeable colony in the holy city.^42
Nothing in Josephus’ long description in the Jewish War of the pious
Essenes suggests that they did not worship with sacrifices in the Jeru-
salem Temple. It is therefore likely that they did so. There are, however,
reasons to suppose that their views on how the sacrifices should be car-
ried out gave them a rather a different attitude to the Temple cult than
was to be found among other Jews (even though, as we have seen, Phar-
isees and Sadducees will have had to tolerate their differences in the
shared shrine). According to the Greek manuscripts of Antiquities, Jos-
ephus wrote that the Essenes ‘send offerings to the Temple but perform
their sacrifices using different customary purifications. For this reason
they are barred from entering into the common enclosure, but offer
sacrifices among themselves.’ Quite how they were thought to conduct
themselves in Jerusalem as a result is obscure, although it does suggest
some sort of participation in the cult in obedience to the explicit injunc-
tion of the Torah. The Latin translation of Josephus, dated to the fifth
century ce, asserts that the Essenes offered no sacrifices because of their
disagreement about purifications, but this was probably a retrojection
from a time when both Jews and Christians had become accustomed to
worship without sacrifice. When Philo wrote of the Essenes that to be