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Someone might think that they ought to be shut up in the prisons of the heretics. First, because Saint Epiphanius, in heresy 10, makes the Essenes the first kind of the Samaritans, who were heretics. Second, the same author, in heresy 19, says that the Osseni were Jews and heretics. Third, the Essenes were excluded from the temple, as appears from Josephus, book 18, chapter 2. Fourth, they preferred their own purifications and baths to the sacrifices instituted by God. Fifth, they prayed to the sun as though to God. Sixth, they attributed all things to fate. Therefore, were they not heretics?
Besides, it was said in the previous chapter that the Pythagoreans were similar to the Essenes. But Origen, book 6 on Romans, calls certain heretics Pythagoreanizers. In Philastrius, Valentinus, from whom came the Valentinian heretics, is more Pythagorean than Christian. Saint Jerome, writing to Ctesiphon against the Pelagians, says: What greater rashness can there be than to claim for oneself, I will not say likeness to God, but equality with him, and in one short sentence to contain the poisons of all the heretics, which flowed from the fountain of the philosophers, and especially from Pythagoras and Zeno, prince of the Stoics? And afterward: Who could explain in fitting speech that rashness, indeed madness, of Rufinus,
[margin: They were not heretics. Objections from Epiphanius, temple practice, the sun, fate, and Pythagorean parallels.]
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that he prefaced the book of Xystus the Pythagorean, a man without Christ and a pagan, with a changed name as though it were the book of Sixtus, martyr and bishop of the Roman Church? In that book, according to the doctrine of the Pythagoreans, who make man equal to God and say that he is of God’s substance, many things are said about perfection, so that those who do not know the volume of the philosopher may drink, under the name of a martyr, from the golden cup of Babylon.
What, then, shall we think about the Essenes? Certainly, if anyone weighs by a more careful balance all their sayings and decrees which have been reviewed and explained, he will find nothing which, in those times of the Mosaic law, would deservedly be regarded as heresy. Nor, so far as I know, is there any one of the ancients who brands them with the foul mark of heresy. Indeed, many praise them highly, as we have partly seen already, and partly, if the Lord grants my prayers as I hope, we shall see afterward. Nor were they ever rebuked by Christ the Lord, as the Pharisees or Sadducees were, or by the apostles, although they flourished at that time and in that place.
Therefore, to the first objection it must be answered that those whom Epiphanius calls Samaritans were of another kind, although he seems to make two further kinds even of those men. For he reports some who, with the Sebuaeans, celebrated feast days at another time than the Jews, as those do today who prefer the old calendar: Passover and Unleavened Bread in September, or the seventh month, from which perhaps the name of the Sebuaeans comes, since sebah in Hebrew means seven;
[margin: Answer to the charge of heresy. Epiphanius’s Samaritans are distinguished from these Essenes.]
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Tabernacles in March and April, and the rest accordingly. He reports others who, with the Gortheni and Dositheans, differed in nothing from the Jews in the time of the feasts. Of these he says at the beginning of heresy 12, “the Gorthaeans and the other Essenes”; but of the former, at the end of the same heresy 12, he says, “likewise with the Essenes,” about whom he had spoken in heresy 10.
To the second objection: those Osseni are different from both kinds of Essenes mentioned by Saint Epiphanius; how much more, then, from these Essenes of ours? And those men existed after Christ the Lord. Moreover, those men took their name from a tree or from wood, which is called עץ, hozs, in Hebrew, or, as some prefer, from קשה, a word meaning to be hard. These men, by contrast, took their name from piety, as was argued above.
To the third, I say that, if the statement is true, they were nevertheless not Samaritans on that account, because they did not sacrifice on Gerizim either. They abstained from both temples: from the one so that they would have no communion with heretics, and from the other because of the excellence of their own purifications.
To the fourth, I wonder what those purifications were and of what sort they were. But this was granted to them at that time as a kind of opinion. To the fifth and sixth, an answer was given earlier. To the seventh, which was woven together from blame of the Pythagoreans, I answer first that among the Pythagoreans, and therefore among nearly all philosophers, there were many things which rightly incurred blame. What they drew from the clear fountains either of nature
[margin: Answers to objections: Osseni are distinct; exclusion from the temple does not make them Samaritans; the Pythagorean objection is limited.]
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or of Jewish institutions, they muddied and dirtied with the silt of their own talents and vices. But the heretics who arose among Christians imitated spiders: from those philosophers they not rarely gathered precisely those things which were muddied and dirtied, and which were harmful and poisonous, and they tried to bring them into the honey-bearing hives of the Catholic Church.
The cited Fathers are to be read about these people. Among them, Saint Jerome, in the passage cited against the Pelagians, praises the judgment of Tertullian against Hermogenes, saying: One of our writers finely said that the philosophers, the patriarchs of heretics, stained the purity of the Church with perverse doctrine. And when Tertullian had said many things against the various schools of the philosophers on this very matter, though without naming the Pythagoreans, he concludes: What has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What has the Academy to do with the Church? What have heretics to do with Christians? Our instruction is from the portico of Solomon, who himself had handed down that the Lord is to be sought in simplicity of heart. Let those who have brought forward a Stoic, Platonic, and dialectical Christianity look to it.
But why should the guilt of these men be transferred to the Essenes? For the Essenes did not learn certain things from the philosophers; rather, as was shown above, the philosophers learned certain things from them. Later, the philosophers’ error and pride made those things worse, while, professing themselves wise, they became fools. I know that certain superstitious things are attributed to the same Essenes by some authors, but at present I have investigated only heresies.
[margin: Philosophical errors do not make the Essenes heretics. Tertullian and Romans 1:22 are cited.]
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