Endnote 16 – Reinterpreting John

Despite the cries of a few authors, a consensus still exists among the best Qumran specialists that the Qumranites were Essenes. Lawrence Schiffman challenges the Essene origins of the Qumran group, (see his “The Significance of the Scrolls,” BR 06:05) but he has affirmed (at least to me on several times) that the Qumran group in the first century C.E. is to be identified as Essenes. After almost 30 years of teaching and publishing on the Qumran scrolls I have seen that the Qumran group was a sect (it deliberately removed itself, sociologically and theologically from other Jews) and that we think about Qumran Essenes, Jerusalem Essenes and other groups living on the outskirts of most of the cites, as Philo and Josephus reported.