Jesus the Wicked Priest: How Christianity Was Born of an Essene Schism

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 256 pages
• Published by: Bear & Company April 7, 2008
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 159143081X
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-1591430810
• Book Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Weighs: 10.4 ounces

Product Review
“Marvin Vining has produced a fascinating and engaging book with a provocative thesis--namely that the Dead Sea Scrolls refer directly to Jesus of Nazareth and that the Essene movement that they represent opposed him as the character they called ‘The Wicked Priest.’ This sort of connection between Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls, both in terms of chronology and history, has been dismissed by almost all scholars in the field. Vining skillfully puts the case back on the table. He deserves a careful reading by non-specialists and those in the academy alike.”
(James D. Tabor, Ph.D., chairman of the Department of Religious Studies, UNC Charlotte, and author of The Jesus Dynasty
)

“Vining’s work is remarkable Christian scholarship. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the Essenes, Jesus, and the early Christian Church.”
(Clayton Sullivan, Ph.D., author of Rescuing Jesus from the Christians )

Product Description
Decodes the Dead Sea Scrolls to reveal Christianity’s hidden Essene origins

• Reveals the Essenes as key figures behind Jesus’s trial, torture, and crucifixion

• Shows how Jesus, a former Essene himself, was deemed “the Wicked Priest” for his liberationist politics and humanist bent

• looks at the lost Christian doctrine of reincarnation and the secret role of Gabriel in the Virgin Birth

The Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in 1947 at Qumran, are generally believed to have been written by a Jewish sect known as the Essenes between 350 BCE and seventy CE--but until now no convincing methodology has linked the Scrolls to the actual life and teachings of Jesus. Marvin Vining builds from the controversial work of Barbara Thiering to demonstrate that the Scrolls do speak directly to the origins of Christianity and even reflect a mirror image of the Gospels from the perspective of Jesus’s enemies.

Christianity arose out of a schism between the exclusivist, rigid, and militant views of the Essenes and the inclusivist, tolerant, and nonviolent views of Jesus. Jesus was raised an Essene, but he refused to follow their orthodoxy. Vining shows that the Dead Sea Scrolls are written in a secret coded language called pesher in which Jesus emerges as the Wicked Priest, the antagonist to the Teacher of Righteousness who was the leader of the Essenes. Jesus the Wicked Priest revitalizes the Gospel message by revealing Jesus’s true role as a tireless social reformer and revolutionary teacher. Vining’s study reopens Christian doctrinal questions supposedly long settled, such as reincarnation and the Virgin birth--even demonstrating that these two issues are related. He discloses that the angel Gabriel was incarnate in a living human being and transmitted the seed of a holy bloodline to the Virgin Mary.


Reader Reviews
Outwardly this is a scholarly treatise, filled with arcane references and academic endnotes. Inwardly it feels more like a novel. The plot is bizarre, but fascinating. The main characters are the Teacher of Righteousness and the Wicked Priest, two antagonists lifted directly from the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Teacher, a rigid and ascetic interpreter of the Laws of Moses, is the leader of the Essenes, a Jewish cult that wrote and maintained the Scrolls. As Vining sees him, the Teacher is a mix of the Grand Inquisitor and Darth Vadar. Vining takes the Wicked Priest to be Jesus of Nazareth, demonized by his enemies. For Vining, as for other Christians, Jesus is not wicked, but is the incarnation of the Divine Logos and Savior of Mankind. [Spoiler alert: Read on only if you want to learn the big surprise at the heart of the book.] Vining suggests, through a selective reading of passages in the Dead Sea Scrolls and other non-canonical sources, that - in order to fulfill his messianic dreams - the Teacher of Righteous needed a heroic figure he could control, another David. He selected a teenage girl, named Mary, assumed the role of the angel Gabriel, and impregnated her (possibly through artificial insemination.) Her child, Jesus, was trained as an Essene, but eventually rebelled when he sensed that a rigid observance of the letter of the Law can, at times, lead to actions contrary to the justice and compassion that God demands. Jesus began to preach and do healing on the Sabbath. He argued that the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath. He gathered grain on the Sabbath. (The Dead Sea Scrolls prohibit even rescuing an animal out of a ditch on the Sabbath.) Furthermore, Jesus began to associate with people the Scribes (read Essenes) considered to be unclean - tax collectors, prostitutes, lepers, gentiles, etc. In another insult to the Essenes, Jesus rejected their militant chauvinism to become a pacifist and a believer in universal love. All this made the Teacher furious. Next, an event happened that, as Vining sees it, changed the course of world history: Jesus healed a man with a withered hand on Yom Kippur, the holiest of days. The man miraculously cured was his biological father, the Teacher of Righteousness. A chaos of emotion welled up inside the Teacher, inciting him to conspire to have Jesus executed. He went to the authorities, and the Passion of the Christ ensued. This book will be criticized for its inferential leaps, its vacillations between orthodox and wildly unorthodox theology, and its occasionally self-congratulatory tone, but it is a good read, and it does make one wonder whether many contemporary Christians act and think more like the Teacher of Righteousness than Jesus.