The Aryan Hypothesis: Race, Religion, and Research on the Essenes before and after the Discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls

• In Event: Situating Ancient Judaism in Ancient and Modern Contexts

Abstract

This paper interrogates the empirical presuppositions of the first scholars to make the case for identifying the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls as Essenes. Prior to the discoveries at Qumran, the Essenes had been pegged as ethnic anomalies among the Jews, geographically displaced Aryans who assimilated to their Semitic surroundings. The notion that the lineage of the Essenes could be traced to Iran weighed heavily in the characterization of the Qumran sectarians as dualists influenced by the Zoroastrian doctrine of an eternal cosmic struggle between good and evil. Developed in the 1950’s by André Dupont-Sommer and Karl G. Kuhn, that characterization persists in contemporary research on the group’s anthropological and eschatological beliefs despite the fact than no concrete evidence linking the Qumran community to Iran has come to light. The author argues that the Aryan theory of Essene origins was racialist hokum devised in the late nineteenth century and propagated by biblical researchers seeking scientific grounds on which to distance Jesus and his followers from Judaism. By casting Christianity as a product of Essenism, those scholars sought to demonstrate that its earliest proponents were not authentically Jewish. That tendentious impression informed inferences of Iranian influence at Qumran among early interpreters of the Scrolls apt to identify their authors as Essenes. Those inferences must now be considered unfounded. Consequently, scholars of the Scrolls should forgo the premise of discerning traces of Zoroastrian culture at Qumran where they are not readily apparent.

Author

• Joshua Ezra Burns, Marquette University