Some modern scholars and archaeologists have argued that Essenes inhabited the settlement at Qumran, a plateau in the Judean Desert along the Dead Sea, citing Pliny the Elder in support, and giving credence that the Dead Sea Scrolls are the product of the Essenes.

Many of the Essene groups appear to have been celibate, but Josephus speaks also of another " order of Essenes " that observed the practice of being engaged for three years and then becoming married.

For Golb, the amount of documents is too extensive and includes many different writing styles and calligraphies ; the ruins seem to have been a fortress, used as a military base for a very long period of timeincluding the 1st centuryso they could not have been inhabited by the Essenes ; and the large graveyard excavated in 1870, just 50 metres east of the Qumran ruins was made of over 1200 tombs that included many women and childrenPliny clearly wrote that the Essenes that lived near the Dead Sea " had not one woman, had renounced all pleasure ... and no one was born in their race ".

The Saint Thomas Christians (" Nasrani ") of southwestern India may have connections with the Essenes, according to the Manimekalai, one of the great Tamil epic poems, which refers to a people called " Issani ".

The first surviving historical mention of the Pharisees is from the Jewish-Roman historian Josephus ( 37 – 100 CE ), in a description of the " four schools of thought ," or " four sects ," into which the Jews were divided in the 1st century CE ; the other schools were the Essenes, who were generally apolitical and who may have emerged as a sect of dissident priests who rejected either the Seleucid-appointed or the Hasmonean high priests as illegitimate ; the Sadducees, who were the main antagonists of the Pharisees ; and the " fourth philosophy " possibly associated with the anti-Roman revolutionary groups such as the Sicarii and the Zealots.

According to Josephus, whereas the Sadducees believed that people have total free will and the Essenes believed that all of a person's life is predestined, the Pharisees believed that people have free will but that God also has foreknowledge of human destiny.

The scrolls are traditionally identified with the ancient Jewish sect called the Essenes, though some recent interpretations have challenged this association and argue that the scrolls were penned by priests in Jerusalem, Zadokites, or other unknown Jewish groups.

Many scholars believe the location to have been home to a Jewish sect, the Essenes being the preferred choice ; others have proposed non-sectarian interpretations, some of these starting with the notion that it was a Hasmonean fort which was later transformed into a villa for a wealthy family or a production center, perhaps a pottery factory or similar.

Some scholars believe that some of these texts describe the beliefs of the inhabitants of Qumran, which, may have been the Essenes, or the asylum for supporters of the traditional priestly family of the Zadokites against the Hasmonean priest / kings.

De Vaux concluded that this was the area in which the Essenes could have written some of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Humbert accepts that the site might have been originally established as a villa rustica, but that the site was abandoned, and was reoccupied by Essenes in the late 1st century BCE.

There have been attempts to link the text both to the Essenes of Qumran, who separated themselves from what they saw as a wicked world, and alternately to the Pharisees in opposition to the Sadducees who generally supported the Maccabees.

Hill notes that the Essenes called each other prophets, and that Jesus might have here adopted that usage.

According to the Order of the Nazoreans Essenes, there are seven types of modern essenes: the Nazorean Essenes of the Order of O: N: E :, the Dead Sea Scroll Essenes, the Scholar Essenes, the New Age Essenes, the Szekely Essenes, the Rastafari Essenes and the Hippy Essenes.

Pharisees become dominant, and their form of Judaism evolves into modern day Rabbinic Judaism ( whereas Sadducees and Essenes are no longer recorded as groups in history – see Origins of Rabbinic Judaism ).

Members of the modern American groups claiming to be Essenes, but viewed by scholars as having no ties to the historical group, treat Mount Carmel as having great religious significance on account of the protection it afforded to the historic Essene group.

Also in Roman times, some Essenes settled on the Dead Sea's western shore ; Pliny the Elder identifies their location with the words, " on the west side of the Dead Sea, away from the coast ... the town of Engeda " ( Natural History, Bk 5. 73 ); and it is therefore a hugely popular but contested hypothesis today, that same Essenes are identical with the settlers at Qumran and that " the Dead Sea Scrolls " discovered during the 20th century in the nearby caves had been their own library.

The Essenes too disappeared, perhaps because their teachings so diverged from the concerns of the times, perhaps because they were sacked by the Romans at Qumran.

There did exist some ascetic Jewish sects in ancient times, most notably the Essenes and Ebionites.

The Essenes also vanished, perhaps because their teachings so diverged from the issues of the times that the destruction of the Second Temple was of no consequence to them ; precisely for this reason, they were of little consequence to the vast majority of Jews ).

The Essenes chose not to possess slaves, but served each other and, as a result of communal ownership, did not engage in trading.

The best known of these are the Essenes of Qumran, who left an extensive library known as the Dead Sea Scrolls.

While under the emperor's patronage, Josephus wrote that after the Roman Legio X Fretensis, accompanied by Vespasian, destroyed Jericho on 21 June 68, Vespasian took a group of Jews who could not swim ( possibly Essenes from Qumran ), fettered them, and threw them into the Dead Sea to test the sea's legendary buoyancy.

In fact, some scholars suggest that the Essenes began as a group of renegade Zadokites, which would suggest that the group itself had priestly, and thus Sadducean origins.

His warriors and his honored ones perish by the sword .” The reference to the Sadducees as those who reign over Israel corroborates their aristocratic status as opposed to the more fringe group of Essenes.

According to Epiphanius, and Josephus, Mount Carmel had been the stronghold of the Essenes that came from a place in Galilee named Nazareth ; though this Essene group are sometimes consequently referred to as Nazareans, they are not to be confused with the " Nazarene " sect, which followed the teachings of Jesus, but associated with the Pharisees.

In America, E. Wing Anderson and his group, the Essenes of Kosmon, published the 1891 Oahspe edition in several printings from the 1935 printing up to the 1955 printing.

Essenes, a monastic group of people, had a “ monastic organization ”.

The Essenes were a group of religious and philosophic virtuosi, living a utopian life of the sort that would provoke the admiration of Jews and non-Jews alike.

This ascetic group owed its origins to the political manoeuvrings of Herod the Great and consequent friendliness of the Herodian house to the Essenes from the height of Herod the Great's reign to the demise of his son Archelaus in AD 10.

In this interpretation of the events described in the Gospels, Jesus was resuscitated by Joseph of Arimathea, with whom he shared a connection through a secret order of the Essenes — a group that appear in many of the " swoon " theories.

John the Baptist and a group of Essenes find him there, and take him back to their community, where they care for him for some time.

* That Jesus was a deeply religious Jewish man, probably well-versed in the teachings of the local northern sects such as the Nazarenes and Essenes.

The Scrolls suggest that the Sadducees ( Manasseh ) and the Pharisees ( Ephraim ) became religious communities that were distinct from the Essenes, the true Judah.

" This hypothesis suggests that the original residents of the settlement were the Essenes, and that they established the site in the desert for religious purposes.

The Dead Sea Scrolls were written between 200 BCE and 68 CE, and give insight into the religious life and thought of a Jewish sect based at Qumran by the Dead Sea and usually identified as Essenes.

De Vaux's conclusion was that the inhabitants of the site were a sect of highly ritualistic Jews called the Essenes, a conclusion that has come to be known as the " Qumran-Essene Hypothesis.

Easterman's ideas in this respect are taken directly from contemptorary scholarship in the quest for the historical Jesus and the debate about whether or not there is a relationship between Jesus and the Judean sect known as the Essenes.

If it is correct to identify the community at Qumran with the Essenes ( and that the community at Qumran are the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls ), then according to the Dead Sea Scrolls the Essenes ' community school was called " Yahad " ( meaning " community ") in order to differentiate themselves from the rest of the Jews who are repeatedly labeled " The Breakers of the Covenant ".

Most scholars believe that the community at Qumran that allegedly produced the Dead Sea Scrolls was an offshoot of the Essenes ; however, this theory has been disputed by some, for example, by Norman Golb:

* Scholar: The Essenes, Dead Sea Scroll ' authors ,' never existed-Haaretz, 13 March 2009.