Essene : Jewish brotherhood in pre-Christ Israel that considered monastic life the ideal way to practice the Laws God gave to Moses; they believed in the immortality of the soul & divine punishment for sin, but not the resurrection of the body.
... profoundly [affected] the thought of the West in many of the most critical stages of [its] development; at first through Pythagoras and other Greek philosophers, then through Buddhism working into Essene, Gnostic and Roman Christianity and once again in our own times through German metaphysics, Theosophy, and a hundred strange and irregular channels. One can open few books now at all in the latest ...
... more authentic. I may add that the mention of Crete in Vivekananda's dream is rather odd. The Therapeutae are historically known to have been a religious group of Jews akin to the Qumran Essenes. The authoritative account of them in ancient times is The Contemplative Life (I.2, cp. II.10-11) by the famous Philo of Alexandria (a contemporary of Christ). He locates them not in Crete but in... is a mistake and, although Christianity may have and does have affinities with religious beliefs and practices which are pre-Christian, particularly with the Dead-Sea denomination of ascetics named Essenes, Jesus started a distinctive movement. He was a real historical personage and his movement alone can be termed Christianity. Those who try to prove Jesus to be a myth overlook an objection ...
... "Even in its central citadel Judaism had never been impervious to foreign influence. The orthodox Jewish angelology and demonology of Jesus' time had come mainly from Persia, and, as for the Essenes, 'Pythagorism, Orphism, Chaldean astral religion, Parsiism and, apparently, even Buddhism all contributed ingredients much transformed on their way to the Jordan Valley.' 7 The idea of a capsulated ...
... Ephesus, 483 Epiphanius, 238, 593 Eran stone inscription, 38, 511 Erandapallaka-Damana, 203 Erannoboas (Hiranyavāha, Sonos/Son), 116 Eratosthenes, 261 Erythraean Sea, 55, 56 Essenes, 240 Eudemus, 66 Eucratides/Eukratides, 40, 429, 441 Eumenes of Pergama, 236-7 Euripides: Bacchae, 260 Euthydemus, 532 evam aha, 384 Evvi, 380 Fa-hien/Fa-hsian ...
... reflect Assyrian religious symbolism. All in all, there are no positives to go by. Not that the ancient Western world was quite unaffected by Buddhism. The Jewish religious body known as the Essenes, as early as the middle of the 2nd century B.C., seems to have been affected in subtle ways by Buddhist monastic practices, and the early Christians themselves were perhaps tinged with a Buddhist attitude ...
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