Luke, who was a physician, is designated in the Syriac texts as _Asaia_, the Essaian or Essene. Josephus and Philo Judæus have sufficiently described this sect to leave no doubt in our mind that the Nazarene Reformer, after having received his education in their dwellings in the desert, and been duly initiated in the Mysteries, preferred the free and independent life of a wandering _Nazaria_, and so separated or _inazarenized_ himself from them, thus becoming a travelling Therapeute, a Nazaria, a healer. Every Therapeute, before quitting his community, had to do the same. Both Jesus and St. John the Baptist preached the end of the Age;[226] which proves their knowledge of the secret computation of the priests and kabalists, who with the chiefs of the Essene communities alone had the secret of the duration of the cycles. The latter were kabalists and theurgists; “they had their _mystic_ books, and predicted future events,” says Munk.[227] Dunlap, whose personal researches seem to have been quite successful in that direction, traces the Essenes, Nazarenes, Dositheans, and some other sects as having all existed before Christ: “They rejected pleasures, _despised riches_, _loved one another_, and more than other sects, neglected wedlock, deeming the conquest of the passions to be virtuous,”[228] he says. These are all virtues preached by Jesus; and if we are to take the gospels as a standard of truth, Christ was a metempsychosist “or _re-incarnationist_--again like these same Essenes, whom we see were Pythagoreans in all their doctrines and habits. Iamblichus asserts that the Samian philosopher spent a certain time at Carmel with them.[229] In his discourses and sermons, Jesus always spoke in parables and used metaphors with his audience. This habit was again that of the Essenians and the Nazarenes; the Galileans who dwelt in cities and villages were never known to use such allegorical language. Indeed, some of his disciples being Galileans as well as himself, felt even surprised to find him using with the people such a form of expression. “Why speakest thou unto them in parables?”[230] they often inquired. “Because, it is given unto you to know the Mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given,” was the reply, which was that of an initiate. “Therefore, I speak unto them in parables; because, they seeing, see not, and hearing, they hear not, neither do they understand.” Moreover, we find Jesus expressing his thoughts still clearer--and in sentences which are purely Pythagorean--when, during the _Sermon on the Mount_, he says: “Give ye not that which is sacred to the dogs, Neither cast ye your pearls before swine; For the swine will tread them under their feet And the dogs will turn and rend you.”