Regarding the difficulty of supposing that Jesus or the Evangelists could have been imbued with any sun-myth ideas, we must take into consideration the existence at that time of the Jewish sect, the Essenes. It seems quite possible that they considered Jesus of Nazareth to be the Messiah they were expecting, and that they came over to Christianity in a body. This monastic brotherhood, living in settlements in the desert west of the Dead Sea--i.e., within a day's journey of Bethlehem and Jerusalem--not only placed love of God, of goodness, and of man as articles in their programme, but also sought with wonderful energy, according to their lights, to realise them in their life. Bunsen assures us (p. 158 of his Angel-Messiah), and furnishes strong grounds for his opinion, that the Essenes introduced the new doctrine of an Angel-Messiah, and with it the doctrine of the atoning death of the Messiah, into Judaism and Christianity. Canon Cheyne likewise places them among the number of those who prepared the way for the new world-religion. This seems to have been the very reason of their disappearance in the second century A.D.--Christianity dissolved them. So much so that the Essenes (often called Therapeutæ or healers) are identified by Eusebius with the Christian monks, and this opinion was generally adopted by the Fathers (see chap, xvii., bk. ii., p. 117, of The Church History of Eusebius, translated by the Rev. A. C. McGiffert, under the editorial supervision of Henry Wace, D.D., and Philip Schaff, D.D.). From a perusal of the article on the "Essenes" in the Encyclopædia Biblica, it will be seen that Essenism is not a purely Jewish product, but that "Persian and Babylonian influence may reasonably be admitted." "Oriental influences were," Canon Cheyne informs us, "so to speak, in the air, and it is probable that the belief in the resurrection was not the only great debt which Jewish religionists owed to Zoroastrians." Bishop Lightfoot describes the Essenes as sun-worshippers. Is there, then, no likelihood of Jesus and His disciples being familiar with the ideas of sun-worshippers?