“But hear the Sadducee’s nonsense (comp. ibid., p. 42): he rejects the sacrificial and altar services, as repulsive to the Deity, and as things which, according to the meaning of the fathers and the Mosaic law, were never offered to the Lord in a worthy manner. Yet he says that we must pray with our faces to Jerusalem, where the sacrificial altar and the sacrifices have their place. He rejects the eating of animal flesh which is common among the Jews, and other things; nay, even the sacrificial altar and the sacrificial fire, as being foreign to the Deity. The purifying water, he says, is worthy of God, but the fire is unworthy, because of the declaration of the prophet: ‘Children, go ye not there to see the fire of the sacrifices, for ye err; yea, it is already an error to think such a thing.’ ‘If you look at the fire very closely,’ says he, ‘it is still far off. Moreover, go ye not to look at the sacrificial fire, but go ye rather to the doctrine of the water....’ There is much more of such idle talk to be found among the Ossenes.” [75] These are the sources from which writers upon the Essenes have, till within very lately, drawn their information. As to the account of Eusebius (comp. Hist. Ecclesiast., lib. ii, cap. xvii), to which appeal is often made, it is nothing but a Christianized reproduction of the so-called Philonic description of the Therapeutae. It would therefore be useless to give it. In looking through these accounts, it will be seen that there are only three independent ones among them, namely—Philo’s, Josephus’s and Pliny’s; as the notice of Solinus is merely a repetition of Pliny, the description of Porphyry is almost a literal reproduction of Josephus; whilst the distorted scraps of Epiphanius are not only worse than useless, but are unworthy of him, and the account of Eusebius is simply misleading, inasmuch as it is a repetition of an apocryphal story, which has nothing to do with the Essenes. III. Having given the ancient documents, all that now remains is that I should give a brief sketch of the most important modern literature on the Essenes. In doing this part of my task, as in the former, I shall try as much as it is possible to follow the chronological order.