1825.—Neander, whose first instalment of his gigantic Church History appeared in 1825, now began to grapple with this mysterious brotherhood. In the introductory chapter of this history, in which a description is given of the religious condition of the world at the advent of Christ, he gives a very brief but very pregnant sketch of the Essenes. With that deep penetration, which was one of the chief characteristics of this sagacious critic, he repudiates the notion that the Essenes originated under foreign influences, and maintains that “it is a gross error to infer from the resemblance of certain religious phenomena the relationship of which is to be traced to a common inward cause, inherent in the nature of the human mind, that they have an external origin, having been copied from the other.” Hence, he submits that Essenism arose out of the deeper religious meaning of the Old Testament, that it afterwards adopted some of the old Oriental, Parsee, and Chaldean notions, and that it had no Alexandrian elements. Neander moreover most justly cautions against the accounts of Philo and Josephus, saying that they clothed the opinions of the Essenes in a garb peculiarly Grecian, which we might rightly consider as not originally belonging to them. [84] 1829.—The difficulty which perplexed Christian writers, arising from the fact that the Essenes are not mentioned in the New Testament, did not affect Jewish writers, although it is true that this name is also not to be found in the ancient Jewish writings. For if it be granted that this appellation is a corruption of an Aramaic word, the Essenes must be looked for in the Talmud and Midrashim, which are chiefly written in Aramaic, under their original designation whatever that might be. The clue to it must, of course, be the identity of the features ascribed to them by Philo and Josephus and those ascribed in the ancient Jewish volumes to any order of Judaism. To this task Rappaport, the corypheus of Jewish critics, betook himself. Knowing that the Essenes were no distinct sect, in the strict sense of the word, but simply an order of Judaism, and that there never was a rupture between them and the rest of the Jewish community, Rappaport most justly does not expect that they would be spoken of under a fixed denominational name. He therefore rejects De Rossi’s notion that the Baithusians, so frequently denounced in the Talmud and Midrashim, are the Essenes described by Philo and Josephus, and sought to identify them by their peculiar practices, expecting to find that they would be spoken of by different names. He soon found that what Philo and Josephus describe as peculiarities of the Essenes tallies with what the Mishna, the Talmud, and the Midrashim record of the Chassidim (‏חסדים‎), and that they are most probably the so-called old believers (‏ותיקין‎), who are also described in the Talmud as the holy community in Jerusalem (‏קהלא קדישא דבירושלים‎). He rightly recognised in them an