Did The Essenes Really Not Eat Meat & Sacrifice Animals? Dr. Robert M. Price

Added: 2026-05-11

[00:00:02]help midvision keep bringing you material by becoming a patreon member as well as paypal like share subscribe and comment [Music] join the patreon to get early access to videos and check out the website dr price i have an email from a guy named dusty mathis did the essenes really not sacrifice animals and not eat meat hello i came across this the other day on wiki and i am wondering if there is any truth to this if there are any other writings on this according to joseph lightfoot the church father epaphinius writing in the fourth century ce seems to make a distinction between two main groups within the essenes of those that came before the l e l x a i n o saiyan o s s a e a n prophet time and enduring it the osans and the nazarenes part 18 epaphanias described each group as following the nazarene they were jews by nationality originally from gallaudet's bastionitus and trans-jordan they acknowledged moses and believed that he had received the laws not this law however but some other and so they were jews who kept all the jewish observances but they would not offer sacrifice or eat meat they consider it unlawful to eat meat or to make sacrifices with it they claim that these books are fictions and that none of these customs were instituted by the fathers this was the difference between the nazarene and the others also came across this as well see link below who is the e-l-a-x-a-i are the o saiyans oh yeah are the osaians the ones that did not eat meat or sacrifice animals any info on how i can study this more would be greatly appreciated please ask dr price if he has any information thank you greatly there must be a book on uh jewish sectarian groups at the time of jesus i can't quite think of one at the moment but this the book this these quotes are from is uh the panarion which means the medicine chest of epiphanies of salamus the fourth century bishop and uh he does give an encyclopedic account of dozens of jewish and early christian groups including them and some people think he's sort of unreliable but i don't know why i guess because some other ancient horizons have conflicting data on some of them but i'm inclined i mean if where we don't have a problem i'm inclined to believe him and he's certainly a lot closer to it than we are and it's the the best information we have uh the the nazarenes who apparently gave rise to the ebionites even though there was another group of jewish christians still called the nazarenes the ebionites believed in the theory of the false pericopies or the false passages that god had never wanted sacrifices and that it wasn't in the torah originally but the scribes inserted it now why would they believe that well because the bible explicitly says so uh in jeremiah seven it's is let me just see if i can find this fast in a uh where is that i'll grab it oh which one are we using oh how about the new american standard the orange one okay yeah this is really one of those shocking passages that uh people just read right by and have fun trying to explain it away and let's see let's see let's see well there's a lot of books in the bible isaiah jeremiah i think this is in jeremiah 7.

[00:04:52]7 21 thus says the lord of hosts the god of israel keep your holocausts and holborn offerings upon your sacrifices eat up the flesh and speaking to your fathers on the day i brought them out of the land of egypt i gave them no command concerning holocaust or sacrifice this rather is what i commanded them listen to my voice then i will be your god and you shall be my people walk in all the ways that i command you so that you may prosper but they obeyed not nor did they pay heed etc well across the page in chapter eight says let's see here yeah in verses 8 and 9 how can you say we are wise we have the law of the lord why that has been changed into falsehood by the lying pen of the scribes holy mackerel uh the two have to go together uh that he has god saying i've never commanded you to slaughter these animals and all this uh somebody made that up who would that be the liars wielding the scribal pins adding in stuff and according to the christian ebionites jesus came to uh straighten this out to point out the true text of moses later on um the epistle to florianis by the gnostic i think it was ptolemaeus he said let me explain something to you there are three levels of of text in the old testament there's the stuff god said directly to moses and then i figured what the second one was and the third one was uh well maybe the second one was what moses said in elaboration of the third one was just junk that people added and uh so this was not unparalleled and um so that yeah that's what he's talking about so yeah we know good and well there were pious jewish christians had said that and probably uh their uh their predecessors were jews who already thought that the in the gospel of the ebionites jesus says i have come to cause sacrifices to cease but if you cease not sacrificing the wrath of my father will not cease from you so they figured jesus said this stuff and he didn't want all those sacrifices it's quite astonishing uh the stuff that's in here as to the nazarenes the jewish nazarenes i guess robert eisler pointed this out but i first read it in hugh schoenfield i believe his epiphanies that says that the nazarenes were an essene-like group who were kind of like gypsies they traveled around and made their living as carpenters and i thought wait a minute an itinerant carpenter who was a nazarene and of course the schoenfield sees a link here he may well be right to poor schoenfield he he is just uh dumped on like john allegro was and uh yeah you can't do that there's stuff to learn from from all these people you know dr price i just did an amazing video on i recorded it i'm not trying to brag about it like oh i did it but what i mean is really what the video i did is is the content i read dave allen's work and he gave you pieces of his chapter well at the time all of this chapter four to put in the journal of higher criticism well he's added quite a bit more to this book and he's even perfected his chapter four better than what it was then so he wants to get you he even wants me to send it to dr carrier if he'll take a look at it on this negative testimonial position that he takes and he goes into the nazarenes there's a spot in the video that i recorded reading his thing on the nazarenes and when you listen to everything he brings it really makes me scratch my head you know when i wrestle in the historicity and stuff it makes me scratch my head and go why would all that be just made up or was there a polemic in some of these places that people were using to try and discredit christians say come on he's a sophist he's you know going into these examples and he's saying you know is it x nihilo in the testimony of lavinium or is there something there and so i say all that to say he keeps rooting it into these movements these nazarians not a place of nazareth these nazarians who were very nationalistic who were uh were definitely people you could imagine hanging out with zealots and other such folks you know and so uh i i just am fascinated with this whole idea but would they have been okay with sacrificing animals uh is there anywhere in the new testament where it's clear there's a sacrifice of animals being made on behalf of someone in there so anyone like where's there's they're okay with that notion i don't i can't recall it well we're not told why jesus kicks everybody out of the temple uh some people have said they think it's because he's anti-sacrifice uh but it just doesn't say money changers are mentioned though i don't know if that's because they're negative or if we're reading too much into that you know what i mean or if it's just based on the thing in zechariah in that day there'll be no business done in my house um interesting in acts 6 in the speech of stephen it's interesting that when he is brought before the sanhedrin and they say this guy says jesus of nazareth is coming back to uh destroy this temple it's interesting to keep that in mind when you get into stephen's speech and he talks about the well i'm wrong maybe there's such a passage in hebrews i think but uh i give up from the moment okay but that's not i mean if he is condemning that as he does seem to be the temple as a whole he says uh he quotes god from first samuel saying to david you're going to build a house for me you know i want to buy human hands uh yeah you can't or solomon later the heaven of heavens cannot contain me how much less this house i have built and so there does seem to be a polemic against the temple which would mean against sacrifices too but i i really there's a place where it speaks of serving god with hands which has to mean food sacrifices [Music] [Music] you