Essenes (sources)

Survey of ancient sources on the Essenes

Primary Sources

Our knowledge about the Essenes depends mainly on the writings of Flavius Josephus, Philo of Alexandria, and Pliny the Elder. Accepting, with the majority of scholarship today, the existence of some kind of connection between the Essenes and the group that lived in the site of Khirbet Qumran and between the latter and the Dead Sea Scrolls, these texts too can be accounted among the primary source available on the Essene movement.