Crossword-Solution: ESSENES 7 letters, 102 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 7

The Essenes attached but little importance to the Messianic expectations of the Pharisees, and mingled scarcely at all in national politics.

The sect of Ebionites, who represented the earliest doctrine and practice of Christianity before it had been modified by Paul, differed from the Essenes in no essential respect save in the acknowledgment of Jesus as the Messiah, and the expectation of his speedy return to the earth.

Secrets are told--where silence ought to reign; and that regard to cleanliness, which some religious sects have, perhaps, carried too far, especially the Essenes, amongst the Jews, by making that an insult to God which is only an insult to humanity, is violated in a brutal manner.

Furthermore, it has been proposed that Jesus held the office of Messiah defined in the Damascus Covenant and His goal as well as that of the other Damascus Covenant Essenes was to convert the Pharisaical Jews of Judea which they viewed as the lost sheep of Israel to the Essene sect of Judaism.

Thus, the PGH sequence of the canonical gospels depicts what some scholars believe to have been a sectarian struggle between the Essenes who adhered to the Damascus Covenant in Northern Palestine and the Pharisaical Jews in Judea for religious leadership of all Israelites.