Engedi

142:8.1By the end of April the op­po­si­tion to Je­sus among the Phar­isees and Sad­ducees had be­come so pro­nounced that the Mas­ter and his apos­tles de­cided to leave Je­ru­sa­lem for a while, go­ing south to work in Beth­le­hem and He­bron. The en­tire month of May was spent in do­ing per­sonal work in these cities and among the peo­ple of the sur­round­ing vil­lages. No pub­lic preach­ing was done on this trip, only house-to-house vis­i­ta­tion. A part of this time, while the apos­tles taught the gospel and min­is­tered to the sick, Je­sus and Ab­ner spent at En­gedi, vis­it­ing the Nazarite colony. John the Bap­tist had gone forth from this place, and Ab­ner had been head of this group. Many of the Nazarite broth­er­hood be­came be­liev­ers in Je­sus, but the ma­jor­ity of these as­cetic and ec­cen­tric men re­fused to ac­cept him as a teacher sent from heaven be­cause he did not teach fast­ing and other forms of self-de­nial.

135:4.3For two and a half years John lived at En­gedi, and he per­suaded most of the broth­er­hood that “the end of the age was at hand”; that “the king­dom of heaven was about to ap­pear.” And all his early teach­ing was based upon the cur­rent Jew­ish idea and con­cept of the Mes­siah as the prom­ised de­liv­erer of the Jew­ish na­tion from the dom­i­na­tion of their gen­tile rulers.

135:1.1John had no school from which to grad­u­ate at the age of four­teen, but his par­ents had se­lected this as the ap­pro­pri­ate year for him to take the for­mal Nazarite vow. Ac­cord­ingly, Zach­a­rias and Eliz­a­beth took their son to En­gedi, down by the Dead Sea. This was the south­ern head­quar­ters of the Nazarite broth­er­hood, and there the lad was duly and solemnly in­ducted into this or­der for life. Af­ter these cer­e­monies and the mak­ing of the vows to ab­stain from all in­tox­i­cat­ing drinks, to let the hair grow, and to re­frain from touch­ing the dead, the fam­ily pro­ceeded to Je­ru­sa­lem, where, be­fore the tem­ple, John com­pleted the mak­ing of the of­fer­ings which were re­quired of those tak­ing Nazarite vows.

135:2.3John and Eliz­a­beth re­turned to their home and be­gan to lay plans for the fu­ture. Since John re­fused to ac­cept the priest’s al­lowance due him from the tem­ple funds, by the end of two years they had all but lost their home; so they de­cided to go south with the sheep herd. Ac­cord­ingly, the sum­mer that John was twenty years of age wit­nessed their re­moval to He­bron. In the so-called “wilder­ness of Judea” John tended his sheep along a brook that was trib­u­tary to a larger stream which en­tered the Dead Sea at En­gedi. The En­gedi colony in­cluded not only Nazarites of life­long and time-pe­riod con­se­cra­tion but nu­mer­ous other as­cetic herds­men who con­gre­gated in this re­gion with their herds and frat­er­nized with the Nazarite broth­er­hood. They sup­ported them­selves by sheep rais­ing and from gifts which wealthy Jews made to the or­der.

165:0.1On Tues­day, Jan­uary 3, A.D. 30, Ab­ner, the for­mer chief of the twelve apos­tles of John the Bap­tist, a Nazarite and one­time head of the Nazarite school at En­gedi, now chief of the sev­enty mes­sen­gers of the king­dom, called his as­so­ciates to­gether and gave them fi­nal in­struc­tions be­fore send­ing them on a mis­sion to all of the cities and vil­lages of Perea. This Perean mis­sion con­tin­ued for al­most three months and was the last min­istry of the Mas­ter. From these labors Je­sus went di­rectly to Je­ru­sa­lem to pass through his fi­nal ex­pe­ri­ences in the flesh. The sev­enty, sup­ple­mented by the pe­ri­odic labors of Je­sus and the twelve apos­tles, worked in the fol­low­ing cities and towns and some fifty ad­di­tional vil­lages: Za­phon, Gadara, Macad, Ar­bela, Ra­math, Edrei, Bosora, Caspin, Mis­peh, Gerasa, Ragaba, Suc­coth, Am­athus, Adam, Penuel, Capi­to­lias, Dion, Hatita, Gadda, Phil­a­del­phia, Jog­be­hah, Gilead, Beth-Nim­rah, Tyrus, Elealah, Livias, Hes­h­bon, Cal­lir­rhoe, Beth-Peor, Shit­tim, Sibmah, Medeba, Beth-Meon, Are­opo­lis, and Aroer.