Jesus the Vegetarian Essene? Inside Aaron Abke’s Massive Hoax
Inside the New Age hoax that turns Jesus into a vegatarian Essene messiah.
Aaron Abke is selling podcasters like Aubrey Marcus on a New Age, vegetarian “Essene Jesus.” His case depends on forged gospels, fabricated and doctored quotes, and serious historical falsehoods. When he tries to explain why, he gets caught in a series of falsehoods. Abke is a radical vegetarian who smuggles his own agenda into an eye-catching but invented Jesus—then sells that “revealed” version back to followers as a paid path.
Be Scofield is a prominent cult reporter whose reporting is cited by the NY Times, Rolling Stone, People, and more. Her work has led to the hit HBO series Love Has Won, as well as Dateline, VICE, the Dr. Phil Show, and a Netflix episode.
11/23/25
By BE SCOFIELD
In the 1930s, a little-known Hungarian writer named Edmond Bordeaux Szekely began telling a remarkable story. While studying in the archives of the Vatican and the monastery of Monte Cassino, he said he had uncovered ancient manuscripts in Hebrew and Aramaic: the long-lost Essene Gospel of Peace. In Szekely’s telling, these fragile pages preserved the original words of Jesus before the church edited him into something harsher and more convenient. His Jesus bathed in rivers, preached raw food and enemas, and warned that “he who eats the flesh of slain beasts eats the body of death.” The Son of God was a desert naturopath, it turned out.
There was only one problem. No one else ever saw the manuscripts. Szekely never produced photographs, catalog numbers, or independent witnesses. The Vatican denied housing such a text; Monte Cassino’s librarians had no record of it. The “translation” appeared first in French, then English, through Szekely’s own presses. The book appeared just as he and his wife were launching a health retreat center in Baja, California. It became Rancho La Puerta, the original destination fitness spa for Hollywood's health-conscious elite and a prototype for the modern wellness industry.
The gospel, with its strict vegetarianism and detox rituals, was a perfect piece of marketing copy and matched Szekely's own raw food/vegetarian lifestyle. While scholars quietly dismissed it as a modern forgery, health seekers, raw-food apostles, and a growing fringe of spiritual vegetarians embraced it as suppressed truth.
By the 1960s, hippies and macrobiotic pioneers were passing The Essene Gospel of Peace around with the same excitement as the Bhagavad Gita and Crowley’s occult texts. Today you can find it circulating in New Age Facebook groups, raw-food and vegan forums, and even in small Essene-style churches that treat it as inspired scripture. The manuscript Szekely claimed to find in a locked Vatican room almost certainly never existed. The Jesus it invented, however—a gentle vegan prophet raging against meat and sacrifice—has never been more popular.
Enter Aaron Abke, a former CrossFit trainer at Google turned online mystic, who builds whole programs—The Jesus Diet, The Jesus Way—on Szekely’s phantom Essene gospel. In his videos and course materials, he calls The Essene Gospel of Peace “a core component” of his teaching, praises it as “a work of spiritual genius” that changed his life, and says he has “no problem” believing Szekely’s story about the hidden manuscripts in the Vatican. Abke calls it "one of his all-time favorite books" and says, "I think the universe is bringing it back at this time for a very important reason." He defends the book in videos, laying out his case for its legitimacy.
His journey from fitness bro to online spiritual influencer is, in his own telling, a story of reinvention. Before he was decoding Essenes, he was doing three sessions a day of CrossFit, then bodybuilding, chasing trophies and trying to go pro while working as a trainer at Google. After a painful marriage, he says he “ran to fitness” to fill the void, got “extremely fit, ridiculously fit,” slid into modeling, won his first two shows, and placed fourth at nationals. Then, he says, he had a spiritual awakening backstage, decided he wanted “nothing to do with that way of life anymore,” quit modeling, and “became nobody.”
“Why I left modeling to find enlightenment,” reads the thumbnail on a 2020 video where Abke explains his pivot. After he walks away from the fitness world, YouTube becomes his new gym. His early platform is built on two spiritually channeled cult classics—A Course in Miracles and The Law of One. Video by video he reshapes himself into a nondual mystic, unpacking “ego death,” “ascension,” and “Christ consciousness.”
The Law of One, in particular, is his north star. It’s a 1980s UFO-era channeling project from a small group in Kentucky who said they began “receiving a communication from the social memory complex Ra” in 1981 after years of studying UFOs. The material comes through a woman in a trance, speaking in a stiff, otherworldly voice that begins every answer with “I am Ra,” while her partners sit nearby asking questions about pyramids, densities and cosmic harvests. The sessions talk about psychic attacks, magic protection circles, and Orion entities trying to kill the channeler. This is the text Abke treats as a master key to the Bible.
Over time his branding shifts. The same Law-of-One/A Course in Miracles framework stays in place, but the wrapping changes from generic awakening content to an explicit Jesus rebrand: The Jesus Way podcast, the “Christ consciousness” series, Essene deep dives, and finally full-blown claims that he’s restoring the original vegetarian, anti-sacrifice Jesus hidden by the church.
Last year Abke was a major influencer behind the movie Christspiracy: The Spirituality Secret, a vegan documentary that claims there’s been a 2,000-year cover-up of Jesus’ supposed opposition to animal sacrifice. He appeared alongside the film’s creator in debates and podcast tours, repeating its core message that the “real” Jesus was a vegetarian Essene whose teachings about animals were buried by the church—exactly the same narrative he uses to sell his Jesus Way and Jesus Diet programs. The Guardian called it “a mishmash of pseudoscience and manipulated religious doctrine” and singled out the “Jesus was a vegetarian” claim as flimsy apocrypha dressed up as revelation.
Abke is now a darling of the Aubrey-Marcus–style podcast circuit. His Know Thyself episode on Jesus and the Essenes has pulled in close to a million views, with an earlier Law of One sit-down on the same show nearing three-quarters of a million. He’s since graduated to a two-and-a-half-hour turn on The Aubrey Marcus Podcast and a steady run of repeat guest slots on consciousness-and-wellness shows, cementing him as a go-to explainer of New Age Jesus for the wellness-bro ecosystem.
He is Bentinho Massaro minus the overt cult meltdown. He’s handsome, charismatic, and runs an online school for “4D ascension” and nondual awakening—only now it’s draped in Jesus language and Essene branding. Both he and Massaro lean hard on The Law of One and monetize its cosmology through memberships and courses. Abke charges $44 a month to join his school, then layers on offerings like The Jesus Diet and The Jesus Way for followers who want to go even deeper into his Essene-Jesus universe. Members get treated to guest appearances from fellow New Age gurus like Teal Swan.
Both also claim enlightenment, the standard badge that separates guru from follower. In Abke’s telling, he hit bottom—severely depressed, divorced, in what he describes as intense suffering—before “laughing” himself into awakening. He says he entered samadhi, a state of total liberation, and saw that all is one, we are eternal, and there is only a single being in the universe. “I actually experienced it,” he tells listeners. “It was just absolute bliss everywhere I looked.” He claims this “unbroken” enlightened state lasted for fourteen days.
Holy Meat
In Genesis 1, God places Adam and Eve in a garden and hands them a menu of plants: “every seed-bearing herb” and “every tree whose fruit yields seed.” Animals are not part of the meal. The first time God explicitly green-lights meat is much later, after the Flood. The waters recede, Noah steps out of the ark into a world wiped clean, and God revises the rules. “Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you,” Genesis 9 has God say. “As I gave you the green plants, I give you everything.”
There is one rule in God’s new menu: no blood. The blood belongs to God and must be poured out, not eaten. You can kill and cook the animal, but you can’t drink its blood or rip into meat while the blood is still in it. Later Jewish law builds a whole system from this: animals must be killed in a specific way, the blood drained and covered, and the meat soaked and salted to pull out as much blood as possible. Leviticus and Deuteronomy repeat the rule: blood is off-limits as food because it is the life, and the life is God’s. From one brief line in Genesis, kosher meat laws are born.
By Jesus’ time in first-century Judea, kosher rules shape daily food. God allows only certain animals to be eaten: land animals with split hooves that also chew the cud, meaning they swallow their food, bring it back up, and chew it again. Cows, sheep, and goats are in; pigs, camels, and horses are out. Leviticus offers no reason; it just states the rule. Fish must have both fins and scales, so eels, catfish, shrimp, and all shellfish are banned. Birds of prey and scavengers are out, leaving everyday meat as domestic fowl like chickens, ducks, doves, and pigeons rather than vultures or hawks. In practice, the laws draw a tight circle around a small set of animals and treat everything outside it as forbidden.
In recent decades, the Bible has turned into a diet catalog: the Daniel Fast, the Bible Diet, the Shepherd’s Diet, and so on. Abke’s Jesus Diet and Essene meal plans are just the latest entry. His system is a fruit-heavy, low-fat, low-to-moderate-protein vegan regime that he calls “the optimum sort of dietary protocol that the creator intended for mankind to eat for maximum health and longevity.” Fructose, he says, is God’s chosen “primary energy source,” and public fears about sugar are a plot to hypnotize the masses into animal “genocide.” He claims this whole framework comes from how the Essenes ate in the desert: simple plant foods, no animal flesh, no alcohol, lots of fasting, and daily cold-water immersions.
The public fears about sugar are designed to hypnotize the masses into animal “genocide.”
The Jesus Diet is woven into his paid 4D University and Jesus Way Circle communities, where members get the teaching, meal plans, and group support, and where it all feeds into a forty-day “Jesus 40” challenge. The challenge is "free" but it functions as a sleek marketing funnel, warming people up for his paid memberships and programs. Abke also promotes “plant-powered” supplements through discount links.
New Age Jesus
When Abke mentions the Essene Gospel of Peace, most listeners can’t tell it from the Gospel of John. The average viewer has never heard of its author, Edmond Bordeaux Szekely, has only a vague sense of what the Essenes were, and is in no position to fact-check claims about first-century Judea. The same is true for most of what Abke says about the Bible and early Judaism. He is speaking into a knowledge vacuum, and he knows it.
When he pitches Essene Jesus to his New Age followers, the language is absolute. The evidence is “a slam dunk,” he says, while uploading videos with titles like “The Proof That Jesus Was an Essene” and “Jesus the Essene: The EXPLOSIVE Truth That Rewrites Christian History.” Certainty is part of the product. It lets viewers feel they’re being handed a secret the church hid or lost, and it flatters them for being brave enough to accept it.
Put him in front of actual scholars, and the tone changes. In a debate with apologist Wes Huff, he backs away: “We’re not saying Jesus was an Essene… he emerged from this lineage.” Suddenly the same claim becomes “emerging scholarship,” a tentative possibility, or a family resemblance. He knows how implausible his ideas sound in a room full of PhDs, so he retreats to softer verbs.
Back in the spiritual influencer ecosystem, the hesitations disappear. On the Know Thyself podcast, he says flatly that “Jesus was an Essene master.” On the Emilio Ortiz show: “There’s no question Jesus was an Essene. It’s almost hilarious how much proof there is.” In countless podcasts and interviews, Abke emphatically claims Jesus was an Essene; this is the 2,000-year hidden truth that he is revealing.
“We're not saying Jesus was an Essene," Abke tells scholars. “There's no question Jesus was an Essene," he tells his spiritual followers.
Essene Jesus is only one layer of the remake. Abke has spent years presenting Jesus as a covert teacher of the Law of One, the 1980s UFO-channeling cosmology. In that frame, Jesus is an early mouthpiece for a timeless nondual “oneness” law that supposedly sits behind every religion. Abke even tells listeners to reread the gospels by swapping “heavenly Father” for “the Law of One."
Then the claims devolve into spectacle. Abke has said Jesus “definitely” used psychedelic mushrooms, was clairvoyant, had no ego, performed energy healing, experienced a kundalini awakening, carried a “green-ray energy center,” and was a “4th-density being” eligible to graduate to a 5th-density lifetime on another planet. By that point, history has been replaced by sci-fi metaphysics.
None of this is new. Theosophists in the late 1800s and early 1900s like Blavatsky and Besant already cast the Essenes as a secret Jewish mystery school that trained Jesus during his “missing years,” a story grounded in esoteric insight rather than evidence. Rudolf Steiner built the same framework into his occult Christianity, describing Jesus as an Essene initiate on the basis of “spiritual research.”
By the early 1990s the script gets updated for the hypnosis era. Dolores Cannon’s Jesus and the Essenes (1992) presents Essene connections as “recovered history” from past-life regression sessions, filling Jesus’ silent years with travel, initiation, and hidden mentors that conveniently explain why he sounds “Eastern” to modern ears. Szekely’s Essene revivalism belongs to the same ecosystem: his Essene Gospel of Peace doesn’t just hand Abke a vegan, anti-sacrifice Jesus; it universalizes Essene teaching as timeless wisdom found everywhere from “India” to “Tibet,” pre-approving the whole “Jesus learned it in the East” fantasy.
“Bro, you’re in for such a treat with that one,” Abke gushes about Cannon to a podcast host. “She does a [past-life] regression with somebody who was an older mentor of young Jesus as a little boy," he says. "It's just incredible. So much of what’s shared in that book has actually been corroborated by new archaeological evidence.”
Abke isn’t uncovering a buried Jesus; he’s recycling a century-old esoteric myth based on no evidence. The Essene lineage, the Law of One overlay, and the mushroom Jesus aren’t separate ideas. They’re a single project: replace a messy, historically Jewish Jesus with a spiritual avatar who validates Abke’s full brand: anti-church, anti-sacrifice, psychedelic, vegetarian, cosmic-oneness Christianity. The past becomes a mirror that always reflects the teacher back to himself.
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God's Diet
In Exodus 12, God doesn’t just free the Hebrews from Egypt; he gives them a meat-based ritual and makes it mandatory. Each household must take a lamb, slaughter it, put its blood on the doorposts, and then roast and eat the flesh with flat bread made without yeast and bitter herbs. This meal is an “everlasting ordinance,” a covenant meal that marks who belongs to Israel’s god and who doesn’t.
Jesus grows up inside that world. Every year Jews would celebrate the Exodus through Passover, a night when families gather after sunset, slaughter a lamb, roast it, and eat its meat with flat bread made without yeast and bitter herbs while retelling how God “passed over” their houses and struck Egypt instead. For an observant Jew in first-century Galilee like Jesus, skipping Passover would mean stepping outside the script. In multiple locations, the gospels explicitly state that he took part: “The Passover of the Jews was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.” New Testament historians broadly agree that the gospels accurately show him observing Passover along with other Jews, and nothing in the surviving record suggests he refused the meal or its lamb.
In first-century Judea, “meat” mostly meant lamb and goat, with the occasional calf or bird. Festival days and family celebrations might feature roasted lamb or a fattened calf; ordinary weeks relied more on bread, olives, beans, and cheap salted fish from the Sea of Galilee. Jesus’ world is clearly omnivorous, not vegetarian.
The gospels also give multiple scenes of Jesus and his followers eating meat, especially fish. In Luke 24, the risen Jesus appears to his disciples in Jerusalem, shows them his hands and feet, and asks, “Have you anything here to eat?” They give him a piece of broiled fish, and Luke says he eats it in front of them. John 21 describes another event: sometime later in Galilee, several disciples are out fishing when Jesus tells them where to cast the net; they haul in 153 fish and then sit on the beach while he serves them a breakfast of bread and grilled fish.
In Mark 7, Jesus even loosens the food rules rather than tightening them. In a dispute about ritual purity, he tells the crowd that nothing entering a person from the outside can defile them, and Mark adds the editorial punch line: “Thus he declared all foods clean.” It’s a sweeping move that undercuts kosher boundaries, not a pivot to stricter vegetarianism.
The most famous miracle meal in the gospels points the same way. In the feeding of the five thousand, Jesus takes a boy’s offering of five loaves and two fish, blesses it, and has the disciples distribute it to the crowd. Everyone eats and is satisfied, and they gather up baskets of leftovers. The text doesn’t treat the fish as any type of compromise; it presents Jesus multiplying seafood and bread to feed hungry people.
Magic Fish
The evidence is overwhelming that both the God of the Bible and Jesus approved of consuming meat, albeit within kosher boundaries. To overturn that history, New Age reformers like Abke have to lean on forged gospels, fabricated quotes, and increasingly bizarre explanations.
In their debate with Wes Huff, Abke and Kameron Waters end up treating the Bible like a magic show. The fish in the resurrection stories suddenly become “onion relish,” thanks to a creative Greek word game that somehow turns working fishermen into failed condiment-catchers. When they’re pressed on the miraculous haul of 153 fish, they don’t want to say real animals were caught and killed, so they start calling them “miracle fish.” Huff and Boyce just say the quiet part out loud and label them “magic fish.”
The same evasive move shows up around Passover. Despite Jesus telling his disciples to “prepare the Passover,” which by definition involved slaughtering and eating a lamb, Abke and Waters insist the Bible never explicitly says Jesus ate lamb, so they “don’t think he did.” It’s an unfounded assertion that ignores both Exodus 12 and basic Second Temple practice. It lets them smuggle in their preferred version of Jesus, the one who somehow keeps Passover without ever touching the Passover lamb.
In the debate, Waters reads a passage he says is from the Hebrew Gospel of Matthew, where Jesus says, “I do not desire to eat lamb with you on this Passover.” In reality, that line doesn’t come from some early, more authentic Matthew at all. It comes from a much later, heavily edited Jewish-Christian gospel known to us only through a hostile fourth-century bishop, Epiphanius, who quotes the Ebionites’ rewritten version of Luke.
In their text, composed at least a century after Jesus, the Ebionite community changes Jesus’ words from “I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you” into a vegetarian manifesto about not wanting to eat the lamb. Waters presents this as if it were an ancient Hebrew Matthew correcting our gospels, when it’s actually one small sect putting new lines in Jesus’ mouth to match their anti-sacrifice, anti-meat theology.
This sleight of hand is common for Abke and his co-conspirators. They routinely distort and misrepresent passages, claiming meanings that simply aren’t there. Take Hosea 6:6, one of Abke’s favorites: “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” Because Jesus quotes this line, Abke insists it proves he opposed animal sacrifice altogether. But in Hosea’s own context, God isn’t outlawing the sacrificial system; he’s attacking hypocrisy—people who keep bringing animals while trampling the poor and breaking the covenant. When Jesus cites Hosea, he’s doing the same thing: shaming religious leaders who are meticulous about ritual but cruel to human beings. It’s a critique of those who do rituals while ignoring injustice and the covenant, not a vegan rallying cry.
Abke fills his slides with quotes that are either false reconstructions or wildly misrepresented. He turns a dry line from Pliny the Elder about an administrative district called “Nazerini” into evidence for a Nazarene sect linked to Jesus, even though Pliny is just listing place-names in Syria, not Jewish movements. He splices Epiphanius so that a group he says existed before Christ somehow also “acknowledged Christ and the Resurrection,” welding together two different groups, the Nasaraeans and Nazoraeans, into a single pre-Jesus Nazarene church Epiphanius never describes.
He also attributes to Hippolytus a line about “Nasaraeans” who “acknowledge Moses… but do not observe sacrifices” that simply doesn’t appear in standard editions of Hippolytus at all. And he treats Pliny the Younger’s “innocent meal” comment about Christians, that they shared a harmless meal to rebut rumors of vice, as if it meant vegetarian Essenes boycotting meat and sacrifice, rather than Roman officials checking for political loyalty.
Abke likes to repeat, “We know all Jesus’ disciples were vegetarian.” There is no ancient source that says that. A few very late church fathers claim that individuals like James or maybe Matthew avoided meat, but the gospels themselves show core disciples as fishermen who eat fish with Jesus.
He also says “half the prophets” of the Old Testament were vegetarian. The Bible never claims Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hosea, or anyone else lived on plants only. Abke lifts lines like 1 Samuel 15:22 (“to obey is better than sacrifice”) and Hosea 6:6 (“I desire mercy, not sacrifice”) and treats them as diet rules, when they’re actually attacks on hypocritical worship—bringing sacrifices while oppressing people. He turns sermons about justice into retroactive vegan endorsements that simply aren’t in the text.
The magic fish evasions, the Hosea spin, and these slide quotes all show the same pattern: cautious or mundane texts are quietly rewritten into evidence for Abke's Essene-Jesus thesis.
The Smoking Gun
Abke doesn't just rely on selective use of passages and invented meanings. He employs nonexistent quotes that always support his perspective. When Abke tried to explain to me why he’s used fabricated and doctored quotes, he got caught in a lie. One prime example is his use of a fake quote he attributed to the 4th-century church historian Eusebius.
Abke told me by email that ChatGPT had generated the bad quote when he asked it, “Show me the quote from Proof of the Gospel where he says Jesus rejected animal sacrifice.” He claimed the AI had simply “re-rendered” a different passage, Proof of the Gospel 3.3.
The problem for Abke is that the false quote (labeled 1.10) majorly strengthens his position. He told me that “all the same ideas are given” in the real 3.3 passage and that the fake version adds nothing. That is simply false. The 3.3 passage only talks about sacrifice. The fabricated 1.10 passage adds new and separate ideas: that Jesus rejected circumcision and did not support the other “precepts of Moses” (the 600 Old Testament laws). No standard edition or translation of Eusebius says anything like this; he never attributes to Jesus a rejection of circumcision or Moses’ laws. Those additions are precisely what Abke needs to bolster his Essene-Jesus narrative.
Abke then tried to distance himself from the fabricated quote by calling it an “inconsequential” mistake and claiming he didn’t agree with the new additions. “I’ve told you that Jesus rejecting circumcision and the precepts of Moses is not our position or something we have ever taught,” he wrote to me. “We believe specifically the opposite and believe those two points in the GPT quote were just polemical.” It’s hard not to read this as damage control: a quick excuse offered in the hope I’d drop it. He likely never imagined anyone would transcribe hours of his content and compare his private walk-back to his public enthusiasm for the quote.
This is where Abke is caught. In multiple video podcasts, Abke enthusiastically uses the fabricated quote that has Jesus rejecting the precepts of Moses and circumcision. Despite his proclamation that it expresses views he doesn't hold, he calls it a "really great quote" and "one of our most important quotes."
In several videos he puts the quote on screen. He highlights in yellow the exact lines about Jesus rejecting circumcision and the “precepts of Moses.” As he reads those lines aloud, his voice slows and rises; he stresses them in a positive way. He then uses those highlighted lines to support his larger story about Jesus and the law. At no point does he push back on the quote, warn his audience about it, or say that he disagrees with its claims.
“Wes and Steven made no mention of our two most important patristic quotes from Eusebius, which I’ll read for you again right now…,” Abke protests in one video. He then proceeds to read Proof of the Gospel 3.3 and the bogus “1.10” back-to-back. The passages are on screen, and he bolds part of 1.10.
In another talk, he goes even further. Acting out how modern Christians might object, he says they complain, “You expect me to follow the 600 Levitical commandments?” He then answers his own imaginary critic by leaning directly on the forged Eusebius quote he’s just read, which says Jesus rejected the precepts of Moses: “Absolutely not… We’re not expecting you to follow the 600 Levitical laws…because neither did Jesus.” In his teaching, the fake Eusebius line is the bridge that lets him say Jesus himself rejected most of what he calls the precepts of Moses—the Law of Moses—and that Christians today don’t have to keep it either.
This video shows several times where Aaron Abke used the fabricated quote to teach that Jesus rejected circumcision and Moses' precepts (which support his thesis). He said in an email he had never taught these views and opposed them to try and distance himself from the fabricated quote.
Even if Abke now wants to say that “precepts of Moses” only refers to later, “man-made” additions and not Moses’ true law, that is not how he uses the phrase in front of an audience. On camera he conflates the “precepts of Moses” and “the 600 Levitical commandments” and tells his viewers that Jesus did not give or command them. Then he turns around and tells me that “Jesus rejecting circumcision and the precepts of Moses is not our position.” His own recordings show the opposite.
Abke also told me he believed the additions were “polemical,” i.e. a church father painting an inaccurate, exaggerated picture of Jesus. That’s false too. In practice he treated them as accurate: he read the lines straight, called them a “really great quote” and “one of our most important quotes,” and used them to bolster his broader Essene-Jesus argument.
In private, he tells me he rejects those added ideas in the fabricated quote and that the mistake is “inconsequential.” In public, he spotlights those same words, calls them among his “most important” patristic quotes, and uses them as key proof for his Essene-Jesus view. Both cannot be true.
Dead Sea Foils
Abke uses another nonexistent quote in his presentations. This one he attributes to Dead Sea Scrolls scholar Geza Vermes. After praising Vermes as a leading expert on the subject, he puts this line about John the Baptist on screen: “John appears to be associated with the wilderness sects that rejected the Temple sacrifices.” He cites the source as Vermes’ book The Dead Sea Scrolls in English.
The problem is that this sentence does not exist in that book. A full digital search of the text confirms the words were never written by Vermes.
Like the fabricated Eusebius quote, the fake Vermes quote conveniently does what Abke needs. It has a top Dead Sea Scrolls scholar saying that John not only belonged to a “wilderness sect” but specifically to one that “rejected the Temple sacrifices.” In other words, it turns Vermes into a mouthpiece for Abke’s Essene storyline. It paints John as part of an anti-sacrifice sect that bridges the Dead Sea Scrolls community and Jesus using a quote Vermes never wrote.
When confronted with the Eusebius forgery, Abke offered an excuse, claiming ChatGPT was responsible. When asked repeatedly about the Vermes fabrication, Abke went radio silent. Furthermore, he never issued a public retraction for the false Eusebius quote, only telling me he had generally warned followers that AI can give errors. Abke's calculated evasion on the Vermes quote, following his private admission of error on Eusebius, suggests these fabrications are not isolated mistakes but part of a systemic pattern.
The same pattern shows up in his use of the Dead Sea Scrolls. On his slides, Abke quotes lines like “For the poor in spirit are a spring of living waters” and “For the meek is the fruit of the earth,” all labeled as coming from the Community Rule, a Dead Sea Scrolls manual for Essene life. Those sentences don’t appear anywhere in the Community Rule or in any standard English translation of the scrolls. He’s stitching together loose phrases—“poor in spirit,” “living water,” “fruit of the earth”—into neat, Beatitude-style soundbites that make the Essenes sound like they’re already preaching Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.
He does the same thing with the word "ebionim" (poor). In the scrolls it’s an ordinary term for poor or humble people, but on Abke’s slides it becomes a sect: “the Ebionim, who will inherit the whole world,” with a “teacher to all the Ebionim” at their head. Those exact sentences don’t exist in the underlying texts either. They’re built to turn Qumran into a proto-Ebionite church with a special teacher of the “poor ones” and a Beatitude-style promise to “inherit the world”—in other words, to make the scrolls line up perfectly with his Essene/Ebionite Jesus storyline.
Researcher Dallas Cowan has combed through Abke’s debate slides line by line. He found multiple instances of doctored and fabricated quotes. Abke's Essene Jesus collapses under the weight of its own inventions.
Inventing Jesus
To pull off a Jesus-sized hoax, Abke has to do two things at once: repeat blatant falsehoods and deliver them with the calm of someone describing the weather. That confidence isn’t a personality quirk; it’s a method. Say the bizarre thing often enough, say it like settled fact, and soon you’re not arguing anymore; you’re narrating reality. Keep that voice steady, and alt-wellness podcasts will happily platform your “revelation” as breaking news.
Abke’s Jesus isn’t a first-century Jewish preacher at all; he’s a New Age pastiche built on a mystical ancestor. In Abke’s telling, Jesus doesn’t stand in the line of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Moses but comes from Enoch, a shadowy pre-Abrahamic figure he recasts as the first rainbow-body guru. The Bible gives Enoch one strange line—he “walked with God; then he was no more, because God took him”—and Abke inflates it into a whole cosmic genealogy: Enoch becomes a light-body master, the Essenes inherit his secret wisdom, and Jesus arrives as the final emissary of their “Enoch sect.”
To make that story work, Abke has to cut Jesus loose from Judaism and remake the Essenes along the way. A small Jewish sect obsessed with Torah and purity rules is turned into a pre-Jewish mystery school, a race apart carrying Enoch’s primordial teaching through the ages. In his universe, Jesus isn’t one Jewish apocalyptic teacher among many; he’s the last link in a hidden Enochian chain. Once you see that framework, every move he makes bends the same way: away from Abraham, away from Judaism, and toward an Essene Jesus who looks a lot like Aaron Abke’s brand.
One of the first things Abke has to move, if his brazen idea is going to work, is Jesus’ hometown. “The city he is from is not called Nazareth, it’s called Nazar,” he declares. Nazar does not exist. It appears only on fringe Essene-revival sites, with no historical record. Abke then quietly relocates this imaginary Nazar to the Qumran valley so he can park Jesus next to the Essenes. In reality, Jesus lived up in Galilee, about a hundred miles north, in Nazareth.
“There was no place called Nazareth,” Abke insists. This is flatly false. Multiple early sources call Jesus “from Nazareth,” and archaeology confirms a small first-century village there during his life. Finally, he claims “Nazarene” is secret code for “Nazar” + “Essene,” as if the word were a hidden Essene badge rather than a plain geographic label.
Abke even plays games with the names. He takes a Jewish group Epiphanius calls “Nasaraeans”—a sect Epiphanius says existed before Jesus and did not follow him—and quietly relabels them “Nazarenes.” He then tells viewers this proves there was a Nazarene sect before Jesus that Jesus himself belonged to. By the time he’s done, a village in Galilee has vanished, a fictional Nazar has appeared in Qumran, and an obscure pre-Christian sect has been retrofitted into Jesus’ own Essene-style order.
In one video, Abke does a routine pitched at about a fifth-grade level. In Jesus’ day, he says, there were only four kinds of Jews: Pharisees, Sadducees, Zealots, or Essenes. He rules out the first three: Jesus criticized Pharisees and Sadducees, and he wasn’t a violent Zealot. Abke then triumphantly concludes he “must” have been an Essene. The whole bit is staged as a friendly logic puzzle, so viewers feel like they’re solving it with him. He repeats this same funnel in video after video.
Anyone with a basic grasp of the period knows this is fiction. Most Jews in first-century Judea didn’t belong to any sect. They were am ha-aretz, “people of the land”: farmers, fishermen, artisans, and day laborers under Roman rule. Josephus, Abke’s main ancient source, does mention Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, and Zealots—but as small groups within a much larger population, not four boxes that cover everyone.
Modern estimates put Jews of the time in the millions; Josephus’ own figures suggest only a few thousand Pharisees and a few thousand Essenes. He also talks about wandering prophets, miracle workers, “sign prophets,” and bandit leaders—people who don’t fit any of those labels. Abke rips the four-sect chart out of context, flattens it, and turns it into a one-way slide into “Essene Jesus.”
“You don’t get someone who walks around condemning Pharisees and Sadducees who was himself an Orthodox Jew,” Abke says of Jesus. In fact, you do. The Hebrew Bible is full of prophets blasting kings, priests, and fellow worshippers. Later rabbis argue with each other for pages. Even the Essenes—hardly liberal—railed against the Jerusalem priesthood (Sadducees) as corrupt usurpers. Intra-Jewish attack is normal, not proof someone stepped outside Judaism or magically turned Essene.
From this, Abke concludes that Jesus “definitely wasn’t a Sadducee or Pharisee, so there’s only one option left. That’s plenty of evidence for me.” In reality, Jesus could have been loosely Pharisaic, overlapping several currents, or part of no formal sect at all—like many prophetic, apocalyptic preachers of the time. The landscape is messy and fluid, not four simple boxes feeding a single Essene-Jesus outcome.
Abke makes Jesus’ mentor, John the Baptist, an Essene too. “There’s almost no argument in theology and hermeneutics that John the Baptist wasn’t an Essene,” he claims. This is false. The mainstream view among scholars is that John was not an Essene and not a member of the Qumran community.
He does the same thing with specific practices. In a video called “The Proof That Jesus Was an Essene,” Abke tells viewers, “Jesus does those three things—communion, baptism, and 40 days in the wilderness—that we know are Essene rituals. To me that’s case closed.” Each item collapses under basic scrutiny. The forty days in the wilderness are a Jewish scriptural motif—Moses on Sinai, Elijah on the run, Israel’s forty years of wandering—not an Essene creation. The Last Supper (communion) is a Passover meal of bread and wine, a festival kept by virtually all Jews, not an Essene innovation.
Abke wants the listener to believe that because Jesus got baptized, he was an Essene, but the practices don’t line up. The Essenes carried out regular, repeated washings inside their own communities as part of ongoing purity discipline—the same mikveh culture you find across Second Temple Judaism. John the Baptist, who baptizes Jesus, offers a one-time immersion in the Jordan to anyone who comes, as a public sign of repentance before God. Jesus’ baptism and the Essenes’ ritual bathing are different both functionally and spiritually. And there is nothing unique about the Essenes’ ritual bathing; it is standard Jewish practice at the time.
One of the things Abke repeatedly points to is Jesus flipping the money changers’ tables. He uses it as proof he opposed temple sacrifice itself. But in the gospels, Jesus keeps going up to the temple for festivals and even sends healed people to the priests “to offer the sacrifices that Moses commanded.” He’s attacking corruption, price-gouging, and empty worship in a system he still treats as Israel’s sacred space, not promoting an Essene-style boycott of sacrifice.
Even the scholar Abke leans on most heavily (and misrepresents) doesn’t back his Essene-Jesus story. New Testament historian James Tabor, who has spent decades on the Dead Sea Scrolls, agrees there are overlaps in language and ideas—but he’s clear that Jesus was not an Essene and likely broke with that kind of separatist community. The Essenes avoided Gentiles and obsessed over ritual purity; Jesus eats with “sinners,” touches the unclean, and moves freely among ordinary people. In other words, Abke’s star expert actually sees Jesus and the Essenes as different kinds of movements—not proof that Jesus was an Essene at all.
One of Abke’s favorite backup texts is The Moses Scroll, a modern reconstruction of some leather Deuteronomy strips an antiquities dealer tried to sell in 1883. Scholars at the time examined the strips and declared them forgeries; the pieces themselves are now lost, and all anyone has are 19th-century transcriptions. A tiny circle of modern defenders argues they might be genuine, but the wider field still treats the “Shapira scrolls” as fake. Abke skips all that and simply presents The Moses Scroll as if it were an ancient Torah that just happens to agree with his anti-sacrifice, anti-meat Jesus.
Abke’s “experts” don’t rescue him either. His Essene-Jesus mashup leans on a small circle of fringe voices: James Tabor and Ross Nichols, who defend the disputed Shapira Moses Scroll; Robert Eisenman, whose sweeping attempt to fuse James, the early church, and the Dead Sea Scrolls has been called “speculative, fanciful, and largely discredited” by Dr. Bart Ehrman; and New Age hypnotherapist Dolores Cannon, whose book Jesus and the Essenes is based not on texts or archaeology but on past-life regression sessions. These, along with Edmond Bordeaux Szekely's Essene Gospel of Peace, are the authorities behind his confident claims that Jesus was an Essene vegetarian whose real gospel was scrubbed from history.
Alien Mind Control
While Abke and Kameron Waters resort to distorting history and poor scholarship, they also descend into what can only be described as conspiratorial thinking. In a podcast they describe the ancient Jewish temple sacrificial system as a “mind-control program” run by elites to manufacture “programmable people” willing to go to war. The idea is that killing animals and smelling blood literally conditions the masses so they’re “ready to go kill some human beings” on command.
In their cosmology, this all starts long before Moses. Abke claims blood sacrifice was introduced to humanity by fallen “divine beings” that are “probably ETs.” He has said animal sacrifice “is not a Jewish practice in any way at all,” which is patently false; animal sacrifice is central to Israel’s worship throughout the Old Testament and Second Temple Judaism. In Abke's view sacrifice becomes an alien technology—“the most negative possible thing there is”—installed to hijack human morality and break people away from their own “God consciousness” so they’ll obey kings and priests instead. These extraterrestrials are seeding a blood-atonement cult on earth to polarize the planet negatively.
Drawing on the Book of Enoch, they say the fallen angels first descended on Hermon, taught humanity weapons and warfare, and started the original “sin against animals.” In their retelling, that’s the origin point of the Enoch line Abke thinks Jesus comes from. When Jesus says, “On this rock I will build my church,” he is literally founding a Nazarene movement at the Hermon portal to reverse that pre-human cosmic fall. The “gates of Hades” are no longer a metaphor; they’re an ancient ET doorway Jesus is trying to shut.
Seen together, it’s not a historical argument at all. It’s a stitched-together cosmology where extraterrestrials invent temple sacrifice, monarchs use it to program soldiers, prophets are secret vegans, the Dead Sea Scrolls predict an Essene rainbow-body Christ, and Jesus plants a Nazarene church on a demon portal to undo alien blood magic. That story may be thrilling inside a New Age echo chamber, but it has about as much to do with first-century Judaism as Szekely’s spa-brochure Essene gospel—and even less to do with the very Jewish Jesus who ate Passover lamb and multiplied fish.