Scholar Suggest Essenes Never Lived

An Israeli biblical scholar has made the controversial claim that the Essenes, the group reputed to have written the Dead Sea Scrolls, never actually existed. Rachel Elior, who teaches Jewish Mysticism at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. contends that the Essenes were the fabrication of Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, and that the Dead Sea Scrolls were actually the work of a priestly caste banished during the Greek occupation of Jerusalem.