What we know about the Essenes is that “they related to each other as family, even when they were not physically related”. They called each other brother and siter, and very likely called senior members father and mother, just as Christians came to do. The Essenes did BC what the Christians did AD except that Essenes were Jews and Christians quickly became mainly gentiles. There is a continuity between the culture of the Essenes and that of the Christians that modern Christians simply will not recognize because they insist on supernatural explnations not natural ones.