with freethinkers, and he defended his theories to his death. Larson stated that he spent more than four years studying ancient Egyptian, Persian, Brahman, Jain, Buddhistic, Judaistic and Essene cultures which all influenced the Essene Order from which the Christian Gospels originated. According to Larson, the Essenes absorbed the eschatology and metaphysics of the Zoroastrians and later the Pythagoreans and ancient mystery cults of Greece and the Asia Minor. Larson studied the Dead Sea Scrolls literature and commented that the Essenes "engrafted a Christology which combined a Persian with a Messianic Judaic concept, which, in a period of crisis, they personalized in a martyred Teacher of Righteousness whom they expected to return upon clouds about 35-50 B.C. accompanied by a myriad of angels to conduct the Last Judgement." Larson concluded that Jesus was an Essene who convinced himself he was the incarnate of Christ destined to redeem mankind so left the Order to create a mass movement. Reception Leander E. Keck a Professor of Biblical Theology noted that Larson reconstructed "post-Maccabean Judaism, pre-Constantinian church history, the literary and historical developments of Essenism and Qumran and the historical Jesus, in order to build a pan-Essene view of Christian origins." Millar Burrows positively reviewed Larson's The Essene Heritage commenting that "of all the efforts thus far to demonstrate an Essene origin of Christianity surely this is the most ingenious, elaborate and determined... Dr. Larson does not lack imagination. If his conclusions prove less convincing to others than they are to him, his book at least deserves fair consideration as a serious, conscientious piece of work, evincing both originality and industry." However, Siegfried Horn negatively reviewed the book as trying "to prove that Christianity is nothing but a warmed-up Essene religion" and criticized Larson for "reconstruct[ing] an artificial history of Essenism according to his own interpretation of the scanty historical evidence extant in the Qumran scrolls and in other ancient records." Larson's The Essene Heritage was also negatively reviewed in the Indian Journal of Theology as an "offering from the lunatic fringe. He argues, with a conspicuous lack of scholarship and a depressing mishmash of phoney exegesis, that Jesus was a frustrated Essene who (probably) survived his attempted crucifixion, and whose simple Essene-type gospel was rapidly distorted by the machinations of the crypto-Catholics." Published books The Modernity of Milton: A Theological and Philosophical Interpretation (1927) The Religion of the Occident: Or, The Origin