DeWitt posits that the early Christian monastic communities were patterned after the Epicurean Gardens in the ancient world.
I was just listening to a Bart Ehrman podcast and he brought up the Essenes in relation to a topic.
I'm not sure if DeWitt mentions them, but they were a Jewish ascetic community set off from others founded in the 2nd c. BCE.
It seems more likely to me that this would have been a model for early Christians than the Gardens, although I suppose there could have been a conflation of the two groups.
Thoughts?