James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls I (102 page)

Though Hippolytus is basically following Josephus’ sequence again here, the language he uses is different. For the purposes of our identifications too this makes all the difference. He expresses this as follows: ‘They assert, therefore, that the cause of this (their longevity) is their extreme devotion to Religion (this, of course, the very language James 1:26–27 is using) and condemnation of all excess in regard to
what they eat
and their
being temperate
and
incapable of anger
. And so it is that they despise death, rejoicing when they can
finish their course with a good conscience
’
(here Paul’s ‘running the course’ and ‘conscience’ language in 1 Corinthians 8:7–10:25).

Hippolytus continues: ‘If, however, anyone would attempt to torture men of this description with the aim of inducing them
to eat, speak Evil of the Law or eat that which is sacrificed to an idol
, he will not effect his purpose, for these
submit to death and endure any torture rather than violate their consciences
.’ Here not only is Hippolytus once again using the language of ‘eating’ and ‘conscience’ that Paul is using in 1 Corinthians 8:4–9:14 and 10:16–33 (in 8:12, referring to ‘the
brothers
’, ‘
weak
consciences’, and eating only vegetables, Paul actually uses the
very
words, ‘wounding their consciences’), but Hippolytus is also employing the language of James’ directives to overseas communities Paul also exploits in his arguments with Community Leaders (principally James) who make problems over ‘things sacrificed to idols’ – ‘a
stumbling block
to those who are
weak
’ (8:9).

That Hippolytus here actually evokes the very directive incontrovertibly (and probably uniquely) associated with
James
’ name in the New Testament, which Paul so rails against in 1 Corinthians and which Peter quotes too in the Pseudoclementine
Homilies
,
15
makes it absolutely clear whom and what we are dealing with here. It would be impossible, I think, to achieve a more perfect match and better convergence of themes than this. These ‘
Zealot
’ Essenes are also
Jamesian
. Earlier in this section, in the aftermath of alluding to ‘loving God’, ‘love building up’, not ‘Knowledge puffing up’ (8:1–3) – all phraseologies encountered at Qumran – Paul even plays on all these conceptualities by ridiculing the ‘Knowledge’ of the ‘some’ (that is, those who ‘came down from James’), who ‘with conscience
of the idol
(the wordplay here works in the Greek only), eating as if of a thing
to
an idol’, ‘their “conscience”, being weak, is
defiled
’ (8:7). Paul is at his allegorical and polemical best here, again reversing the ideology of his opponents against them with spellbinding rhetorical artistry.

His conclusion is a model of facetious dissimulation: ‘Yet, if anyone sees you, having Knowledge, eating in an idol Temple, will not the
conscience
of such a
weak being
be built up (meaning, in this context, ‘strengthened’), causing him to
eat things sacrificed to idols
?’ (8:10). Therefore, ‘through your Knowledge, the weak brother will be destroyed ... so if meat causes my
brother to stumble
, I will
never eat flesh forever
that I should not
cause my brother to stumble
’ (8:11–13).

He even goes on to use this word ‘conscience’ in Romans 13:5 to justify
paying taxes
to Rome – the same ‘conscience’ Hippolytus claims
these ‘Zealot’ Essenes ‘would submit to death and endure torture rather than defile’ by ‘eating things sacrificed to idols
’. We can say here that Paul and Hippolytus are basically talking about the same group. One even might go so far as to claim that Paul was among those ‘cast out’ (
ekballo
) of such a group, one reason perhaps for the New Testament’s focus on this kind of language and its trivialization into that of ‘casting out demons’, the Authority for which Jesus accorded his principal Apostles.

In view of Josephus’ notice about Nero sending Florus as Governor in Palestine with the express purpose, seemingly, of goading the Jews into revolt, it begins to look as if the circle of people around Nero we have described above – who were neither unsophisticated nor unintelligent (including people like Epaphroditus, Seneca, Felix’s brother Pallas, and on its fringes someone even Josephus calls ‘
Saulus
’) – were willing even to wipe out a whole people. In the end, anyhow, their best general, Vespasian, was sent from Britain to rid the world of this pestilent Messianic agitation that was then disturbing the entire Mediterranean and inciting revolt against Roman Imperial Authority everywhere.

It is this then which, via the magic of literary re-creation, becomes converted in the traditions embodied by the Gospels and the Book of Acts into the picture of a pacifist, other-worldly ‘Messianism’ with politically-harmless ‘
Disciples
’, such as ‘
Stephen
’ and Paul, who basically approve of foreign or Roman Rule and do not oppose it. By the same token, their tormentors (as, for instance those ‘
Nazirite
’-style oath-takers who ‘
vow not to eat or drink until they have killed Paul
’) are essentially the very people obliterated
en masse
because of their propagation of this form of more militant ‘Messianism’ – the more subversive ‘
disease-carriers’
of the ‘
Nazoraean heresy
’ whom, as Acts 24:5 attests, were active around the Mediterranean, ‘
fomenting revolution among all the Jews in the inhabitable world
’.

It is to this description of their continent life-style, their unwavering willingness to undergo death or torture rather than
blaspheme their Law-giver
or
eat any forbidden things
that Josephus attaches his picture of the ‘resolution’ these ‘Essenes’ showed in the
recent War with the Romans
, thereby tying Essenes of this kind to the Uprising against Rome in the manner of ‘Zealots’. This is missing from Hippolytus’ description. For Josephus the point was simply ‘eating
forbidden
things’ or ‘blaspheming the Law-giver’, but the direct association here in Hippolytus of ‘blaspheming’ or ‘speaking Evil against the Law’ – the point is the same – with not eating ‘
things sacrificed to an idol
’ ties this description
absolutely
to the Community of James.

At this point in Josephus’ description of Essenes and, interestingly enough, in regard to what he calls their ‘
practising Piety towards the Deity
’ as well, Josephus uses the ‘
casting out
’ language, but this now in regard to those ‘
cast out from the group
’ or ‘
expelled
’(
ekballousi
). This language, as should be clear, is rife in both the Qumran Community Rule and Damascus Document. Since the probationer had already
sworn an oath only to eat ‘the pure food’ of the Community
– the ‘
eating and drinking
’ theme again (this is exactly the same as at Qumran) – according to Josephus, he will, therefore, die unless he breaks his oath.
16

The language Josephus uses to describe this, including ‘
not revealing secrets to others even if tortured to death’, ‘swearing to transmit these exactly as he received them himself, and always being a lover of Truth and an exposer of Liars’
, is almost word-for-word the language of the terrifying oath-taking required by James of the Elders of the Jerusalem Assembly, following Peter’s Letter to him in the introduction to the Pseudoclementine
Homilies
. This is the kind of ‘
casting out
’, that is, ‘
casting
’ someone ‘
out
’ of the Community or ‘
expelling
’ him, that in the New Testament becomes, as we have now made clear, the Jews viciously ‘casting Stephen out of the city’ (
ekbalontes
) in Acts or the Apostles receiving ‘the Authority to cast out Evil Demons’ from Jesus in the Gospels (
ekballein
).

It also is interesting that in his description of those he calls ‘the
Naassenes
’, Hippolytus asserts that they received their ideas from numerous discourses which ‘
James the brother of the Lord handed down to Mariamne
’. Whatever confusion may be involved here, the same idea appears in the Second Apocalypse of James from Nag Hammadi, where this individual is now called ‘
Mareim one of the Priests
’. There he is associated with someone called ‘
Theuda, the father
’ or ‘
brother of the Just One
since he was a relative of his
’,
17
and we are now on our way to solving the ‘Thaddaeus’/‘Theudas’ problem as well.

One can assume that the discourses, which Hippolytus says James ‘handed down’, are basically the same as those which somehow reappeared in the Pseudoclementine literature – or what other early Church writers refer to as the ‘Travels’ and/or the ‘Preaching of Peter’ – or, for instance, Epiphanius’ ‘Ascents of James’. Curiously enough, Hippolytus considers these ‘Naassenes’ to have been the first ‘
heresy
’ before even the Ebionites or Elchasaites, whatever Hippolytus might mean by ‘
heresy
’ at this point – the same word used to describe early Christianity in Acts 24:14, where it is also called ‘
the Way
’, and 28:22.

He says they believed ‘the Christ’ to be, in a kind of incarnationist or Islamic-style ‘
Imam’
ate doctrine, ‘the Perfect Man’ or ‘the Primal Adam’ – or simply ‘Adam’. But these are just the ideas which in the Pseudoclementines come to be associated with Jewish Christianity or the Ebionites, as well as with ‘the Standing One’, not unrelated to all these allusions to ‘standing’ in the various Gospel accounts we have been looking at above. One can still find such teachings among groups called in Arabic ‘the
Subba
‘ or ‘the Sabaeans of the Marshes’ – the ‘Mandaeans’ of Southern Iraq. Apparently ‘Mandaean’ was the name for the rank and file of such groups, the priestly élite being known as the
Nazoraeans
! ‘
Subba
’, of course, meant to be baptized or immersed.
18

For Hippolytus, this ‘
Christ’
or ‘
the
Perfect Man’
– according to Mandaean doctrine ‘
the Demiurge standing above the cosmos
’ – descended on numerous individuals. This is a quasi-Gnostic doctrine. For the latter, in the ‘
aeon
’ we have before us, the descent of this ‘
Christ
’ or ‘
Perfect Man
’ on ‘Jesus’ occurred
in the form of a dove
– the picture disseminated in the Gospels. Hippolytus ascribes the same ideology to ‘t
he Elchasaites
’ who seem to be a later adumbration of such groups as well as to one, ‘Cerinthus’, referred to by all these heresiologists, who was said to have taught ‘the Ebionites’.

This doctrine of ‘the Perfect Man’ or ‘Standing One’ is also abroad among Shi‘ites in Islam even today, albeit in a slightly different nexus, which seems to have developed out of the persistence of many of these groups and the central notions they all seemed to share in Northern Iraq. In Epiphanius, some two centuries after Hippolytus, these ‘Naassenes’ are called ‘Nazareans’ or ‘Nazrenes’ – the ‘Nazoraeans’ who go into the élite Priest Class of Mandaeans. For him,
they exist even before Christ
– as do our so-called ‘Essenes’ at Qumran – and are coincident with other similar groups he calls Daily Bathers/Hemerobaptists and ‘
Sebuaeans
’ (thus!).

It is clear that the majority of these groups do not differ markedly from each other as to basics and we are really only witnessing overlapping designations and the transference of terminology from one language into another in this region. In Arabic and to Islam they are what – via the Aramaic and Syriac – come to be called ‘
Sabaeans
’, based on the word in those languages for baptism or immersion, ‘
masbuta
’ – ‘Masbuthaeans’ according to some of Eusebius’ reckonings. In Palestine, for example, one of the several names for them is ‘Essenes’.

In the First Apocalypse of James from Nag Hammadi, where James is regarded as a kind of Supernatural Redeemer figure, James is encouraged to teach these things, firstly, to Addai and, secondly, to ‘
Salome and Mariam
’, and in the Second Apocalypse, to ‘
Mareim one of the Priests’
– this obviously the ‘
Mariamne
’ (also ‘
Mariamme
’ elsewhere at Nag Hammadi) in Hippolytus’ descriptions of what he is calling ‘
Naassenes
’. Like Matthew of Christian tradition – called in Mark, it will be recalled, ‘Levi the son of Alphaeus’ and, therefore, usually considered ‘Priestly’ or at least ‘levitical’ – he is described as doing the ‘writing’.