James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls I (107 page)

Later Herodian Kings, like Aristobulus, Herodias’ nephew who was married to Herodias’ daughter Salome, are put by the Romans in control of Lower Armenia. As opposed to them, the family developing around Helen of Adiabene, just a little further East, seems to have been highly esteemed in Palestine by opposition and resistance forces; and her son Izates, the convert to Judaism whom Josephus calls her ‘
only begotten’
, seems to have preferred ‘
circumcision
’. On the other hand, Helen, responding to the teaching of Ananias and another unnamed companion – the doctrines of whom have a lot in common with Paul’s (to say nothing about Acts portrait of his encounter with one ‘Ananias’ reputedly ‘
in Damascus
’) – seems to have had
a horror of the practice
which, for her (thinking realistically, would put her favorite son Izates in ill-repute with his subjects.
18

Izates has an older brother named, like their father, ‘
Monobazus
’ – a name or hereditary title within the family, like ‘Ceasar’ in Rome or ‘Herod’ in Palestine and its analogue in Edessa, ‘
Agbarus’/‘Abgarus’/’Augarus’/’Albarus’
– one perhaps in a Persian framework and the other, Semitic. In turn, one or the other of these brothers appears to have had a third-generation descendant or ‘
kinsman
’, also named ‘Monobazus’. Josephus calls him and another such ‘
kinsman
’, his brother ‘Kenedaeos’ – both of whom later leaders in the Uprising against Rome – ‘
descendants of Queen Helen’
. We shall have more to say about these later two descendants of hers presently but, for the moment, suffice it to say that they fought on the Jewish/Revolutionary side and were the first martyrs in the War against Rome – leading the initial stand at the Pass at Beit Horon (shades of Leonidas at the Battle of Thermopylae?).

These same Syriac sources, being Semitic and talking about ‘
Agbarus
’/‘
Abgarus
’ in Northern Syria, ‘
the King of the Edessenes
’ and all the ‘
Peoples beyond the Euphrates
’ – as Eusebius and Moses of Chorene do. They even claim that Helen was one of ‘
Agbarus
’’ or ‘
Abgarus
’’ wives – like all ‘Eastern Potentates’ he kept a big harem which seems even to have included quasi-‘sisters’.

For Josephus, the name of ‘Helen’’s husband (who so much overlaps this ‘
Agbarus
’’ in Edessa) was ‘Bazeus’ – that is, a cognate of ‘Monobazus’ above. Moreover, he adds the fact that she was his ‘
sister
’ too, in consequence of which this original/first-generation ‘Bazeus’/‘Monobazus’ – obviously identical with ‘
Agbarus
’/‘
Abgarus
’ in Edessene and Roman sources – allowed her ‘
the Kingdom of Adiabene
’, roughly equivalent to present-day Kurdistan further East. It should be appreciated that Kings of this kind had numerous wives, some merely formal arrangements for the purposes of child-bearing or other alliances, and some even sisters or half-sisters as seems to be the case here.

This last arrangement is attested to in this region as far back even as in the Old Testament (cf. Genesis 20:12) aboriginal here, the legendary ‘
Abraham
’ who, for it, purportedly married his half-sister Sarah. Probably even more to the point, Abraham also came from this area – ‘
Haran
’ in Northern Syria (Haran and Edessa being contiguous and part of the same geographical framework) – what Eusebius and others are also calling at this point ‘
the Land of the Osrhoeans
’ (meaning, of course, ‘
Assyrians
’). It is perhaps not simply coincidental that this is ‘
the Kingdom’
, Josephus tells us, Izates received from his father ‘
Bazeus
’ – the first and  original ‘
Monobazus
’.

The association of this area with ‘
Abraham
’ – real or legendary is immaterial – will also have great importance for Paul’s constant evocation of Abraham in his writings, as well as James’ – not to mention Muhammad’s in succession to them, whom, as we shall assert below, is absorbing the traditions from this area six centuries later. If Helen was, indeed, the wife or wife-sister of this ‘Abgarus’/‘Agbarus’ (i.e., Josephus’ ‘Bazeus’/‘Monobazus’) and Izates, too, his son, as Josephus contends; this would draw the stories of these two conversions – Agbarus’  to ‘Christianity’ and Helen’s and Izates’ to ‘Judaism’ (depending on the observer) even closer still. We shall see how materials in Acts, by implication, give credence to much of this complex in a completely unexpected and very powerful way.

Before moving on, one should note again how the name of her Kingdom, ‘Adiabene’, incorporates a root phonetically parallel to the name perennially associated with this region and this omnipresent Apostle ‘
Addai
’. As later Syriac documents would have it, quoting Eusebius: ‘Thomas the Apostle, one of the Twelve, by a divine impulse, sent Thaddaeus, who was himself also numbered among the Seventy Disciples of Christ (this in accord with our other materials), to Edessa to be a preacher and Evangelist of the teaching of Christ.’
19
These documents also incorporate the correspondence Eusebius says he translated from the chancellery records of Edessa, to wit, how ‘after the Ascension of Jesus,
Judas who is called Thomas
, sent him
Thaddaeus the Apostle, one of the Seventy
’. Note how the confusion between Thaddaeus ‘as an Apostle’ and ‘one of the Seventy’, already evident in the Hippolytus fragment and here in Eusebius (not to mention the Gospels), continues.

Eusebius returns to this affair again at the beginning of the Second Book of his
History
immediately after his discussion of how – now quoting Clement of Alexandria – there were ‘two Jameses, one called
the Just
, who was thrown from a wing of the Temple and beaten to death with a fuller’s club, and another, who was beheaded’. Eusebius now repeats what he has just said earlier, also quoted in the Syriac sources: ‘But
Thomas
, under a divine impulse, sent
Thaddaeus
as preacher and Evangelist to proclaim the doctrine of Christ, as we have shown from the public documents found there.’
20

The sequencing of these events as Eusebius begins his Second Book, leading into Hegesippus’ long presentation of the death of James is interesting. First he mentions the election to replace ‘the
Traitor
Judas’ and then the stoning of Stephen ‘
by the murderers of the Lord
’. But immediately after this, he introduces James as ‘the brother of our Lord’ and ‘the son of Joseph’ – no ‘cousin’ relationship here, though Mary is called ‘the Virgin’ – it is, therefore, the previous-wife theory. Here Eusebius immediately adds that ‘he was the first elected to the Episcopate of the Church at Jerusalem’, only the point about being direct ‘from Jesus’ hand’ is missing.

The implication, however, is that this event happened
directly
after Jesus’ death, so if we discard the material from Acts about ‘Judas
Iscariot
’ and ‘Stephen’, then we do have roughly the proper sequence of events in the early Church. Eusebius, of course, does take the time to point out the translation of Stephen’s name as ‘Crown’, associating it with his being ‘the First’ to ‘carry off the martyrs’ Crown’, and we have already noted the relation of this to the
Nazirite
‘Crown’ of the long hair worn by martyrs such as James. He then gives the notice from Clement about ‘The Lord imparting the gift of Knowledge to James the Just, to John, and to Peter after his resurrection. These delivered it to the rest of the Apostles, and they to the Seventy, of whom Barnabas was one.’ Then the notice about Thomas sending Thaddaeus to ‘the King of the Osrhoeans’ – the Assyrians. The proximity of all these matters, bunched so soon after the death of ‘the Lord’, is interesting and, after making the proper deletions, one does get a sense of the approximate history.

The Background of Agabus’ Prediction of the Famine in Acts

Seven chapters further along, now following Acts as a source, Eusebius refers both to ‘the Famine’, because of which Paul and Barnabas were delegated by the brothers at the Church in Antioch to proceed to Jerusalem to bring Famine relief (Acts 11:28), and the martyrdom of James the son of Zebedee ‘with the sword’ (Acts 12:1).
21
At this point, Eusebius returns to Josephus as his source, quoting the passage about the ‘impostor’ or ‘Deceiver called Theudas’, who persuaded the multitude that ‘he was
a prophet
’ (it is from here that Acts takes its material about ‘Agabus’ being a ‘prophet’) and that he would take them to the other side of the Jordan – that is, Perea where John the Baptist had been executed – and repeat Joshua’s miracle in the biblical Book under his name of ‘dividing the Jordan at his command’. One should keep one’s eyes on the parallels here with the miracles, he has already recited, done by ‘Thaddaeus’ – and in later Syriac sources, ‘Judas
Thomas
’ – in the Land of the Osrhoeans.

Eusebius, rather, immediately follows up these things with the story of Queen Helen, referred to in most title epitomes of Eusebius’ work as ‘the Queen of the Osrhoeans’. This is triggered by his mention at the end of the preceding Chapter Eleven (giving the citation about the miracle Theudas – who called himself ‘a prophet’, but whom Josephus rather calls ‘an impostor’ – undertook to do) of the Famine again ‘that took place under Claudius’.

Eusebius does so, because his source, Josephus, also evoked this Famine directly following the story of Theudas’ beheading and immediately preceding his mention of the crucifixion of James and Simon, the two sons of Judas the Galilean, ‘who caused the people to revolt when Cyrenius came to make a census of the possessions of the Jews’.
22
As in Acts, where their deletion causes the anachronism of Theudas being described as coming
before
Judas the Galilean, Eusebius also declines to mention these two sons.

Of course, the reason Eusebius mentions Helen here is that Josephus did so as well at this point, describing how ‘Queen Helen bought corn in Egypt at great cost and distributed it to those that were in need’, because of ‘the great Famine that happened in Judea’. The mention of this Famine at this point directly follows a brief aside about Tiberius Alexander, who succeeded Fadus (44–46), Theudas’ executor, as Governor in 46 CE and whose ‘Piety was not like that of his wealthy father (Philo of Alexandria’s brother) the
Richest
among all his contemporaries’. Rather, as Josephus puts it, Tiberius Alexander ‘did not continue in the Religion of his father’.
23

Eusebius, following Acts once again, now turns to Barnabas and Paul and their Famine-relief mission ‘to the Elders’ (
Presbyters
) in Jerusalem taking the funds that were being sent up by ‘the Disciples’ at ‘Antioch’. We are now patently in a contemporaneous situation. Eusebius had mentioned this mission and the Famine eight chapters before in Chapter Three in connection with ‘Agabus’ prophecy’, the only problem being that Paul, in his corresponding description of these years in Galatians,
never
mentions such a journey or mission to Jerusalem. In fact, he is quite emphatic to the contrary, saying in a statement leading up to his introduction of Peter and James that has over two millennia become almost proverbial:

When it pleased God … by His Grace to reveal His Son in me that I should announce him as the Good News among the Nations, I
did not confer with people of flesh and blood
, nor did I go up to
those who were Apostles before me
, but rather went away
into Arabia
and again
returned to Damascus
. Then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to make the acquaintance of Peter, though of the other Apostles, I saw none except
James the brother of the Lord
. (Gal. 1:15–19)

Here Paul assures his respondents in his own inimical style, ‘now the things that I write you, by God, I do not lie’, continuing, ‘then I came into the regions of Syria and Cilicia’ – the regions of concern to us at this point in the discussion (Gal. 1:20–21).

To review the chronology: Paul points out that this was the reason he was ‘unknown by sight among the Assemblies in Judea which were in Christ’ (‘they heard only that he who formerly persecuted us was now announcing the Good News’), before finally explaining, ‘then after fourteen years I went up to Jerusalem again with Barnabas, taking Titus with me also’ (Gal. 1:22–2:1). These ‘fourteen years’ put us somewhere into the early 50s, well past the time of ‘the Famine’ reported by Josephus.

Not only this, but in describing this
second
trip, Paul makes it clear it was not for Famine-relief activities, but rather he ‘went up because of a revelation to lay before them the Good News which I announce among the Nations’. Paul says he did this ‘privately’ to ‘those reckoned as important’ – the same persons he goes on to speak of as ‘those reputed to be something’ or ‘reputed to be Pillars’, whose importance ‘nothing conferred’ – so that ‘I should not be running or have run in vain’ (Gal. 2:2–9).