James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls I (117 page)

Then the individual beheaded in Acts at the time of the Famine is simply ‘
Jude
the brother of Jesus
’ or ‘
Juda
s
the brother of James
’ too. Not only is it chronologically in synch, but it also makes the ‘Zealot’ nature of all these episodes abundantly clear – ‘
Theudas
’ obviously being another one of these ‘
Zealot
’-type ‘
Deceivers
’ against whom Josephus so rails. It also accords with the notices from Hegesippus about Jesus’
third brother ‘
Judas’ having already been executed at the time his descendants are interviewed by Vespasian in the wake of the fall of the Temple and the collapse of the resistance against Rome after the
Sicarii
suicide on Masada
.

There really is, therefore, a ‘
brother
’ killed around the time of the Famine, but it is not ‘
James the brother of John’
. It is ‘
Theudas’, ‘Thaddaeus’
, or ‘
Judas the brother of James
’. ‘Judas’ is
the brother killed
and, just as there was no ‘
Stephen
’ who was stoned ‘
by the Jews
’ (though there was one in Josephus beaten outside the walls of Jerusalem by Revolutionaries), there was no ‘
James the son of Zebedee
’ who was, as such, ‘beheaded with the sword’. Again this is and was, more likely, ‘Theudas’/ ‘Judas’. All this is patent dissimulation but dissimulation with a clear goal – to
downplay the role of
and
finally
eliminate ‘James the Just’ (‘the brother of Jesus’) from Scripture
.

Nor was there any Central Leadership of James, John
his brother
(the shell game continues), and Peter, as the Gospels portray it – this to displace the Central Leadership as enumerated straightforwardly by Paul in Galatians of James, Cephas, and John. These, as Paul says, were ‘the Pillars’ of the ‘Jerusalem Assembly’ (not that their importance meant anything to him, as he says). There may have been another ‘John’, possibly John the
Essene
, who along with Silas and Niger of Perea led the Zealot assault on Ashkelon on the Palestinian seacoast. But there was no
second
James, just as there was no
second
Mary – not Mary ‘the mother of the sons of Zebedee’; nor ‘Mary the wife of Clopas’, Jesus’ mother’s sister; nor, for that matter, was there an ‘Agabus’. There are many such substitutions, too numerous to list. We can now transform all these stories about someone called ‘Judas Thomas’ sending someone called ‘Thaddaeus’ to ‘Augarus’ or ‘Albarus’ or ‘Abgarus’ into James
sending his brother
‘Judas
the Zealot
’ to Edessa and Adiabene to
evangelize the Edessenes and Osrhoeans
.

In this context, one should recall the third teacher who comes to Adiabene – whom Josephus says
came ‘from Galilee’
and whose teaching about
the necessity of ‘circumcision’ for conversion
so contrasted with that of Ananias and his unnamed companion/Paul(?) who ‘
get in among the King’s women’
but ‘
do not insist upon circumcision’
. This also puts into stark relief the Naziritism of Queen Helen, whom we have identified as a wife of this Ruler. He has perhaps given her a kingdom of her own from among his possessions further east, just as in Syriac sources Abgarus
divides his kingdom
between his two sons; one called ‘Sannadroug’ gets the area around Haran, Abraham’s birthplace – this would clearly be ‘Izates’ in Josephus’ version. This Abgarus would appear to have died around the time that Theudas was beheaded in 45–46 CE. Armenian sources claim that he was in alliance with Aretas, King of Arabian Petra, and actually sent forces to aid him in his mini-war with the Herodian Tetrarch Herod Antipas, husband of Herodias, after John the Baptist’s death.

In approximately the year 49 CE, the Romans appear to have carved up parts of this area and given them to Herod of Chalcis’ son Aristobulus, the
second
husband of Herodias’ infamous daughter Salome; these two advertise themselves on their coinage as ‘Great Lovers of Caesar’. This gave Herodians a foothold in these domains and was in exchange for Agrippa II succeeding to his father’s Kingdom, which his uncle Herod of Chalcis had been holding for him. It is this Herod we consider to be alluded to in the execution of ‘James the brother of John’ in Acts and ultimately responsible for the beheading of ‘
Theudas
’.

Not only do the conditions of Izates’ circumcision concur perfectly with the outlook of James, as expressed by refraction either in Paul’s Letters or the Letter of James, but the whole episode harmonizes with the theme of Helen’s extreme Naziritism from Rabbinic sources. For the new
Galilean
teacher, Izates ‘was guilty of breaking the Law and bringing offence to God himself’, and he is advised ‘not only to
read the Law
, but to
do what was commanded in it’
. For James, as at Qumran, ‘
doing what was commanded
’ is paramount and the point was, ‘whoever shall keep the whole of the Law, but stumble on one (small point) is guilty of breaking it all’. It should be clear that, according to the parameters of the Letter of James, Izates’ teacher is ‘Jamesian’.

James’ Naziritism and the Poor

Helen’s ‘Naziritism’ is also exactly in conformity with this aspect of James’ person and behaviour, as we have been observing it in early Church sources. The terms of such Naziritism are laid out in the chapter on Naziritism following that on the suspected adulteress in Numbers 5–6. This Naziritism is also expressed in the penance James imposes on Paul, before Paul is finally mobbed by the Jewish crowd in the Temple and rescued by Roman troops stationed there. These last were perhaps already on the alert to intervene in this manner following Paul’s convenient stopover in Caesarea – the Roman administrative centre in Palestine – where Acts pictures the ‘prophet Agabus’ as warning him not to go up to Jerusalem.

In the case of Paul and the ‘four others’, whose expenses Acts informs us he must pay, it is a temporary form of Naziritism. Here mythologization does seem finally to have gone by the boards, because Paul is obviously perceived of as being ‘Rich’ and capable of paying for these others. He himself avers the pains he went to in order to collect funds before going up to Jerusalem, presumably so that he could make a claim on the basis of such collections (1 Cor. 16:1–9 and 2 Cor. 8:1–9:15). In the case of Helen, too, her Naziritism was supposed to have been temporary, though in Rabbinic sources, however exaggerated, it was to last for
twenty-one years
. So in their own queer way these claims do begin to verge on life-long Naziritism of a Jamesian kind.

So we are entitled to say that Jamesian Christianity and the approach reflected in the Dead Sea Scrolls, which put so much emphasis on the ‘Perfection of Holiness’ and the ‘wilderness Way’, involved a stress on Naziritism. This included abstention from ‘eating and drinking’ – as Paul or Rabbinic literature would express it and, as both also appear to imply, abstention from eating meat. This last Paul confirms in Romans 14:2 and 1 Corinthians 8:13, when talking about the ‘weakness’ of his opponents whom he declines to name, though they are obviously important because Paul calls them ‘Hebrews’, ‘Servants of Righteousness’, and ‘Apostles of the Highest Rank’. Not only does the theme of this abstention from eating and drinking get turned around in the Gospels into its mirror opposite, but finally this emphasis on Naziritism, too, becomes transmuted into something involving a
geographical location
– the same way that the Galilean terminology does. In this case, the phrase, ‘He shall
be called a Nazirite
’, in this instance literally ‘Nazoraean’ – attributed to ‘the Prophets’ (Mt 2:23), becomes Jesus came from ‘Nazareth’ or that Jesus is a ‘Nazrene’.

In both Judaism and Islam, Christians are called either ‘
Nozrim
’ or ‘
Nasrani
’s, emanating of course from this ‘
Nazirite
’ ideology or the related play on it in Hebrew hinted at here, ‘the Nazoraeans’. This, too, derives from a Hebrew root, meaning ‘keeping’, namely, ‘keeping the commands of their father’ or ‘keeping their secrets’. The Nazirite, of course, was just an extreme example of this, but even here the wordplay is homophonic, ‘Nazirite’ carrying the meaning of ‘abstain’ or ‘keep away from’ – the language of James’ directives to overseas communities, as Acts reproduces them. In fact, in Hebrew, these would actually have been expressed in terms of the Hebrew verb, ‘
lehinnazer
’ or ‘
lehazzir
’ – as they are in the Damascus Document – the Hebrew root of the word ‘Nazirite’ in English.
7

In addition to this usage ‘keep away from’, based on the Hebrew root
N–Z–R
, the terminology
‘linzor et ha-Brit
’ (‘to keep the Covenant’) actually exists in the Scrolls and is a synonym for a parallel usage found there, ‘the Sons of Zadok’. The latter, as we have seen in the Community Rule, are defined as ‘the Keepers of the Covenant’ (the ‘
Shomrei ha-Brit
’); the former is found throughout the Damascus Document.
8
It will also be recalled that the latter are defined in the Damascus Document as ‘those who will
stand in the Last Days
’. The ‘keeping’ aspect of this terminology is exactly the definition emphasized by modern-day offshoots of this orientation, ‘the Sabaeans of the marshes’ in Southern Iraq, who still hold the memory of John the Baptist dear and call their Priests, ‘Nazoraeans’.
9

This kind of wordplay, of course, moves into a further adumbration of the ‘Sons of Zadok’ terminology at Qumran, the ‘
Moreh ha-Zedek
’ or the ‘Teacher of Righteousness’, and we have come full circle. This is
exactly
the role James played in all early Christian literature, evinced by his cognomen or title ‘James the Righteous’, so called because of the
extreme Righteousness
he practised, both in his uncompromising Naziritism and the
doctrine of Righteousness
he presumably taught.

The term, as we have seen, develops out of following the ‘Righteousness’ Commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself’, to its absolute limits, that is, that you cannot be completely Righteous towards your fellow man if there is economic inequality. At Qumran, this is expressed in the Damascus Document as follows:

(You shall)
separate between polluted and pure and distinguish between Holy and profane
. . . according to the Commandment of those entering
the New Covenant in the Land of Damascus
to set up the Holy Things according to their precise specifications,
to love each man his brother as himself, to strengthen the hand of the Meek, the Poor, and the Convert
…
to keep away from fornication
…
to separate from all pollutions according to Law
. And no man shall
defile his Holy Spirit
, which God separated for them. Rather all should
walk in these things in Perfect Holiness
on the basis of all they were instructed in of the Covenant of God, Faithfully promising them that they
will live for a thousand Generations
.
10

This is also exemplified in the Gospel picture of Jesus by favourite sayings like ‘sooner would a camel go through the eye of a needle than a Rich Man to Heaven’ (Mt 19:24 and pars.) or, better still, in the denunciations of ‘the Rich’ found in the Letter of James.

Of course these denunciations of the Rich and Riches are also strong in the Qumran documents and run the gamut of almost all Josephus’ notices about ‘Deceivers’ and ‘impostors’ leading the people astray by going out in the wilderness, there to show them ‘the signs of their impending freedom’ or ‘Salvation’. In fact, at the actual moment of burning the palaces of the most hated and Richest of the High Priests, Ananias, and also the Rich Herodians, Bernice and Agrippa II (Queen Helen’s palace and those of her two sons are spared until the Romans put them to the torch at its conclusion),
11
Josephus says these partisans and extreme
Sicarii
‘
turn the Poor against the Rich
’ and, in the process,
burn all the debt records
.

Hillel, the proverbial leader of Pharisaic Judaism, whose descendants became, after the destruction of the Temple, the Roman Patriarchs of Palestine, responsible among other things for collecting taxes – is, in fact, reputed to have made the continuation of these debts possible even past Sabbatical years by a legal device known in Rabbinic literature as ‘the
Prozbul
’ when, in theory, they were supposed to be forgiven.
12
James 5:1–5, by contrast, rails against ‘
the Rich
’ in the most apocalyptic and uncompromising manner threatening them, as we have seen, with
the coming Vengeance ‘of the Lord of Host
s’. Immediately following this, James 5:6 blames ‘
the Rich’
for ‘
putting the Righteous One to death
’ – presumably ‘Jesus’, but possibly even James himself – in contrast to Paul who, in 1 Thessalonians 2:14–15, rather blames (in his usual fashion) ‘
the Jews
’.