James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls I (13 page)

Either one is willing to accept that a character as important as James could be just introduced into the text of Acts at this point in such an off-hand manner, or something is missing or has been discarded. He is obviously already the leader of ‘the Jerusalem Church’ and continues in this role for the rest of the book.

The actual episode occurs just after Peter, who has been having visions via the mechanism of the Holy Spirit and experiencing voices crying out to him from Heaven on the rooftop in Jaffa, goes to visit the household of a Roman Centurion named ‘Cornelius’ (Acts 9–11). All these episodes have as their root the admission of Gentiles or those who do not follow Jewish religious Law – ‘the Law of Moses’ – into the Church. Peter escapes from prison after having been arrested for some unexplained reason by ‘Herod’ (Acts 12:6). All these points need exposition. We are in the thick of the Jewish historical world in Jerusalem and along the sea coast of Palestine of the late 30s and early 40’s CE.

The Herods

Setting aside for the moment the actual historicity of this curious Peter or Simon, involved in these kinds of activities along the Palestinian coast, and who he might have been – Josephus will tell us about a parallel ‘Simon’, the head of an ‘Assembly’ (
Ecclesia
) in Jerusalem in the same period, whom ‘Herod’ would have very good cause to arrest or execute – it would be important to grasp who all these characters designated in the New Testament as ‘Herod the King’ actually were. Acts has this particular Herod beheading James the brother of John at the beginning of the chapter and dying ‘eaten by worms’ at the end of the chapter (12:23).

Curiously, the next chapter, 13, in swinging back to Paul and describing the nature and composition of his Antioch ‘Church’ or ‘Assembly’ (
Ecclesia
again), begins with a reference to another ‘Herod’ – ‘Herod the Tetrarch’. This notice is referring to the ‘prophets and teachers of the Church in Antioch’. Aside from Barnabas and Saul, these include someone referred to as ‘Manaen, the foster brother of Herod the Tetrarch’. This is not the same ‘Herod’ as in chapter 12. Whatever one might wish to say about him, the fact of a Herodian member of the founding Community for Gentile Christianity in Antioch is embarrassing enough. Ultimately, if one drops what is probably another nonsense name, ‘Manaen’, and transfers the descriptive phrase ‘the foster brother of Herod the Tetrarch’ to Saul or Paul, one might have a more accurate description of the truth of the matter.
When speaking about this ‘Herod the Tetrarch’, though, there can be little doubt that Acts means
Herod Antipas
(7–39 CE).

Antipas was one of the several Herods, sons of Herod the Great. By this time the family was referring to its members, much like all the ‘
Caesars
’ (whom it was aping in more ways then one), as ‘
Herods
’. This Herod, along with Herod Archelaus (4 BCE–7 CE) whom we have already mentioned above in connection with the 4 BCE disturbances and the Census Uprising, was the son of Herod’s Samaritan wife. He is the Herod responsible for John the Baptist’s death and the one King Aretas in Transjordan went to war with because he had divorced his (Aretas’) daughter to marry his (Antipas’) niece Herodias. He also appears in Luke interviewing Jesus.

Herod the Great had numerous sons by some nine or ten different wives, only a few of whom could by any yardstick be reckoned as ‘Jewish’. This will be an important problem for our period, not only as far as the Dead Sea Scrolls are concerned, but also for the Jerusalem Church, that is, who will be Jewish and what effect this perception has on the Jewish mass. If we take the Rabbinic delineation of this problem, the matrilinear yardstick – if your mother was Jewish, then you were Jewish – Herod did have at least two
Jewish
wives, both daughters of High Priests and both called Mariamme (‘Miriam’ or ‘Mary’).

The first Mariamme carried within her veins the last of the Maccabean Priest line. On both sides of her family she was of the blood of the heroic Maccabees, the Jewish High Priest line defunct after Herod. This in itself is
a tragic enough story. Herod married her
, seemingly by force,
when he was besieging
the Temple in 37 BCE. Ultimately he had her executed on the charge that she had been unfaithful with his brother Joseph (the original ‘Joseph and Mary’ story?). In time, Herod also executed his two sons by her, who had been educated in Rome, because he feared the Jewish crowd would put them on the Throne in his place – presumably because of their Maccabean blood – though not before they had reached majority and produced offspring of their own.

In a similar manner years before, he also had her brother, a youth named Jonathan (Aristobulus in Greek, that is, Aristobulus III – the Maccabees often combined Greek with Hebrew names), killed for the same reason when he came of age and was able to don the High Priestly robes. It was the assumption of the High Priesthood by this Jonathan that probably explains Mariamme’s willingness to marry Herod in the first place. In one of the most tragic moments in Jewish history as we saw, Herod, like some modern Joseph Stalin or Adolf Hitler, had Jonathan drowned while frolicking in a pool at his winter palace outside Jericho – this after the Jewish crowd wept when the boy donned the High Priestly vestments of his ancestors. The time was 36 BCE after Herod had assumed full power in Palestine under Roman sponsorship as a semi-independent King, the preferred manner of Roman government in that recently acquired part of their Empire.

Herod, not being of Jewish blood or origins, might have been able to secure his kingship from the Romans in replacing the Maccabees as Jewish kings, but he was unable to secure their High Priesthood as well, however he might have wanted it. There can be little doubt that in arranging the marriage with Herod, theoretically forbidden under Jewish law (certainly as advocated by ‘the Zealots’), those left in the Maccabean family aspired to rescue whatever remained of the fortunes of their family after thirty years of civil strife and war with Rome had so destroyed it.

Grateful to a fault, Herod proceeded to decimate the remainder of the Maccabean family, even that part of it that survived by subordinating itself to him and accommodating itself to Rome: first Jonathan; then Mariamme herself – though Josephus portrays Herod, soap-opera style, as being both in love with and hating her at the same time; then Hyrcanus II, Jonathan’s grandfather from the generation of the 60s when the fraternal strife that resulted in foreign occupation began.

This Hyrcanus had been Judas Maccabee’s great-grandnephew and had first introduced Herod’s father Antipater to a position of power as his chief minister and go-between with the Romans and Arab/Idumaean power across the Jordan and in Petra. It was he who probably arranged
Herod’s marriage with Mariamme in the first place. As noted above,
Herod then executed his own two sons by her – again probably for the same reasons – because the crowd, being nationalistic and Maccabean in sentiment, preferred them to him. Finally he executed Mariamme’s mother and Hyrcanus’ daughter, the wily old dowager Salome, who was the last to go besides these.
1
When Herod was done, there were no Maccabeans left, except third-generation claimants in his own family, whose blood had been severely cut by his own over three generations of cleverly crafted marriages.

The Marriage Policy of Herodians

The Herodians in the third generation – the time of John the Baptist – descended from Herod and the last Maccabean Princess Mariamme, were one-quarter Jewish. The other blood line that flowed into them was carefully crafted and Idumaean/Arab. Herod himself was primarily what today we would call ‘Arab’ in origin. In fact his behaviour, particularly where sexual mores and marital practices are concerned, is still very much that of what might be called a typical Middle Eastern chieftain or potentate.

Herod pursued the policy for his descendants of
niece marriage
or
marriage to
close family relatives
, usually cousins. This marital policy, roundly
condemned in the Dead Sea Scrolls, is probably the key datum of the kind we called ‘internal’ – as opposed to ‘external’ – for dating Qumran documents. So obsessed are the Qumran documents with this kind of sexual and marital behaviour that we have used this to insist that key documents making such complaints must be referring to a
Herodian Establishment
. There is no indication that Maccabeans previously, that is, before they were ‘
grafted
’ to Herodians, indulged in this kind of behaviour. For Herodians from 60 BCE onwards, this kind of behaviour – considered ‘incest’ at Qumran – was a matter of actual family policy preserving their mastery in Palestine and elsewhere in Asia.

It is this kind of sexual behaviour that will provoke the ire of leaders – now considered ‘Christian’ – such as John the Baptist against Herodians. The popular picture of a Salome dancing at Herod’s
Birthday Party
is just scriptural tomfoolery, although as always in these instances, not without a seed of historical reality – in this case, the seed is the problem of Herodian family morals and their sexual practices that were objected to by all these Messianic leaders like John the Baptist and after him, presumably Jesus, whoever he was.

The picture, therefore, that we have in the Gospels of a Jesus eating with ‘
tax collectors and Sinners’
or speaking favourably about ‘
harlots
’ or ‘
prostitutes
’ is again just part of this casuistry.
2
Herodian Princesses, as we shall see, will be seen by the Jewish nationalistic mass as nothing better than ‘harlots’ or ‘prostitutes’ – Herodias is a case in point, but there will be others – and this issue, ‘
zanut
’ or ‘fornication’, dominates the mindset of those responsible for the Dead Sea Scrolls, as it does early New Testament documents like the Letter of James – so much so as to appear like an obsession. We will also be able show that other nationalist leaders like the Simon mentioned in Josephus above, ‘the Head of an Assembly’ or ‘Church’ of his own in Jerusalem, will confront the Herodians in the Hellenistic centre of Caesarea on the marital practices of Herodians, in particular Herodian Princesses.

In this next generation – the fourth after the original Herod in the 40’s–60s CE and the period James held sway in Jerusalem – the principal representatives of this line, now one-eighth Maccabean or Jewish, are three Herodian Princesses, two of whom make an appearance in chapters 24–26 of the Book of Acts, Bernice and Drusilla. Both of these princesses have been divorced. Both ultimately took up with foreigners and deserted Judaism altogether. Bernice was not only divorced,
she married her uncle as well, Herod of Chalcis,
her father Agrippa’s brother. Agrippa II, her brother who becomes king in the 50s and 60s just preceding the Uprising, also appears in Acts on her arm chatting amicably with Paul in prison (25:13). This is perhaps the original for the intervening interview in the Gospels between Jesus and Herod the Tetrarch (Luke 23:7–12), who really would have had no business in Jerusalem, his Tetrarchy – literally his ‘fourth’ of the Kingdom – being in Galilee and across the Jordan in Perea where John the Baptist was executed.

Here it is possible to lay another sexual-mores charge at the feet of these Herodian Kings and Princesses, ‘incest’, the basis in any event of the ‘niece-marriage’ charge so striking in the Scrolls. ‘Niece marriage’, on the other hand, has never been an infraction for Talmudic Judaism, nor is it in Judaism succeeding to it to this day. The Scrolls also pointedly condemn marriage with close family cousins on the basis of a generalization of the Deuteronomic Law of incest, and Josephus tells us that it was reputed that Bernice actually had an incestuous relationship with her brother Agrippa II.
3
The picture in Acts does not gainsay this. In fact, to some extent it reinforces it.

Both Claudius and Caligula were reputed to be great friends of Agrippa I, who had been brought up with them in Augustus’ Imperial Household in Rome after his father, the second of Mariamme’s two sons by Herod had been dispatched by him in 7 BCE. These third and fourth Julio-Claudians restored the Throne to this particular line which had been denied Herod’s descendants in the aftermath of the uprisings from 4 BC to 7 CE – the period in which the Gospels date the birth of Jesus. Therefore, the various tetrarchs, ethnarchs, and governors in the period till Agrippa I’s re-emergence in 37 CE. This was the line, of course, with the original Maccabean royal blood which, however diluted, was obviously both meaningful and significant to the Romans.

Agrippa I was restored to the Throne of Palestine following the death of Tiberius, who had put him in prison because of his too-friendly relations with Caligula and Claudius. Importantly, too, his restoration also followed the removal of Pontius Pilate from Palestine – after complaints like those of Philo’s about his extreme venality and brutality – in the year 37 CE, not long after the death of John the Baptist according to the timeframe of Josephus’
Antiquities
.

In the previous generation, Herodias had first been married to one non-Maccabean uncle – supposedly named ‘Philip’ in the New Testament, but actually named ‘Herod’. After divorcing him, she married another Herodian uncle, descended from a
non-Maccabean, Samaritan blood-line. This one, as we saw, Herod Antipas
(7–39 CE), was the Herod known as ‘Herod the Tetrarch’ in the New Testament (Lk 3:19 and Acts 13:1) and the individual both Josephus and the Gospels blame for the death of John the Baptist.