James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls I (14 page)

For his part, John is pictured in the Gospels as objecting to Herodias’ divorce and remarriage on the basis of an obscure point in Mosaic law – violating the law of levirite marriage, a point that might have appealed to someone taking his view of the Jews in Palestine from books (Mk 6:17 and pars.). It was permitted to marry one’s brother’s or half-brother’s wife, if that individual was childless and one were, so to speak, ‘raising up seed unto your brother’ which would be counted for your brother’s inheritance or posterity.
For the New Testament, this was not the case, but there is nowhere any external proof of this.

In fact, the New Testament has the situation totally wrong here. The man it is calling ‘Philip’ is rather only called ‘Herod’ in Josephus. Actually, he had at least one daughter by Herodias, the famous ‘Salome’ (though she is not identified by name in the New Testament even though most people think she is. One has to go to Josephus to for this). The ‘Philip’ in Josephus is the Tetrarch of Trachonitis in Syria a little south of Damascus. He is
not Salome’s father
,
but rather her husband
! It is he, Josephus specifically remarks, who dies childless, making way for Salome’s next marriage to
her mother’s brother’s
son Aristobulus. But the Gospels, as we presently have them, have conflated all these things, producing what we today perceive as truth. So ingrained has this picture become that it is now automatic as well to speak of
two Philips
and this
Herod
as ‘
Herod
Philip
’.

Actually, however, to the non-Roman, non-Hellenistic native eye, there were all these other sexual and marital infractions sufficient to explain John’s objections to Herodias, in particular, her relations with
not one uncle
,
but two
, and her
self-divorce
, which even Josephus admits ‘violated the Laws of our country’. This is the kind of ‘divorce’ the Dead Sea Scrolls so protest against and, no doubt, John the Baptist as well.

It would be legitimate to query at this point, why among all these Herodian progeny – and the Herodian family was beginning to resemble a vast network like some royal families in the Middle East in our own time – was Herodias so desirable that two uncles were intent on having her, even to the extent of shedding John’s blood and fighting a war with the Arabian King Aretas of Petra because of her?

The answer is twofold. The first is that of all the various Herodian lines, this Maccabean one was the ‘Richest’ – a factor further highlighted by the wealth that came to her brother Agrippa after his appointment as actual ‘King’ by his boon companion Caligula. Josephus specifically calls Agrippa I’s daughter, Bernice, one of the ‘Richest’ women in Palestine and Herodias probably was not far behind her where this was concerned.

This is another important theme in our texts, ‘the polluted Evil Riches’ of the Establishment, a theme along with ‘fornication’ which is again paramount in both the Scrolls and the Letter of James. It is also prominent in the Gospels and in Josephus, all purporting to be first-century texts. This is certainly the principal reason behind Herodias’ attractiveness to less fortunate, collateral Herodian lines, such as those of Herod (in the Gospels, ‘Philip’), the son of Herod’s second wife by the name of Mariamme, and
Antipas, only the son of his Samaritan wife. It was also no doubt an
important reason for the involvement of the future Roman Emperor Titus with Bernice, Herodias’ niece, as it no doubt was a century before for the various parvenu paramours of Cleopatra.

But there is a second reason as well, royal blood – in Cleopatra’s case, stemming from those connected to Alexander the Great; in Herodias’, the blood of the Maccabees in her veins. Apart from her ‘Riches’, this is sufficient to explain all this interest in developing a progeny-bearing relationship with her. But John the Baptist certainly would have had quite a few other objections besides ‘Riches’ that would have met the Qumran criteria for condemnation as ‘unlawful’ (Matt. 14:4). Where
fornication
was concerned, ‘divorce’, ‘polygamy’, ‘niece marriage’, and ‘incest’ – including the marriage of close cousins – and the Herodian family could certainly be accused of practicing most or all of these.

When the Letter of James objects to ‘fornication’, all of these aspects of what was considered ‘fornication’ in this period by documents like the Dead Sea Scrolls should be uppermost in the reader’s mind. Where, of course, those with royal blood are concerned, the Temple Scroll, drawing on the Deuteronomic King Law, adds another – marriage to a foreigner, insisting that the King should marry once and only once in the lifetime of his wife and this only to a Jewish woman.
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It is interesting that for Matthew 21:32, ‘John came to you in
the Way of Righteousness
, and
you did not believe him
[note the Pauline thrust here] but
the tax collectors and the harlots believed
him’
. ‘The Way of Righteousness’ is, of course, a favourite Qumranism, but the true situation as far as John is concerned is rather
the opposite
. Aside from the joke of having ‘the harlots believing’ John (not to mention the travesty), if one understands that at this point the Roman tax collectors in Palestine were the Herodians, then the farcical thrust of this saying ascribed to Jesus in this supposedly
most Jewish
of all the Gospels is actually quite amusing. Those who inserted it into the Jewish
Messiah’s
mouth, no doubt, had a most macabre sense of humour. The saying of Jesus from the Pseudoclementines about being able ‘to detect false coin from true’ begins to develop the force of a hammer-like blow.

James the Brother of John and Theudas

Either Agrippa I, then, or his brother Herod of Chalcis, would appear to be the ‘Herod the King’ in Acts, portrayed as ‘stretching forth his hands to ill-treat some of those of the Assembly’ or ‘the Church’ (12:1). In the very next sentence in Acts, this ‘Herod the King’ puts ‘James
the brother of John
to death with the sword’, leading up to James’ first appearance just a few lines further in the text in the same chapter!

This ‘beheading’ (which is what is meant by ‘putting to death with the sword’) parallels one mentioned in Josephus already alluded to somewhat obliquely in Acts 5:36 – the execution of ‘
Theudas
’. This was in the course of the suppression of these various seditious and charismatic leaders and Messianic pretenders that Josephus considers so dangerous. In fact, Acts 5:36 uses the same Greek word for ‘put to death’ in referring to him as Acts 12:2 uses in referring to the ‘
beheading’
of ‘James the brother of John’.

If one looks at the Talmudic enumerations of the various Jewish kinds of execution of this period found in Tractate
Sanhedrin
of the
Mishnah
, one will find that beheading was applied in Jewish religious Law to cases of subversion, treachery, insurrectionary activities, or the like. Some of the other kinds of execution described in
Sanhedrin
are quite gruesome, including pouring rocks down on someone or forcing burning pitch down his throat, but however tendentious Talmudic materials can sometimes be, crucifixion was not one of them. In fact, crucifixion or its Jewish equivalent, ‘
hanging upon a tree’
, was quite specifically forbidden under Jewish Law (Deut. 21:23).

For his part, Josephus mentions at least four important beheadings in this period from the time of the Maccabees to the fall of the Temple. The first two are Maccabeans trying to regain their Kingdom following Herod’s takeover in 37 BCE, both sons of Aristobulus II.
5
The other two are Herod the Tetrarch’s beheading of John the Baptist and the beheading of Theudas in the period of Herod of Chalcis and the Roman Governor Fadus (
c.
45 CE).

Apart from the impersonal mass of crucifixions by the Romans up to the fall of the Temple, Josephus mentions two that stand out: Jesus’ (if not an interpolation) and that of James and Simon, the two sons of Judas the Galilean, the founder of ‘the Zealot Movement’, who were executed a year or two after Theudas.

Of stonings, Josephus really only mentions those of Honi or Onias the Righteous, just before the Romans first assaulted the Temple in 63 BCE presaging Aristobulus II’s downfall; James in 62 CE; and another son or grandson of Judas the Galilean, one Menachem, in the events surrounding the outbreak of the Uprising in 66 CE. Puerile as these authors in the Roman period often were, had there been others, Josephus probably could not have resisted telling us about them.

Both ‘James the brother of John’ in Acts and ‘
Theudas
’ in
Antiquities
are executed around the same time by either the same individual or set of individuals and, regardless of Acts’ agenda, one would assume for similar reasons. As we saw, Acts 5:36 uses the very same Greek allusion ‘put to death’ in referring to Theudas’ execution as Acts 12:2 does in referring to ‘James the brother of John’.

Theudas is an otherwise unknown individual. The reference to his execution in a speech put in the mouth of Paul’s Pharisee teacher Gamaliel gives rise to the well-known anachronism in Acts 5. This, in turn, is tied to another deletion or oversight, the crucifixion of Judas the Galilean’s two sons, James and Simon, which follows almost directly thereafter in Josephus’
Antiquities
. In Gamaliel’s speech, Theudas is represented as somehow being related to the activities of Judas the Galilean, but arriving on the scene before him.

Judas the Galilean seems to have flourished from around the time of Herod’s death in 4 BCE to 7 CE, the time of the Tax Uprising that brought Herod’s son Archelaus’ crisis-ridden reign to an end. With the banishment of Archelaus, the Romans imposed direct rule, via governors who were obedient – and answerable – to the Emperor and Senate, until the time of Agrippa I’s emergence in 37 CE. The period in between not only turns out to be a period when we have a paucity of historical data compared to the ones just preceding and following it, but also the time identified by most as precisely that of Jesus’ lifetime. As the author of the Book of Acts has Gamaliel euphemistically describe Judas the Galilean’s death: ‘After this one [Theudas], Judas the Galilean arose in the Days of the Census and led many people astray. He perished and all of them scattered’ (5:37); but neither he nor Josephus tells us how or under what circumstances. Rather Josephus in the
Antiquities
again turns to the subject of Judas the Galilean when discussing the execution of ‘
James and Simon
, the sons of Judas the Galilean … who caused the people to revolt when Cyrenius came to take an accounting of the estates of the Jews’. This would make ‘James and Simon’ quite old, since, as he describes it, their crucifixion appears to take place coincident with the Famine ca. 46–8 CE (
Ant.
20.101–2).

The Census of Cyrenius and the Sects of the Jews

The Census of Cyrenius, imposed after a series of uprisings led by Judas and other ‘Messianic’ leaders, which Archelaus (4 BCE–7 CE) was unable to control, is the event seized on as well by the author of Luke – the author also credited with Acts – to fix the date of Jesus’ birth. This, of course, makes the birth of Jesus coincident with the birth of sectarian strife generally – in particular, what Josephus is calling the birth of the ‘Zealot’ Movement and what we would call the ‘Messianic Movement’. Though the point of Luke’s approach is to get Jesus to Bethlehem to be born, so much does it fly in the face of the parallel one in Matthew that nothing of certainty can be said with regard to Jesus’ birth at all, neither the place, the date, nor the political and social circumstances.

For Luke, if not Matthew, Jesus’ parents are already living in Galilee. But since David came from Bethlehem, in his view Jesus should be born there as well. Perhaps this was the popular religion, but there is no known prophecy specifically delineating such a requirement. In fact, further information regarding this requirement in John 7:42 has the crowd doubting Jesus’ Bethlehem birth and therefore specifically denying that he comes from there. However this may be, the Lukan author uses the patently artificial stratagem of a Roman-imposed census to get Jesus’ family back to Bethlehem from Galilee and to develop his very popular ‘no room at the inn’ scenario. As a result, the Christ-child, like the Oriental mystery-religion god Mithra before him, is born in a manger, a favourite biblical folk tale without any historical substance whatsoever.

But the Census of Cyrenius, referred to by Luke both in his Gospel and Acts, does have substance. Cyrenius was Governor of Syria, to whom the task fell to take an evaluation of the property of Palestine for taxation purposes in advance of the imposition of direct Roman rule following the removal of the inept Archelaus. Josephus refers to this on three occasions in his works, the last, as we saw, when discussing the execution of James and Simon, the two sons of Judas the Galilean, in the
Antiquities
. It is this execution in the year 48 CE that explains the anachronism in the speech attributed to Gamaliel in Acts – better still would be to Josephus, once one realizes that Acts’ author(s), like many a Roman historian thereafter, was dependent on the latter (not to mention a few other sources).