James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls I (25 page)

But this position is completely gainsaid in the series of parables – also in Matthew – having to do with ‘the Tares of the Field’ and ‘the Enemy who sowed’ the Evil seed (13:24–41). These are just about the only anti–Pauline parables in the Gospels and end with the characteristic condemnation of ‘those
doing
’ or ‘
practicing
Lawlessness’, who ‘shall be
cast
into a furnace of Fire’ (
balousin
– 13:41–43). We shall see how this imagery will recur in both the Letter of James and the Habakkuk
Pesher
from Qumran.

Matthew follows this up with another parable comparing the Kingdom of Heaven ‘to a net being
cast
into the sea’, which like John 21 makes repeated mentions of ‘casting down’ (
bletheise
– 13:47–50). The unifying allusion in this parable, having to do with fish again –
rotten fish
– with ‘the Field of Tares’, is ‘casting them (
balousin
) into the furnace of Fire’ (13:50). Here, the reference is rather to ‘
separating the Wicked
(the rotten fish)
from the midst of the Righteous
’ rather than the Scrolls’
separating the Righteous from the midst of the Wicked
.

Even more startling than any of these is the amazing reversal one finds in Matthew’s version of Judas
Iscariot
’s suicide. Like the matter of the prostitute’s wages, this also has to do with the High Priests and the Temple Treasury: ‘And the High Priests took the pieces of silver and said: “It is not Lawful to put them in the Treasury, since it is
the price of blood”
’ (Mt 27:6). Not only does this incorporate a play on the banning of blood in
both
Jewish dietary
and
sexual prohibitions, but also on Paul’s contention that ‘all things are Lawful for me’. This is the position Matthew basically pictures Jesus as adopting in the ‘unwashed hands’ episode above that nothing ‘entering the mouth defiles a man’. As Paul puts this in 1 Corinthians 6:13, immediately following his first ‘all things Lawful’ permission and also grouping dietary prohibitions with sexual ones: ‘Food is for the belly and the belly for foods, but God will bring both to nothing. However the body is not for fornication, but for the Lord’ (1 Cor. 6:13).

The subject of ‘blood’, central to both of these, will also be integral to ‘the Cup of the New Covenant in his blood’ ideology, with follows in this section of 1 Corinthians (10:16–11:25). In Luke’s version of ‘the Last Supper’, this will be ‘the Cup of the New Covenant in my blood which is poured out for you’ (Luke 22:20). This will represent yet another esoteric reformulation into Greek from the Hebrew ‘New Covenant in the Land of Damascus’, found in both the Damascus Document and the Habbakuk
Pesher
from Qumran – ‘
Dam
’, the Hebrew word for ‘blood’, being equivalent to the first syllable of the word ‘Damascus’ as written in Greek; ‘
Chos
’, the Hebrew word for ‘Cup’, the last.
2

This proscription on ‘blood’, part and parcel of the ‘First Covenant’ with Moses on Mount Sinai and the legendary ‘Noahic’ one preceding it,
3
is the first and most fundamental element in James’ prohibitions to overseas communities, to which Paul seems to be responding in 1 Corinthians 6–11.

The proscription on blood also relates to James’ extreme Naziritism and vegetarianism, not to mention his ‘life-long virginity’.
4
In turn, all of these will have to do with a group embodying many such ‘Nazirite’ traits, the ‘Rechabites’, known as well for their
proscription on wine
, another trait early Church sources will ascribe to James.

In Hebrew, the word ‘Nazirite’, meaning ‘consecrated’ or ‘separated’, is based on a root meaning
set aside
or
keep away from
. One should remark the play on this word represented by the designation ‘Nazoraean’, applied in Jacob of Kfar Sechania’s story to Jesus and, it would appear, to James’ followers generally. In Hebrew ‘Nazoraean’ (sometimes ‘Nazarean’ in Scripture) has a slightly different root, meaning ‘keeping’ or ‘Keeper’. In Scripture, too, this sometimes – but not always – gets rephrased, particularly in translation, as ‘of Nazareth’!

Not only is this ‘Nazirite’ ideology sometimes expressed as ‘Nazoraean’, but one should note the play on it represented by the Hebrew term ‘
Nezer
’, ‘the Crown’ or ‘diadem’ worn by High Priests, which bore a plate inscribed with the words, ‘Holy to God’. Both ‘the diadem’ and these words will have special import for notices recorded in early Church tradition about James.

In Hebrew, ‘
Nezer
’ also has the secondary meaning of
the unshorn locks of the Nazirite
– his ‘Crown’, so to speak – which tradition also says was
worn by James
. This symbolism will have particular relevance for Acts’ substitution of the stoning of Stephen, a name also bearing the meaning of ‘Crown’ in Greek, for the attack on or stoning of James.

These references to ‘blood’ (or ‘wine’) not only circulate somewhere around Judas
Iscariot
’s attendance at the Last Supper, but Matthew also goes on to describe how the High Priests ‘bought the Potter’s Field for a cemetery for foreigners’ with the money or ‘price of blood’ that Judas ‘cast into’ the Temple Treasury (Mt 27:5–6). This episode is transformed in Mark and Luke into Jesus’ parable about the ‘Poor’ widow ‘casting’ her one or two mites ‘into the Temple Treasury’.

It is also echoed somewhat in Jesus’ saying about the unclean things of the belly ‘being cast into the toilet bowl’. In our view, the presentation of Jesus in Rabbinic tradition, basically supporting extreme purity and cleanliness, is a truer version of what an
Historical
Jesus would have actually said than any of these others, which obviously reflect Paul’s perspective of the subject.

One should also note the partial play, in Matthew’s reference to ‘the Potter’s Field’ or ‘Field of Blood’, on his earlier parable about ‘the Tares of the Field’ (13:36). Even more germane is the
Potter
part of this
Field
allusion. This will allow us to unravel the whole tangle of these materials and connect them to the ‘Rechabites’, which will ultimately be – along with Ebionites, Nazoraeans, and Essenes – another synonym for James’ ‘Jerusalem Community’.

The Rechabites, their Abstention from Wine, and the Cup of Blood

In identifying this ‘Potter’s Field’ with ‘the Field of Blood’ (27:7–8), Matthew says he is going to quote a passage from the Prophet Jeremiah, who first extensively delineated who these ‘Rechabites’ were. Instead, he quotes a passage from
the Prophet Zechariah
, which he paraphrases as follows:

Then that which was spoken by
Jeremiah the Prophet
(
thus
) was fulfilled (that is, when the High Priests took the pieces of silver that Judas
Iscariot
had cast into the Treasury and bought with them the Potter’s Field, ‘called the Field of Blood to this day’), saying ‘And I took the thirty pieces of silver, the price of him who was priced, on whom they of the sons of Israel set a price, and gave them for the Potter’s Field, as
the Lord had commanded me
’. (27:9-10)

To understand Matthew’s confusion about the source of this quotation, one must start with the allusion to ‘command’ in the last clause, ‘…the Potter’s Field, as the Lord had commanded me’. This nowhere appears in Zechariah, but it is the central focus of
Jeremiah
’s presentation of
Jonadab son of Rechab
’s ‘commands’ to his descendants not to drink wine, plant no field, nor build any permanent abode (Jer 35:1–19). Likewise, ‘the Potter’s Field’ does not appear in Zechariah 11, but only in Matthew’s paraphrase of it above.

Acts 1:18–19 provides a totally different picture, not based on Zechariah 11:12–13, nor mentioning any ‘Potters’ at all. Nor does Judas
Iscariot
‘hang himself’; rather he ‘falls face downwards, his entrails gushing out’. He buys his
own
‘Field’ out of his ‘Reward for Unrighteousness’, the ‘
Akeldama
, which is, in their own language, Field of Blood’. Judas doesn’t ‘cast’ thirty pieces of silver into the Temple Treasury, nor do the High Priests buy anything ‘with them’. In our view, the latter element comes from the story of Jacob of Sihnin above, where
the Priests
buy ‘
a
toilet
’ – the ‘price of blood’ or ‘bloody’ fornication (Deut. 23:18’s ‘prostitute’s hire’) being the key connection.

What
does
appear in Zechariah 11:13 is ‘cast them to the Potter in the House of God’, and this is what Matthew uses. The passage from Zechariah reads: ‘And the Lord said to me, “
Cast it to the Potter
(the reason for the ‘casting’ language regarding Judas’
casting down the pieces of silver in the Temple
in Matthew 27:5), a goodly price, that I was valued at by them”. And I took
the thirty pieces of silver and cast them to the Potter in the House of the Lord’
(11:12–13).

‘Casting to the Potter’ is normally taken as a euphemism for the Temple Treasury. This is clearly how Matthew understands it too in his version of how
Judas Iscariot cast the pieces of silver into the Temple,
not to mention the variation in Mark and Luke’s picture of the
Poor
widow casting her one or two mites
into the Temple Treasury
.

For Matthew 27:6, the High Priests now take the silver and say, ‘It is
not Lawful to put them into the Treasury
, because it is
the price of blood’
. The emphasis on ‘Lawfulness’ here brings us right back to Jacob’s anecdote about Jesus’ view of the ‘Lawfulness’ of ‘bringing a prostitute’s hire into the House of the Lord your God’. It also circles back to the contrapositive of this in Paul’s blanket permission, ‘all things are Lawful for me’.

The theme of ‘joining’, connected to both ‘a prostitute’s members’, and ‘the House of the Lord’ in 1 Corinthians 6:16–17, is also important in the Scrolls and will reappear in the Nahum
Pesher
and Damascus Document in the context of
strangers or foreigners
‘attaching themselves to’ or ‘joining’ the Community.
5
Even more significantly, it follows the Three Nets of Belial prohibitions on ‘fornication’, ‘polluting the Temple’, and the charge against the Establishment of ‘sleeping with women in their menstrual flow’. In the Damascus Document, this last becomes the bridge between the ‘fornication’ and ‘pollution of the Temple’ charges and, in it, all are inextricably connected.
6

Not only does it directly involve ‘blood’, it brings us back to Judas’ saying, ‘I have sinned, delivering up guiltless blood’ and the High Priests’ refusing to put ‘the price of blood’ into the Treasury in Matthew 27:4-6, not to mention Pilate ‘being guiltless of the blood of this Righteous One’ that follows in 27:24. In evoking this refusal on the part of the High Priests to put Judas’ silver pieces in the Treasury, Matthew now uses the ‘Potter’ allusion in the passage from Zechariah that he quoted in support of this to develop his crucial ‘Potter’s Field’ designation (Mt 27:7-9).

Again, none of these elements has survived in Acts, except the allusion to ‘
Akeldama
’ or ‘Field of Blood’, which appears to be connected as much to
the bloody fall
Judas takes as to ‘the price of blood’ it is supposedly bought with.

To bring us full circle, in Rabbinic tradition, the ‘Potters’ as in Matthew’s ‘Potter’s Field’ are, in fact,
also Rechabites
. These ‘Rechabites’, whom we mentioned above with regard to James’ Naziritism and
abstention from wine
– not to mention sexual activity – are defined in Rabbinic tradition and in Jeremiah as ‘keeping the oath’ of their father Jonadab the son of Rechab to ‘drink no wine, plant no field, nor build any permanent abode’, and are thought to have been ‘Potters’. The root used in the Rabbinic tradition to express this ‘keeping the oath’ is ‘
linzor
’, the root as well of
Nozrim
– ‘Christians’ in the
Talmud
– and
Nazoraeans
/‘Keepers’.
7
Interestingly, Matthew 26:71 now applies this ‘Nazoraean’ terminology to Jesus – this right after ‘the Last Supper’ and before his description of ‘the Potter’s Field’ and Pilate ‘washing his hands’.

It is this ‘
Potter
’ and ‘
Field
’ imagery that Matthew so deftly capitalizes on to build his version of Zechariah. Now the reason for this incongruous mention of the Prophet Jeremiah should be clear: it is in Jeremiah that ‘Jonadab son of Rechab’, the proverbial ‘father of the Rechabites’ and his ‘house’ are delineated. These are called
Rechabites
because they ‘
kept the Commandments
their Father
gave them
and
did all he commanded them
’ (35:18 – note the ‘doing’ emphasis here), including ‘dwelling in tents’ (35:10) and ‘
living on the ground like Strangers
’ (35:7). This is where the allusion to
command
or
commanded
that appears in Matthew’s version of Zechariah – which like ‘the Potter’s Field’ nowhere appears in the original – comes from.

In our view, these are the passages that originally appeared in the source underlying our present accounts – which also included the introduction of James missing from Acts in its present form. This source was using part of or the whole of Jeremiah 35:1-19 about ‘the Rechabites’, just like early Church sources thereafter, to explain the peculiar characteristics of James’ being. Matthew also took material from sources like those behind the Rabbinic story about Jacob of Kfar Sechania’s story about ‘
the High Priest’s privy
’ and overwrote them; Acts, sources behind the early Church accounts of the death of James to develop the story about ‘the suicide’ or ‘fall’ of Judas
Iscariot
.

‘The Cup of the New Covenant in His Blood’ and ‘Drinking No Wine’

This refusal on the part of the House of Rechab to ‘
drink wine
’ is exactly the behaviour of James in early Church sources. This then is reversed in the Synoptic Gospels with Jesus’
new
Commandment ‘to drink’
the wine at the Last Supper
– the wine in this case being
his
blood (Mt 26:27 and pars.).

We have already hinted at the relationship of ‘blood’ in this context to the terminology ‘Damascus’ and ‘the New Covenant erected in the Land of Damascus’ in the Damascus Document. In Matthew’s account of the Last Supper, Jesus takes the bread, blesses it, and bids all eat. Then he takes the cup, and bids all drink, words paralleled in 1 Corinthians 10:16 by Paul. Now the ‘blood’ is ‘the blood of the New Covenant’.

Matthew even employs the ‘pouring’ imagery of the Damascus Document as well but varied somewhat and in the latter applied to ‘the Man of Lying’ or ‘the Lying Spouter’. Now Matthew applies it, not to ‘Spouting’ or ‘Pouring out Lying’, but to ‘the blood of the New Covenant being
poured out
for the Many for remission of sins’ (26:28). The term ‘the Many’ is, of course, the Qumran terminology for the rank and file of the Community.
8

We are now in a world of almost pure allegorization, thematic variation, and repeated wordplay. Judas is the one ‘delivering up guiltless blood’ (27:4). Not only do we have wordplay here relating to the theme of
consuming blood while eating
, considered ‘guiltless’ by Paul, but we shall see how this ‘
delivering up
’ is used at one point in the Damascus Document in relation to ‘consuming blood’.
9
Judas receives ‘
the price of Blood’
, the ‘
hire
’ the High Priests refuse to put in the Temple Treasury, with which they buy ‘
the Potter’s Field
’ (‘
the High Priest’s privy
’ in the story about ‘
Jesus the Nazoraean
’) – now ‘
the Field of Blood
’ – instead.

All this ends up with Pilate averring that he is ‘guiltless of the blood of
this Righteous One
’ and releasing Barabbas instead, while the Jewish crowd cries out, ‘Let his
blood
be on us and our children’ (Mt 27:23-25). Note the irony of ‘
Zaddik
’ language and that of ‘guiltlessness’ and ‘blood’ put in the mouth of perhaps
the most brutal
Roman Governor
ever sent to Palestine.

Here in Matthew, Jesus ‘takes the cup’ and commands ‘all to drink’ the wine ‘of the New Covenant in (his) blood’ (26:28 – ‘the Cup (of) the New Covenant in (his) blood’ in Luke 22:20). However, in the very next line in Matthew and Mark, Jesus suddenly and inexplicably reverses himself, saying, ‘But I say unto you, that I will
not henceforth drink of this fruit of the vine at all
until the day when I drink it with you new
in the Kingdom of my Father’
(Mt 26:29 and Mk 14:25).