James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls I (31 page)

For the Second Temple mind anyhow, it was only after Noah’s sacrifice that it was permissible to eat meat again. Once again, to repeat, Noah and those with him clearly did not consume meat during the period of the Flood and their incarceration in the ark. With Noah’s atoning sacrifice, they were free to eat meat once again with the caveat
that they
abstain from blood
.

‘Pleasing Men’ or ‘Friendship to the World’ in Paul and James

Two conclusions emerge from this. The first has to do with James’ instructions to overseas communities; the second, Paul’s
modus operandi
. James’ directives to overseas communities are presented in three different versions in Acts.
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They are presented there as a result of what is usually called ‘the Jerusalem Council’. This episode begins in Acts 15:1 with the laconic note that:

Some, having come down from Judea, were teaching the brothers: ‘
Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved
.’ A commotion, thereupon, ensued and much discussion … and Paul and Barnabus and certain others were appointed to go up to … Jerusalem (and inquire) about this question.

James then is clearly presented as making the kind of ‘Judgements’ predicated of ‘the
Mebakker
’ in the Damascus Document. He ‘rules’: ‘Therefore I judge, we should not trouble
those Gentiles turning to God
, but write to them
to abstain from the
pollutions of idols
, from
fornication
,
and from what is strangled and from blood’
(15:19–20).

In ‘
the epistle
’ that Acts pictures James as sending to Antioch via ‘Judas Barsabas’, this is slightly rephrased as ‘
abstain from things sacrificed to idols and from blood, and from what is strangled and fornication
’ (15:29). Six chapters later, Acts 21:25 repeats this second version in James’ final confrontation with Paul and the culmination of the speech James makes to Paul, reiterating what Gentile believers are ‘
to observe
’ and ‘
keep away from
’.

At this point, James sends Paul into the Temple to have himself ‘purified’ and his ‘head shaved’ along with the four others evidently under a ‘Nazirite’ oath of some kind (i.e., a ‘temporary’ one). Paul was to pay all their expenses. For Acts 21:24, the reason James gives for this penance is simple: so that ‘all may know that the things they have been told about you are not so, but that you yourself also walk regularly keeping the Law’. But of course, Paul does no such thing. He does not ‘keep the Law’ – or, if he does, he does so only as a convenience or to further his mission. Paul’s view of the Law is succinctly given in Galatians. It is ‘a curse’ (3:10–13).

In 1 Corinthians, the letter in which Paul announces himself as the ‘architect’ or ‘builder’ and wrestles with James’ directives to overseas communities, Paul presents his philosophy such as it is. Some might call it cynical or self-serving. Some would call it pragmatic, but, as we shall see, there can be very little pragmatism in dealing with the Jerusalem Church Leadership or individuals at Qumran like ‘
the
Mebakker
’ or ‘
High Priest Commanding the Many
’ and those inhabiting the wilderness camps. They saw things in black and white.

Paul states in 1 Corinthians 9:4, clearly in response to these and other kinds of charges, after having just dealt with the twin issues of ‘things sacrificed to idols’ and vegetarianism: ‘My defence to those who examine me is this: “
Have we not (the) authority to eat and drink?”
’ – this directly preceding a reference to ‘
the brothers of the Lord and Cephas
’ (9:5). Here it should, once again, be appreciated that the role of ‘the
Mebakker
’ at Qumran was
to ‘examine’ people and make ‘Judgements’
.

Then Paul turns again to the issues of authority and freedom:

Being free from all, I made myself the slave of all so as to win the most. To the Jews, I became as a Jew to win the Jews. To those under the Law, I who am not a subject of the Law, made myself a subject to the Law, to win those who are subjects of the Law. To those without the Law, I was free of the Law myself – though not free from God’s Law being under the Law of Christ – to win those without the Law. For the weak I made myself weak. To all these, I made myself all things to all men that by all means some I might save
(1 Cor. 9:16–22).

No clearer philosophy of ‘
making oneself a Friend to the world
’ has ever been so baldly or unabashedly put on record. In fact, in announcing this philosophy of ‘
winning
’, Paul has perhaps identified himself as
the first modern man
. It only remains for his interlocutor in the Letter of James to turn it around, reversing it into the calumny, ‘
the Enemy of God
’.

The Issue of Blood and the Ban on Gentile Gifts and Sacrifices in the Temple

One may assume that the proscription on the consumption of blood would also extend to the mystery-religion phenomenon of
Communion with the Cup of the blood of the Christ
, which Paul introduces into his understanding of Messianism and the death of the Messianic Leader in 1 Corinthians 10:14–11:30. The Synoptic Gospels, of course, represent this as being introduced by Jesus himself at ‘the Last Supper’.

Therefore James’
proscription on ‘blood’
in the directives to overseas communities, as depicted in Acts, would seemingly also extend to the
consumption of the blood of the crucified Messiah
, even if taken in its most extreme sense – this apart from obvious Noahic bans on human sacrifice and consuming human blood generally. This, of course, brings us full circle and back to James’ strange evocation of Abraham’s willingness
to sacrifice his son Isaac
as evidence of Abraham’s ‘
Faith working with his works
’ (2:21–22). This is also echoed in the Gentile Mission claim that God chose ‘to sacrifice His only-begotten’ son in the world – a comparison expressly drawn in Hebrews 11:17.

The Final Triumph of Hellenization

But this is not the whole story. There is another theme related to it,
the admission of Gentiles into the Temple
, or, if one prefers,
the barring of Gentiles from the Temple
. This also punctuates this period leading up to the Uprising against Rome in 66–70 CE. It is also intrinsic to Paul’s activities, both in his own presentation of how God chose him ‘from the womb to reveal His Son in’ him to ‘announce the Gospel among the Gentiles’ and how Acts presents the scene in the Temple, in which Paul is mobbed after having been sent in by James to go through the procedures of a temporary Nazirite oath. The cry raised there, aside from ‘
teaching against the people, the Law, and this place
’, is that ‘
he has brought Greeks into the Temple and polluted this Holy Place
’ (21:28 and 24:6).

That this theme was of concern in this period is verified by Josephus’ discussion of the stones that were put up in the Temple to warn foreigners on pain of death of inadvertently intruding into the Sacred Precincts. The point made in them about foreigners, that their death would be ‘their own responsibility’, is exactly the point made in the Gospel of Matthew, where Pilate is depicted as
washing his hands
‘of the blood’ of Jesus, but reversed. The crowd, there, is rather pictured as crying out gleefully, ‘let his
blood
be upon us and on our children’ – a most terrible cry that, it is worth repeating, has haunted the Jews through the ages (27:24).

Paul emphasizes the Community as both spiritualized Temple and body of Christ. As Paul reiterates, he is ‘building’ a Community where both Greeks and Jews can live in harmony (Gal. 3:28).
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Using the language of the Community Rule at Qumran and Paul elsewhere in 1 Corinthians, Ephesians 2:19–22 insists that Jesus Christ is the Precious ‘Cornerstone’; the Prophets and Apostles, ‘the Foundation’; and the members ‘the building’, all growing into ‘the Holy Temple in the Lord’.

Those who wish to bar Paul from the Temple are reflecting their awareness that he
wishes to bring foreigners into it
– whether actually or spiritually. There is no doubt he does spiritually. As he puts it in 1 Corinthians 2:10–15, he teaches ‘spiritual things spiritually’. All these matters were comprehensible to the Hellenistic spirit and mind.
The consumption of blood
was part and parcel of the ceremonies of a welter of Hellenistic mystery cults that had as their goal the conquest of death – the same goal Paul announces in his letters (1 Cor. 15:54–57), the end being, as he puts it, to enter the tomb with Jesus or ‘being crucified with Christ’ (Gal. 2:20).
They are certainly
not
comprehensible in a Palestinian Jewish milieu.

One should correct this slightly – at Qumran, there was the imagery of spiritualized Community, spiritualized Temple, spiritualized sacrifice, and spiritualized atonement, as in the Community Rule. But Paul’s imagery is a little more circuitous; the Community
is
Jesus, Jesus is the Temple, therefore, the Community
is
the Temple. The end is the same. There is even the imagery in the Community Rule of the ‘three Priests’ of the Community Council as the ‘Holy of Holies’ or ‘Inner Sanctum of the Temple’. But further than this, those of a Palestinian perspective were generally unable to go. Nor did anyone see the Law as metaphor, except someone like Philo in Alexandria – but his arguments were already highly Hellenized and, in any event, not in Palestine, which is an important difference.

For those
in
Palestine, Paul was, indeed, trying to introduce Gentiles into the Temple, spiritualized or real. Therefore there were plots to kill Paul – again seemingly among some who had taken a kind of
Nazirite
oath as described in Acts 23:12. But it is doubtful whether Jesus could have held a doctrine such as
introducing foreigners into the Temple or consuming blood
even if only symbolically, and still have been the popular leader he is presented as being. Such an anomaly could only have existed in the always-mischievous imagination of those responsible for the dissimulation in the Gospels and the Book of Acts. This was certainly aimed at pulling the teeth of ‘the Messianic Movement’ in Palestine, reversing it, and turning it against itself and into its mirror opposite.

Seen from this vantage point, Paul represented the final triumph of that Hellenization the Jews began struggling against in the generation of Judas Maccabee, two centuries before, and had been combating ever since. From Paul’s point of view, it was normal to reconcile the claims of Judaism with those of Hellenism, and profitable to do so. From the Jewish perspective in Palestine, particularly the ‘Zealot’ one, it was anathema to do so. Therefore, the clash – the very real ‘plots’ against Paul become transmogrified in these accounts into
Jewish plots
against Jesus or the Messiah.

There were also very real plots against James, but these were on the part of the Herodian quasi-Jewish Establishment,
not the Jewish mass
. The majority of James’
Jerusalem Church
followers are described, by no less an authority than Acts itself, as ‘
Zealots for the Law
’ (21:20). These are the actual words used. They are, also, the horns of the dilemma. The only escape from this dilemma is to the Dead Sea Scrolls, which lead us in the proper direction where Jewish life and thought in Palestine from the first century BCE–CE is concerned.

The Simon who Wishes to Bar Herodians from the Temple as Foreigners

Initially, then, we have these ‘Zealot’-like groups that wish to kill Paul for introducing Gentiles into the Temple even if only spiritually or allegorically or as ‘
heirs according to the
Promise
’, as he puts it in Galatians 3:29. But there are also Zealots
who wish to bar Herodians from the Temple.

Josephus will introduce us to one such Zealot leader, one ‘Simon’ who called an ‘
Assembly
’
of his own
in Jerusalem.
16
The time is the early 40’s. The very word Josephus uses here in the Greek is the same word used throughout our sources for the ‘
Church’
or
‘Assembly in Jerusalem’
– that is, this Simon, whom Josephus refers to as a ‘
somebody
’ again and ‘
very scrupulous in the Knowledge of the Law
’, is the head of his own ‘Church’ in Jerusalem, contemporaneous with Simon Peter depicted in Acts.

And what does this Simon wish to do? He does not wish to
admit Gentiles into the Community
, as Acts pictures Peter being instructed to do after receiving his vision of the Heavenly tablecloth on the rooftop in Jaffa (10:1–11:18). Rather the Simon in Josephus wishes to
bar Herodians from the Temple
(‘
which belonged only to native Jews
’) as non–Jews and ‘unclean’. It is the position of this book that the Simon in Josephus is
the demythologized Simon
in the New Testament, just as Josephus’ John the Baptist is
the demythologized John
. Furthermore, in the next generation, not only do these same ‘Zealots’ wish to bar Agrippa I’s son Agrippa II from the Temple, but his sister Bernice too.