James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls I (4 page)

It is important to look into the original contexts of passages used in scriptural and scholarly debate, because the ambience of such materials is important in determining the frame of mind and intent of the original, not its derivative application. References are confined as far as possible to primary sources, the trends implicit in secondary ones often ebbing and flowing with the times and one generation’s consensus being overturned by the next’s.

For this reason, readers are advised to go directly to the ancient sources themselves. It is in the ancient sources that the data is to be found and this is where the battle must be joined. What is required is a critical faculty, sensitivity to language, and simple common sense. These, one hopes, are shared by everyone.

Fountain Valley, California

April 30th, 2012

PART I:

Palestinian Backgrounds

Chapter 1

James

The Downplaying of James in Christian Tradition

In the period of Palestinian history ending with the destruction of the Second Temple, one of the most under-esteemed and certainly under-estimated characters is James the brother of Jesus. James has been systematically ignored by both Christian and Jewish scholars alike, the latter hardly even having heard of him, his very existence being a source of embarrassment to them both. Muslims, too, have never heard of him, since their traditions were bequeathed to them by Christians and Jews.

This silence surrounding James was not accidental. Augustine (354–430), writing to his older contemporary Jerome (348–420), expressed his concern about problems between Peter and Paul signaled in Paul’s Letter to the Galatians. Clearly, these were directly connected to James’ leadership in the early Church and his directives. But, curiously, neither Augustine nor Jerome even mentions James in this exchange. The early Church theologian Eusebius (260–340) had finalized the process of the downplaying of James, questioning the authenticity of the Letter of James
.
Martin Luther a thousand years later felt that this letter should not have been included in the New Testament anyhow.
1

It is not surprising that these arbiters of Christian opinion in their day should have felt the way they did, because it is hard to consider the Letter of James as ‘Christian’ at all, if we take as our yardstick the Gospels or Paul’s letters. If we widen this interpretation somewhat to include the Eastern sectarian tendency referred to in early Church literature as ‘
Ebionite
’ (a word deriving from an original Hebrew root meaning ‘the Poor’) and other parallel currents like the Essenes, Nazoraeans, Elchasaites, Manichaeans, and even Islam, we discover a different story. For its part, the Letter of James in its essence resembles nothing so much as the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Origen (185–254) railed against traditions giving James more prominence than he was prepared to accord him, namely those connecting James’ death – not Jesus’ – to the fall of Jerusalem. The normal scriptural view and popular theology to this day connects Jesus’ death not James’ to the destruction of the Temple. Origen’s view of the tradition connecting the fall of Jerusalem to the death of James, which he credited to Josephus, is probably not a little connected with its disappearance from these materials as they have come down to us.

Eusebius contemptuously alluded to the poverty-stricken spirituality of the Ebionites, who held James’ name in such high esteem. He did so in the form of a pun on the Hebrew meaning of their name, ‘the Poor’, thereby showing himself very knowledgeable about the meaning and consideration of James’ person.
2
‘The Poor’ was already in use as an honourable form of self-designation by the community responsible for the Dead Sea Scrolls, as it was among those in contact with James’ Jerusalem Community, most notably Paul. The usage also figures prominently in both the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew and in the Letter attributed to James.
3

The group or movement associated with James’ name and teachings in Jerusalem is usually referred to as ‘the Jerusalem Church’ or ‘Community’, an English approximation for the Greek word
Ecclesia
, which literally means ‘Assembly’. It is also possible to refer to it as
Palestinian Christianity
, which would indeed be appropriate. But an even more popular notation one finds in the literature is
Jewish Christianity
.

Jewish and Christian Sectarianism

Sects such as these were at a very early time pronounced anathema by the Rabbis – the heirs of the Pharisees pictured in the New Testament – who took over Judaism by default seven and a half years after James’ judicial murder. After the destruction of the Temple theirs was the only Jewish tradition the Romans were willing to tolerate in Palestine. The legal tradition they inherited has come to be known as
Halachah
, the sum total of religious law according to the traditions of the Pharisees. It is preserved in the literature of the Rabbis known as the
Talmud
. This includes what is also known as ‘the Oral Law’ and consists mainly of a document compiled in the third century called the
Mishnah
, a number of commentaries on it, and further traditional compilations, together known as either the ‘Babylonian’ or ‘Jerusalem
Talmud
’, depending on whether they originated in Iraq or Palestine.

The Movement headed by James from the 40’s to the 60s CE in Jerusalem was the principal one of a number of groups categorized in the
Talmud
by the pejorative terminology
minim
. This has now come to mean in Jewish tradition ‘sectarian’. With the gradual production of this rabbinical literature, a new form of Judaism was formulated no longer predicated on the Temple. This became dominant in Palestine only after the Romans imposed it by brute force.

Because of its palpably more accommodating attitude towards foreign rule and, at least while the Temple was still standing, to High Priests appointed by foreigners or foreign-controlled rulers, it was really the only form of Jewish religious expression the Romans were willing to live with. The same was to hold true for the form of Christianity we can  refer to as ‘Pauline’, which was equally accommodating to Roman power. For his part, Paul proudly proclaimed his Pharisaic roots (Phil. 3:5).

This form of Judaism must be distinguished from the more variegated tapestry that characterized Jewish religious expression in Jesus’ and James’ lifetimes. This consisted of quite a number of groups before the fall of the Temple, some of which were quite militant and aggressive, even apocalyptic, that is, having a concern for a highly emotive style of expression regarding ‘the End Time’. Most of these apocalyptic groups focused in one way or another on the Temple. They were written out of Judaism in the same manner that James and Jesus’ other brothers were written out of Christianity.

‘Christianity’, as we know it, developed in the West in contradistinction to the more variegated landscape that continued to characterize the East. It would be more proper to refer to Western Christianity at this point as ‘Pauline’ or ‘Gentile Christian’. It came to be seen as orthodox largely as a result of the efforts of Eusebius and like-minded persons, who put the reorganization programme ascribed to Constantine into effect. It can also be usefully referred to as ‘Overseas’ or ‘Hellenistic Christianity’ as opposed to ‘Palestinian Christianity’.

Its documents and credos were collected and imposed on what is now known as the Christian world at the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE and others that followed in the fourth century and beyond. These formally asserted the divinity of Jesus and made it orthodox. Eusebius, Constantine’s bishop and personal confidant, had a major role in the organization and guidance of the Council of Nicaea. The development of this genre of Overseas Christianity was actually concurrent and parallel to the development of Rabbinic Judaism. Both were, not only willing to live with Roman power, they owed their continued existence to its sponsorship.

To put this proposition somewhat differently: it was the fact of the power and brutality of Rome was operating in both traditions to drive out and declare heretical what many now refer to as ‘Jewish Christianity’ – ‘
Ebionitism
’ would perhaps be a better description of it in Palestine. In Judaism, what was left was a legalistic shadow of former glories, bereft of apocalyptic and Messianic tendencies; in Christianity, a largely Hellenized, otherworldly mystery cult, the real religious legacy of three hundred years of Roman religious genius and assimilation. This surgery was necessary if Christianity in the form we know it was to survive, since certain doctrines represented by James were distinctly opposed to those ultimately considered to be
Christian
.

James the Real Successor to Jesus,
not Peter

In the literature, James’ place as successor to and inheritor of the mantle of his brother was largely taken over by the individual known, in the West, as ‘Peter’. This was a logical end of the legitimization of certain claims advanced by the now Hellenized and largely non-Jewish, Gentile Church at Rome following the destruction of the Jerusalem centre in the wake of the Uprising against Rome. It is an interesting coincidence that ‘the Jerusalem Community’ of James the Just and the Community at Qumran disappeared at about the same time – though perhaps this is not so coincidental as it may seem.

The ‘Rock’ terminology reflected in Peter’s name and the imagery related to it were actually in use contemporaneously in Palestine in both the literature at Qumran and in what were probably the documents of the Jerusalem Church.
4
In the latter, a version of it was applied to James, as well probably to his successor - a man identified in the tradition as Jesus’ (and therefore James’)
first ‘cousin’
, Simeon bar Cleophas. We shall see that Simeon bar Cleophas is very likely
the second brother of Jesus
, an individual called ‘
Simon
’ (and sometimes even ‘Simon
the Zealot
’/’
Zealotes
’) as presented in Gospel Apostle lists - Christianity in Palestine developing in something of the manner of an Islamic Caliphate (and a Shi‘ite one at that), that is, one centered on the
family
of Jesus and familial succession.

James is not only the key to a reconstruction of Jewish Christian history, he is also the key to the Historical Jesus. The solution to this problem has evaded observers for so long primarily because they have attempted to approach it through the eyes and religious legacy of James’ archrival and sometime religious ‘Enemy’, Paul.
5
It is through James that we are on the safest ground in approaching a historically accurate semblance of what Jesus himself, in so far as he actually existed, might have been like.

Of all the characters in the early stages of Christianity, Paul alone is
known to us through first-hand autobiographical documents, that is, the genuine letters attributed to him. They reveal his life, character and thought in the most personal manner possible. All others, even Jesus and most of those generally called ‘Apostles’, we know only by second- or third-hand accounts, if we know them at all. We have Gospels or letters purportedly written about them or in their names, but these must be handled with the utmost care.

It is also not generally comprehended that this is the sequence in which we should take the New Testament. Paul’s genuine letters and a few other materials – possibly including the Letter of James – come first and are primary. The rest come later and are secondary. The Gospels themselves are probably even tertiary. Biblical scholars have not come to a consensus on which aspects of this legacy can properly be considered historical. Nor have they succeeded in giving us a very real picture of what might have occurred at this formative moment in human history or of the events surrounding and succeeding the life of the individual called, in the Hellenistic world, ‘the Christ’.

When it comes to the person of Jesus’ brother James, however, we are on much firmer ground, not least because he has been so marginalized. We have a number of facts concerning James’ life attested to by a variety of independent observations within and without Christian tradition.

It should not be surprising that the existence of an actual brother of Jesus in the flesh was a problem for the theologian committed to ideas of divine sonship and supernatural birth. In Roman Catholic doctrine it has been the received teaching since the end of the fourth century that James was the brother of Jesus, not only by a different father, an obvious necessity in view of the doctrine of divine sonship, but also by a
different
mother – the answer to the conundrum presented by the perpetual virginity of Mary. That is, James was a cousin of Jesus. We shall take this for what it is, embarrassment over the existence of Jesus’ brothers and bids to protect the emerging doctrine of the supernatural Christ. This started gaining currency in the second and third centuries, but was totally absent from contemporary documents relating to the family of Jesus that survived the redaction processes of the New Testament.

There is also sufficient evidence to show James as a normative Jew of his time, even one referred to by the most extreme terminology ‘Zealot’ or ‘
Sicarii
’, this in spite of his being the most important of the Central Triad of early Church leaders, whom Paul denotes as ‘Pillars’ (Gal. 2:9). What a normative Jew might have been in these circumstances before the fall of the Temple will require further elucidation. For the purposes of discussion we are on safe ground, however, if we say that such a concept at least encompassed an attachment to the Law. It also consisted of a feeling for Temple and Temple worship, regardless of attitude towards the Herodian, pro-Roman Priesthood overseeing it. At some point in the mid-40’s, Cephas and John, two of those Paul designates as ‘Pillars’ in Galatians 2:9, along with another James, ‘the
brother
of John’ as distinct from James the subject of this book, disappear from the scene, probably in the context of conflict with Herodian kings such as Agrippa I (37–44 CE) or his brother Herod of Chalcis (44–49 CE). Thus, James was left to occupy the ‘Christian’ leadership stage in Palestine alone for the next two decades. At least this is what can be gleaned from the materials in Acts, however imprecise or mythologized they may be.