James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls I (42 page)

This is a turning point of Jewish history and, once again, Aristobulus’ actions are paradigmatic of the ‘Purist Sadducee’ or ‘Zealot’ orientation
. Antipater now transferred his allegiance from the Arab King Aretas of Petra to Pompey.
33
Herod’s father is adept at exploiting the connections he developed with Pompey, his adjutants, and their successors, like Gabinius and Mark Anthony, who develops a special fondness for
Herodians
(no doubt because of the lucrativeness of their bribes). Aristobulus is put under arrest and ultimately sent to Rome in chains, while his supporters, once more, take refuge
in the Temple
for a last stand.

The year is 63 BCE. Pompey’s forces now besiege the Temple, and, as Josephus portrays it, Pompey is
amazed at the steadfastness of those Jews who resisted and could not help but admire it
. In the midst of the bombardment by catapult, Aristobulus’ priestly supporters went about their religious duties in the Temple, as if there were no siege at all. They performed the daily sacrifices and purified themselves with the utmost scrupulousness, not interrupting these even when the Roman troops finally stormed the Temple:

Even when they saw their enemies overwhelming them with swords in their hands,
the priests
(Aristobulus’ supporters) with complete equanimity went on with their Divine worship and were
butchered while they were offering their drink–offerings and burning their incense, preferring their duties in worship of God before self-preservation
.
34

These are obviously exceedingly zealous and Pious ‘
Zadokite
’ priests. Josephus adds, almost as an afterthought, that ‘
the greatest part of them were slain by their own countrymen of the opposing faction
’ – that is,
the Pharisees supporting the turncoat Hyrcanus, who with the help of Herod’s father Antipater, brought the Romans into the country in the first place
. The inevitability of the process is stunning. This pattern is consistent and will be re-enacted in the events of 37 BCE, where Herod himself, now backed by Roman troops provided him by Mark Anthony – his father’s friend – storms Jerusalem, thereby putting an end to insurgency and Maccabean hopes. Once again, it is the Pharisees,
Pollio and Sameas
– probably the Rabbinic ‘Pair’
Hillel and Shammai
–
who counsel the people to ‘open the gates to Herod’ and the Romans
. For this, they are duly rewarded and
Herod, not surprisingly, ‘prefers them above all others’
.
35
Typically, the people, however, ignore this advice in favour of resistance, again showing that
the Pharisee position on accommodation to foreign power was not the popular one
.

The same is true in the period of the New Testament during the run-up to the War in 66 CE. It will be recalled that, in another crucial insight in his work, Josephus reveals that it is ‘
the Chief Priests (the Herodian Sadducees), the principal Pharisees, and the men of power (the Herodians themselves)’, and, as he puts it, ‘all those desirous of peace’, who send for the Roman Commander, Cestius, outside the city to enter Jerusalem with his troops and put down the Uprising
. Likewise, the Uprising was triggered by
the same ‘zealous’ lower priesthood, who stopped sacrifice on behalf of Romans and other foreigners in the Temple and rejected their gifts
.

This picture of a ‘zealous’ lower priesthood stopping sacrifice on behalf of Romans and other foreigners not long after the stoning of James replicates to some extent that following the stoning of Honi, ‘
Onias the Righteous
’ – ‘
the Friend of God’
; and Honi’s refusal to condemn those of similar zeal in the Temple in the previous Century.
These priestly supporters of the more nationalist, last real Maccabean Priest-King, Aristobulus, go on with their ‘Pious’ sacrifices in honour of God, to the amazement of the Romans, as we saw, even while they are being cut down by those of the opposite faction in the Temple precincts
.

They are the epitome of later ‘Zealots’, the same class of priests who supported Judas Maccabee’s activities a century before and those pictured in the Book of Acts as joining the Movement led by another latter-day ‘Pious
Zaddik
’ and ‘
Righteous
’ High Priest James (in this instance, directly
preceding the stoning of Stephen
), the greater part of whose supporters even Acts calls ‘
Zealots for the Law
’ (Acts 6:7 and 21:20). Not only are they responsible for the War against Rome, they are epitomized by the documents we find at Qumran, and the mindset they represent is that of an absolutely unbending insistence on purity and uncompromising militancy, best expressed in terms of the word ‘zeal’.

By the time of the First Century, there is a ‘Messianic’ strain to their mindset and ideology. This can be seen, not only from the general tenor of most of the documents at Qumran and those sources underlying the New Testament approach – transformed to bring them in line with a more spiritualized and Hellenized ‘Messianism’ overseas, but also from
the identification of ‘the Messianic Prophecy’ by Josephus as the driving force behind the Uprising against Rome
.

The moment we have before us here is a pivotal one. It is pivotal not only in illustrating this unbending, uncompromising attitude of priestly and apocalyptic ‘zeal’, but also in defining the situation that would characterize Jewish existence from that time forward. Josephus describes this very well.
From the time of the stoning of Honi and the massacre of the ‘Zealot’ priests in the Temple following it, the fact of Roman power has to be reckoned with and how parties respond or adjust to it. All parties opposing it will ultimately be eliminate
d.

Josephus’ Testimony Connecting James’ Death to the Fall of Jerusalem

There is one further point that must be considered with regard to the ‘
Oblias
’ epithet, and it was already noted, as remarked at the beginning of this book, as early as the Third Century by the Alexandrian theologian Origen. In two works,
Contra
Celsus and his
Commentary on Matthew
, he claims to have found in his copy of the
Antiquities
of Josephus a passage
attributing the fall of Jerusalem to the death of James not Jesus
.
36
Eusebius seems to have seen a similar passage in his copy of Josephus’ works – in his case, he claims it was in the
Jewish War
. Jerome in the next century – like these other two, someone with access to Palestinian documents – claims to have seen the same passage, though it is not clear whether he actually saw it or heard about it through the works of these others. As he puts it: ‘
This same Josephus records the tradition that this James was of
such great Holiness
and enjoyed so great a reputation among the people (for Righteousness) that
the downfall of Jerusalem was believed to be on account of his death’
.
37

In normative Christian usage, ‘Jesus’ is considered to have predicted both the downfall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple, and Origen’s outrage at having come upon these passages in the copy of Josephus available to him – presumably in the library at Caesarea on the Palestine coast, where Eusebius, too, had later been Bishop – and Eusebius’ own concern over this discrepancy, might be not a little connected to its disappearance in all extant copies of Josephus’ works. It should be recalled that in ‘the Little Apocalypses’ of the Gospels, where Jesus is presented as both predicting Jerusalem’s encirclement by armies and the destruction of the Temple, Jesus is normally considered to have predicted the destruction of Jerusalem as well.
38

As Origen puts the proposition in
Contra Celsus
:

But at that time there were no armies besieging Jerusalem … for the siege began in the reign of Nero and lasted till the government of Vespasian,
whose son Titus destroyed Jerusalem on account, as Josephus says, of James the Just, the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ; but, in reality, as the truth makes clear, on account of Jesus Christ the son of God
.
39

Origen puts this proposition even more vehemently earlier in the same work, attacking his interlocutor Celsus as
‘a Jew’ who is willing to accept that ‘John baptized in the wilderness’, but not ‘the descent of the Holy Spirit on Jesus in the form of a dove’
. Directing Celsus, therefore, to Josephus’ description of John’s baptism in the
Antiquities
, Origen now uses this reference to Josephus to raise the question of ‘seeking the cause of the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple’. He contends that in the
Antiquities
, Josephus said that
these disasters happened to the Jews as a punishment for the death of James the Just, who was the brother of Jesus called the Christ, the Jews having put him to death, although he was a man of pre-eminent Righteousness
. He grants that
Josephus, ‘though not a believer in Jesus as the Christ … in spite of himself, was not far from the truth … since he ought to have said that the conspiracy against Jesus was the cause of these calamities befalling the people, since they put to death Christ, who was a Prophet
’.
40

But, not satisfied with this, Origen demonstrates how much the issue exercises him by repeating the position in a somewhat different form. Starting with the point that Paul – ‘a
genuine disciple of Jesus
’ – admitted that ‘
this James was the brother of the Lord
’, he adds a new caveat not found in Paul’s writings or, for that matter, the Gospels, that this was ‘
not so much on account of their blood relationship or having been brought up together, as because of his virtues and doctrine
’. This is a new understanding of the issue, that James and the other brothers were not ‘
blood
’
brothers, but rather symbolic or adoptionist brothers. He now proceeds, once more, to interpret the statement about James in Josephus:

If then, he (Josephus) says that
it was on account of James that Jerusalem’s destruction overtook the Jews, how much more in accordance with reason would it be to say that it happened on account of Jesus Christ
, of whose Divinity so many churches, converted from a flood of sins, bear witness, having
joined themselves
to the Creator.
41

Origen’s expressions of outrage surely had much to do with this passage or passages being omitted from versions of Josephus’ works thereafter. It is interesting how developed this theological approach had already become by Origen’s and Eusebius’ time.

As in the case of God’s ‘
vengeance
’ for the death of a previous ‘Righteous One’ Honi and the defeat Herod Antipas suffered in his war with Aretas of Petra and which Josephus says the
people attributed to what Antipas had done to John the Baptist
–
this attribution to James’ death followed by the fall of Jerusalem is the kind of sequentiality that would make most sense to the general population
. To have attributed the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple to Jesus’ death, except retrospectively, would be something like people today attributing the Second World War to the assassination of President McKinley or the election of Theodore Roosevelt to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

Furthermore, such an attribution has the additional factor in its favour of
being surprising and running counter to received tradition or orthodoxy
. In historical research, it is often traditions of this kind, bearing the most surprising content, that carry a kernel of actual historical truth. In his
Commentary on Matthew
, Origen puts the proposition of Jerusalem being destroyed on account of the death of James with greater equanimity, also focusing on James in a sharper manner:

And so great a reputation for Righteousness did this James have, that Flavius Josephus, who wrote the
Antiquities of the Jews
in twenty volumes, when wishing to exhibit the cause why the people suffered so great misfortunes that even the Temple was razed to the ground, said,
that these things happened to them (the Jews), because of the Wrath of God in consequence of the things which they had dared to do against James the brother of Jesus
, who is called the Christ.

This he repeats, for perhaps the fifth time: ‘And the wonderful thing is that, though he did not accept Jesus as Christ,
he yet gave testimony that the Righteousness of James was so great, saying that, the people thought they had suffered these things on account of James
’.
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For his part, Eusebius puts the same proposition as follows. Whether he is dependent on Origen is not clear:

So admirable a man, indeed, was James, and so celebrated among all for his Righteousness, that even the wiser part of the Jews were of the opinion that this was the cause of the immediate siege of Jerusalem, which happened to them for no other reason than the crimes against him. Josephus, also, has not hesitated to super-add this testimony (elsewhere) in his works: ‘These things’, he says, ‘happened to the Jews to avenge James the Just, who was the brother of him that is called Christ, and whom the Jews had slain, notwithstanding his pre-eminent Righteousness
.’
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