James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls I (62 page)

There is surely more lurking beneath these events than appears on the surface. The fact of these sessions in Caesarea and the space Acts devotes to them in its apologetics is impressive – almost a quarter of the narrative. Certainly they took place, but more was probably discussed during the ‘two years’ of these sessions than this. But why is Acts so silent as to whether anyone from James’ Jerusalem Community ever came down to visit Paul during his entire ‘imprisonment’? Rather Acts only emphasizes these contacts with Roman Officials and their protégés. This is not the only thing Acts is silent about.

Chapter 17

The Truth About the Death of James

The Blasphemy Charge Against James

We now turn to the Fourth-Century theologian Jerome, who in a few allusions finally gives us the key to sort out all these overlaps, transpositions, and
non sequiturs
in the various stories about the attack on and death of James. Though Jerome presents the data about James’ death in just a few sentences, several points emerge from his version which overlap the presentation of the attack on James in the Temple by ‘the Enemy’ Paul in the 40’s not the 60’s in the Pseudoclementine
Recognitions
. Can it be possible that Paul did this – can
Recognitions
be true? Not only is it possible and it did probably happen, but there is more – much more.

When one reads Jerome carefully, one can see he knows many of the things we know today about biblical research. For instance, he is aware that
not all the letters of Paul may have been written by Paul, that Hebrews might have been written by Barnabas, that Jude is the brother of James, and that there is a question about the authenticity of the Letter attributed to James because of its excellent Greek
– all points still discussed by biblical scholars today. Nevertheless one must approach his work with caution, for in it there is still an orthodox theological orientation, coupled with a desire to protect the Church at all costs which must be reckoned with.

When Jerome comes to present the death of James, he prefaces this with the usual – probably direct – quotation from Hegesippus, describing James’ Naziritism, which is worth repeating: ‘
He alone enjoyed the privilege of entering the Holy of Holies since, indeed, he did not wear woollen, but only linen clothes, and went into the Temple alone and prayed on behalf of the People, so that his knees were reputed to have acquired the calluses of a camel’s knees
.’ This could be nothing other than an account of a
Yom Kippur
atonement.

Like Eusebius, Jerome also claims to be quoting Hegesippus directly but makes no bones about the fact that
it was the Holy of Holies into which James went
. For Jerome, this atonement was a function of James’ ‘Priestly’ activities and, therefore, his functioning as a kind of ‘
Opposition High Priest’
– not so much of his ‘bathing’ ones or the other aspects of his ‘Piety’ or life-long Nazitism or ‘Holiness’, which were more in the manner of those Josephus is calling ‘Essenes’ or parallel ‘Sabaean’, ‘Elchasaite’, or ‘Mandaean’ practices of Northern Syria and Southern Iraq.

Then Jerome, combining what he claims to be the accounts of both Clement and Josephus, provides the following description:

On the death of Festus who governed Judea, Albinus was sent by Nero as his successor. Before he had reached his province, Ananias the High Priest (
thus
), the youngest son of Ananus of the class of Priests, taking advantage of the state of anarchy, assembled a Sanhedrin and publicly tried to force James to recant that
Christ was the Son of God
.
1

Here Jerome replaces the usual chronology of James’ death, being immediately followed by the fall of Jerusalem of the other early Church accounts, with Josephus’ chronology.

By ‘Ananias’ he clearly means Ananus, but his confusion is interesting, since the distinction between Ananias and Ananus is not always clear even in Acts, which knows no ‘Ananus’ – nor clearly drawn in Josephus. Both were extremely ‘Rich’ and we have already noted the pivotal role Ananias played in collusion with Governors like Albinus in ‘robbing the tithes of the Poorer Priests’ in Josephus’ accounts of the violence High Priests were willing to use with the People.

In combining Josephus and the early Church accounts, which Jerome generally credits to Clement of Alexandria, the charge against James in the Sanhedrin trial that he extracts from Josephus becomes one of refusing to deny that Jesus was ‘the Son of God’. This charge, along with
the Sanhedrin trial
, is missing from the accounts we have excerpted from Eusebius, Epiphanius, and Hegesippus; however, the charge brings us right back into the Gospel accounts of
the death of Jesus
.

As in the Gospels, it is James’ insistence that in Jerome’s account leads directly to the ‘
blasphemy
’ charge, for which stoning was the punishment in the classical Jewish sources. This point may have been in Clement’s no longer extant account. The charge itself is certainly not in Josephus, though the trial, of course, is.

It will be recalled that in Eusebius, in response to the question ‘the Scribes and Pharisees’ demanded of James when he ‘stood on the Pinnacle of the Temple’, ‘What is the door to Jesus the Crucified One’, James simply moves on to his proclamation of how Jesus – specifically identified as ‘the Son of Man’ – is ‘sitting on the right hand of the Great Power and will come on the clouds of Heaven’ (presumably meaning, ‘with the Heavenly Host’). This is a scenario of final apocalyptic Judgement which, as we saw, has much in common with the extended exposition of ‘the Star Prophecy’ in the War Scroll.

In most early Church accounts of the debates on the Temple steps, such as those in the
Recognitions
– refracted to some degree also in Acts – the writers are mainly intent on showing James to be demonstrating how Jesus could be ‘the Christ’. That is to say, a Supernatural Being, a Redeemer Figure seated ‘on the right hand of Power’, but with distinctly Greco-Hellenistic overtones. As in the case of the ‘Son of Man’ notation, one might legitimately call this too a Greco-Hellenistic variation of the ‘
Primal Adam
’ ideology of the various Ebionite/Nazirite/Elchasaite groups dressed up in new attire.

It is Paul who is wedded to the idea of a Supernatural Figure, with whom he is in contact – at least he claims that he is – and whom he calls ‘
Christ Jesus
’. This may or may not be the same individual Jerome is referring to in this single reference to ‘the Son of God’. Obviously normative Christian theology would say it is. It is only a fine point, but it is important for determining just what early Church accounts thought the charge against James for ‘blasphemy’ really was.

Finally one must always keep in mind the confluence of all these terminologies in Paul’s ‘Second Adam’ or the Ebionite ‘Primal Adam’ terminologies, which certainly have a Supernatural aspect or – put in another way – a component involving ‘Divine Sonship’.

The Parallel Blasphemy Charge in Pictures of the Trial of Jesus

‘Blasphemy’ really is a specific charge in Judaism. It is outlined in some detail in the
Talmud
, which is claiming to present materials going back to the period in question or even before. Whether it does or not or how accurately it might do so is a matter of opinion. In the
Talmud
, the punishment for blasphemy is stoning, though this is less clear in the Old Testament.
2

Jesus, therefore, does not die a blasphemer’s death. Jesus may have been condemned for blasphemy, which the New Testament appears sometimes to be claiming (Mt 26:65 and pars.), but the charge sheet against him is unclear and varies from Gospel to Gospel. The Gospel of John, for instance, puts this charge into the mouths of the Jewish crowd, who purportedly cry out that ‘he made himself the Son of God’ (19:7). For Matthew 26:63 and Mark 14:61, it is the High Priest who identifies ‘the Christ’ with ‘the Son of God’, but both charges appear simply to be a retrospective emendation. The second, in any case, more properly relates to the James story as Jerome recounts it.

According to the Gospels, Pilate, quite properly, shows himself interested only in the charge of ‘
making himself a King
’ when examining Jesus. In the Gospel of John, Pilate is corrected by the Jewish mob, which once more tells him his job: ‘
Everyone that makes himself a King, speaks against Caesar
’ – whereupon Pilate condemns Jesus. John even depicts the crowd as warning Pilate that, if he releases Jesus, he is not ‘a Friend of Caesar’ (19:12) – terminology used on Herodian coins such as those of Agrippa I and Herod of Chalcis.

The answer Jesus gives to Pilate’s question, ‘Are you the King of the Jews?’: ‘My Kingdom is not of this world’ (John 18:33–38), identifies John, anyhow, as late – demonstrably later, for instance, than the early Second Century and the correspondence between Pliny the Younger and Trajan. The latter, at least according to Eusebius, when instructed by Trajan as Governor of Bithynia in Asia Minor to investigate Christians (112 CE), ‘
found no fault in them’
– a response equivalent to Pilate’s in John, ‘
I find no fault in him
’ (19:4–6, paralleled in Luke 23:4–15).
3

In any event, it is as late or later than similar inquiries – also described by Eusebius, this time following Hegesippus again – in Domitian’s time (81–96 CE) of
the sons (or grandsons) of
Jesus’
third brother Judas
. Depicted as simple country menials, these respond to questions ‘concerning the Christ and His Kingdom’ almost exactly as Jesus is depicted as doing here in John: ‘That it was not of this world nor earthly,
but Heavenly and Angelic, when
He would come in Glory to judge the quick and the dead and give every man according to his works
. At this, Domitian
found no fault with them
, but having contempt for them as simpletons, dismissed them.’
4
The reader will note the repetition here of James’ proclamation of the Son of Man coming in Glory in the Temple at Passover, again precisely as depicted in Hegesippus – including the note about ‘
giving every man according to his works
’.

For Luke, the charge sheet to Pilate is quite specific: ‘We found this man
leading the people astray and forbidding them
to pay tribute to Caesar
, saying that
he himself, Christ, is a King
’ (23:1). Here Luke combines Jesus’ ‘being a King’ – which Pilate alludes to in his ‘Are you the King of the Jews’ question – with the ‘Christ’ ideology. Going on to emphasize the issue of ‘insurrection and murder’ concerning Jesus’ alter ego Barabbas (23:19), Luke also twice plays on the point concerning whether Jesus and his followers – Peter in this case – were ‘Galileans’. In the process, he shows an understanding of the confusion between taking this terminology literally or in the more symbolical sectarian or subversive sense (22:59 and 23:6).

In his picture, the Jewish crowd is now doing the ‘blaspheming’ (22:65: ‘they said many other blaspheming things to him’). When ‘the Chief Priests and Scribes gather’ in his Sanhedrin scene, the two questions, ‘are you the Christ’ and ‘are you the Son of God’, follow one after the other (22:67–71). These then lead into the only real answer Jesus makes as far as Luke is concerned: ‘Henceforth shall the Son of Man be seated at the right hand of the Power of God’ – which is again, of course, the proclamation attributed to James in the Temple on Passover by Eusebius and Hegesippus, as well as by Jerome – before all three move on to the stoning material.

But Luke is quite consistent in the manner in which he separates the thrust of these ‘blasphemy’ materials – which hardly concern Pilate at all, or for that matter the Romans – from social agitation or insurrectionary activities, for which in Roman Law (
not Jewish
) the punishment was
crucifixion
. Matthew and Mark, on the other hand, rather combine the two queries into a single question: ‘Are you the Christ, the Son of God’ (26:63 and 14:61), showing that they think the two expressions, ‘the Christ’ and ‘the Son of God’ are basically either two aspects of the same thing or identical.

Mark, however, like John above, is the only Synoptic to have Jesus actually answer in the affirmative – Jesus’ words, ‘I am’, taking the place of ‘henceforth you shall see, etc.’ in Matthew and Luke. But this being said, Matthew and Mark also go on to attach their version of the two notations combined into a single phrase to
Jesus
’ proclamation (not
James
’): ‘Henceforth you shall see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of Power and coming on the clouds of Heaven’ (Mt 26:64 and Mk 14:62). It is at this point that Matthew and Mark depict the High Priest as ‘rending his clothes’, specifically giving the verdict, ‘You have spoken
blasphemy
’, and ‘all of them condemning him to be worthy of death’.

But this is just what one would expect, because the claim of being either ‘the Christ’ or ‘the Son of God’, or both, is a theological one and the crux of issues between Christians and Jews even today. Since the claim is not on the surface, anyhow, a political one,
this is the claim
that gives rise to the ‘blasphemy’ charge – just as in Jerome’s account of the events leading to
James
’ stoning.

For his part, not only does Luke avoid any overt mention of the blasphemy charge against Jesus – picturing it rather as what the men taking Jesus to the ‘High Priest’s House’ do to him (22:65: ‘and they said many things to him, blaspheming him’) – he also uses the issue of Jesus ‘being a Galilean’ to interrupt the more political scene with Pilate with an intervening interview with ‘Herod’ (namely Herod Antipas, Tetrarch of Galilee and Perea). This interview and this scene are unique to Luke’s Gospel and are followed directly by the final climactic condemnation before Pilate.

However, in all three Synoptic Gospels,
the Sanhedrin trial of Jesus
for blasphemy at ‘the High Priest’s House’ ends on the note of their ‘spitting in his face and striking him with blows’. This is not only similar to how ‘the High Priest Ananias’ has people hit Paul ‘in the mouth’ in Acts 23:2, but, as we have already remarked, also the James martyrdom scene in all the various presentations. Matthew adds ‘with the palms of their hands’ (26:67). For Luke, the men conveying Jesus ‘beat’ him, ‘striking his face’ (22:63–64).

Mark and Luke even include the curious element of their ‘covering’ Jesus’ face, which parallels the bizarre picture in the Second Apocalypse of James of James’ stoning, where after having James dig a hole, they ‘cover him’ up to his abdomen before they stone him.
5
In fact, the sequence and scenario here in the Gospels is exactly the same as that of James’ martyrdom scene in all sources above. Of course, this may have been common to all the puppet trials and executions of the period, but in the James scenario the blasphemy charge with more sense does move directly on to a stoning, and this, without the patent attempts – in spite of the fact that crucifixion in this period was pre-eminently
the Roman punishment for insurrectionary
and
subversive activities
– to rescue Roman officials or their underlings from any taint of collusion or responsibility.

Jesus Before Herod and Paul Before Agrippa II and Bernice

Luke takes these whitewashing attempts or the power of creative writing to even greater heights. As in the case of ‘Jesus the Nazoraean’ or ‘Nazirite’, supposedly coming from ‘Nazareth’ elsewhere in the Gospels, Luke either misunderstands or purposefully obscures the ‘Galilean’ accusation, making it appear as if it involves only geographical and not socio-revolutionary aspects (23:4–6). Using his superior knowledge of Josephus, Luke exploits Pilate’s question about whether Jesus was ‘a Galilean’ to intersperse a quick intervening interview with ‘Herod’ (that is, Herod Antipas), since this was his ‘Jurisdiction’ (23:7).

The Herod in question, Herod ‘the Tetrarch’, is the one who carried out the execution of John the Baptist across the Jordan, also in ‘his Jurisdiction’. It is his ‘foster brother’ supposedly who is a
founding member
of the Pauline ‘Antioch’ Community. The picture of Jesus’ execution even outdoes this in the way it dissimulates on the question of Roman and/or Herodian involvement. In the Gospel of Matthew, Pilate’s wife sends him a message, warning him to ‘have nothing to do with
that Righteous One
’ (in other words, now
she
is using the ‘
Zaddik
’ terminology), because just that day she had a dream, where she ‘suffered many things because of him’ (27:19). Once again, we are in the Roman world of superstitious fantasy and ‘birthday parties’. Luke adds the colourful detail that Herod and Pilate, supposedly ‘previously at odds, both became friends with each other on
that very day
’ (23:12)!

At a later period consonant with the stoning of James, Agrippa II and Ananus the High Priest do seem to have become friends in Rome, during the latter’s ‘appeal to Rome’ following the beating of ‘the Emperor’s Servant Stephen’ and the crucifixions at Lydda, as do the Roman Governor Albinus and the ‘Rich’ High Priest Ananias thereafter in Judea. Of course, Felix is such a friend of the Herods that he even married one of their daughters, the ‘Jewess’ Drusilla. In Luke, however, the note about this alliance between Romans and Herodians just serves to exculpate them both from any complicity in the murder of ‘Christ’, which is the real point of the episode. Therefore, at its conclusion, Pilate is made to say to the ‘Chief Priests and the Rulers and the people’: ‘You brought this man to me as one who
perverts
(‘misleads’) the people, but behold, having examined him before you,
I found no fault in this man touching on those things you charge him with
.
No, nor yet Herod
…
nothing deserving of death has been done by him
. I will, therefore, punish and release him’ (Luke 23:13–16). But, of course, this is just the conclusion we would have expected if Christianity were to circulate and survive in the Roman Empire at this time. If it had not been, we would have had to invent it – as it, no doubt, was in the first place. In any event, it agrees perfectly with the scenes in Acts between Agrippa II (who really was a ‘King’, unlike the Herod the Tetrarch who interviews Jesus and, in Mark 6:14 below, destroyed John the Baptist) and the Roman Governor Festus, who really do examine Paul and conclude with even more verisimilitude:
‘This man might have been released
if he had not appealed to Caesar’ (Acts 26:32).