James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls I (72 page)

This idea of a fall may have also developed via the over-active imagination of early pilgrims who, as Jerome – nay even Hegesippus – suggest, were already visiting the place associated with his interment,
popularly called ‘the Tomb of St James’ ever since
, which from its location in the Kedron Valley looks directly up at ‘the Pinnacle of the Temple’ some hundred metres above. As we have suggested, the idea could have developed that James died from either being pushed or falling that distance.

The note in these traditions about a laundryman beating in James’ brains with a club, however colourful, no doubt comes from all the various beatings we have reviewed above, in particular, Paul taking a faggot from the wood piled at the altar and calling on others to do the same, swinging it around wildly to begin the riot that ends in James being beaten, his fall, and his broken leg(s)! Vivid and realistic detail such as this is not to be dismissed lightly.

Nor is the vivid detail about a flight of the whole Community to the Jericho area thereafter, whence Peter is sent out by James on his first missionary journey to encounter Simon
Magus
in Caesarea. Nor that of James still ‘limping’ from his fall thirty days later. All these matters have been purposefully refashioned and systematically overwritten in the traditions that have gone into the Book of Acts in the manner we have seen – thus revealing the
modus operandi
behind these overwrites in a most patent manner.

The Talmudic material about the young priests taking a fellow priest outside the Temple and beating out his brains with clubs if he served in a state of uncleanness – note how in the Pseudoclementine tradition, the ‘Enemy’, Paul
calls to the young priests to help him
– relates to these traditions as well. So does the equally colourful one in the Second Apocalypse of James about James being forced to dig a pit and a heavy stone being placed upon his stomach, which comes directly from the
Mishnah Sanhedrin
’s descriptions of such stoning procedures.

What is even more interesting about this one in Nag Hammadi lore is that it includes all the additional motifs of ‘casting down’, ‘being thrown down from a great height’, ‘taking away the
Zaddik
’, and James now ‘standing’ down in the hole! But in addition, the Pinnacle of the Temple is replaced by ‘the great Cornerstone’, thus linking it to traditions about ‘Peter’ generally and allusions in the Scrolls to the Community Council being the Cornerstone – to say nothing of those in Scripture about ‘
Jesus’ being ‘the Stone which the builders rejected
’.

Paul’s Contacts in the Household of Nero

Paul, of course, knows the ‘
Belial
’ terminology, because he refers to it, however defectively, in 2 Corinthians 6:15. Not only is the ‘Belial’ terminology relevant to Herodians, but the ‘
balla‘
’/‘Bela‘’/‘Balaam’ circle of language, relating to this root in Hebrew, has to do with what the leaders of this Establishment did to those objecting to their behaviour, that is, ‘
swallowed
’ or ‘
consumed them
’ – ‘
Belial
’ in the Damascus Document becoming ‘
Balaam
’ in Revelation, 2 Peter, and Jude.

It is even possible that the circle relates to the ‘
Benjamin
’ appellation as well, a terminology that Paul applies to himself in Romans 11:1 (echoed in Acts 13:21). It is extremely unlikely that Jews were evoking their tribal affiliations by this time in their history – except for ‘Priests’ or ‘Levites’ – most other tribes having long since been absorbed into the principal group, ‘Judah’ –
the source of the appellation ‘Jew’ or ‘Yehud’
. But in Paul’s case, when he describes himself in Philippians 3:5 as ‘of the race of Israel’, ‘a Hebrew of the Hebrews’, he conspicuously avoids any reference to the appellative ‘
Jew
’.

There is some indication that overseas Jews may have been using this ‘
Benjamin
’ appellation to apply to themselves too, though Paul might simply have been evoking his biblical namesake, the Benjaminite King Saul, a thousand years before. Even more germane, as we have also suggested, it is possible that Herodians and others, because of their peculiar quasi-Jewish status, used the terminology – as Muhammad does ‘
Ishmael
’ in a later generation – to show that they too were originally ‘
heirs to the Promise and Children of Abraham
’, or, as Paul puts it, ‘
Israelites
’ and ‘
Hebrews
’ – but not ‘
Jews
’.

Edomites, too, were children of Abraham, but, in view of these very interesting overlaps between Edomites and Benjaminites in the matter of their eponymous ancestor,
Bela‘ the son of Be‘or
(in Biblical writ, both
the first Edomite King and one of the principal Benjaminite clans
– not to mention that Benjaminites in Judges 19–20 being referred to as ‘
Sons of Belial
’), the Herodians may have been turning the insults of their detractors around into testimony to their own legitimacy. If the Herodians were using this terminology and applying it to themselves, it would be further verification that Qumran’s use of this cluster to imply everything negative – in fact,
the epitome of Evil incarnate
– and our identification of it as
a leitmotif for Herodians
is correct.

In Philippians also, Paul makes use of another allusion right out of the Community Rule from Qumran and applies it to Epaphroditus, whom he calls his ‘
brother and fellow worker’, ‘an odour, a sweet fragrance, an acceptable sacrifice, well pleasing to God
’ (2:25 and 4:18). At Qumran, this latter allusion is the kind of simile actually applied to the Community Council, whose members are described as ‘
a sweet fragrance’, ‘an acceptable sacrifice atoning for the land’, and ‘a tested Wall and Precious Corner-Stone … establishing the Holy Spirit according to Truth forever’
. In this regard, for the Community Rule too,
prayer rightly-offered is described as ‘a pleasing odour of Righteousness and Perfection of the Way, an acceptable free-will offering
’ – again, the same kind of language Paul is applying to  his ‘
brother and fellow-worker
’ (even his ‘
Apostle
’) Epaphroditus above.
10

For his part in Philippians, after then referring to having ‘
Riches in the Glory of Christ
’, Paul sends his greetings ‘to
every Holy One
…
especially those of the household of Caesar
’ (4:19–22.). This Epaphroditus would appear to be an interesting person. ‘Epaphroditus’’ name, also, appears as the name of Josephus’ editor and patron. Josephus refers to ‘Epaphroditus’ as the ‘most excellent of men’ and ‘a lover of all kinds of learning …
principally the knowledge of History’
, who ‘himself
had a part in great events
and
many turns of fortune
…
showing the wonderful vigour of an excellent constitution and
an immovable virtuous resolution in them all’
– flattery on a par with Paul above.
11

Like Felix, a freedman of Nero, Epaphroditus was also involved in Nero’s death, helping him commit suicide – though this may actually have been an assassination. As a reward, he would also appear afterwards to have become Domitian’s secretary, until the latter turned on him and put him to death supposedly for
daring to
kill an Emperor
. This was around 95 CE and the same time that Domitian was reputed to have put to death or banished two other ‘Christians’ in his household, Flavius Clemens (possibly Clement) and his wife or niece, Flavia Domitilla (and possibly even Josephus).

Paul also refers to Epaphroditus in Philippians 2:27 as at one point having been sick and near death. The reference to him  connected to ‘
the household of Caesar
’ in Philippians 4:22 makes it virtually certain we are speaking about the same person as the ‘Epaphroditus’ just described above. One should note the parallel reference to ‘
those of (the household) of Aristobulus
’ in Romans 16:11 and ‘
the littlest Herod
’, his and the infamous Salome’s putative son, in 16:13. Herod of Chalcis’ son Aristobulus was certainly very close to Claudius since the latter, not only conferred upon him the Kingdom of Lower Armenia, but also the title of ‘Friend’. Doubtlessly, this same ‘Aristobulus’ was on equally friendly terms with persons in Nero’s household as well and the Flavians after that – if he lived that long. His son seems to have.

It is a not incurious footnote to all these relationships that
the offspring of the marriage of Drusilla and Felix perished in the ‘conflagration of the mountain Vesuvius in the days of Titus Caesar’
– a matter Josephus promises to relate further but never does.
12
Josephus, also, promises to tell us
more about the family of Philo and the Alabarch of Alexandria
but, likewise, never does.

Final Conclusions about Peter and Josephus’ Simon

To go back to John the Baptist’s Qumranic-type complaints against the Herodians – clearly, what he objected to on the part of Herodias and Herod Antipas was their ‘
fornication
’ to say nothing of their ‘
Riches
’. The New Testament presentation of an arcane problem over levirate marriage may or may not have played a part. The issue of whether ‘Philip’ (actually ‘Herod’ the younger) did or did not have children is, in any event, moot.
Herodias divorced ‘Philip’
, which even Josephus notes was illegal. Nor did this ‘Herod’, who was the son of Herod’s second wife called ‘Mariamme’ as well, die at this point.

As the Gospel of Luke graphically expresses it, ‘
but Herod the Tetrarch was reproved by (John) concerning Herodias, the wife of his brother Philip
’ (3:19). The issue as Josephus graphically delineates it
vis-à-vis
Herodias was her marriage with,
not one
but
two uncles
and
her illegal divorce from the first of them
, all things roundly condemned at Qumran and, no doubt, in John’s complaints against her too – for which he loses his life.

Likewise, the confrontation between Peter and Simon
Magus
, so creatively enhanced in our several sources, had little probably to do with theological problems
per se
, though these may have played a part as, for instance,
ideologies surrounding ‘the True Prophet’, ‘the Primal Adam’, and ‘the Christ’
. It is impossible to tell, but Josephus does unequivocally state that there was
a ‘magician’ called ‘Simon’ in Felix’s employ
.

As we saw, Felix used this individual to convince Drusilla, not only to ‘
break the Laws of her Ancestors
’ (‘
the First
’ in the parlance of the Damascus Document), but
to divorce a previous husband and marry another
– all roundly condemned at Qumran. Moreover, while the previous one had
circumcised himself expressly to marry her
, Felix, quite obviously,
did not
. Furthermore, in the Pseudoclementine
Recognitions
– which makes so much of Peter’s confrontations with Simon
Magus
up and down the Palestine coast – we have it that James sent out Peter from somewhere outside of Jericho around this time
to confront Simon Magus in Caesarea
.

In all the materials about James, condemning ‘
fornication
’ is a most insistent theme as it is in the literature centering around ‘
the Righteous Teacher’
at Qumran. I think we can safely say that the same ‘Simon’,
who wanted to bar Agrippa I from the Temple as a foreigner
despite the latter’s obvious attempts at ‘Piety’ and
inspected his household to see what was being done there contrary to Law
, confronted Simon
Magus
in Caesarea as well and the issue between them was ‘
fornication
’ –
the ‘fornication of the Herodian family
!

That the Felix, who employed a namesake of this ‘Simon’ in the next decade was a foreigner, to say nothing of his repression of Opposition leaders and self-evident brutality, just compounds this same issue. Finally, one can take it as a given that Felix was
neither circumcised
, nor scrupled
to sleep with women during ‘the blood’ of their periods
(as Qumran would put it) – not issues, one can assume, of
very great moment in the Hellenistic world he functioned in
.

The key allusion in the Damascus Document to this last practice relates to
how foreigners were perceived in Palestine
. That is not to say that all foreigners did these things, only that this is
how they would have been perceived in Palestine
. These are the kinds of aspersions that would have circulated in everyday conversation – and everyone would have known what they meant. The calumny as it is present in the Damascus Document,
relating to
‘
the Priestly Establishment’
, did not mean that all such persons
slept with women ‘during
the blood
of their menstrual flow’. They most certainly did not.

However, what it did mean was that
they had commerce with persons who did
and, in the Damascus Document’s own words, they incurred their ‘
pollution
’ thereby – meaning primarily Herodians. In the case of the High Priests,
they accepted their appointment from such Herodians
, considered by extremist ‘Zealot’ types irretrievably ‘
polluted
’; and, worse still,
from Roman Governors
–
sometimes even for bribes
. This is why ‘the Zealots’ and probably those represented by the literature at Qumran and proto-‘Christians’ in Palestine were so intent on ‘
electing a High Priest of greater purity and Righteousness
’ (Heb. 4:14 and 7:26).