James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls I (83 page)

In Mark 1:16, ‘Simon and Andrew
the brother of Simon
are
casting
(
ballontas
)
a net
into the sea’, while in Matthew 4:21, ‘James the son of Zebedee and John
his brother
’ are
mending their ‘nets
’. Here, not only do we have both these various permutations of the ‘
brother
’ theme, but also of our ‘
casting down
’ and ‘
nets
’ vocabulary with a vengeance. Mark adds the charming little detail, missing from Matthew, that
Zebedee had ‘hired servants’ with him in his boat
(Mark 1:20).

This episode, as it is retold in Luke 5:1–11, almost perfectly parallels the post-resurrection episodes in John. Meticulous as ever, Luke even gets the name of the Lake right: ‘
Gennesaret
’, not ‘
Tiberias
’ as in John. For Luke, it is ‘the fishermen’ who are now ‘
washing
their nets’ at the start of the episode – not the two brothers, ‘James the son of Zebedee and John his brother’ – not ‘mending’ them (5:2) and he, too, repeats the word ‘net’ or ‘nets’
four times
in five lines before he is done!

According to his version, ‘Jesus’ goes out in Simon’s boat and, is teaching the people from it, when he tells Simon ‘
to let down’ his ‘net’
(5:4). When it is all done – for they ‘
worked through the whole nigh
t’ – ‘
their net was breaking
’ and filled almost two boats to the sinking (5:7)! For Luke, all then left their boats and followed him, Jesus uttering the now proverbial words that ‘
henceforth’ he (Peter) ‘would be catching men
’ (5:10).

In Matthew and Mark, ‘
they left their nets and followed him
’ and ‘Jesus’, addressing all four, utters the even more famous, ‘
I shall make you
fishers of men
’ (Mt 4:18 and Mk 1:17). Both clearly play on and invert the allusions in the Damascus Document about ‘
Belial
’ (‘
Balaam
’ and ‘
Balak
’ in Revelation) casting his ‘
net
’ to deceive Israel (in Revelation, this is literally ‘
cast a stumbling block before the Sons of Israel
’) or ‘
catch
’ men. The writers of these Hellenized New Testament parodies could not have been unaware of this.

For his part, Matthew 13:1–53 again returns to this theme of ‘
casting a net into the sea and gathering together every kind’ of fish
in his famous series of ‘Jewish Christian’ parables. These include the now-proverbial ‘
Parable of the Tares’
which condemns ‘
the Enemy
’ who,
while all the men slept, ‘came and sowed the tares
(i.e., weeds)
among the wheat
’ (13:24–30). As in Luke, Jesus is
teaching from a boat
and now it is ‘
the crowd
’ which ‘
stood on the shore
’ (Mt 13:2). In Matthew, this comes right after the ‘Gentile Christian’ episode about Jesus’
curing a series of demonics
(12:22–45) and his rejection of his ‘
mother and his brothers standing outside seeking to speak to him
’ in favour of his Disciples (12:46–50) – providing a good example of Matthew’s schizophrenia and rather representing the layering of various contradictory sources.

In the largely ‘Jewish Christian’ parables that follow, Jesus is ostensibly explaining what ‘the Kingdom of Heaven’ is. In his final interpretation of this, ‘
the sower
’ once again is ‘
the Son of Man
’; the good seed, ‘
the Sons of the Kingdom
’; and ‘
the Enemy who sowed the tares
’, ‘
the Devil
’ or ‘
Diabolos
’ (Mt 13:36–42). Jesus goes on to picture – in the spirit of the War Scroll, the Letter of James, and James’ proclamation in the Temple – how ‘
the Son of Man will send forth his Angels
’ to gather out of the Kingdom ‘
the tares sowed by the Enemy
’ and ‘
cast them
into the furnace of Fire’ (
balousin
).

After describing how ‘the Righteous shall
shine forth as the sun
in the Kingdom of their Father’, he compares the Kingdom of Heaven to ‘
a large net cast
(
bletheise
)
into the sea
’,
catching all different kinds of fish
– this, a clear ‘Gentile Christian’ overlay. Nevertheless, the Parable ends on the same uncompromising ‘Jamesian’ note as the preceding one about ‘
the tares
’. Here, instead of ‘breaking bread’ with Jesus and ‘sitting down to eat’ – as in the majority of these episodes – the fishermen rather ‘
sit down
and gather the good into containers, and the bad they
cast away
(
ebalon
)’. This is now followed by the words: ‘So shall it be at
the Completion of the Age
.
The Angels will go out and separate the Evil from among the midst of the Righteous
and
cast them
(
balousin
)
into the furnace of the fire
’ (Mt 13:49–50). This is an
authentic
Palestinian Christian tradition because everything in it reflects what we know about these native Palestinian movements.

These ‘
casting
’s, of course, undergo even further transformation and refinement into the ‘
casting out spirits
’ (
ekballo
) or ‘
demons
’ in the Gospels – an ‘
Authority
’ or ‘
Power
’ given to the Apostles on their appointment by ‘Jesus’. In turn, they recall how Josephus portrays the Essenes as ‘
casting out
’ (again
ekballousi
)
backsliders unwilling
or unready to
keep the practices of the Community or observe its secrets
– nor is this to mention how Josephus recounts the ‘
casting
’ of James’ nemesis Ananus’ naked body ‘
out
’ of the city without burial as food for jackals above; nor how he describes ‘
the Zealots
’’ ‘
casting down
’ the body of the ‘
Rich
’ collaborator, ‘Zachariah’, as well, from
the Pinnacle of the Temple into the Kedron Valley below
, whom they also executed after a cursory trial, when they took over the City!
15

The first of these is, of course, reversed in Acts’ portrayal of the ‘
casting out
’ (
ekbalontes
) of its archetypical Gentile believer ‘Stephen’ from the city – itself inverting, as we have seen,
the stoning of James
. As we also saw, these are now further trivialized, as
per
the casting down of Belial’s ‘
nets
’, in episodes relating to ‘the Power’ Jesus gives his Apostles ‘
to cast out demons
’ and
the supernatural accoutrements attached to this
– as, for instance, in Mark 3:15: ‘
and he appointed Twelve …  to have authority to cast out demons
’ (
ekballein
) or Matthew 17:19’s further elaboration of the same idea following Jesus’ ‘Transfiguration’ on the mountain.

This last directly precedes another episode about how Peter ‘
casts
’ (
bale
) his hook into the sea to get the money to pay the Roman tribute – an easy answer to the tax question – whose relation the Habakkuk
Pesher
‘s exposition of Hab. 2:3-4, we have already expounded above. Here, ‘
the Disciples
’ (the Central Triad of Peter, James, and John ‘his brother’), who are portrayed as being unable – unlike Jesus – even
to cure a demonic boy
, ask Jesus, ‘
Why were we unable to cast out
?’ (
ekbalein
). For perhaps the umpteenth time, Jesus gives the typical Pauline response, ‘
Because of your unbelief
(Matt. 17:20)!

In a parallel reversal, using now the subject matter of the ‘
Parable of the Tares
’ and again showing the various layers of these inverted polemics, Mark 4:26–32, as we saw, has ‘Jesus’
teaching the people from a boat
, but now ‘the Parable’ is that of ‘the Mustard Seed’. Yet again, a man is ‘
casting
(
bale
)
the seed on the ground
’, which grows into a quite gigantic tree with ‘
great branches
’ (note, the Messianic ‘
Branch
’ symbolism), ‘
larger than all the plants
’. Though the meaning here should be clear even to the non-specialist, the fiercely apocalyptic, indigenous Palestinian attitude has now been completely pacified in a haze of Hellenizing intellectualization.

In another funny adumbration of the way this kind of ‘
casting out
’/‘
casting down
’ language is used in the Gospels, directly after the ‘Transfiguration’ scene and the ensuing aspersion on the Central Three as being ‘
unable to cast out
’, Matthew 17:24–27 varies Jesus’ position on the tax issue. At the same time he employs the ‘
stumbling block
’/‘
being scandalized
’ language, that is, so as ‘
not to offend
’ or ‘
scandalize them
’ (‘
them
’ being the
tax collectors
!) and now he has Peter ‘
casting
(
bale
)
a hook
’, as we have already signaled, into the sea to get a coin from a fish’s mouth there in order to pay the Roman tax.

This is supposed to be serious, the point being, that ‘Jesus’ is portraying as doing this because he was, presumably, unwilling to pay the tax himself or, Essene-style,
did not carry coins on his person
– or both (though in the portrait here, he never actually ‘touches’ the coin Peter returns with). Notwithstanding, in typical Platonic repartee and following the ideology of Paul, Jesus is made laconically to conclude ‘then the Sons are
truly free
’. Here, typically, ‘
freedom from Rome
’
or ‘
foreign dominion
’ or ‘
oppression
’
is, as usual,
ever so subtly transformed
into Pauline
freedom from the Law
.

The conclusion has to be that, by looking into seemingly innocuous episodes about Jesus ‘breaking bread’ with his Apostles after his resurrection – relative to
the first appearance to James
hinted at by Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:7 – we are, once again, led to completely unexpected results about the whole ‘
Belial’/’Diabolos’/’casting out
’ circle-of-language, now turned into stories about how the Apostles ‘
cast down their nets
’ or have the Authority ‘
to cast out demons
’, rather than how James was ‘
cast down
’ from the Temple steps or Temple Pinnacle.

Nor could we have foreseen where the investigation of such language and examples would lead us. In another transmogrification of this language, that of the ‘
tares
’ or the ‘
rotten fish
’ being ‘
cast into a furnace of Fire
’, we are led into a picture of the plight of ‘
Evil persons
’ generally at ‘
the Last Judgement
’ which does, in fact, parallel the Qumran response to how these same ‘Evil’ persons ‘
swallowed
’ the Righteous Teacher. In turn, they themselves would ‘
be paid the Reward on Evil
’ or ‘
be swallowed’
by
‘the Cup of the Wrath of God
’, which so parallels the Isaiah 3:10 verse, applied to James’ death by the Second-Century testimony of Hegesippus: ‘
Wherefore they shall eat the fruit of their doings
’.

John’s ‘Net Full of Fishes’ Again and Luke’s Emmaus Road Sighting

To return to the Gospel of John’s testimony to Jesus’ appearance to his Disciples along the shore of the Sea of Galilee
after
his resurrection: after putting on his clothes ‘
to cast himself into the sea
’ (‘for he was naked’) Peter is
swimming to shore
. Nor does he this time appear to ‘sink’ for ‘lack of Faith’ as when he tries to walk on the waters in Matthew or as the boats so ‘
full of fish
’ are on the verge of doing in Luke. Rather, he was ‘
dragging the net full of one hundred and fifty-three large fishes to land but, though there were so many, the net was not torn
’ (John 21:11).