James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls I (86 page)

As Luke continues, he has Jesus swinging back to a more narrowly apocalyptic Jewish viewpoint: ‘You may
eat and drink at my table
in my Kingdom
and sit on Thrones judging the Twelve Tribes of Israel’
(22:30–31). Here he, not only returns to the Apostles
participating in the Last Judgement
, an activity which the Habakkuk
Pesher
ascribes to
the ‘Elect’ of Israel,
themselves synonymous – according to Damascus Document definition – with
the Sons of Zadok
‘
called by Name
who would
stand
in the Last Days’
2
– to say nothing of the theme of ‘
eating and drinking’
, now tied to the issue of table fellowship – but also to the ‘
Twelve Tribe
’ scenario regarding these things as in Galatians.

In the Gospels, Jesus is portrayed as ‘reclining’ with ‘the Twelve’ at the Passover meal at the Last Supper (Jn 13:1–30). Luke, for instance, has Jesus saying: ‘“
I will not eat any more with you until it is fulfilled in the Kingdom of God
” and (as in the Gospel of the Hebrews),
taking his Cup
, he gave thanks saying, “… I will never again
drink of the fruit of the vine until the Kingdom of God has come
”’ (22:16–18 and pars.). Not only do we have here yet another play on the
Rechabite
or
Nazirite
theme of ‘abstention from wine’, but also James’ oath in the Gospel of the Hebrews.

Furthermore, we again have in this statement by ‘Jesus’ at ‘the Last Supper’ in the Synoptics a variation on the ‘
eating and drinking
’ theme – so important in early Church accounts of James’ behaviour and interactions with Paul – following which, Jesus announces almost a verbatim version of Paul’s ‘
Communion with the blood of Christ
’ in 1 Corinthians 10–11, the letter with which we began our discussion of all these post-resurrection sightings of Jesus in the first place.

Jesus’ words here just about amount to a word-for-word recapitulation of those, the Gospel of the Hebrews attributes to James, also repeated to some degree in the sighting ‘along the way’ to Emmaus in the Gospel of Luke (24:30). It is not even clear whether this passage from the Gospel of the Hebrews about James – which obviously has nothing to do with any consumption, even symbolically, of
‘the body’ and ‘blood’ of Jesus
– is not the more primitive original of what ‘Jesus’ was supposed to have said at ‘the Last Supper’ in the Gospels; wherein
the Pauline symbolical consumption of ‘the body’ and ‘blood’ of Jesus
is, perhaps,
written over
an originally
more Jamesian core
.

Communion with the Blood of Christ in Paul and at the Last Supper

Paul launches into this subject of ‘Communion with the body’ and ‘blood of Christ’ in 1 Corinthians 10:16 after first announcing that ‘
if food scandalizes
(or ‘
offends
’)
my brother, I will never eat flesh forever
’ – this followed immediately by his reference to ‘
the brothers of the Lord and Cephas
’ (8:13–9:5) – and elaborating on his philosophy of ‘
winning
’ at all costs (9:18–27). When he does so, he addresses himself yet again to the ‘
Beloved Ones
’, admonishing them to ‘
flee from idolatry
’ (1 Cor. 10:14).

He says: ‘The Cup of blessing which we bless, is it not Communion with the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not Communion with the body of Christ?’ (1 Cor. 10:16), and then goes on to allegorize on the Qumran language of ‘the Many’, denoting himself and ‘the Many’ as the ‘body’, by which he means both the body of the Church and the body of Christ (1 Cor. 10:17).
At the same time he proceeds to invoke ‘
drinking the Cup of the Lord’ and ‘eating at the Lord’s table
’ (1 Cor. 10:21), both encountered in Jerome’s account of Jesus’ first appearance to James in the Gospel of the Hebrews. It is at this point that he starts to contrast ‘Communion with the blood of Christ’ and ‘Communion with the body of Christ’ with ‘
the sacrifices of the other Israel
’ – the one ‘
according to the flesh
’ – which ‘
eats the sacrifices in Communion with those at the altar
’ (1 Cor. 10:18 –
thus
!).

In the peculiar manner in which his
allegorizing logic
works – and again showing it is James with whom he is arguing – Paul actually alludes now to these ‘sacrifices in the Temple’ in terms of the ‘
things sacrificed to idols
’ prohibited in James’ directives to overseas communities according to Acts’ portrayal (15:29 and 21:25) – and
MMT
–
yet again reversing the original sense of this phrase
. It becomes clear he is, once more, talking about the more general theme of ‘
eating and drinking
’, referring to it in terms of his characteristic language of ‘causing offence’/ ‘stumbling’, and ‘all things being Lawful’ to him (1 Cor. 10:23–32).

Just so there can be no mistaking what he means here, he now
compares these sacrifices in the Temple to ‘the Cup of demons’ and ‘the table of demons
’ (1 Cor. 10:21). This would have been shocking in a Palestinian milieu, though the idea of the ‘
pollution of the Temple
’ sacrifices was already widespread in the Qumran documents, particularly in the ‘Three Nets of Belial’ condemnations and
MMT
, paralleling James’ directives to overseas communities as we have shown above. We have seen in the Pseudoclementine
Homilies
how Peter identifies this ‘table of demons’ with eating ‘food sacrificed to idols’. Still, it is another excellent example of how Paul reverses the vocabulary of his interlocutors, using their own ideological posture against them.

He ends this discussion by, once again, alluding to the theme that characterizes his ideological position: ‘
to me, all things are Lawful
’ (1 Cor. 10:23). Paul uses this to move directly on to the two specific permissions, ‘
eat everything sold in the marketplace’ and ‘eat everything set before you
’, in connection with which he now cites a second time
James’ prohibition on eating things ‘sacrificed to an idol’
– with which, of course, he disagrees,
referring to it as ‘a stumbling block
’ (10:25–32).

This leads to Paul’s further discussion in chapter 11 of the ‘
eating and drinking
’ theme, which he
specifically relates to ‘eating the Lord’s supper’ and to ‘drinking the Cup of the Lord
’ (as in the Gospel of the Hebrews’ ‘breaking bread’ scene with James above) and
the Cup of ‘the New Covenant in (his) blood
’ (11:20–29). Paul, for his part, puts this as follows: ‘For
I received from the Lord
, that which I also delivered to you, the Lord Jesus, in the night in which he was delivered up,
took bread
and, after giving thanks,
he broke it and said, “Take, eat … ”’
(11:23–24).

Paul purposefully juxtaposes his first use of the word ‘delivered’ with that of his second, ‘delivered up’ – in the New Testament normally associated with ‘Judas
Iscariot
’ (a usage widespread, too, in the Dead Sea Scrolls but to entirely different effect) however, in Paul, no ‘
Judas
Iscariot
’ is ever mentioned! ‘In the same manner also, (he took) the Cup after having eaten, saying, “
This Cup is the New Covenant in my blood
... For as often as you
eat this bread
and
drink this Cup
, you announce
the death of the Lord until he comes
”’ (11:25–26). We have already remarked and will further discuss in a follow-up volume how this ‘
New Covenant in my blood
’ relates to the Dead Sea Scrolls’ ‘
New Covenant in the Land of Damascus
’ – ‘
Cup of blood
’ in Hebrew and the Greek ‘
Damascus
’ being homophones.

That Paul announces he ‘
received’ this new insight ‘from the Lord
’ makes this claim even more curious. This is also true where his first enunciation of this ‘Cup of blessing’ as ‘Communion with the blood of Christ’ is concerned earlier in 1 Cor. 10:14–23 – itself preceded by his lengthy analyses of the two subjects from James’ directives to overseas communities in Acts, ‘
fornication
’ and ‘
things sacrificed to idols
’.

The implication of this claim preceding the list of ‘Jesus’’ post-resurrection appearances in 1 Corinthians 15 is that he ‘received’ these doctrines from the Apostles before him. In the case of ‘Communion with the body and blood of Christ’ here 11:23–27, the implication is clearly that he
did ‘not receive this from any man’ but rather as a direct ‘revelation from Jesus Christ
’ (Gal. 1:12). In fact, the implication of this, too, may be that no one else even knew of the doctrine. The Gospels, of course, make good this deficiency.

In fact, not only does Paul then proceed in 11:30 to cast aspersions on
the ‘weak’
again, his favourite circumlocution for those in authority over him who cause problems regarding ‘
eating and drinking
’,
circumcision
, table fellowship, etc. Here, Goebbels-like, he also calls them ‘
sickly
’ while, again, repeating his ‘
many are fallen asleep
’ allusion and tying all these things to another allusion to
the idea of being ‘examined
’ (11:31). Previously
being ‘examined’
for him had to do with
his teaching credentials or lack of them
, however now he asserts
rather ominously
: ‘For
he who
eats and drinks
unworthily, not seeing through to the body of the Lord,
eats and drinks Judgement to himself
’ (
thus
– 11:29).

Not only is the play on the language of ‘eating and drinking’ again self-evident, but now he is threatening those, who do not ‘see’ things in the manner he does, with ‘
Judgement
’. This clearly has to do not with a reversal once again of the kinds of ‘
Judgement
’ his opponents would call down on him – as, for instance, that on ‘
Law-breakers’ who ‘do not keep the whole Law’ and on those who claim their ‘Faith will save them
’ in James 2:10–14 – i.e.,
Divine or eschatological Judgement
. Furthermore in regard to this ‘
Judgement
’, he is using ‘
Cup
’ imagery, in particular, ‘
drinking the Cup of the Lord
’ –
imagery specifically employed in the Scrolls
to describe ‘
the Vengeance’ God would take for the destruction of the Righteous Teacher and ‘the Poor
’.

Of equal importance, this same Habakkuk
Pesher
– which described ‘
the Lying Spouter
’ as having
‘led Many astray
to build a Worthless City upon blood and erect an Assembly on Lying
for the sake of his Glory, tiring out Many with a Worthless Service
and
instructing them in works of Lying
so that their works will be of Emptiness
’ – calls down upon this ‘
Liar
’/‘
Spouter of Lyin
g’ and his associates the very same ‘
Fire with which they blasphemed and vilified the Elect of God
’!
3

In both of these quotations, the one from Paul and the one from Qumran, one should note the repetition of the allusion to ‘
Many
’ and how Paul also uses the word ‘
Glory
’ – also used here in this passage from the Dead Sea Scrolls – as part of his allusion to ‘eating and drinking’ in 1 Cor. 10:31 and repeatedly through Chapters 11 and 15. It should also be appreciated that throughout these passages concerning the destruction of ‘the Righteous Teacher’ in the Scrolls, the word ‘
drinking
’ is being used to express both this and ‘
the Divine
Vengeance’ that will be exacted because of it.

Before mentioning ‘the other Apostles and Cephas and the brothers of the Lord’ traveling around with women in Chapter 9, Paul protests: ‘
Am I not an Apostle? Am I not free? Have I not seen Jesus Christ our Lord? Are you not my work in the Lord? If I am not an Apostle to others, at least I am to you
…
My defence to those who would examine me is, do we not have authority to eat and drink
?’ (9:1–4). This, just after he had studiedly concluded, ‘
food (
literally,
‘meat’) does not commend us to God
’ – ‘
neither, in not eating, do we fall short
’ (8:1–11); but
his subtle plays on language
and
the way he turns the language
his adversaries appear to be using
against
him back on them are canny.