James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls I (89 page)

Preceding the Righteousness Commandment at the end of Column Six of the Damascus Document was the admonition ‘to separate between polluted and pure and to distinguish between Holy and profane’, exactly the opposite of what Acts says Peter learned on the rooftop in Jaffa.
19
This also included the commandment to ‘separate from the Sons of the Pit’ and, in Column Seven, ‘from all pollutions according to Law, so that a man will
not defile his Holy Spirit, which God separated for them
’. This last is basically an allusion to either temporary or life-long Naziritism and being ‘consecrated’ or ‘set aside as Perfectly Holy’.

This passage ends with another admonition ‘
to do
according to the exact sense of the Law’ – again the tell-tale Jamesian note on ‘doing’ – ‘everyone walking in these (Commandments) in Perfect Holiness relying on all that was transmitted of the Covenant of God, promising them (here, a variation of the word, ‘Faithfulness’) to live for a thousand generations’.
20

In the Damascus Document, this section also includes the allusion to ‘the offspring of vipers’ (Isa. 59:5), applied to those ‘who defile their Holy Spirits, opening their mouth with a blaspheming Tongue against the Laws of the Covenant of God saying, “They are not sure.” They speak an Abomination (or ‘a blasphemy’) concerning them.’ This section of the Damascus Document draws to an end, following the allusion to ‘separate from the Sons of the Pit’, with the instruction ‘to keep away from polluted or Evil Riches (acquired by) vow or ban and (to keep away) from the Riches of the Temple (meaning the Temple Treasury) and robbing the Poor of His People’.
21

Towards the end, in the Eighth Column, those who ‘have spoken wrongly against the Laws of Righteousness and rejected the Covenant and Compact (‘the Faith’) they raised in the Land of Damascus, the New Covenant’ – including ‘the Liar’ – are condemned. Not only are such persons said to have ‘put idols on their hearts’ and ‘walked in the stubbornness of their heart’, but ‘all the Holy Ones of the Most High’ are described as having ‘cursed him’ and ‘no one is to co-operate with him in regard to Riches (or ‘purse’) or work (in the sense of ‘Mission’ or ‘Service’)’.
22
These, as the Document puts it, ‘shall have no share in the House of the
Torah
’, a spirit, as should be plain, that could not be more different from the Pauline. Not only does reference to ‘the Man of Lying’ directly follow, but in addition, so do two allusions to ‘fearing God’ and ‘fearing His Name’, coupled with the pronouncement that ‘to those that love Him’ and ‘reckon His Name’, God would reveal Salvation (
Yesha‘
) and Justification … for a thousand Generations.
23

That we have in the midst of these allusions by Paul to ‘eating and drinking’ and ‘breaking the bread’ in 1 Corinthians 10–11, evocation of ‘taking the Cup’ and ‘the New Covenant in my blood’ or ‘Communion with the blood of Christ’ (1 Cor. 10:16 and 11:25 – repeated in Matthew, Mark, and Luke in the context of the ‘Last Supper’), is of the utmost importance. As Paul goes on to express it, ‘for as often as you
eat this bread and drink this Cup
, you announce the death of the Lord until he comes’ (11:26).

It should be appreciated further that the context in Paul is one of ‘examining oneself’ so as ‘not to be judged’ (1 Cor. 11:28–32), concepts that in the Letter of James come out in the context of subjecting yourself ‘to God’ (not the Roman State), and ‘resisting the Devil’ (
Diabolo
– Jas. 4:7–10), also seen as representing that State. The Letter of James puts it, ‘He that speaks against a brother and judges his brother,
speaks against the Law
and judges the Law, but if you judge the Law,
you are not a Doer of the Law, but a judge
’ (4:11). This could not agree more with the Damascus Document, which specifically mentions ‘speaking erroneously against the Laws of Righteousness’. Even the expression, ‘Doer of the Law’, is to be found in two successive notices in the Habakkuk
Pesher
, fundamental both to the exposition of Habakkuk 2:3 on ‘the Delay of the
Parousia
’ and Habakkuk 2:4, ‘the Righteous shall live by his Faith’.

For Paul the ‘judging’ in the Letter of James is now applied to the man who ‘eats and drinks unworthily’, by which he means, ‘not seeing through to the body of the Lord’. Such a man is not only ‘
guilty of the body and blood of the Lord
’, but moreover, ‘
eats and drinks Judgement to himself
’ (11:27–29). Not only does this fly in the face of allusions like the one to ‘putting idols on his heart’ in the Damascus Document above and of the substance and spirit of the Letter attributed to James in the New Testament; ‘
abstention
(‘
lehinnazer
’)
from things sacrificed to idols and from blood
’ – just as at Qumran – form the centrepiece of James’ instructions to overseas communities, which Paul appears to be answering in these passages from 1 Corinthians.

One should note that in 1 Corinthians 10:5, when discussing these things, Paul actually alludes to the Children of Israel ‘being cut off in the wilderness’ – found at this same point in the Damascus Document – but without telling why. In fact, he even uses these words ‘cutting off’ to express the hope in Galatians 5:12 that the circumcisers disturbing his communities, like the ‘some sent by James’ earlier in the same letter, would ‘themselves cut off’ – meaning, as we have previously explained, their own privy parts.

It is almost inconceivable that this could be accidental or that these things could have been misunderstood, though they have been for the better part of two millennia, particularly since Paul is combining all these allusions in 1 Corinthians. The only difference is that instead of ‘abstaining from things sacrificed to idols and blood’, Paul’s communities are now being encouraged (or at least not discouraged)
to partake
, certainly
to partake of the blood of Christ
. This flies in the face of the James-like vegetarianism and Rechabite-style aversion to wine of all these Nazirite extremist groups, who neither consumed wine, nor ate meat at all. It also flies in the face of James’ proscription on the consumption of blood in the Book of Acts, even as we have it, not to mention Jewish legal restrictions generally.

It cannot be that Paul misunderstood the true thrust of James’ instructions to overseas communities (if these are the same or parallel to those enshrined in
MMT
, all the more so). On the contrary, Paul reveals that he understands them very well. That these directives were
written down
in some manner is not only averred in Acts’ account – such as it is – of an ‘epistle’ being sent down from James with two ‘prophets’, Judas (called by Acts) ‘Barsabas’, and Silas (15:22–23), but also by Paul in 1 Corinthians 10:11 (though, strictly speaking, this allusion more likely refers to these passages in the Damascus Document).

That in his delineation of these issues involving the ‘Cup of blood’, Paul is speaking figuratively and James literally is just the point. As we have repeatedly stressed, Paul allegorizes in the manner that Philo of Alexandria – his older contemporary – allegorized about the Old Testament. Only in Paul, everything emerging from a ‘Jamesian’ framework – and, as it were, the perspective of Qumran – is not only allegorized, but reversed.

It is no wonder that the world has for so long been confused about the true nature of what occurred at this crucial juncture in human history. But now that we have the Qumran documents to aid us (come down nineteen centuries after they were deposited as if to haunt us), it is no longer possible to be mistaken about the true nature of what occurred. Without these documents we could never have, using the words of Paul, ‘seen through to it’.

The Cup of the Lord, Tombs that Whiten, and Linen Clothes Again

We can now return to this passage in the Gospel of the Hebrews with a clearer understanding of this process and of what is at stake in considering all these parallel and interlocking testimonies about ‘breaking the bread’, ‘eating’, and ‘the Cup of the Lord’. We can now see that the language of this short passage, inadvertently preserved by Jerome, actually parallels Paul in 1 Corinthians 10–11 and, in turn, the Synoptic Gospels about ‘eating and drinking’ at the so-called ‘Last Supper’.

But in the Gospel of the Hebrews, the episode, while including reference to ‘the Cup of the Lord’, is completely devoid of extrapolation into ‘the Communion with’ or ‘the Cup of the New Covenant in’ the blood of Jesus Christ, which nowhere did play or could have played a part in any
Palestinian
documents – only overseas or foreign ones. Whatever the redaction process involved, and however amazing it might at first seem, it is possible even to conclude that the Gospel of the Hebrews’ version of the tradition about ‘the Cup of the Lord’, which James purportedly drank with Jesus, incorporating, as it does, a
first appearance
to James, represents an earlier version than orthodox Gospel ones – or even
the original one
. This was then inverted, in line with Paul’s understanding of ‘Communion’ in 1 Corinthians 10:14–33 and 11:22–30, and retrospectively inserted into the history as it has come down to us.

In fact, this episode in this so-called ‘Jewish Gospel’ is not only paralleled in John’s episode about Jesus’ appearance along the Sea of Galilee, where in addition to ‘giving them’ some of the bread,
Jesus gives them
‘some of the fish too’ (in Luke 24:42, this is turned around to ‘
they gave him
a piece of broiled fish and part of a honeycomb’ and the locale is confined to Jerusalem); but even more completely in Luke’s detailed story of a first appearance by Jesus to the ‘two’ outside Jerusalem on the Emmaus Road. If what we have just said is true, this would make the story about the first sighting by these two Disciples in Luke – one called ‘Cleopas’ –
later
than the one in the Gospel of the Hebrews – or at least the source on which it was based. To put this slightly differently, both are based on the same
Palestinian source about James
. This in our view is the proper conclusion to draw.

Though we have already described the basic outline of this episode above, it is worth considering it in more detail. This sighting is also noted in Mark, where characteristically (as in most other matters relating to the family of Jesus), it is for the most part erased (16:12–13). Whereas Luke only partially rubs out the identities of its protagonists, making it difficult to determine precisely what happened, Mark simply notes this initial appearance in the environs of Jerusalem and then moves on, as do Matthew and John, to Galilee (for some reason the preferred focus of these other Gospels). Luke, in line with the saying in the Gospel of Thomas about ‘going to James the Just’, never does get to Galilee – but rather has everyone stay in Jerusalem, which is more sensible. Just as Mark also retains the traces of an appearance ‘to the Eleven’ as they reclined – like Agrippa II on his dining patio – again, Paul-like, Jesus chastises even his core Apostles for their lack of ‘belief or ‘Faith’ here.

Mark retains the traces of the appearance to the two on the Emmaus Road, which he places just before the appearance ‘to the Eleven’ in Jerusalem, noting that: ‘After these things, he appeared in a different form’. This motif will reappear in all three mistaken-identity episodes in John, where Jesus is either portrayed as ‘standing’ in front of Mary Magdalene (20:14), ‘standing among them’ (20:26), and ‘standing on the shore’ (21:4), and will be the reason no one recognizes him.

The ‘things’ Mark is referring to are for a start the report of a
first appearance
– not paralleled in the other Synoptics – ‘to Mary Magdalene, from whom he
cast out
seven demons’ (Mark 16:9)! Here, of course, is the language of ‘casting out’, ‘casting down’, and even sometimes ‘casting into’, an additional adumbration. Wherever the phraseology occurs, its basic relationship to the ‘nets’ Belial or Balaam ‘cast before Israel’ in the Damascus Document or Revelation and to the deaths of both the Righteous Teacher in the Dead Sea Scrolls and James in early Church sources, should always be appreciated.

The variations on this ‘
ballo
’/‘casting’ theme are so widespread and insistent in the Gospels that these, in effect, begin to resemble divertimentos or excurses on this word. One particularly humorous example in Mark has to do with the Temple Treasury again – and, of course, by implication, its pollution. It is Jesus’ Parable about ‘the Poor widow’s two mites’ (Mk 12:41–44 and Lk 21:1–4).

In Mark, the ‘Poor widow’ – ‘Poor’ terminology again – ‘casts into’ the Treasury what appear to be her last ‘two mites’. Here, the allusion, ‘casting into’ (
ebalen
), occurs
five times in just four lines
. The widow’s contribution is not only favourably contrasted with what ‘the Many’ – the name, as we have seen, for the rank and file at Qumran – ‘cast in’ (
eballon
), but, significantly, also what ‘the Rich cast in’, a major theme of both the attack on the Establishment in the Letter of James and the parallel ‘Three Nets of Belial’ critique in the Damascus Document.

It should also be immediately apparent that this episode is but a further variation on Matthew’s story of Judas
Iscariot
‘casting the thirty pieces of silver’ he received for betraying Jesus ‘into the Temple Treasury’ (Mt 27:3–10) – itself an adumbration of the Talmudic story about Jesus’ recommendation, attributed to the James-like ‘Jacob of Kfar Sechania’ in the
Talmud
, to use not ‘the
Poor
widow’s’, but
the Rich prostitute
’s gifts to the Temple Treasury to build a latrine for the High Priest and the whole ‘Rechabite’/‘Potter’/‘blood’ and ‘poverty’ circle of motifs encountered in our discussion of this.