James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls I (91 page)

There is a certain parallel in the way Peter is the witness to these things, here, to the way Epiphanius in his version of Hegesippus has Simeon bar Cleophas as ‘the witness’ to the stoning of James. For his part, Eusebius, it will be recalled, rather describes this ‘witness’ as ‘one of the Priests of the sons of Rechab, a son of the Rechabites spoken of by the Prophet Jeremiah’. Both allude to this in conjunction with the language of ‘casting down’ and the ‘laundryman’ and his ‘club’ allusion, we have been delineating above. For Eusebius, this is ‘a club he used to beat out clothes’. For Jerome, describing this in slightly different language but nevertheless betraying the same source, ‘such a club as laundrymen use to beat out clothes’.
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Acts’ version also has Stephen being ‘cast out of the city’. We have already identified this as a substitution for Paul’s attack on James in the Pseudoclementine
Recognitions
, where not only the language of ‘casting’ occurs – now ‘casting down’ – but also that of ‘whitening’. At this point in Acts, ‘the
witnesses lay their clothes
(completely incomprehensibly)
at the feet of a young man
named Saul’, thus combining our ‘witness’, ‘clothes’, and ‘feet’ themes, but now adding a new one, that of the ‘young man’ (Acts 7:58).

However convoluted it may seem, in Mark this ‘young man’ is now actually
in
the empty tomb, parallel to the ‘two men’ – plural in Luke – and the Angel, whose ‘clothing was white as snow’, ‘sitting on’ the stone in Matthew. Mark rather now describes him as ‘
sitting on
the right side,
clothed in a white robe
’ (16:5). It is a not incurious coincidence that two lines before this reference to Saul as ‘a young man’ and Stephen being ‘cast out of the city’, Acts portrays Stephen as ‘full of the Holy Spirit’ and, like the witnesses to Jesus’ Ascension earlier, ‘looking into Heaven’ and seeing ‘Jesus s
tanding at the right hand
of God’.

Repeating this in the next line, but substituting the usage ‘the Son of Man’ for Jesus, Acts now has Stephen ‘crying out’ how he ‘saw the Heavens opened and
the Son of Man
standing at the right hand of God’ (7:55–56), a variation on what James is said to have proclaimed in the Temple in the early Church accounts before he ‘was cast down’ – even including the repetition of the words ‘crying out’, now attributed to Stephen.

Not only do we have here basically the language Mark combines to produce his version of the ‘young man
sitting on the right
’
side
in the empty tomb (the ‘clothing white as snow’ in these pictures probably coming from Daniel 7:9’s picture of ‘the Ancient of Days’, also evoked in these visions); but also that of our Primal Adam/Standing One ideology again, now identified directly with Jesus. It should not be forgotten, too, that this language, ‘the Son of Man
sitting on the right hand of Power
and coming on the clouds of Heaven’, actually appears in Matthew 26:64 and Mark 14:62.

Our purpose in presenting the multiple variations on these repeating historical motifs is to demonstrate the fertile manner in which the Gospel artificers felt free to improvise or enlarge on their themes. These also provide vivid illustration of the endlessly creative manner with which they allowed their imaginations to rove across the real or historical events before them, creating a host of scriptural parodies.

Luke’s Picture of the First Appearance to James along the Way to Emmaus

Again, it should be emphasized that Luke’s account of what occurred in the empty tomb contains no mention of an actual physical appearance to Mary Magdalene, Mary
the mother of James
, or Joanna. The women only see the ‘two men
standing
beside them in effulgent astral-like clothing’. Nor one to Peter, as per the implication of Paul’s testimony in 1 Corinthians 15:5 – which we have already designated as an orthodox interpolation – who in Luke and John sees only ‘the linen clothes lying by themselves’. Instead, Jesus appeared to ‘two of them’ – presumably either ‘Apostles’ or ‘Disciples’ – who ‘were going the same day to a village called Emmaus, sixty furlongs (about seven and a half miles) from Jerusalem’ (Luke 24:13).

It is interesting that the only mention of Emmaus in Josephus comes in the
Jewish War
following
the fall of the Temple
. Here, in the same breath that he tells us that the two drachmas’ tax formerly paid by Jews to the Temple – the ‘two mites’ paid by the Poor widow in Gospel parody in Mark and Luke! – were
now to be paid directly to Rome
and that Titus was leasing
out the whole country
, Josephus tells us that Emmaus was only ‘thirty furlongs from Jerusalem’, not the ‘sixty’ as here in Acts. What is more, it was now to be settled by
eight hundred Roman army veterans at Titus’ express order
.
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One should immediately remark the parallel represented by this appearance ‘in the Way’ – as the two put it to each other when discussing ‘these things’ afterwards, their ‘heart burning within’ them (Lk 24:32) – to presumable family members of Jesus and an appearance ‘in the Way’ that Paul was supposed to have experienced as he chased those ‘of the Way’ to Damascus, albeit in a somewhat more visionary (literally, ‘apocalyptic’) manner (Acts 9:2–8). In Acts’ picture of Ananias going to meet Paul in Damascus and ‘laying hands on him’, Ananias too for some reason –
not
Paul – announces that Jesus appeared to Paul ‘in the Way in which’ he came (Acts 9:17). Even here, there appears to be just a touch of parody of Jesus’ words directly appointing James as successor, ‘in the place where you are to go’, in the Gospel of Thomas.

When Barnabas brings Paul to Jerusalem, he confirms once again how Paul ‘saw the Lord in the Way’ (Acts 9:27), which are, of course, the very words the two use here in Luke. In this sense, these are competitive, if antithetical, encounters with or visions of ‘the Risen Christ’. In Luke’s encounter, the two – one identified as ‘Cleopas’ – are conversing with each other along the way to Emmaus when ‘Jesus draws near’; in Acts, Paul ‘draws near to Damascus when suddenly a light from Heaven shone round about him’ (9:3).

Again as is usual in these post-resurrection manifestations – in the Gospel of John and even Luke, usually associated with Jesus ‘
standing in their midst
’ – they are unable to recognize him (Lk 24:15–18). This is a very important aspect of these encounters, usually signalling his otherworldly substantiality, but also his true nature as ‘the Standing One’ or ‘Primal Adam’. The two then tell him all ‘the things that had happened’ (the language Mark later absorbs into his account), including the charge that ‘the Chief Priests and our Rulers
delivered him up
to the death penalty and
crucified him
’ (24:20).

However tendentious the author’s intent in stating this last – the emphasis being on the word ‘our’ – it is still altogether more accurate than the repeated description of ‘Judas
Iscariot
’, the archetypical ‘Zealot’ or ‘
Sicarios
’ of the kind of
Judas the Galilean
or
Judas Maccabee
, as ‘delivering him up’, or, for that matter, the equally misleading and malicious picture of the People crying out for Jesus’ ‘blood’ and Pontius Pilate ‘delivering Jesus up
to their will
’ (Lk 23:24 and Matthew).

This formulation, ‘their will’, will reappear in the general ‘delivered them up’ formulae in Hebrew in the picture of the salvationary history of Israel in the Damascus Document. In it, ‘delivering them up’ is what God repeatedly did to ‘those who walked in the
stubbornness of their heart
, deserting the Covenant’, ‘each choosing
his own will
’ or ‘doing what was right
in his own eyes
’. It is usually combined with the imagery of God’s ‘Visitation of the land’ and, of course, ‘delivering up to the sword’ – the real origin of the repeated use of such words like ‘delivering up’ and, for that matter, giving him over ‘to their will’.

Here too, along the way to Emmaus, Jesus castigates the two for their lack of ‘belief’ and elucidates for them the scriptural meaning of his suffering and death (Lk 24:25). The same is true to some extent in the Gospel of the Hebrews of his lecturing James. But the words Jesus is pictured here as using, ‘slow of heart to believe’, are also another variation of the words used in the above passages in the Damascus Document about ‘delivering up His people’ or ‘cutting off their males in the wilderness’ – ‘stubbornness of their heart’. At Qumran, this is almost always used in regard to ‘the Liar’ and implies ‘rejecting’, ‘not doing’, or ‘breaking’ the Law, essentially the reverse of the more Pauline signification here of ‘not believing’.

Jesus then goes on to ‘expound to them the things about himself in all the Scriptures’, this a seeming follow-up to what Paul says he received ‘according to the Scriptures’ prior to his version of post-resurrection appearances in 1 Corinthians 15:5–6. The Righteous Teacher, too, is described as ‘interpreting all the words of His Servants the Prophets’, God having put this ‘Intelligence in his heart’ and ‘revealed to him all the Mysteries of the words of His Servants the Prophets’. Notice the parallel too in these kinds of notices to the language Hegesippus uses in his account of the death of James, whose cognomens, ‘the Righteous One’ and ‘Protection of the People’, ‘the Prophets’ were said to have ‘declared concerning him’.
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‘Drawing near to the village where
they were going
’, Jesus now ‘reclined with them’. ‘Taking the bread, he blessed it, and breaking it, he gave (it) to them’ (Lk 24:28–30). This is almost verbatim the language of the Gospel of the Hebrews’ account of the
first appearance to James
– not to mention aspects of other accounts involving Jesus breaking bread and eating with his principal Apostles or Disciples in Luke again and in John. This is also the picture one gets in Paul in 1 Corinthians 11:23–27 about how the Lord Jesus ‘taking the bread, and having given thanks, broke it and said, “Take and eat!”’, as it is in the Gospel ‘Last Supper’ accounts as they have come down to us, in particular, echoing this last almost verbatim – the only difference being that in this appearance in Luke, as in the Gospel of the Hebrews, there is nothing about ‘Communion with the blood of Christ’ or ‘the New Covenant in my blood’.

To put this in a somewhat different way, these two accounts – that of a
first appearance to at least one member of Jesus’ family
, his uncle Cleopas, along the way to Emmaus and that embodying a
first appearance to James
after ‘the Lord had given his linen clothes to the Servant of the (High) Priest’ in the Gospel of the Hebrews – are exactly the same. The only difference is that Luke presents him breaking the bread and ‘giving it to them’ (Cleopas and the other), whereas in the Gospel of the Hebrews, Jesus ‘breaks it and gives it
to James the Just
’.

It would be possible to conclude at this point that the unnamed other along with Cleopas in this account of a first appearance in Luke, to whom Jesus appears and with whom he breaks bread ‘along the Way’, erased for one reason or another or eliminated in the redaction process, is none other than
James the Just, the brother of Jesus
, himself, conveniently rubbed out in the Lukan redaction.

So here too – even in Luke’s presentation then – we have the unmistakable traces, however obliterated, of the lost Palestinian tradition of
a first appearance to James
– confirmed for us by Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:7, when read in its uninterpolated form, which can now be read simply:

For I delivered to you what in the first place I also received: that ... (first) he appeared to James, then to all the Apostles and last of all he appeared also to me, as if to an abortion. For I am the least of the Apostles, who am not fit to be called an Apostle, because I persecuted
the Assembly of God
.

Of course, this is also supported by all sectarian traditions featuring James, as, for instance, that at Nag Hammadi. There, James is clearly ‘the Beloved Disciple’ and Jesus, who ‘sits down on a stone’ with him (like the Angel in Mt 28:2), actually kisses him on the mouth, as we saw.
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At this point the account in the Gospel of Luke becomes rather confused, since now that ‘they recognize him’, Jesus vanishes (Luke 24:31)!

Returning to Jerusalem, these two then ‘relate the things in the Way’ to the Eleven and those ‘assembled’ with them and how ‘he was (made) known to them in the breaking of the bread’ (24:35). Again, the difference is that in the Gospel of the Hebrews, it is James to whom ‘these things’ are made known, and it is he who learns, after Jesus breaks the bread and gives it to him, that ‘the Son of Man is risen from among those
that sleep
’.

What Jesus says to James, ‘My brother, eat your bread, for the Son of Man is risen from among those that sleep’, finds an echo in Luke after the report of Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Mary
the mother of James
about the empty tomb, preceding this episode of Peter, ‘having risen up’, running to the tomb only to find ‘the linen clothes lying alone’.