James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls II (10 page)

In addition, however, it is clear that what is being described in this pivotal section of the Habakkuk
Pesher
is the well-known Roman administrative practice of
tax-farming
, particularly among the petty Kings in the East (like the
Herodians
who fun
c
tioned as Roman juridical and
tax-gathering
officials – in the Gospels, that is,
Publicans
!), and which the Romans practised so assiduously in the Eastern part of the Empire (therefore, the
Census
referred to in Luke).
118
Once again, these petty or Eastern Kings were specifically referred to in Roman juridical language as ‘
Kings of the Peoples
’ – of which such
Herodians
were pr
o
totypical.
Here, too, the exact phraseology actually appears in the Damascus Document in describing just such kinds of ‘
poll
u
tion’
, which included even ‘
polluting the Temple Treasury’
, ‘
robbing of Riches’
, and ‘
approaching near kin for fornication
’ – meaning
marriage with nieces
and
close family cousins
.

Of course, once one has accepted such evidence, it must be accepted, as we have been trying to point out, that all
sectarian
texts have to have been written at more or less the same time since they all
use the same vocabulary
,
refer to the same
dramatis personae
, and
express basically the same concerns and orientation
. As hard as this may be to appreciate for those making supe
r
ficial analyses on the basis of pseudo- or quasi-scientific
external data
, this is true and defeats both palaeographic theorizing and archaeological reconstructions, such as they are, not to mention the
wishful thinking
embedded in the unrealistic expectation or inflation of
the ‘results’
of radiocarbon test data interpretation. To be sure, there may be copies made of copies, but all of the key
extra-Biblical
or
sectarian
texts – except some very early apocryphal and pseudepigraphic texts – particularly those i
n
cluding real historical indications or dating parameters,
had to have been written in more or less the same period of time
.

One could go on perhaps endlessly to give examples of allusions or expressions from the Scrolls demonstrating a First-Century CE provenance but not a particularly earlier one. Two of the most telling of these are ‘
the House of his Exile
’ or ‘
his Exiled House’
, used in the Habakkuk
Pesher
to describe a final confrontation of some kind between
the Wicked Priest
– clearly
the Establishment High Priest
– and
the Righteous Teacher
, which seems to have ended up in the destruction of the latter along with a number of his followers referred to, as just noted, as ‘
the Poor
’ (
Ebionim
).
119
No sense whatever has ever been made of this ‘
House of Exile
’ by any commentator, but, as we shall demonstrate, it clearly relates to
the
‘
Exile
’
of the Sanhe
d
rin around the Thirties to the Sixties of the Common Era
, frequently attested to in the
Talmud,
120
from its place of sitting in the Great Stone Chamber on the Temple Mount to a
‘
House
’
outside its precincts
(not unlike the trial at ‘
the House of the High Priest
’ in the Luke 22:54/Matthew 26:57) – the implication being that, because of this, all capital sentences imposed in this Period under such jurisdiction
were to be considered unlawful
or
invalid
.

Finally there is the reference in the Damascus Document to ‘
raising’
or ‘
re-erecting the fallen Tabernacle of David
’
in a Land North of
‘
Damascus’
.
121
But this usage is also one expressly attributed to James in his speech at the famous ‘
Jerusalem Council
’ in Acts 15:16, which we shall consider in detail in the second part of this book. Another such allusion, expressly a
t
tributed to James in early Church accounts of the circumstances leading up to his death (to say nothing of Jesus’
122
), is the proclamation of ‘
the coming of the Heavenly Host upon the clouds of Heaven
’ which will, as we shall also see, form the bac
k
bone of two extensive apocalyptic sections of the War Scroll.
123

There, of course, it is ‘
the Star Prophecy
’ of Numbers 24:17 which is being both evoked and expounded and, once again, we have come full circle, because according to Josephus this was the ‘
ambiguous Prophecy
’ – ‘
ambiguous
’ because it was c
a
pable of multiple interpretations – that
most moved
the Jews to revolt against Rome
.
124
To put this in another way: this
Prophecy
, r
e
ferred to
upwards of three times
in the extant corpus at Qumran, together with Isaiah 10:34–11:5, also extant in
Pesher
-form in at least two contexts at Qumran, was
the
driving force behind the Revolt against Rome
– again, yet another
unambiguous dating param
e
ter
. One need not mention, of course, the fact of the emergence of the whole
Christian
tradition, itself another response to this ‘
ambiguous
’ Prophecy. Then, of course, there is the very term ‘
Damascus
’ itself, the esoteric meaning of which we shall attempt to delineate at the end of this book. Though one could go on, this is the kind of powerful
internal
evidence
that exists for a First-Century provenance of many crucial and interrelated
sectarian
texts among the Scrolls.

THE NEW COVENANT IN THE LAND OF DAMASCUS

Life-long Naziritism and the ‘
Perfect Holiness
’ Lifestyle

The traditions about James’ ‘
Holiness from his mother’s womb
’ or life-long Naziritism, vegetarianism, and abstention from sexual relations are to be found in the early Church fathers Hegesippus, Origen, Eusebius, Jerome, and Epiphanius.
1
Though many of these notices go beyond what is normally associated with a
Nazirite
or ‘
Perfect Holiness
’ lifestyle,
2
they pe
r
sist in all sources relating to James and among all groups seemingly descended or claiming descent from him. They also appear, not surprisingly, to relate to what numerous persons in different contexts are calling ‘
Essenes’
.

Where James’ sexual continency – his ‘
life-long virginity
’ as Epiphanius graphically describes it
3
– is concerned, this may have been a concomitant of his ‘
life-long Naziritism
,’ as it was of people contemporary with and not too different from him, such as the individual Josephus’ calls
Banus
and those he denotes as ‘
Essenes’
.
4

Obliquely too, it provides a clue as to how this claim came to be reflected – or retrospectively absorbed as the case may be – into the more familiar one of
Mary
’
s life-long virginity
or, as this was first seemingly enunciated in the early Second Century,
her
perpetual
virginity
.
5
The ‘
perpetual
’ aspect of this claim can certainly with more justification, be applied to James since, even according to orthodox theology,
Mary
had at least one son and perhaps more, not to mention at least one daughter.
7

The claim of Mary’s
perpetual virginity
, in any event, had an anti-James undercurrent to it meant to deny the credibility of there actually
being
any ‘
brothers
’ as such or, as the polemic shook out,
half-brothers
,
cousins
, or ‘
milk brothers’
.
8
Incredibly enough, the claim for Mary’s
perpetual virginity
is first made in a text:
The Protevangelium of James
, attributed to James and actua
l
ly put into his mouth, the implication being, of course, that he, the closest living relative, heir, and even successor, would have known about these kinds of things better than anyone else – and no doubt he did.
9

The motifs of sexual continency and abstention from meat or vegetarianism, whether part of a ‘
Nazirite
’ oath procedure of some kind –
temporary
or
life-long
– are also to be seen in the notices from Rabbinic literature and Acts about exactly such kinds of
Nazirite
oaths on the part of extreme irredentists or revanchists.
10
In Acts 23:12–21, such persons vow ‘
not to eat or drink
’
until they have killed Paul
, the implication being that they
will not eat meat or drink wine
. In Rabbinic sources, the i
m
plication shifts to
waiting until the Temple should be reborn
or
rebuilt
, and the interconnectedness of these imageries to Paul’s and the Gospels’ presentations of
Jesus
’
body as Temple
should be clear.
11
From 1 Corinthians chapters 8–12, where he is actually discussing James’ directives to overseas communities, Paul himself speaks about ‘
eating and drinking’
, to wit, ‘
have we not ev
e
ry right to eat and drink
?’ (9:4). Such challenges not only lead up to his ultimate allowing of ‘
eating
’
or
‘
partaking of things sa
c
rificed to idols
’
–
in fact, ‘
all things sold in the marketplace
’ (10:25) – and his ‘
for me all things are lawful
’ assertions (10:23 repeating 6:12), but also his climactic final formulation of ‘
Communion with
’
the body and blood of Christ Jesus
(10:16).

The Gospels also emphasize this kind of Naziritism when they describe John the Baptist as ‘
coming
neither eating nor drin
k
ing
’ – this, as opposed to the more Paulinized description of
Jesus ‘coming eating and drinking
’ in Matthew 11:18–19 and Luke 7:33–34. Such ideologies are immediately reinforced by the portraits of Jesus as
a ‘glutton’
and ‘
wine-bibber’
, and the portrait of Jesus ‘
eating and drinking with publicans and Sinners
’ generally throughout the Gospels.
12

As Paul develops this ideology and these esotericisms in his final enunciation of the true meaning of ‘
the Cup of the Lord
’ and ‘
drinking
’ it as ‘
the New Covenant in (the) Blood
’ of Christ, he totally
reverses
the lifelong or temporary Nazirite notion of ‘
not eating or drinking
’ and rather aims at those
who would
‘
eat this bread and drink
’
this Cup
‘
unworthily
’ (1 Corinthians 11:27). In a final crowning, and what might be construed as a cynical reversal of this ideology, such persons now become ‘
guilty of the body and blood of the Lord’
, a frightening accusation in any context, as the history of the Western World has demonstrated. Using this imagery, which we already have found present in the Habakkuk
Pesher
, such persons will now actually ‘
drink vengeance to themselves, not seeing through to the Blood of Christ
’ (11:29), an equally terrifying imprecation.
13
As we shall see towards the end of this book, one understanding of this phraseology will be that such persons do not understand the word ‘
Damascus
’ according to its proper or esoteric sense – such things, as he would have it in Galatians 4:24 (when speaking about ‘
casting out the slave woman
’ and ‘
Agar which is Mount Sinai in Arabia
’) ‘
being allegory’
.

By contrast, as noted, in Rabbinic sources such temporary or life-long Nazirite oaths shift and take on a wholly different, more nationalistic – even ‘
Zionistic
’ – sense of ‘
not eating or drinking
’
until one should see the Temple rebuilt
.
15
For these sources and Karaism to follow,
including
later witnesses like the Eleventh-Century Spanish-Jewish traveler Benjamin of Tudela, such oaths are a consequence of
mourning for the destruction of the Temple
and
waiting for it to be rebuilt
which, in turn, blossom into a full-blown Movement, ‘
the Mourners for Zion’
, the origins of which, though clouded in obscurity, have to be understood in terms of the events of this period.
16

Such a period of ‘
waiting
’ relating to the rebuilding of the Temple resembles nothing so much as the well-known one a
s
sociated with ‘
the Disciple Jesus loved
’ at the end of the Gospel of John or that ‘
delay
’ in the Habakkuk
Pesher
, which goes in Christianity later by the name of ‘
the Delay of the
Parousia
’, based in the
Pesher
on Habakkuk 2:3:
‘If it tarries, wait for it, for it will surely come and not delay’
.

The notion of such ‘
Mourners for Zion
’ is highly underestimated in the history of this period and deserves a good deal more attention than it usually gets. There can be little doubt that one can still discern its influence, however metamorphosized, in the black garments worn by Jewish
Hassidic
groups to this day – to say nothing of
Christian
ones. It also paves the way for the development of Karaism in Judaism which, with the appearance of Dead Sea Scrolls material in Jerusalem at the beginning of the Ninth Century, reached what some might consider a final fruition.
17

Karaism itself certainly grew out of movements such as these ‘
Mourners for Zion
’ forming part of its own ideology.
‘
The Mourners for Zion
’ themselves had already been functioning in Palestine and places further East prior to the emergence of Karaism in the Seven Hundreds CE. In fact, such ‘
Mourners
’ were already influencing a series of
Messianic
Uprisings in the East in areas being treated in this book, namely Kurdistan, Northern Iraq, and Persia, a happenstance that may not be coinc
i
dental.
18

Nor is it too much of a stretch to put the Crusaders in a similar category as these ‘
Mourners
’ and undoubtedly a case can be made that these ‘
Mourners for Zion
’ had a tenuous, even if underground, influence on groups like ‘
the Templars
’ and, if real, possibly the now infamous inner coterie known to some as ‘
the
Prioré de Sion
’,
19
both of which preserving some semblance of their name. This may even extend to ‘
the Cathars
’/‘
the Pure
’ whose Priests, carrying on this theme of ‘
mourning’
, however bizarre,
actually wore black rather than the more typical white
. In Jerusalem, unfortunately, all such Jewish groups were prob
a
bly liquidated in the general blood-letting that occurred in 1099 after it fell at the end of the First Crusade – a possible cons
e
quence of their own success – though perhaps not before many of their ideas were communicated to groups such as the Te
m
plars (and ‘
the
Prioré
,’ if it ever really existed – a doubtful proposition).

Notices such as ‘
life-long Naziritism
’ and ‘
Perfect Holiness
’ – ‘
Holiness from his mother’s womb’
, as all our descriptions of James put it – are also to be found in Gospel descriptions of John the Baptist and in the way Paul describes himself in Gal
a
tians 1:15–16 – seemingly in competition with James – as ‘
separated
’ or ‘
chosen
’
by God from his
‘
mother
’
s womb
’
to
‘
reveal His Son in
’
him
. They are also found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, particularly in the Hymns.
20

We have just seen how the Gospels of Matthew and Luke insist that John ‘
came neither eating nor drinking’
, seemingly implying that like James thereafter John too
was a vegetarian
.
As Luke also puts this earlier in the form of a prophecy by ‘
an Angel of the Lord
’:
‘He shall be great before the Lord and
never drink wine or strong drink
and he shall be filled with the Holy Spirit even
from his mother
’
s womb
.’ (1:15)
This clearly implies that, for Luke anyhow, John like James was ‘
a lifelong Nazirite’
, a condition that apparently entailed for Matthew and Luke – as in early Church descriptions of the details of James’ life – in a
d
dition to
abstaining from wine and strong drink, abstention from meat
.
21