James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls II (13 page)

If
Elchasai
is a title, it is not very different from the usage ‘
Righteous Teacher
’ at Qumran or one of his ideological d
e
scendants. This is the problem with many such denotations. Names like either ‘
Bazeus
’ or ‘
Monobazus
’ – the most prominent name among Helen’s relatives and descendants – could well have been equivalent to what goes in more Semitic renderings as ‘
Agbarus
’ or ‘
Abgarus
’
.

However this may be, the leader of these
Elchasaites
in Palestine – if they existed in any separate way and were not simply local variations of groups like
the Essenes
or
Ebionites
– would certainly have been a contemporary of James’ ‘
cousin
’ – as already suggested, possibly his putative
brother
– Simeon Bar Cleophas, who reigned over what was left of James’
Jerusalem Assembly
and, according to reports in early Church literature (themselves difficult to credit where chronology is concerned), survived into and was crucified under Trajan’s reign!
53

Nor is this to say anything about another putative contemporary of this
Elchasai
and
Simeon
, ‘
Simeon bar Yohai’
, the eponymous founder of
Zohar
tradition.
54
Epiphanius together with Hippolytus, our main sources for this bewildering plethora of sectarian and bathing groups, relates ‘
the Elchasaites
’ to both ‘
Nasaraeans
’ (or ‘
Nazoraeans
’) and ‘
Ebionites
’.
55
Nor does Epiphanius distinguish to any extent between these last, that is, ‘
Nazoraeans
’ and ‘
Ebionites
’. For him
Elchasai
was originally an
Ossaean
(clearly he means ‘
Essene
’ here) with followers on both sides of the Dead Sea and further north in Syria and Nort
h
ern Iraq. These latter areas, in turn, are where the conversions of King Abgar/Agbar and Queen Helen’s family occurred – whether to Christianity or Judaism, or something in between.
56

These Elchasaites also seem to have spread down into Southern Iraq. In the Koran and later Arab sources they are r
e
ferred to as ‘
Sabaeans’
, a term itself going back to Greco-Aramaic and Syriac usages like
Sobiai
and ‘
Masbuthaeans’
, that is,
Immersers
or
Daily Bathers
. Again, this was the same area where Queen Helen’s favorite son Izates was living at Charax Spasini (today’s Basrah). Curiously this town, which was a trading center at the mouth of the Tigris, was another of those cities known as
Antioch
– this time, ‘
Antiochia Charax’
, the fourth we have so noted.

It is here this highly favored son of Queen Helen (strikingly, Josephus uses the term ‘
only begotten
’ that the Synoptic Gospels use to describe Jesus
57
) was living when he was converted in the Twenties of the Common Era to something Jos
e
phus presents as approximating ‘Judaism’. In his version of this episode, Izates was converted by the Jewish teacher Ananias.
58
We say ‘
approximating
’ here, because what Ananias and his unnamed companion taught (whom, given the circumstances and teaching involved, we take to be Paul)
did not require circumcision
– a strange sort of Judaism!

Ananias
, whom Josephus refers to as
a merchant
, also appears in parallel texts like the one Eusebius claims he found in the Royal Archive of the Edessa describing
Agbarus
’ conversion to what Eusebius thinks is Christianity, though the date is only 29–30 CE or thereabouts. And as already remarked, he also appears in Acts’ presentation of the aftermath of Paul’s co
n
version at
a house of one
‘
Judas
’
on
‘
a street called the Straight
’
in Damascus
.
59

Just as in Scroll delineations of its ‘
New Covenant in the Land of Damascus’
, Acts also considers the conversion of the character it most cares about to have taken place ‘
on the road to
(or ‘
in the Land of
’)
Damascus’
, which might have wider i
m
plications, as we shall eventually see, than the first-time reader might initially imagine.
60
One consequence of this correspon
d
ence is that the ‘
Covenant
’ in the first might simply be
reversing the other
, that is, unlike the more ‘
Paulinizing
’ one in Acts, Qumran’s ‘
New Covenant in the Land of Damascus
’ rather insisted on ‘
separating Holy from profane
’ as well as ‘
setting up the Holy Things according to their precise specifications’
.
61

Not only did Mani (216–277 CE), the founder of Manichaeism, reportedly come from an
Elchasaite
family living in the same general locale in Southern Iraq as Izates when he was converted – a place the sources refer to as ‘
Mesene
’,
62
but
the Mandaeans
, who represent themselves as the followers of John the Baptist and are in all things absolutely indistinguishable from these same
Elchasaites
, inhabit Southern Iraq down to this very day.
63
They have been referred to in Arab texts for over a thousand years as ‘
Sabaeans
’ – again, Arabic for ‘
Baptizers
’ or ‘
Daily Immersers
’ (not persons from Southern Arabia as no
r
mative Islam usually considers the term to mean) and, in popular parlance, used by Arabs then and still today, ‘
the
Subba
‘
of the Marshes’
. These Mandaeans also refer to their priest class as ‘
Nasuraiya
’, that is, ‘
Nazoraeans
’ (compare this with the town of
Naziriyya
fought over by US forces in the war in Iraq).

This is the area that in later times ultimately becomes a hotbed of Shi‘ite Islam as it clearly still is today. The key seems to have been ‘
the Primal Adam
’ ideology associated, according to all commentators, with groups like
the Ebionites
and
Elchasaites
. It, in turn, was transformed into what became
the
Imam
or
Hidden
Imam
idea so integral to Shi‘ite though not Sunni Islam.
64
The
Hidden
Imam
idea is basically a variation of this ‘
Primal Adam
’ or ‘
Standing One
’ notation fundamental, according to the Pseudoclementines, Hippolytus, and Epiphanius, to groups like the Ebionites, Elchasaites, Jewish Christians, and, even before these, Simon
Magus
.
65

The idea would also appear to be present in one form or another in Qumran documents and echoes of it are identifiable across the breadth of New Testament literature – though not perhaps to the uninitiated reader – in the never-ending allusions to ‘
standing
’ one encounters in it.
66
Like
the Elchasaites
preceding them, the Manichaeans were precursors of Islam and, for the most part – in this part of the world anyhow, probably absorbed into it. Indeed, Muhammad has many doctrines in co
m
mon with the traditions represented by both groups, in particular, the idea of
the ‘True Prophet’
or
the ‘Seal of the Prophets’
and the importance of Abraham in the salvationary scheme he is delineating.
67

The Land of Noah and Abraham’s Religion

The connection to Abraham of traditions relating to religious ideas arising in these areas should not be underestimated. It is important to realize that Edessa, the capital of Eusebius’ ‘
Great King of the Peoples beyond the Euphrates’
, is basically the sister city of Haran some thirty miles south. Haran is well known in the Bible as Abraham’s place of origin before he received the call to depart for the Land of Israel (Genesis 11:28–32), a fact its inhabitants are not slow to advertise to this day. Nor were they in ancient times as Abraham’s fame grew more and more legendary.

Not only do shrines and legends connecting Abraham with sites in this area persist to this day, Paul and Muhammad – whose respective salvationary schemes, while not always distinguishable from one another, pivot on the spiritual status of Abraham – both emphasize their common connection to ‘
the Faith
’ or ‘
Religion of Abraham’
.
68
So does the ideologically o
p
posite and, in this sense, parallel salvationary scheme set forth in the Letter of James and, if one looks carefully, one can detect the same ideological focus on Abraham across the breadth of the Qumran corpus.
69

Paul makes his allusion to Christianity being ‘Abraham’s Religion’ in Galatians 3:6–4:31 and Romans 4:1–22 and 9:7–9, even going so far as to claim that Christians were
the true
‘
Heirs to
’ or ‘
Children of the Promise
’ and ‘
were justified
’
in the way
‘
Abraham was justified
’
–
his famous ‘
Justification by Faith
’ polemic.
70

In James however, Abraham ‘
is justified by works’
, his ‘
Faith
’ rather ‘
Perfected
’ or ‘
made Perfect
’
–
according to some translations ‘
completed
’
– by ‘works’
. This then fulfills the biblical passage about Abraham’s ‘
Belief’
, that he ‘
believed God and it was counted
’ or ‘
reckoned to him as Righteousness’
. It is as a result of this that, according to James 2:22–23, ‘
he was called Friend of God’
, all terminologies well-known to the Dead Sea Scrolls.
71
This position, of course, is the opposite of that of the stated opponent of James – ‘
the Empty
’ or ‘
Foolish Man
’ (2:20) – that Abraham
was saved
‘
by Faith only
’ and thought by most to reflect the position that can be identified with Paul in Galatians 2:16–3:7 above.
72

For Muhammad, Islam is ‘
Abraham’s Religion
’ (for Paul, the term is ‘
Abraham’s Faith
’). But as in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Letter of James, Muhammad goes even further designating Abraham as ‘
the Friend of God
’ – the epithet for him ever after in Islam to this day to the extent that
al-Khalil
(‘
the Friend
’) is used in place of Abraham’s very name itself.
73
The diffe
r
ence between Muhammad’s arguments, as they develop in the Koran, and Paul’s, however, is that for Paul, Abraham’s ‘
Faith
’ (using the language of Genesis 15:6) ‘
was reckoned to him as Righteousness
’
before the revelation of the
Torah
to Moses
and, therefore,
Abraham
– as he puts it so inimitably –
could not have been
‘
justified by the Law’
. For Muhammad, following Paul’s ploy, it was rather ‘
Abraham
’
s Religion
’ that
came before both Judaism and Christianity
or, as he so inimitably puts it in the Koran, before either Judaism or Christianity
could corrupt
‘
the Religion of Abraham
’
with their
‘
lies
’ (2:145–56).