James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls II (168 page)

Continuing this theme into Chapter Nine and evoking ‘
the veil
’ between the Outer Sanctum and the Inner – ‘
the Tabe
r
nacle which is called the Holy of Holies
’ (9:2–3)
–
Hebrews 9:12 now alludes to how Christ ‘
by his own Blood
’ (repeatedly rei
t
erating the redemptive power of
Blood
) ‘e
ntered the Holy of Holiest once for all’
.

Hebrews 9:12–14 now asserts ‘
how much more the Blood of Christ can purge
…
the dead works
’ of its hearers’ ‘
co
n
sciences to serve the Living God’
. Again here, one should note not only the completely allegorized, Pauline use of language of the kind already encountered throughout 1 Corinthians 8–11 and Galatians 3–4, but, in addition, the allusion to ‘
co
n
science
(
s
)’, which Paul evokes so contemptuously in 1 Corinthians 8:10–12 too, but which we have also just seen Hippolytus use regarding those
Sicarii
Essenes
who preferred martyrdom to ‘
eating things sacrificed to idols
’ – the very ‘
things sacrificed to idols
’ we have encountered in 1Corinthians 8:1–10 above.

This is the point at which Hebrews 9:15 designates ‘
Christ
’ – much as the
Instrument
/
Seeker
/
Stave
/and
Star
above – ‘
the Mediator of the New Covenant’
. Picking up the ‘
Perfection of Holiness
’ language one encounters in CD XX.2–7 and 1QS VIII.10–20, it concludes in 10:14, ‘
For by one offering he has Perfected forever those who are sanctified
’ (or, in more properly Hebrew terms, ‘
made Holy
’). Again, quoting Jeremiah 31:33 on ‘
putting My
Torah
in their midst and writing it on their hearts
’ (for Hebrews 8:12 and 10:16, it was: ‘
I will put My Laws in their hearts and write them on their minds
’), but completely igno
r
ing Jeremiah’s further absolute and repeated insistence on ‘
keeping the Covenant’
, Hebrews 10:16–17 now states: ‘
This is the Covenant I will make with them after those days
,
saith the Lord
.
Their Sins and lawlessness will I
remember
no more
.’
This is the
Covenant
Paul also develops in 2 Corinthians 3:6 when he calls himself and his colleagues ‘
Servants of the New Covenant
’ which he claims – using the language of Jeremiah, augmented by that of Ezekiel
117
– ‘
to have written on the fleshy tablets of the heart
’ – while simultaneously managing to ignore both Ezekiel’s insistences on ‘
keeping the Laws
’ or ‘
the Covenant
’!

Picking up the ‘
moving through the second veil
’ allusion of 9:3
–15
and, by implication, the allusion to ‘
the Mediator
’ there, the author of Hebrews 10:19–20 now goes on finally and climactically to claim ‘
to have the boldness to enter into the Holiest
(that is, ‘
the Holy of Holiest
’) …
by a New and living way’
. One should compare this with CD VIII.21–22 and XIX.33–34’s use of the term ‘
living
’ in its description of ‘
those who turned back
,
betrayed
,
and turned aside from the Fountain
’ or ‘
Well of Living Waters’
, directly following its evocation of ‘
the New Covenant in the Land of Damascus
’, which it goes on to imply has something to do with ‘
the words
’ with which ‘
Elisha rebuked Gehazi’
. The author of Hebrews means by this and defines this as – moving now into almost total allegory (so much so as to verge on almost complete mystification) – ‘
by the Blood of Jesus
’ which has been ‘
consecrated through the veil
’ (one often wonders what is actually being said here or is it ‘
mystery-fication
’ simply for ‘
mystification
’ sake?).

Finally, in Hebrews 12:23–24, alluding to the dual efficacy again of
Jesus
as ‘
the Mediator of the New Covenant
’ and ‘
the Perfect Holiness of the Spirits of the Righteous
’ and evoking
MMT
’s ‘
Camp
’ language,
Hebrews 13:10–12 and 13:20–21
now states: ‘
Just as the bodies of those animals
,
whose blood was brought into the Holy of Holiest by the High Priest as a sacrifice for Sin
,
118
were burned outside the Camp
;
so too Jesus suffered outside the Camp
,
so he might sanctify the People by his own Blood
….
It is this Blood of the Eternal Covenant of our Lord Jesus that will make you Perfect in every good work
.’

Though the allegorized analogy here clearly moves into Hellenizing ‘
Mystery Religion
’ rituality and even displays, in d
e
picting Jesus as having ‘
suffered outside the Camp
’ – this, hardly deducible from the way the Gospels portray their view of how things happened but the ‘
outside the Camp
’ allusion does reverberate across a wide range of Qumran documents as we have seen
119
– what today might be characterized as the inferiority complex of those feeling in some way rejected or ‘
cast aside
’; still it is mesmerizing in its esoterics and the total Philo-esque allegorization implicit in its mastery of rhetorical display is spell-binding.

The only question remaining is the one we asked at the beginning of this section: did the sectaries at Qumran know the Pauline or New Testament position (if we can refer to it in such a manner) on ‘
the New Covenant
’ to which they were r
e
sponding? Or was there some secret, hidden, or inner meaning imparted only to central members of the sect, as is sometimes implied in Column Four of CD and elsewhere: ‘
And with the Completion of the Era of the number of these years
,
there will be no more joining to the House of Judah
,
but rather each man will stand upon his own net
(
Watchtower
)’?
120
Or, as this is put earlier, ‘
And he built for them a House of Faith in Israel
,
the likes of which has never stood from Ancient Times until now
.
And for them that hold fast to it
,
there will be Victorious Life and all the Glory of
Adam
will be theirs
.’
It is possible, but I consider both options relatively doubtful.

The other possibility is: did someone like Paul – a person who, I consider, because of the breadth of Qumran language i
n
fusing his letters, spent time in the Community before he was, most likely, ejected and who, speaking both Hebrew and/or Aramaic and Greek (as he undoubtedly must have done), understood at least to a certain extent the esoteric possibilities inhe
r
ent in the Greek transliteration of the Hebrew geographical designation
Dammashek
or ‘
Damascus’
, in particular as these bore on the Hebrew terms for
Cup
and
Blood
, to say nothing of ‘
drink this
’ or ‘
give to drink
’ – understand ‘
the New Covenant in the Land of Damascus
’ in such a manner?

In asking this question, I leave aside the allusions to ‘
the Cup of the right hand of the Lord
’ and ‘
the Cup of the Wrath of God
’ in Column XI.10 and XI.15 of the Habakkuk
Pesher
, which – in my view – carry the true sense of all of these ‘
Cup of the Lord
’ allusions one is encountering in these documents. Curiously enough, Revelation also knows this sense, when it states in passages replete with Qumran imagery such as 14:8, mimicking and inverting the language of the mournful Prophet, Jesus ben Ananias, whom Josephus pictures as having first made his appearance in Tabernacles, 62 CE directly following the death of James: ‘
Babylon
is fallen because she has
given to all Peoples to drink
of the wine of the
Fury
of her
fornication
,’
and again with regard to the ‘
Worshipper of the Beast
’ (in Hebrew
Be
‘
ir
or
Be
‘
or
the father of both
Balaam
and
Bela
‘
and the eponymous ancestor of all Herodians
121
): ‘
He also shall
drink of the wine of the Wrath of God which is poured out full strength into the Cup of His Anger
’
(Revel
a
tion 14:10).

This is repeated again two chapters later amid the language of ‘
blasphemy’
, namely ‘
blaspheming the Name of God
’ and ‘
blaspheming the God of Heaven
’ (16:9–11 –
cf
. the parallel with the official charge against James of ‘
blasphemy
’), and ‘
pou
r
ing out the Blood
’ (here, ‘
the Blood of the Saints and of the Prophets
’), literally expressed in Revelation 16:6 in terms of ‘
giving them Blood to drink
’ – perhaps the very correlative in Hebrew of
Dammashek
when taken according to its esoteric decoding: ‘
And the Great City
Babylon
was
remembered
before God
,
to
give her the Cup of the wine of the Fury of His Wrath
’
(
16:19).

In this passage from Revelation 16:19, one actually has the ‘
remembered before God
’ phraseology – now, of course, reversed – of ‘
the Book of Remembrance
’ that ‘
would be written out before Him (God) for all God-Fearers and those reckoning His Name
’ of CD XX.19–20, to say nothing of the episode in the Pseudoclementine
Recognitions
describing the ‘
two brothers
’ whose tomb outside Jericho ‘
miraculously whitened of itself every year
’, who were also characterized there – as will be recalled – as ‘
being
remembered before God
’, as well as the use of this same phraseology in the various New Testament ‘
Last Supper
’ sc
e
narios already alluded to above.

Not only are these various imageries presaged in the Habakkuk
Pesher
’s pictures of how ‘
the Cup of the Wrath of God
’ would ‘
come around to
’ and ‘
swallow him
’ (
the Wicked Priest
), because he ‘
swallowed them
’ (the followers of
the Righteous Teacher
) and ‘
swallowed him in his hot anger
’ (that is, ‘
swallowed the Righteous Teacher
’), but it would seem that Paul has some understanding of this variation of the ‘
Damascus
’ or the ‘
drinking the Cup
’ allusion as well when he states in 1 Corinth
i
ans 11:26: ‘
For as often as you drink this Cup
,
you solemnly proclaim the death of the Lord until He comes’
,
following this up in 11:29 with ‘
for he who eats and drinks unworthily
,
eats and drinks Judgement to himself
,
not seeing through to the Body of the Lord’
.
Allegorization such as this is, in fact, really quite expert.