James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls I (104 page)

It is interesting that Tatian (
c.
115–185 CE), a student in Asia Minor of Justin Martyr (c. 100–165), refers to James the son of Alphaeus also as ‘James the
Lebbaean
’ – again pointing to the basic overlap of this ‘Lebbaeus’ terminology with Eusebius’ ‘
Oblias
’ cognomen, also applied to James as we have seen. Once again, this confirms in the process that the latter is a type of surname or sobriquet applying not just to Judas, Judas Thomas, or Thaddaeus, but other members of the family as well – most notably
James
.

The disputed notice from Papias, also, tries to clear up the supposed parentage of James and John and the notice in Matthew about Mary being ‘the mother of the sons of Zebedee’ (27:56). These last are now described as ‘sons of another aunt of the Lord’s’ not ‘Mary the mother of James the Less and Joseph, the wife of Alphaeus’ (thus), but someone he calls ‘Mary Salome’ or just plain ‘Salome’.

It should be apparent by now that all these evasions circulating around the two ‘sons of Zebedee’ are really connected in some manner to the issue of James and his direct succession as Leader of the Jerusalem Community, which again we have suspected for a long time, and that ‘Zebedee’ is just another one of these nonsense names and one more stand-in for these ‘Alphaeus’/‘Lebbaeus’ evasions. In fact the only real person by the name of John, other than John the Baptist and the individual Josephus designates as ‘John the Essene’, that ever really materializes in any of these sources is ‘John the Evangelist’, considered buried in Ephesus.

‘James the brother of John’ has no substance whatsoever, except in Gospel enumerations of the Central Three, where he is simply a stand-in for the
real
James. In Acts, where he is executed, he is also a stand-in for Jesus’
third brother
, Jude or Judas. It is the ‘brother’ signification that has the real substance here – albeit again completely obscured and transformed – and if one keeps one’s eyes on it, one will never go far wrong.

The Gospels just cannot present the real James as an Apostle, brother, and principal successor of Jesus – despite the fact that this is absolutely attested to without embarrassment by no less a witness than Paul himself – because of their anti-family, anti-national, and anti-Jewish or Palestinian Apostle orientation, the family of Jesus already having been presented as distinct from Jesus’ true followers and real believers and, therefore, the need for this fictional James
the brother
of John and the fictional nomenclature ‘Zebedee’.

This will be further borne out, and to our thinking, definitively so, when we treat the person of this
third brother
of Jesus – Judas, Judas Thomas, Judas the brother of James, or Thaddaeus below. In the meantime it can be averred without reservation that
all
the brothers of Jesus have very
real
substance, including James, Simon/Simon the Cananite/Simon the Zealot/Simeon bar Cleophas and very likely ‘Simon
Iscariot
(the father or brother) of Judas’, and Judas, also known as ‘
Zelotes
’ – however highly refracted or obscured these may have become in the literature as we have it.

But ‘James the son of Zebedee’ does not have any substance. But the ‘brother’ theme connected to this ‘James the brother of John’ and the
beheading
do have real substance, and, as we have shown, simply relate to a
different brother of Jesus
.

Also ‘
Joses
’, when considered
very
carefully, has
real
substance, even though we never hear a single word about him and this is not apparent on the surface. Moreover this is borne home, as we just saw, by looking at the form of the two words in Greek, ‘
IOSES
’ and ‘
IESOUS
’. What becomes immediately apparent is their similarity
and what Papias or his interpolator is telling us, in their straightforward enumeration of the names of Cleophas’ and Mary’s sons, is that there
were only four brothers
,
all of whom
known
,
all of whom
substantial
, and the fourth brother, as we just said, is simply ‘
IESOUS
’ or ‘
Jesus
’ himself!

In fact, what has happened in these early transmissions is that – to repeat – ‘Jesus’ has simply
turned into his own brother
just as ‘Mary’ has done
her own sister
; however, this should not be surprising. We cannot blame these early compilers or redactors, who may or may not have been aware of these transformations or substitutions, if they did not recognize these things, as almost all or most of them were foreigners. Nor do they seem to have recognized the conversion of Mary into her own sister Mary, nor the conversion of Jesus’ father into his uncle. They do not even seem to be aware that Drusilla in Acts, the granddaughter of Herod, is not simply ‘
a Jewess
’ – or were they?

In other words, just averred by Papias – as usual condemned by later theologians like Irenaeus or Eusebius – or the text attributed to Papias (one of the earliest theologians in the Church), there
were only four brothers
and
all
were sons of
Mary and Cleophas
(
Alphaeus
). Jesus is simply his own brother Joses. This is the reason why nothing substantial is ever really said about this fourth brother ‘Joses’ – though he is mentioned in the Gospels (which may tell us something about their dating) – in any of the other early sources, as opposed to the other three brothers. Nor does he appear in the Apostle lists as these other three do.

But how did this happen and why? When did Jesus become his own brother? When did fathers turn into uncles, brothers into cousins, and mothers into their own sisters? The answer is very simple and has been clear from the beginning. It is the growing concept of Jesus as the ‘Son of God’, not, as at Qumran and in other ‘Ebionite’ materials, only a symbolical or ‘adoptionist’ one – in the sense that all these ‘Perfectly Righteous Ones’
become
‘Sons of God’. Not only have we now found this notion at Qumran, it is widespread even in the New Testament as we have it.

In other words, as the doctrine of Christ as a Supernatural Being and the ‘only begotten’ Son of God gained momentum, all these shifts in genealogies became necessary too. It was necessary that ‘Joseph’ – or Cleophas or another – no longer be the real father, but rather only the stepfather. Even the genealogies in the Synoptics show confusion on this issue, as does John.

Then Jesus’ brothers could not have been his
real
brothers, but rather only half-brothers or brothers by a previous marriage of his father or even a different mother. By Jerome’s time, they are simply his ‘cousins’. Mary could not be the mother of these brothers. Therefore in the Gospel of John she gains a sister by the same name who becomes the
real
mother of the brothers – and all other absurdities and evasions follow accordingly.

Clearly, Jerome finds it impossible to admit for ideological reasons that this ‘Mary the wife of Clopas’ in John – in John, ‘Jesus’ mother’ is not even called
Mary
– could be
Jesus’ real mother
. This leads him into a series of self-evident contradictions and evasions, most notably about the relationship of Simeon bar Cleophas and Jesus. Simeon, it should now be appreciated, had to have been Jesus’
second
brother, equivalent to ‘Simon the Cananite/Zealot’, as well as being his second successor, at least in Palestine, if not perhaps worldwide as well, as some of our sources imply.

Of course, who the ‘Peter’ in the Gospels was, whether the same as ‘Cephas’ or different from him now takes on renewed significance. Are ‘Cephas’ and ‘Cleophas’ confused as well? Was Peter the same as this Simeon bar Cleophas or different from him? Was he the same as the ‘Simon the Head of his own Assembly’ in Jerusalem, who wanted to
bar
Herodians from the Temple as foreigners – and this, because they did
not
‘regularly observe the Law’ – or different from him? These things will probably never be known, but the suspicion is strong that we have two ‘Simon’s or two ‘Peter’s, as the case may be – the traditions being somewhat crisscrossed.

How many of the traditions about the
real
character ‘
Simeon bar Cleophas
’ – the putative Second Successor in the Church in Palestine – have become confused with those surrounding ‘
Peter’, ‘the Rock of the Church
’ in Rome? Certainly the idea of ‘Peter’ being a direct successor to Jesus is not borne out by any
real Palestinian
traditions. These have obviously been refurbished in Acts, where, for instance, they portray Peter as
learning to accept Gentiles
and
eat forbidden foods with them
. Not only are these straightforwardly gainsaid in the Pseudoclementine
Homilies
, they are clearly refuted by Paul’s account of his own experiences with ‘Cephas’ in ‘Antioch’ – whichever ‘Antioch’ this will finally turn out to be. The idea, too, of Peter being ‘Bishop of Bishops’, the forerunner of the modern Popes and Leader of Christianity everywhere, owes much to the real position of this Simeon in Palestine – the putative second brother of Jesus. But the present state of our sources, overwritten and mythologized as they are, where Jesus’ brothers and other family members are downplayed and all but written out of the tradition, do not allow us to proceed further or achieve finality on this matter.

Suffice it to say that many of the traditions regarding Simeon – including that of a first sighting on the road to Emmaus, to ‘Cleopas’ and another, and which may or may not have involved ‘Simeon’ and not simply his father ‘Cleophas’ (Origen thinks it involved both, and says so explicitly) and most certainly has something to do with
the first appearance to James
reported in all sources – either overlap with or have been absorbed into traditions regarding ‘Peter’, the successor in Rome and linchpin of Western Christian claims to the mantle of Jesus, to whom no separate appearance ever occurred (at least not in the Gospels).

These are the kinds of conclusions that can be arrived at by pursuing the question of what being a ‘
brother
’ meant and the Apostolic relationship of James the Just, ‘
the brother of the Lord
’, to Jesus. It is attention to detail and to the
real
, not spurious,
traditions about James
that led us to these insights.

PART VI

Jamesian Communities in the East

Chapter 24

Judas the Brother of James and the Conversion of King Agbar

Judas the Brother of James, Thaddaeus, and Judas the Zealot

We can now turn to more extensive data relating to Jesus’ putative
third brother
, Judas (‘Judas
Thomas
’/‘Thaddaeus’). The extant notices about him are particularly interesting. I think we can grant that he is the individual called ‘Judas the brother of James’ in the New Testament Letter of Jude, not to mention the individual in Apostle lists following ‘James the (son) of Alphaeus’ and ‘Simon the Cananaean’ (‘Simon who was called
Zelotes
’), variously referred to as ‘Thaddaeus’ (Mk 3:18), ‘Lebbaeus surnamed Thaddaeus’ (Mt 10:3), and, most realistically, ‘Judas (the brother) of James’ (Lk 6:16 and Acts 1:14).

It should also be noted, and this is important, that he is always followed by reference to another ‘Judas’ – this time, Judas
Iscariot
, called in the Gospel of John either ‘the
Iscariot
’ or ‘the son’ or ‘brother of
Simon Iscariot
’. Judas is related to ‘Simon the Cananite’ or ‘Zealot’ in these lists and there is a notice in the
Epistula Apostolorum
calling him ‘Judas Zelotes’ or ‘Judas the Zealot’. This too was immediately followed by reference to a ‘Cephas’ separate from ‘Peter’, who could be only either Simeon bar Cleophas or Simon the Zealot.

Now comes the rub. In an apocryphal text called the Apostolic Constitutions, when it comes to discussing the bequest of ‘Lebbaeus surnamed Thaddaeus’ – the clear nomenclature of the Gospel of Matthew only reversed – two variant manuscripts note he was also ‘called
Judas the Zealot
’.
1

The date of the Apostolic Constitutions, which comes to us from the Syriac, is contended. Some have it as a typical second-century document – others earlier; according to some scholars (depending on how conventional its conventionalities are thought to be) later. Like the Pseudoclementines, also attested in Syriac, this text refers to James quite straightforwardly as ‘the brother of Christ according to the flesh’ – simply that, no attempt being made at equivocation or evasion. In addition, as in the
Recognitions
, the point is stressed that James was ‘appointed Bishop of Jerusalem by
the Lord himself
.
2