James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls I (106 page)

Edessa is an important centre of early Christianity, probably more important than the centre Acts attributes to Paul and his colleagues in nearby Antioch (11:20–26). Its cultural heritage is claimed by both Armenian and Syriac Christians, as are its kings. In fact, there were originally numerous ‘
Antioch
’s, ‘Antiochus’ being the name of the father of the first Seleucid King following Alexander the Great in this region who apparently liked
honouring the memory of his father
. Edessa was one of these ‘
Antioch
’s, being called ‘
Antiochia-by-Callirhoe
’ or ‘
Edessa Orrhoe
’ – the source of its present name in Turkey, ‘
Urfa
’. So was another town at the southern tip of the Tigris and Euphrates, ‘
Antiochia Charax
’ or ‘
Charax Spasini
’, which will figure prominently in our story.
7
This will make for very interesting mix-ups indeed – as it does in the Paul being at ‘
Antioch
’ story.

Aficionados of searches of this kind even trace the Shroud of Turin back to this city, carbon-dating notwithstanding. Indeed, it is claimed in the literature associated with the Agbar/Abgar Legend that Jesus sent his image to the city.
8
Out of this also has sprung up a lively literature circulating around the individual ‘Addai’, a name clearly not unrelated to ‘Thaddaeus’ or
vice versa
, and even the name Edessa would appear to be based on a not unsimilar phonetic root, not to mention the name of Adiabene just a
little further east
. In fact, Adi is a religious name endemic to this region, revered even today by the quasi-pagans extant in the area called ‘
Yazidis
’. We shall see how it is also picked up in Muhammad’s stories about ’Ad and Thamud’, and ‘the Prophet’ sent to the former, ‘their brother Hud’ (in Hebrew, ‘Yehudah’ or ‘Judas’), not to mention the one called in Arabic, ‘Salih’ or ‘the Righteous One’, sent to the latter.
9

Eusebius himself is already referring to Thomas as Judas Thomas.
10
While acknowledging that Judas Thomas was an Apostle, he is confused about ‘Thaddaeus’, whom he appreciates appears with ‘Barnabas’ and ‘Cephas’ as members of ‘the Seventy’ in Clement of Alexandria’s
Hypotyposes
. This is also something of the case in the Apostolic Constitutions above, ‘the Seventy’ being the Seventy Disciples or Elders stemming from Jewish ideas of the Seventy Nations or language-groups of mankind, as well as ‘the Seventy’ it took to make up a proper ‘Assembly’ or ‘Sanhedrin’.
11

In fact, Eusebius seems to be presenting the exchange of letters between Jesus and Agbarus, the King of the Osrhoeans, as an answer to some other materials that had recently appeared from Roman chancellery records, called the ‘
Acti Pilati
’ that he considered scurrilous. The extant Acts of Pilate – so-called because of their attribution to Pilate – are rather pro-Christian documents attesting to Pilate’s recognition of Jesus, but these other so-called ‘Acts’, which appear to have represented themselves as the
actual
administrative records of Pilate’s Governorship, upset Eusebius so much because they claimed a different date for the Crucifixion of Jesus – around 21 CE.

In truth the Romans did keep very careful administrative records, even in the provinces, and it would have been surprising if records such as these had not once existed, but the ‘
Acti Pilati
’ Eusebius so rails against were obviously being circulated by enemies of Christianity. They claimed that Jesus was crucified in the seventh year of the reign of Tiberius
which commenced in the year 14 CE
. Eusebius counters with the statement from Josephus that Pilate came to Palestine in 26 CE and, in so doing, claiming these ‘
Acti Pilati
’ to be fraudulent – but there is no real proof of this proposition other than this one remark about Pilate from Josephus who hadn’t even been born yet.

Josephus himself might well have been mistaken about this and it would seem foolish to purposefully circulate something like these ‘Acts’ which could, on the surface anyhow, appear so patently fraudulent. If Pilate did come earlier, a 21 CE date for the Crucifixion of Jesus would help markedly in explaining why someone like Paul, who seems to have begun his career in the 30’s, knows so little factually about him. It would also go a long way towards explaining the ‘twenty-year’ period of ‘groping for the Way’, referred to in the Damascus Document from the time of the death of the Messianic ‘Root of Planting’ to the rise of the Righteous Teacher.
12

But however these things may be, for those who would dispute the age of traditions like that of the Agbarus legend, it should be appreciated that Hippolytus, a century before Eusebius, whose testimony about Josephus’ ‘Essenes’ is so full of startling precision and extra detail, was already aware of the tradition concerning ‘Judas the Zealot’ and the Edessenes above, not to mention the one about ‘Lebbaeus surnamed Thaddaeus’ or ‘Thaddaeus surnamed Lebbaeus’ in the two variant editions of the Apostolic Constitutions being the same as ‘Judas the Zealot’.

As another work attributed to Hippolytus puts this in a listing of the Twelve Apostles, it now combines both saying:
‘Judas, also called Lebbaeus
, preached to the people of Edessa and to all Mesopotamia, and
fell asleep at Berytus and was buried there
.’
13
On the face of it, this is absolutely startling testimony, because the Hippolytus work – if authentic, it would be from the second–third centuries – now combines the note about ‘Judas the Zealot being buried in Berytus’ from the variant manuscripts of the Apostolic Constitutions with the one about ‘Lebbaeus being surnamed Thaddaeus’ in the tradition represented by the Gospel of Matthew.

But in its listing of the Twelve Apostles this work (again ascribed to Hippolytus) goes even further than this. Moving over to the matter of ‘James the son of Alphaeus’, obviously the first of our three brothers, it now by implication identifies him with James the Just, the brother of Jesus, saying: ‘
James the son of Alphaeus
, when preaching in Jerusalem,
was stoned to death by the Jews and was buried there beside the Temple
.’ Nothing could be clearer than this, which is nothing but our tradition about James the brother of the Lord, called the Just One in all early Church sources. Whoever wrote this was unerringly prescient.

Clearly, by the end of the Second Century or the beginning of the Third Century, if this listing is authentic, Hippolytus as far away as Rome already knew that ‘James the son of Alphaeus’ was
the same
as the James called ‘the brother of the Lord’ but, as he was not yet privy to Hegesippus’ traditions about the latter’s death (being transmitted at approximately the same time), he does not put them all together as relating to the same person. But this is certainly very important testimony for identifying ‘James the son of Alphaeus’ – ‘James the Less’ at a later point in Mark – with James the brother of the Lord, and, no doubt too, because of the garbling inherent in the name ‘Alphaeus’, ‘James the son of Cleophas’.

In addition, in another fragment ascribed to him, found together with the previous list, purporting now to be a catalogue of ‘the Seventy Apostles’, by which is clearly meant ‘the Seventy’ – ‘the Elders’ or ‘Disciples’ of other reckonings – Hippolytus is presented as listing the first four of these – clearly meant to approximate the names of Jesus’ brothers – as: ‘James the Lord’s brother, Bishop of Jerusalem’, the second being ‘Cleopas Bishop of Jerusalem’.
14
The spelling here is the spelling Luke uses in the matter of the first Emmaus Road appearance by Jesus to ‘Cleopas’, and there can be little doubt that what Hippolytus is presented as meaning or implying here – if not Luke – is that the recipient of this appearance
is
‘Simeon bar Cleophas’, the second Bishop of the Jerusalem Church according to all sources.

Then he lists, regardless of contradictions as to who is or is not an ‘Apostle’, ‘Matthias who filled the vacancy in the number of the Twelve Apostles’, and fourth, ‘Thaddaeus, who conveyed the epistle to Augarus (
thus
).’
15
In other words – if this recording is accurate – Hippolytus has not yet put this ‘Thaddaeus’ together with ‘Judas also called Lebbaeus’ (whom he described ‘as preaching to the people of Edessa and all Mesopotamia’ in the listing of the Apostles attributed to him), even though the Gospels of Matthew and Luke (not to mention these variant manuscripts of the Apostolic Constitutions) have already done this for him – Luke quite straightforwardly calling him ‘Judas the brother of James’.

But even more important than this, if we go back to the previous listing, this text attributed to Hippolytus now calls ‘Simon the Cananaean’ (or ‘Zealot’) ‘
the son of Clopas
, who is also (the brother of) Judas and
became Bishop of Jerusalem after James the Just
and fell asleep and was buried there at the age of 120 years’.

Aside from again stressing the matter of Simeon bar Cleophas’ apparent longevity, this important notice clearly identifies Simon the Cananite or Cananaean (that is, ‘the Zealot’) with Simeon bar Cleophas in a straightforward manner, as we have already done and the variant manuscript of the Apostolic Constitutions does as well. In addition, it affirms, as the fragment attributed to Papias quoted earlier, that ‘Clopas’ – regardless of what spelling one uses – was basically the father of these four children. It is hard to believe that all these fragments, whatever one makes of their origins, could be wrong on all these matters, especially since they make so much good sense!

The reference to ‘Judas’ here again links Simon the Zealot, the son of Cleophas,
the second successor to Jesus in the Church at Jerusalem
, with Judas, not only in the matter of both being ‘Zealots’ or ‘Cananaeans’ – this being the basic implication of the notice as it stands – but also as far as both having the same father, once more our ever-present Cleopas, Clopas, or Alphaeus. It also relates – as over and over again in these notices – to the two
Iscariot
s, both called in the Johannine tradition if not the Synoptic, ‘Judas’ and ‘Simon’.

The Conversion of King Agbar according to Eusebius

Equally important, if authentic – and we think it is – this notice from Hippolytus on ‘the Seventy Apostles’ also provides vivid testimony that the Agbarus legend is a good deal older than Eusebius’ recording of it and that the latter was not fantasizing or indulging in creative writing when he said he got it from the official archives of Edessa. Additionally, as in the case of Eusebius, it is already associating this tradition with the name of Thaddaeus (the ‘Judas also called Lebbaeus’) and our ‘Judas
Thomas
’ or ‘
Judas the brother of James
’, ‘who preached the truth to the Edessenes and all Mesopotamia’.

Equally important too, Hippolytus or a copyist has already begun garbling or mixing up Abgarus’ or Agbarus’ name, calling him here ‘Augarus’ (in some Latin manuscripts he is even called ‘Albarus’). We shall see why this becomes so important below. For Eusebius, the whole is based on Syriac sources and, as Hippolytus before him, Eusebius quotes these as calling Thaddaeus both an ‘Apostle and one of the Seventy’ and directly involves him, in addition, with an individual, ‘Judas’, he too now admits ‘is also
Thomas
’. Interestingly enough, Eusebius’ source presents the courier in this correspondence as someone called ‘Ananias’, the same name as the individual Acts introduces as Paul’s associate when the latter comes to Damascus (9:12–17). It should not be forgotten too that at this point Paul was staying at the ‘house’ of someone called ‘
Judas
’ on a ‘street called Straight’ (9:11)!

As we shall see, Josephus too mentions an individual he calls ‘Ananias’, who plays an important role in the parallel conversion of Queen Helen at approximately the same time – whether to Judaism or Christianity is not always clear in our sources.
16
Though for Josephus this is Judaism, for Armenian sources, which are also interested in the matter of Helen’s conversion, it is, as the conversion of King Abgar, to Christianity. What is even more interesting is that these sources, which see Abgar as an
Armenian
King (which may simply mean he spoke Aramaic; he certainly was King of Edessa), claim that he had allied himself to Aretas, King of Petra in Arabia, thus increasing the pan-Arab ties among these ‘Arab’ Kings.

Therefore, when Herod Antipas – that is, ‘
Herod the Tetrarch
’ – repudiated Aretas’ daughter to marry his niece Herodias, ‘a circumstance in connection with which he had John the Baptist put to death’ (this from Armenian historian Moses of Chorene in the Fifth Century – or perhaps later – echoing Josephus in the First), King Abgar gave Aretas military help in his defeat of Herod, by which Divine ‘Vengeance was taken for the death of John the Baptist’.
17
However inflated such claims may at first appear, there may indeed be an element of truth in this idea of a link between these ‘Arab’ Kings, both as to history and in the light of the political axes developing here.