James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls I (114 page)

Since her attitude and that of her sons – even her grandsons – would appear to have been a competitive one to Herodians, it is possible that the plaque she contributed represented
an attempt to embarrass the latter or rebuke them
. Just as the Herodians were the Roman puppet kings in Palestine seemingly sponsored by and championing the Pharisees, so those in the Royal House of Adiabene seemed to have carried with them the hopes of Nazirite-style, more extreme Zealot and
Sicarii
groups. In fact, the financing they provided Palestinian affairs probably did not just end with Famine relief activities, though this is nowhere as clearly documented as their grain-buying.

They may even have had something to do with the support of installations, as at Qumran – ‘bathing’ activity of this kind being quite popular among other ‘Sabaeans’ and ‘Elchasaites’ at the headwaters of the Euphrates continguous to their domains, as already remarked. Buffer state as they were, to some degree their interest in Palestinian affairs can be seen as a proxy for the even more formidable and inimitable enemies of the Romans, such as the Parthians further east.

This state of affairs can be seen under the Roman Emperor Trajan who, once more, began to make and unmake kings in this area and stamp out all Messianic disturbances, but whose career was probably cut short because of it. In 115–16, he actually put an end to the Kingdom of Adiabene, marching down the Tigris to take the Parthian capital Ctesiphon, and then to the head of the Persian Gulf at Charax Spasini. As if on signal, Messianic revolts broke out among the Jews in his rear around the Mediterranean at Cyrene, Egypt, Cyprus, and Crete, sparking other revolts in Armenia, Syria, and Northern Mesopotamia, suppressing which Trajan suddenly died in 117 CE.

The interest in ‘
harlots
’ and ‘
adulteresses
’ is also keen in Gospel accounts about their ‘Jesus’ as it is at Qumran, providing yet another of these thematic circles; but in the Gospels, ‘Jesus’ is depicted, as we have on several occasions remarked, as keeping ‘
table fellowship
’ with ‘
Sinners
’ of this kind. Such behaviour, if it were true –
which it undoubtedly was not!
– would have sent groups like those represented by the literature at Qumran into paroxysms of ‘Righteous’ indignation. Of course, according to Acts’ distorted historiography, there were believers who were ‘of the
sect of the Pharisees
, who rose up (at ‘the Jerusalem Council’) and said, it was
necessary to circumcise
them (meaning, Gentiles) and that they
be obliged to keep the Law
’ (Acts 15:5).

As we have several times had occasion to point out, the use of the term ‘
Pharisees
’ in the New Testament – as in this instance – is often a polemical code for attacks on Leaders of the Jerusalem Community like James because of the perception of their ‘nit-picking’ attitude over points of the Law – an attitude amply demonstrated in ‘
MMT
’. On the other hand, there were
real ‘
Pharisees’ as well, but these were more like – politically anyhow – the kind, pictured in Scripture as harassing teachers like John the Baptist or Jesus. This picture is doubtlessly true, but ‘Pharisees’ of this kind were basically Herodian/Roman clients.

To be sure, all this is very confusing for the newcomer, as it is for the veteran scholar, but attention to
political
attitudes towards Roman power and the Herodian Establishment, as we have been emphasizing, will soon put one right in sorting out these conflicting code names.

It is impossible to say what the intricacies of Helen’s marital or sexual relations were and who was the father of which of her children. Even today, the institution of ‘temporary marriage’ is a recognized one in areas of Iran and Iraq, where Shi‘ism has a hold and it seems to have been in widespread practice among ‘Arabs’ before the coming of Islam. There is also the issue of whether Helen’s husband, ‘Bazeus’ or ‘Monobazus’, was her brother. Much as in the instance of her younger contemporary, the Herodian Bernice, that questions arose centering around the issue of ‘fornication’ concerning Helen’s behaviour seems almost undeniable.

In addition, in Helen’s case, there was the inordinate
love
she lavished upon her ‘only begotten’ Izates, as opposed to her other children – Izates’ ‘brother’ Monobazus, for instance. For this love, she was apparently well requited by the stipend Izates bestowed upon her and the relative splendour in which she seems to have lived in Jerusalem, rivalling, if not surpassing in some respects, that of
Herodians
. Of course, that Izates supplanted his older brothers and other relatives would lend further credence to his having had a more important forebear, as does the fact of his descendant, Abgar VII, becoming the
Edessan King
from 109 to 116, the period, in which Trajan
put an end
to the separate ‘Kingdom of Adiabene’.

Paul may have had a relationship with Royal circles of this kind, as he did with Herodians before his mysterious trip to Rome at the end of Acts. It should be noted that if Paul is connected in any way with the enigmatic ‘Saulus, a relative of Agrippa’, in Josephus, then the note the latter provides that this Herodian Saulus was sent to Nero in Achaia (Corinth) to brief him on the state of affairs in Palestine is extremely interesting.

This is the year 66 CE and the last one hears about Josephus’ mysterious ‘Saulus’, who had earlier been the intermediary between ‘the Peace Party’ in Jerusalem – consisting of Herodians, Chief Priests, and principal Pharisees – and the Roman Army and that of Agrippa II outside it. This is the coalition of forces that finally calls in the Roman troops
to suppress
the Revolution then in progress. This notice about Saulus in Josephus also fits in very nicely with Paul’s own claims of important contacts in ‘the household of Caesar’, most notably Epaphroditus – also Josephus’ putative publisher, and secretary to both Nero and Domitian and the former’s accused assassin (Phil. 2:25 and 4:18).

As we have seen, Paul does not speak of any intervening trip to Jerusalem to deal with anything resembling Famine relief before the one resulting in the ‘Jerusalem Council’, where Acts pictures James as making his rulings on what was required of foreign proselytes, including, most notably, where
MMT
is concerned, abstention from ‘things sacrificed to idols’; where Helen is concerned, abstention from ‘fornication’, and where Paul is concerned, the ban on ‘blood’, implying presumably, too, ‘Communion’ with it. But Helen also sent representatives to Egypt and Cyprus ‘to buy grain and figs’, and Paul does seem to have been associated with a variety of people ostensibly from Cyprus as, for instance, the ubiquitous ‘Joses Barnabas’.

The similarity of this name to ‘Joseph Barsabas Justus’, who doubled for James in the improbable election to replace ‘the Twelfth Apostle’ in Acts 1:22, should also be recalled. He, in turn mysteriously transmogrifies into ‘Judas Barsabas’ in the story of the two messengers who carry James’ ‘letter’ with his instructions to overseas communities down to ‘Antioch’ in Acts 15:22. In Acts 4:36 this ‘Joses surnamed Barnabas’ is ‘a Levite of Cypriot origins’, while in Mark 2:14 the individual the other Gospels are calling ‘Matthew’ is called ‘Levi the son of Alphaeus’. But, as we have seen, these ‘Barnabas’/‘Barsabas’/‘Barabbas’ names often have to do with writing over and the elimination of the members of Jesus’ family from Scripture.

In Acts 21:16, before Paul goes up to Jerusalem to be mobbed by the Jewish crowd for allegedly bringing
Greeks
into the Temple (21:28), Paul has to do with another curious individual from Cyprus, this time named ‘Mnason’. He is called ‘an old Disciple’ (meaning aged) and, once more, we are probably dealing with obfuscation. The ‘Manaen’ we have already met, the ‘foster brother of Herod the Tetrarch’, was grouped alongside ‘those from Cyprus and Cyrene’, including ‘Lucius the Cyrenian’ (Paul’s putative travelling companion) as one of the five founding members of the ‘Antioch’ Community in Acts 11:20 and 13:1. These also include one ‘Simeon’, now mysteriously called ‘Niger’, a name we have previously, also, met under slightly different circumstance in Josephus above.

These ‘men of Cyprus and Cyrene’, who according to Acts’ completely skewed narrative had scattered in the wake of the stoning of Stephen (that is, the attack by Paul on James in the Temple in the 40’s), now speak to ‘the Hellenists’ (now ‘
Hellenistas
’) at Antioch – whoever these might have been in such a context – about ‘the Gospel of the Lord Jesus’, at which point ‘the Assembly in Jerusalem’ sends down Barnabas to Antioch to deal with this situation there (where ‘the Disciples were first being called Christians’ – Acts 11:22–26) – yet another reverberation of the story of Thomas sending down Thaddaeus, ‘as an Apostle, one of the Seventy’, to the Land of the Edessenes and Mesopotamia when Abgarus ruled in Edessa – not to mention James sending down ‘Judas Barsabas’ with the ‘epistle’ containing his directives.

One can say that here these inverted notices about ‘Cyprus and Cyrene’ are nothing other than the contrapositive of the notices in Josephus about Helen sending her grain-buying agents to ‘Egypt and Cyprus’. In continuing mix-ups involving so-called ‘Cypriots’, ‘Simeon’, and Samaritans, Simon
Magus
, the double of Elymus
Magus
from Cyprus in Acts, is also in some texts – most notably Josephus – said to have come from
Cyprus
not Gitta in Samaria. Hippolytus, the Pseudoclementines, and Eusebius, quoting Justin Martyr, put this right.

Queen Helen and the Supposed
Ethiopian Queen
Kandakes in Acts

However, it is the material in Acts about Philip in Caesarea that clinches in an unequalled manner our identification of ‘Agabus’ as a stand-in for or rub-out of ‘Agbarus’, becoming the ultimate example of Acts’ working method. The material about Philip is peculiar anyhow, and tradition is never quite sure whether he is
an Apostle
or only
one of the Seventy
.

‘Philip’, not insignificantly, participates in John 6:5’s version of the ‘miracle of the loaves’ – like the first account of this miracle, before ‘five thousand’, but now at
Passover
. Instead of the ‘dates’ added to the grain in Josephus’ descriptions of Queen Helen’s grain-buying activities in Egypt and Cyprus, it is, of course, now the ‘fish’ of the various versions of Jesus’ ‘breaking bread’ with his Disciples in his post-resurrection manifestations to them above, added to the ‘loaves’. In John, in answer to Jesus’ question, ‘where shall we buy loaves that these may eat?’ (6:6), Philip is represented as responding in the language and manner of all these ‘grain-buying’ agent notices: ‘two hundred pieces of silver’s worth of loaves is not sufficient for them even for a little to eat’ (6:7). Other than these few points and the story of his confrontation with Simon
Magus
in Samaria, after which he makes his way,
via the road to Gaza in the South
to
Caesarea in the North
, the New Testament knows next to nothing about ‘Philip’.

Acts places the episode of Philip’s circuitous trip – wherein he will finally meet
the Treasurer of the Ethiopian Queen Kandakes
– after the stoning of Stephen and Paul ravaging the Jerusalem Community, dragging people out of their houses and ‘delivering them up’, Judas
Iscariot
-like, to prison (8:1–3), but before his reported ‘Damascus Road’ vision and meeting with Ananias in Damascus in chapter 9. Acts presents Philip as something of a stand-in for Peter, who in any event comes to Samaria after him to rebuke Simon – that is,
Simon Magus
– for supposedly offering ‘Riches’ to Philip, himself, and John, the Samaria locale reflecting the ‘Gitta’ notices about Simon’s origins in these other sources.

One should note how, in all these episodes, the theme of money, ‘Riches’, or being someone’s ‘Treasury’ or grain-buying agent, is played upon in various ways – usually negatively. This totally intrusive episode in Acts 8:4–40, in between the two episodes about Paul’s activities in Jerusalem and ‘Damascus’, has Peter speaking James-like to Simon
Magus
– in the context, totally incomprehensibly: ‘May
the money you have with you
be destroyed, because you thought the gift of God could be
acquired by Riches
’ (Acts 8:18–20). Peter’s anger here is out of place and completely uncharacteristic, but it does echo the attacks on Paul for
profiteering by his ministry
that Paul responds to so emotionally in 1 Corinthians 9:3–12.

Acts’ plot line then for some reason follows Philip, who is told by an ‘Angel of the Lord’ to go south, that is,
towards Gaza and Egypt
, even though his real destination seems to be north or west and
Caesarea on the Palestine coast
– where Paul later encounters him (8:26). ‘On the way’, he meets ‘an Ethiopian man, a eunuch, one in power’, as it turns out ‘over all her Treasure’ or
the Treasurer
of someone called ‘Kandakes, the Queen of the Ethiopians’ (8:27). Not only is the fact of this man being
the Keeper of the Treasure
noteworthy, but that he serves one
Kandakes, Queen of the Ethiopians
, even more so.