James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls I (115 page)

This is just our old friend,
Queen Helen of Adiabene
, again intruding into the text of Acts just where one would expect her to, but now concealed almost – but not quite – beyond all recognition. The masquerade has sufficed for almost two thousand years. Such is the power of mind-numbing devotion and dissimulation.

Though there was a Sudanese/Ethiopian Queen called Kandakes, defeated by Rome in 22 BCE, there were no longer any others in 45 CE, none certainly who
sent their agents or messengers to Jerusalem
. What, anyhow, would the ‘Treasurers’ of such ‘Queens’ be doing in Jerusalem in this period? But no matter; the point is that the name ‘Kandakes’ is but a thinly disguised variation on or overwrite of the name of Queen Helen’s kinsman ‘Kenedaeos’ – probably her
grandson
. We have already encountered this Kenedaeos, probably one of Izates’ numerous sons who, together with
his
brother – the third Monobazus – was killed in the forefront of the assault by Jewish freedom-fighters on the Roman troops coming up the Pass at Beit Horon in the opening days of the War against Rome and whose ‘valour’ even Josephus is forced to remark.
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As with the confusion of
Iscariot
with
Sicarios
or ‘Alphaeus’ and ‘Cleophas’ – if we exchange the
iota
with the
sigma
here, i.e., ‘
si
c’ for ‘isc’, then we probably come very close to the truth.

In the matter of ‘Kandakes’, ‘
Ethiopian’
has simply replaced the denominative ‘
Arab
’. For the Hellenistic/Roman mindset, all dark-skinned peoples would have been alike anyhow – and what fun! This transmutation, to which both the references to ‘Treasure’ and ‘the
Queen of the Ethiopians
’ should have already alerted us, is quite astonishing and of the same order as the one concerning  ‘Agabus’, which follows a few chapters later. This ‘
Prophet called Agabus
’ will appear, in a rather humorous fashion too, later in Acts in connection with Philip – in the story of Paul’s
staying at
‘
Philip’s house’ in Caesarea
.

In addition, this
substitution
or
overwrite
shows substantial knowledge, not only of texts and traditions – in this case, the story of the conversion of Queen Helen and her Famine-relief efforts (the ‘Treasurer’, here, being nothing but one of Queen Helen’s grain-buying agents) and probably the main lines of the ‘Agbarus’ story (
the real one, not the legend
), but also of history and the fact that one of Helen’s descendants or kinsmen, a
heroic one
at that who distinguished himself in the opening engagement of the War against Rome, was named ‘Kenedaeos’. Of course, all of these are being rubbed out and overwritten, probably just because of this
heroism
and the relationship of this family with
Revolutionary Forces in Judea
!

That the story of Kandakes found in Strabo and Pliny relates to 22 BCE and not Claudius’ time demonstrates the deliberate artificiality of this episode. Moreover, in focusing on the story of this legendary ‘Queen of Sheba’, there is a
very real
play upon the kind of ‘Sabaean’ religious practices
Queen Helen
no doubt supported – ‘Sheba’ and ‘Sabaean’ being based on very close linguistic roots in Hebrew and other Semitic languages as well. In fact, the same confusion between ‘Sabaean’ meaning ‘Daily Bather’ and ‘Sabaean’ meaning ‘South Arabian’ or ‘Ethiopian’ has crept into the Koran and Islam as well.

Here someone is overwriting with
definite
knowledge. Such is the ‘playfulness’ of the writers of Acts’
pseudo
-history. In these materials, too, as if we had not already suspected it, ‘Philip’ begins to take, historically speaking, a giant nose-dive. But that these dissimulators have not scrupled to satirize the name of one of the holiest martyrs of the Jewish people – ‘
Kenedaeos
’ – a hero and a convert at that, who has, in the process, been forgotten
even by the Jews themselves
. Such is the power of successful rewriting and the consequences of widespread and an almost congenital ignorance.

To take the name of this non-Jew and convert, who none-the-less was a
valiant freedom-fighter
and
real martyr
for his adopted people, and disembody and ridicule it in this way might not be upsetting for the general reader, but to anyone valuing that cultural heritage or tradition involved – particularly as these words have been taken by endless numbers of people, including even Muslims, as ‘the Word of God’ for the last almost twenty centuries – it will be seen as offensive in the extreme.

For the final and definitive proof, not only of the knowledgeability, but also the cynicism of those responsible for such transformations, one has only to continue the story as it is presented in Acts. Even though this Ethiopian ‘eunuch’ – the story, of course, is playing on ‘circumcision’, just as Paul is in Galatians 5:12 above – and ‘the man over all the Queen’s Treasure’, is sitting in his chariot on the road returning from
Jerusalem to Gaza
, he is
reading the Bible
(as no doubt our author was) – in this case ‘the Prophet Isaiah’. ‘The Spirit’ now counsels Philip to creep up on him and ‘join himself’ to his chariot (Acts 8:29).

At this point, of course, Philip hears the eunuch reading Isaiah, and then asks him, ‘do you then know what you are reading?’ (Acts 8:30). But this is nothing other than
the story from Josephus
about ‘the Galilean’ teacher Eleazar going into
Queen Helen’s favourite son Izates
and finding him reading – not Isaiah – but the Law of Moses, namely the Genesis passage
commanding Abraham to circumcise all the males in his entourage
‘
and any stranger not of his seed
’
that was with him
(Gen. 17:10–27). In Josephus’ story, Eleazar then asks
Izates whether he understood what he was reading
– these, it will be recalled, were the precise words – and informing him of his
Impiety in neglecting this Commandment
.
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The substitution of the Prophet Isaiah here for the Book of Genesis on God’s command to Abraham to
circumcise himself and those traveling with him
–
even the stranger
– is significant, Isaiah being perhaps the fundamental Christian biblical proof-text. The maliciousness in substituting ‘a
eunuch
’ for Izates is equally clear. If there were any doubts about what we have been saying previously concerning Acts’ working method, these can now utterly be laid to rest. As obscure and inconsequential as this episode may seem to be, all our observations about Acts’ rewriting activity can now be thought of as confirmed. The reader will also begin to appreciate that what we have been saying about Acts’ sources and its manner of treating them is true too – all too true – many much older than previously supposed, and, because of Acts’ extremely successful if tendentious methodology,
older, in fact, than Acts itself
.

But this is no longer simply humorous rewriting or overwriting. The disparaging caricature of
Izates’ circumcision
puts paid to this idea. We are now in the realm of outright forgery aimed at disinformation of a most insidious kind. Unfortunately, the methods of our other documents do not differ to any extent from what we are seeing here, and the whole foundational edifice of ‘Gentile Christianity’ must be seen as derivative and tendentious. This is not the case for ‘Jamesian’
Nazirite
or
Nazoraean
‘Christianity’, if we can call it this.

Of course in Luke’s version of this story, now
the Ethiopian eunuch and Treasurer of Queen Kandakes
– not
Izates the son of Queen Helen
– is reading the key exegetical passage of Christian theology on the death of Jesus, Isaiah 53:7–8, the ‘Suffering Servant’, at which point Philip asks him if he understood ‘to whom the Prophet was referring’, and proceeds ‘to evangelize him’ – for which reason he is, no doubt, known as ‘the Evangelist’ when Paul encounters him some thirteen chapters further along in Acts, with his ‘four virgin daughters
who prophesied
’ (
thus
: 21:9) – or, ‘beginning with
this Scripture
, preaches to him the Gospel of Jesus’, as well he might have (Acts 8:34).

Coming to some water ‘along the Way’, he now baptizes the ‘eunuch’ when he agrees that ‘Jesus Christ is the Son of God’ – all perfectly good Gentile Christian theology. The stand-in of this ‘Ethiopian Queen’s eunuch’ for the Izates story should be patent, Philip now taking the place of Izates’ ‘Zealot’ teacher Eleazar.

When they ‘went down in the water’, for both apparently then enter the water, ‘the Spirit of the Lord took Philip away’ and ‘
the eunuch never saw Philip again
’ (Acts 8:39). One might add, neither do we, because Philip is then miraculously transported to Azotus on his way to ‘evangelize all the cities’ on the way to Caesarea in the opposite direction to which he had previously been going (8:40) – in time presumably to meet Paul there a decade and a half later.

The narrative immediately returns, this interruption out of the way, to ‘Saul breathing threat and slaughter against the Disciples of the Lord’, getting letters from the High Priest ‘
to the synagogues of Damascus
’ (Acts 9:1–2) – wherever these may have been – and we are on our way to his vision on the road to Damascus. But what is the point of all this? One point, anyhow, is that the reason Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch are on their way from Jerusalem to Gaza and not Caesarea is that Gaza is
the gateway to Egypt
and this is where Helen’s Treasury agents were, doubtlessly, going to buy grain.

There is unquestionably a lot of truth in this episode lying just beneath the surface, including whatever relationship Paul, Barnabas, or Philip might have had to these grain-buying operations and, no doubt, to Helen’s Treasury agents, but one cannot proceed further along this line – only to observe that, without a thorough grasp of the Queen Helen materials, one would never have suspected the resemblance of this episode to the conversion of Queen Helen’s son Izates and Queen Helen sending her representatives on Famine relief to Egypt and Cyprus thereafter.
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The Lukan author of Acts obviously knows the Queen Helen materials thoroughly, including her relationship to ‘Agabus’. That he sees fit to affix Paul and Barnabas to these matters relating to the Famine, when Paul himself does not even refer to it in his letters, is further proof that Paul was in some manner involved (with some of his ‘Cypriot’ and ‘Cyrenian’ colleagues) not only in Queen Helen’s Famine-relief efforts, or those of her son, but also perhaps her conversion. Josephus opines that Izates also sent relief, this time in the form of ‘money’ or ‘coin’, much like the ‘eunuch who had power over all the Treasure of the Ethiopian Queen’ – read here, ‘
Arabian Queen
’ or ‘
Sabaean Queen
’.

Though Josephus promises us a further account of ‘the good works of this royal pair’, he never provides it, but Talmudic materials also deal with this aspect of the activities of Helen’s son – now called Monobazus. When his brother asks him why he has impoverished himself in such activities, he replies, how good it was to store up ‘Riches’ in Heaven in place of those on earth, which his ancestors stored up, favourite allusions in the New Testament as we have seen – not to mention the Damascus Document – and the gist of Peter’s rebuke to Simon
Magus
in the first part of the Philip materials in Acts.
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As to the reference to this ‘Treasury’ official as a ‘eunuch’, this, of course, has
nothing whatever to do with ‘Ethiopia’
, but rather the practices of the Parthian court and those within the Persian sphere of influence generally, as Adiabene most definitely was. Even more to the point, it relates to the perception of ‘circumcision’ – as in the Roman ‘
Lex Cornelia de Sicarius
’ – as a kind of sexual mutilation. In his full account of Izates’ efforts to remain viable in a Persian buffer state, in addition to showing us how Izates’ father originally gave him a Kingdom around Haran, Josephus gives us a vivid picture of Izates’ struggles, for which his mother no doubt took her famous ‘Nazirite’ oaths or promised to. This ‘eunuch’ status also suits the purposes of the authors of the Book of Acts in inverting Qumran materials such as they are, which would rather ban all classes of such persons – cripples, lepers, diseased persons, those with running sores or ‘founts’ (as it is expressed), and most certainly
eunuchs
– from the Temple, and, as a ‘eunuch’, he would hardly ‘have come to Jerusalem to worship’ in those days (8:27). Acts’ authors knew this.

Those responsible for these materials had an uncanny control over them, as well as a highly developed – albeit derisive – sense of humour. This was much more developed than many of their medieval or modern heirs, who normally see nothing funny in these materials and
almost never laugh at them
, regardless of how preposterous, outrageous, or ribald what is being recounted really is. Rather they take everything extremely seriously, some even to the extent of swearing by their mortal souls on them. The authors of Acts would, doubtlessly also, have been very pleased by the success of their poor efforts, the materials having almost as much power today as they did two millennia ago. They would, however, not perhaps have been very surprised at the credulity of mankind or by its tendency towards self-hypnosis or even mass hysteria over such a long expanse of time, as they seem already to have understood this.