James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls I (120 page)

But in expositions of key biblical texts at Qumran, those called ‘the Traitors’ just about always have something to do with the individual we have identified as Paul’s
alter ego
, ‘the Liar and the men of his persuasion’, including ‘the Violent Ones’. Even in Scripture, it will be recalled, Paul is originally portrayed as using
violence with the people
. These ‘Traitors’ are portrayed as ‘rejecting’ both the Law and the scriptural exegesis of the Righteous Teacher and being ‘Traitors to the New Covenant in the Land of Damascus’.
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This is not to mention the reversal of the ‘delivering up’ language associated with ‘Judas
Iscariot
’ throughout the Damascus Document, in the sense of ‘delivering up’ backsliders or Covenant-Breakers to ‘the Avenging Wrath of God’ or ‘the sword’.

In Johannine tradition, the ‘missing Apostle’ at the time of Jesus’ post-resurrection appearance is ‘Thomas surnamed
Didymus
’ (Jn 20:24) – elsewhere ‘Judas
Thomas
’ (more obfuscation). So here, just as in the Synoptics, the ‘missing’ Apostle is basically someone called ‘Judas’, again associated
with the family of Jesus
. In John, this Thomas will ‘not believe’ unless he can put his finger into the actual ‘print of the nails’ and ‘his hand into his side’ (
thus
– 20:25) – therefore, the still proverbial pejorative appellation, ‘Doubting Thomas’.

In the Gospel of the Hebrews, James ‘will not eat’ until he has ‘seen’ Jesus or ‘the Son of Man risen from among those that sleep’ – more overlaps or transformations having to do basically with James and Judas. Eight days later in John, Thomas supposedly gets this additional appearance, which involves not eating or breaking bread but rather ‘putting his finger’
into Jesus’ side
. The effect is essentially the same. Another appearance occurs by the Sea of Galilee with Nathanael and others and, here, Jesus’ ‘taking the bread and giving it to them’ does finally occur – and ‘some of the fish too’. (In the story of Queen Helen and her son Izates’ efforts, it will be recalled, it was ‘grain (the bread) and dried figs’!)

The Synoptic accounts, of course, know nothing of all of this. Only Matthew and Mark have any real appearances along the Sea of Galilee. Though the ‘breaking bread’ and ‘eating’ are missing, the ‘doubting’ theme is present, at least in Matthew, perhaps Mark as well. But in all of these, including Luke, the
missing Apostle
is now ‘Judas
Iscariot
’, not John’s ‘
Thomas
called
Didymus
’, i.e., ‘Judas’ or ‘Judas
Thomas
’. In Luke’s version of the appearance to ‘the Eleven’ in Jerusalem, they give Jesus broiled fish to eat and he shows them his hands and feet, this after having appeared to at least
one
family member on the Emmaus Road, with whom he ‘broke bread’, as in the Gospel of the Hebrews.

It is difficult to avoid these confusions or overlaps in the traditions between Jesus’ family members – particularly ‘Jude’ or ‘Judas
Thomas
’ – and Judas
Iscariot
. In turn, these overlap traditions having to do with James. The note about ‘breaking bread’ with Jesus in Last Supper scenarios in the Synoptics, incorporating the Pauline overwrite about ‘Communion with the body’ and ‘blood of Christ’ – missing from the ‘Last Supper’ narrative in the Gospel of John – just reinforces these overlaps. John only has Jesus ‘dipping the morsel and giving it to Judas (the son or brother) of Simon
Iscariot
’ in a clear parody of Jewish Passover scenarios. No Communion. This comes much earlier in conjunction with the ‘multiplication of the loaves and the fishes’ after turning
water into wine
at ‘Cana’ in ‘Galilee’.

The Synoptics, of course, do not have Jesus actually ‘give the bread’ to Judas
Iscariot
, as Jesus does
James
in the Gospel of the Hebrews, though they do have Judas ‘dipping his hand’ with Jesus, as we saw (Mt 26:23 and Mk 14:20), and put heavy stress on the ‘eating and drinking’ theme tying it to the theologically even more difficult,
Communion with the blood of Jesus Christ
. This last, even when taken symbolically, flies in the face of Jamesian prohibitions to overseas communities, forbidding the consumption of blood, not to mention those at Qumran, which found it abhorrent. We already noted the reversal in this regard of
Nazirite
-oath abstentions from ‘eating and drinking’, but even more telling,
Rechabite
/Jamesian abstention from ‘drinking wine’ altogether (also parodied in the ‘Cana’ miracle of ‘turning water into wine’ above).

But we have been watching overlaps and confusions of this kind with traditions relating to James the Just the
brother of Jesus
– always reproduced with a kind of negative or inverted effect – throughout the book. For instance, we have seen how Judas’ kiss of betrayal in the Synoptics (Mt 26:49 and pars.) simply inverts the kiss that Jesus gives
his brother James
or
vice versa
. This is not to mention the affection Jesus is pictured as feeling for
the Disciple he loved
, whom John portrays as lying on Jesus’ bosom even as Judas is about to betray him (13:23). We have also seen how the election to replace Judas as the ‘Twelfth Apostle’ in Acts is probably little else than a substitution for the election of James as Overseer of the early Church.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the identification of the Apostle who ‘betrayed’ Jesus with Judas
Iscariot
– which has become such a set piece and one of the iconographies of Western Civilization – is, once again, just another of these malevolent addenda to tradition that has
no historical foundation whatsoever
– except further disparagement of the successors to and family of Jesus in Palestine. On the contrary, it is the product of some of the most successful historical rewriting ever accomplished.

James
sometimes becomes
Judas, just as in the Book of Acts, Judas at one point
even becomes James
. Even more revealing, though scholars have attempted to find the basis of the word ‘
Iscariot
’, none have succeeded in showing any origin for this word other than
Sicarii
, that is, the extreme wing of the Zealot Movement, which Josephus repeatedly blames for assassinations and disturbances in Palestine, ending with the destruction of the Temple – note the additional play here on the
Sicarii causing the destruction of the Temple
and Judas
Iscariot, the destruction of Jesus
.

That, for John anyhow, Judas is also related to someone called Simon
Iscariot
– missing from the Synoptics – corroborates this still further. Nor should we forget that it is the last hold-outs among the followers of Judas the
Galilean
– the author along with ‘
Saddok
’ of the Zealot Movement – under the leadership of another of this Judas’ descendants, ‘Eleazar ben Jair’, who commit suicide on Masada in pursuance of this creed. These are, in fact, the last remnants of these
Sicarii
, against whom Josephus so rails. We have just mentioned the parody of this suicide implicit in Judas’ actions as portrayed in Matthew and Acts, not to mention the additional note of betrayal ‘for money’. How satisfying all this must have been for the authors of these accounts – and how diabolically successful.

Epilogue

In
James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls II: The Cup of the Lord, the Damascus Coveneant , and the Blood of Christ
, we shall continue where this book leaves off on the subject of the Jamesian Communities in the East, the Pella Flight, Agabus’ second prophecy, and the oracle of Jesus ben Ananias in the Temple from 62 to 70 CE – all connected with the death of James. We will treat James’ rain-making and direct confrontations between Paul and James more systematically, and explain
MMT
as a ‘Jamesian’ Letter to ‘
the Great King of the Peoples beyond the Euphrates
’.

Finally we will explore the confrontations between the Righteous Teacher and the Liar in the Scrolls, going through the parallels between James and the Righteous Teacher at Qumran in meticulous detail. We will show the Habakkuk
Pesher
in any event – and by implication, all documents related by sense and nomenclature to it – to be First Century. This will be a proof based on the clear sense of the internal data not the external. We will also treat the parallel ‘
Cup
’ imagery in both it and the New Testament, showing the intimate relationship between the Scrolls’ ‘
New Covenant in the Land of Damascus
’ and the Pauline ‘
Cup of the New Covenant in the blood
’ of Christ.

In the present book Part I, however, we thought it best to confine ourselves to arguments essentially delineating the parameters of James’ existence, his importance for his time, and what he personally represented from the vantage point of New Testament and early Church sources, the Scrolls being used peripherally for purposes of external comparison and verification only. This was because, whereas the dating of early Christian documents is not the subject of inordinate differences of opinion, with the Scrolls it is different. Therefore, we have relegated such matters to the second volume, not wishing to impinge on the clear conclusions of the first based exclusively on New Testament documents, early Church sources, and Josephus.

In it, we have shown how information in the Book of Acts relating to the life and death of James was erased or overwritten. The rather staggering loopholes in the New Testament were systematically and painstakingly set forth. This was true of the election of James and its transformation in Acts into the election of the Matthias to replace ‘the Traitor Judas
Iscariot
’. It is also true of the stoning of ‘Stephen’, executed (according to Eusebius) by ‘
the murderers of the Lord
’ (sic).

The attack by ‘Jews’ on Stephen – identified by some scholars as a stand-in for the stoning of James – is paralleled in Josephus by the robbery and beating of the ‘Emperor’s Servant Stephen’ by ‘Zealot’ Revolutionaries outside Jerusalem in 49 CE. It is also intimately related to the assassination by ‘Stephen’, Flavia Domitilla’s servant, of the Emperor Domitian in 96 CE, itself probably in retaliation for Domitian’s execution of
real
Christians like Flavius Clemens, her husband, and Epaphroditus, Josephus’ putative publisher.

It is even more true of the relatively obscure passage having to do with Philip converting ‘the eunuch of the
Ethiopian
Queen Kandakes’, probably an overwrite of material relating to Queen Helen of Adiabene and her descendant ‘Kenedaeos’, killed in the assault on Roman troops at the Pass at Beit Horon in the first days of the Uprising against Rome in 66 CE. The conversion of Queen Helen’s two sons, Izates and Monobazus, is a pivotal event. Its refurbishment had the additional benefit of heaping abuse on a favourite conversion episode of the Jews involving ‘circumcision’ – in the process vividly exemplifying the derisive invective involved.

Likewise, we have repeatedly shown how historical events were refurbished and changed in the history of early Christianity as represented in Acts. For instance, the visit of Peter to Caesarea to the ‘Pious’ Roman Centurion Cornelius – where Peter learns to accept Gentiles and not reject them – is a rewrite of the visit of Simon (who wished to bar Herodians from the Temple as foreigners, not admit them) to King Agrippa I in Caesarea in 44 CE in Josephus; and the beheading of ‘
James the brother of John
’ is a rewrite of the beheading of the Messianic Leader ‘Theudas’ – presumably ‘Thaddaeus’ alias ‘Judas the brother of James’ (also ‘a relative of his’ – Jesus’).

The ‘prophet’ Agabus, who in Acts predicts the Famine in Claudius’ time (
c.
45 CE), was but a thinly disguised substitute for even more important events about the history of early Christianity overseas in this time, namely the conversion of ‘King Abgarus’ of Edessa. The episode is but another related to the conversion of Queen Helen of Adiabene – in Syriac/Armenian sources Abgarus’ putative wife and probably one of his extensive harem – and her two sons.

We also suggested that the second prophecy attributed to ‘Agabus’, warning Paul not to go up to Jerusalem (Acts 21:11), was an overwrite of the prophecy of one ‘Jesus ben Ananias’ documented in Josephus, who for seven and a half years, immediately following the death of James, prophesied the coming destruction of Jerusalem until he was killed by a Roman projectile shortly before its fall. At the same time, it parodied and inverted the early Christian oracle connected to it, also following the death of James, warning the Jerusalem Community followers of James to flee Jerusalem.

In the process, we showed how abundant wordplay and parallel polemics were involved in these kinds of reformulations as well. For example, ideological notations, such as ‘Nazirite’, ‘Nazoraean’, ‘Galilean’, and ‘
Sicarios
’, were turned into geographical locations. The ‘casting down’ language applied in all early Christian texts to James either being ‘cast down headlong’ from the Temple Pinnacle or Paul ‘casting him down headlong’ from its steps (not to mention to Stephen’s being ‘cast out of the city’ or Judas
Iscariot
’s ‘headlong fall’) comes in for further expansion and variation in the ‘casting down’ metaphor employed in the New Testament’s ‘fishermen’ and ‘nets’ allusions, relating to Jesus choosing his Apostles on the Sea of Galilee.