James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls I (15 page)

The sequence in Acts 5:36–37 of Theudas, his revolt, Judas the Galilean, and the Census would follow that of Josephus in the
Antiquities
precisely, if we simply assume that Luke has for some reason left out the mention of the execution of Judas the Galilean’s
two sons
, James and Simon. This would restore the proper chronological sequencing to the text and give us the mention of Theudas, followed by the mention of the execution of Judas the Galilean’s two sons, followed by the explanation of who Judas was, namely, that he perished in the Census Uprising. As far as Jesus’ birth is concerned, it is totally irrelevant to the Census (except perhaps symbolically); and Luke’s story connecting the two, fictional in any event. Even Acts’ order as it currently stands follows Josephus exactly, the only thing lacking being a few minor details that have dropped out or been deleted in the process of transmission or rewriting. Why the author left out the crucifixion of Judas the Galilean’s two sons in the first place we shall most likely never know.

What is interesting, though, is that Josephus uses the Uprising led by Judas the Galilean as the springboard to describe the Jewish sects in the first century in both the
War
and the
Antiquities
. It is edifying to compare the two descriptions of these sects found in them. In the earlier one – triggered by the appearance of Judas the Galilean and the mention of the imposition of direct Roman rule through a governor who ‘had the power to impose the death sentence’ – Josephus describes the normal three sects: ‘Pharisees’, ‘Sadducees’, and ‘Essenes’, and lingers in loving detail over the last, a group he was evidently well acquainted with.
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He also describes a
fourth group
owing its origins to the activities of Judas the Galilean and the teacher he identifies only by the puzzling sobriquet ‘
Saddok
’. Obviously it is in order to describe this ‘Fourth Philosophy’ of Judas the Galilean that he launches into his discussion of the sects at this point in the
Jewish War
. But though he promises to tell us about this group, he does not. Rather, he lingers over the
Essenes
in loving detail.

His descriptions of both Sadducees and Pharisees are cursory in the extreme, though they too have been picked up in the New Testament and used to characterize these groups. In the
Antiquities
, however, he makes good the omission, describing the ills associated with the Movement led by Judas and
Saddok
in great detail. This Movement, according to him, ‘led our people to destruction’, because ‘our young people were zealous for it’ (
Ant.
18.10).
As we have suggested, there can be little doubt that what he is describing is
the Messianic Movement
in Palestine. Others might call it ‘the Zealot Movement’, but Josephus never uses this terminology until after the Uprising and the killing of all the High Priests, particularly James’ destroyer Ananus in 68 CE. In fact, he never names it at all, except tantalizingly as ‘the Fourth Philosophy’.

What he does do, however, is sharply curtail his description of ‘the Essenes’ in the
War
and take part of it and add it to his description of the Movement initiated by Judas and
Saddok
in the
Antiquities
. This is the moment Luke chooses to date the birth of Christ. In line with his Establishment sensibilities and pro-Roman sympathies, Josephus rails against the leaders of movements such as this, as we saw too, as ‘impostors and Deceivers’, worse ‘even than the bandits and murderers’ that infested the country in this period – worse, because not only did they deceive the people, but they strove to bring about religious innovation and revolutionary change. Most often these disturbances took place at Passover time – probably because this could be looked upon as the Jewish National Liberation Festival when Moses led the ragtag group of former Jewish slaves out into the wilderness and not only gave them freedom and the Law, but produced a nation.

Judas the Brother of James
and Theudas

It is precisely in this manner that Josephus describes – disapprovingly of course – the ‘
Theudas
’ whose death parallels that of ‘
James the brother of John
’ in Acts 12. Calling him an ‘
impostor
’, in the sense of being a ‘
false prophet
’ or ‘
Deceiver
’, Josephus insists that he actually claimed to be ‘a Prophet’ and miracle-worker, and on this basis persuaded ‘Many’ (an important usage in the Dead Sea Scrolls)
to follow him out into the wilderness, where he said he would part the Jordan River. In the Book of Joshua, Joshua is described as parting the Jordan River – just as Moses parted the Red Sea – when he led the people of Israel into the Promised Land ‘dry-shod’ (Josh. 3:13).

Evidently meant to be a Joshua
redivivus
, a Joshua brought-back-to-life or a Joshua incarnated, Theudas is reversing this and leading the people back out into the wilderness. When one appreciates that the name ‘Jesus’ is a Hellenized version of the name Joshua (‘he who saves’),
then one can appreciate that Theudas is a
Jesus
redivivus
as well. Jesus goes out into the wilderness to confront the Devil or multiply loaves; Theudas, to part the Jordan River in reverse. For his troubles, his followers were decimated by Roman soldiers and he was
beheaded
.

The name ‘Theudas’ is a mystery. In the Greek – the only form in which we have it – it resembles the name ‘Judas’. In our view, it is also a parallel to that character who in two Apostle lists is called ‘Thaddaeus’.
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This character will turn out sometimes to be called ‘Judas of James’ or ‘Judas the brother of James’ and, as we shall further develop below, we would identify him as
the third brother of Jesus
, probably the person other sources call ‘Judas Thomas’. The claim implicit in the name, ‘Judas Thomas’, is that he is a ‘twin’, ‘
thoma
’ in Aramaic meaning ‘twin’. The implication usually is that he is a twin of Jesus, his
third brother
, ‘Jude’ or ‘Judas’. We would go further, considering ‘Theudas’ to be either a garbled form or conflation/contraction of the two names ‘Judas’ and ‘Thomas’.

For the purposes of the argument or discussion, let us assume this to be the case. One can now see the importance of the ‘brother’ theme in the Book of Acts, only this time we are not dealing with a ‘brother of John’ or even another ‘James’ but, rather, the
third
brother of Jesus – that is,
Judas the
brother of James
– seen here by the text as a Joshua or Jesus
redivivus
. Again, the theme of beheading and the chronology are approximately right. We are somewhere in the period of Agrippa I or Herod of Chalcis, around 44–45 CE.

Let us also for the purposes of argument assume that ‘James’, the so-called ‘son of Zebedee’, is an editorial gloss. Not only does Acts necessarily have to remove him at this point in order to make way for the appearance of James the Just the brother of Jesus,
the real James
, but what we have here in Acts are the faint traces of the real event just beneath the surface of the fictional one.

To put this another way, there
was
another brother of Jesus called ‘Jude’ or ‘Judas’. In some texts this brother is alluded to as ‘Judas Thomas’, either evoking an actual twinship or the Joshua/Jesus
redivivus
theme of Josephus’ narrative. And there
really
was a brother eliminated at this time, but this brother was not ‘James the brother of John’, but the lesser known, but probably more real, ‘Judas of James’ – ‘Jude the brother of James’ referred to in the letter by that name. That such a brother really did exist and produced offspring continuing down into the period of Vespasian, Domitian, and Trajan is also confirmed for us in Eusebius. Using Hegesippus, Eusebius refers to the offspring of one ‘Judas called the brother of our Lord according to the flesh’, one in the time of Domitian and one right before he describes the martyrdom of Simeon bar Cleophas – ‘the cousin of our Lord’ – in Trajan’s time.
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At this point Eusebius acknowledges that Simeon’s mother was Mary and his father Cleophas, quoting Scripture. Still he cannot yet bring himself to admit that Simeon was a brother too, that is, Jesus’
second brother Simon
, but rather only ‘of the family’ or ‘the relatives’ of Jesus.

By the 90s these descendants of Jesus’ third brother Judas are only simple farmers. Eusebius reports that Domitian (81–96), like his father Vespasian before him, attempted to round up all those people considered to be of the genealogy of David. Among these were the grandchildren of Judas. When questioned about the nature of ‘Christ and his Kingdom’, they replied it was not an earthly one, but celestial and Angelic – but that at the end of the world, he (the Messiah) would appear ‘to give to everyone according to his
works
’. Thereupon Domitian purportedly dismissed them as simpletons. They were reported to have continued living until the time of Trajan (98–117).

There is one more link in this chain, and that comes in the documents from Nag Hammadi. Here in two previously unknown Apocalypses attributed to the person of James, an individual named ‘
Addai
’, again obviously linked etymologically to the name of ‘
Thaddaeus
’, is referred to, as well as another, ‘
Theuda
’, paralleling him and referred to as ‘the father’ or ‘brother of the Just One’, that is, Jesus or even possibly James. We believe this also to be the implication of the author of the Book of Acts. Once one begins to appreciate Acts’ working method and its evasiveness, much else becomes clear in the early history of Christianity.

The First Appearance of James

Acts portrays these kinds of seditious or subversive events, which lead up to the first appearance of James in 12:17, as occurring during ‘the Days of the Unleavened Bread’, that is, Passover time. ‘Herod’, who at this point beheads ‘James the brother of John’, goes on to imprison Peter, because the beheading of this other James ‘so pleased the Jews’ (
thus
), intending to put him on trial at the end of the Passover week (Acts 12:3). This is the kind of tendentious aside that so characterizes Acts and the Gospels.

In any event, Acts goes on to describe a miraculous escape by Peter from prison with the help of an Angel (12:5–10). This escape has interesting parallels with one later offered Paul (Acts 16:25–34). In this later episode, calculated to show the moral superiority of the Apostle to the Gentiles over this archetypically Jewish Apostle, Paul
refuses to escape
out of concern for the welfare of the guards, mindful of the fact that earlier those designated to guard Peter were executed after he escaped (12:19). However this may be, Peter’s escape is used to explain why he no longer functions in Palestine or in Jerusalem. He is forced to flee, but not before James is, at last, introduced in 12:17 and Peter goes to a house in Jerusalem to inform him of his departure. This, at least, might bear some semblance of the truth.

The chapter ends with the death of this ‘Herod’, normally taken to be the death of Agrippa I in 44 CE (12:20–23). The indications are that because of Agrippa I’s growing imperial ambitions in the East, which were unacceptable, his Roman overlords arranged to have him poisoned. Josephus portrays Agrippa, much like his patron Caligula, collapsing in a seizure while dressed in gold leaf – presumably like Apollo or the sun – and giving a theatrical performance of some kind (
Ant.
19.343–52).
Acts portrays him being struck down by an Angel because he looked so magnificent that people mistook him for a god.

The house in Jerusalem where Peter goes ‘to leave a message for James and the brothers’ is pictured as being that of ‘Mary mother of ‘John Mark’, who is mentioned again in Acts as the man who deserted the mission of Barnabas and Paul in Pamphylia (15:37–39). In Acts 13:13 he is simply called ‘John’, and there is no hint of the bitterness evinced by Paul towards him in 15:39. Elsewhere, he would appear to be identified with the Gospel of Mark and Eusebius knows him as Peter’s traveling companion.
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We were not aware that he had a mother called ‘Mary’. Nor that he had a ‘house’ in Jerusalem in which
Mary lived
. Plus, it would seem not a little strange to go to a house where ‘Mary mother of John Mark’ lived to leave a message for
James the brother of Jesus
and the
other
brothers
. It is simpler just to think that the text originally said ‘the house of Mary
the mother of Jesus
’ or ‘Mary
the mother of James the Just
’ or ‘Mary
the
wife of Cleophas
’, and that this somewhat enigmatic substitution has taken place – and so it has remained to be enshrined in seventeen–eighteen centuries of pious history.

But it will not stand up to investigation. One can simply dismiss it as either pious fiction or look at it more deeply and attempt to make out the main lines of the original. We prefer the latter, and we do so on the basis of what seems the simplest and most reasonable under the circumstances. Acts is not
simply
pure fiction. There is real truth lying behind its substitutions or overwrites and the key often is
the family of Jesus
, in particular James, and how they are treated. Here, it is useful to observe that after the attack on James by Paul in the Pseudoclementine
Recognitions
, James is actually carried to his ‘house’ in Jerusalem. In the same vein in the Gospel of John, Jesus instructs ‘the Disciple he loved’ – always unidentified –
from the Cross
no less, to take Mary ‘into his own home’ (obviously in Jerusalem) and be her ‘
son
’ (19:26–27). This is just following the passage in which Mary is identified as ‘the sister of his mother Mary (wife) of Clopas’ (19:25). This is precisely how this phrase appears in the Greek.