James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls I (20 page)

The Successor to Jesus

James’ position is also developed in various ways in early Church literature, most notably by Clement of Alexandria and Hegesippus as conserved in Eusebius. It is also treated in the Pseudoclementines and to a certain extent in the Gospel of Thomas. By contrast, it is missing from Acts in its present form. In the course of this discussion, how James emerged as the Leader of the early Church will be seen to be present in Acts as well, at least
in the source
the authors of Acts used to reconstruct the material they present.

The first question that should be addressed is how does one choose a leader to head the Community? There are really only two methods. The first is by
direct appointment
, that is, that Jesus personally regulated the situation of succession to him in his life-time. In their own way, this is how the Gospels, and the Gospel of Thomas, present the matter. The second is via an
election
or some kind of
consensus
, either the consensus of the Community as a whole or the consensus of its principal leaders – and this is the procedure presented by Acts where
the succession to Judas Iscariot
is concerned.

Eusebius himself is the best repository of these traditions attesting both to
the direct succession of James
and also his
election
– this to the Office of ‘Bishop’. Eusebius puts this as follows: ‘James, who was surnamed the Just by the Forefathers on account of his superlative virtue, was the first to have been
elected to the Office of Bishop of the Jerusalem Church’
.
10

The sequencing Eusebius follows here is important. At the end of Book One, this notice is preceded by an allusion to the execution of John the Baptist, mention of Cephas, Thaddaeus, and James in that order, and the story of the conversion of the King of the Edessenes, ‘Thaddaeus’ and ‘(Judas) Thomas’ participating.

The references to ‘Cephas’, ‘Thaddaeus’, and ‘James’ occur because he is discussing ‘the Seventy’ – ‘no list of whom is anywhere extant’ – as distinct from ‘the Apostles’.
11
Eusebius reckons James, not to mention Cephas and Thaddaeus, among these ‘Seventy’ – clearly the number of ‘the Jerusalem Church’ or ‘Assembly’ – and, citing Paul’s attestation of Jesus’ post-resurrection appearance to him in 1 Corinthians 15:7, for the first time identifies James as ‘one of the so-called brothers of the Saviour’. Because Cephas is also mentioned in this same context in 1 Corinthians, he puzzles over the fact that Clement of Alexandria in the second century considered Cephas ‘one of the Seventy Disciples who had the same name as the Apostle Peter’, though he did not consider him the same person.

The mention, too, of ‘Thaddaeus’ as ‘one of the Seventy’ leads him directly into the story of the correspondence with ‘King Agbarus, the celebrated King of the Peoples beyond the Euphrates’, with which he closes Book One and which he places around 29 CE.
12
It is directly following these events that he moves into
the election of James as Bishop of the Jerusalem Church
at the beginning of Book Two – in exactly the place it should have been dealt with – ‘at the same time’, as he puts it, as the ‘election by lot’ to replace ‘the Traitor Judas’.

His sequencing in the first chapter of Book Two is also important. His reference to choosing the replacement for ‘Judas the Traitor’, Matthias (Acts 1:26), whom he calls ‘one of the Disciples of the Lord’ (again presumably one of these ‘Seventy’), leads him to mention the appointment of ‘the Seven to administer the common fund’ by ‘the laying on of hands by the Apostles’, a procedure specifically applied in the Pseudoclementines to James’ appointment of overseas messengers. This, in turn, leads to allusion to Stephen and his martyrdom by stoning ‘
by the murderers of the Lord
, as if ordained specifically for this purpose’ (
EH
2.1.1).

Curiously,
the election to replace Judas
and
the stoning of Stephen
, like
the laying on of hands
, will have their counterparts in the biography of James and stand-in for critical episodes in it. After detailing the various traditions from Clement of Alexandria about James’ election and appointment to the Episcopate of Jerusalem, the very next event he describes is the dispatch of Thaddaeus by Thomas to Edessa and King Agbarus, ‘the Great King of the Peoples beyond the Euphrates’. Nor does he mention the beheading of the ‘the Apostle James’ for another eight chapters (almost a decade later) – and this in a fairly doctrinaire manner right out of the Book of Acts. For him this leads directly into the
beheading of Theudas
and
the Famine
(2.8.1–3).

Election or Casting Lots

The matter of election and/or ‘casting lots’ needs to be addressed. One first encounters a procedure of this kind in this period in the history of the Maccabean family. It is directly related to the office of the High Priesthood and who should occupy it. From there, it moves into the procedures of what some refer to as ‘the Zealot Movement’. When the Jewish religious hero Judas Maccabee purified the Temple after its liberation in the second century BCE, he did so in conjunction with its rededication. This has always been celebrated thereafter by Jews as the Festival of the Rededication or
Hanukkah
.

Judas presided over these activities like some powerful Vicegerent, but Josephus actually represents Judas as being ‘elected High Priest’. He repeats this claim three times,
13
though it is nowhere presented in the several Maccabee Books purporting to tell the story of Judas Maccabee, his father Mattathias, and his brothers John, Simon, and Jonathan – popular names that have transferred themselves into the early history of Christianity not without reason.

The Maccabee Books do present an election of sorts, when Judas’ second brother Simon is acclaimed High Priest by the priests and people (1 Macc. 14:41). This may be simply pro-Maccabean propaganda, but it was an election of sorts and certainly an acclamation, a procedure also recognized in the Gospels on behalf of Jesus.
14

But in ‘the Zealot Movement’ this notion of ‘an election’ becomes extremely important. Repeatedly, in one uprising after another from 4 BCE to 66–70 CE and beyond, Josephus presents the Revolutionaries as demanding
the election by the people
of a High Priest of
greater purity
and ‘Piety’ than the Herodian High Priesthood that had been imposed on them. Sometimes this is an outright election; at other times it is represented as ‘choosing by lot’.
15
For instance, in his presentation of the revolutionary events of 4 BCE–7 CE after Herod’s death, Josephus presents the Revolutionaries – this should mean both religious and political – as demanding
the election of a High Priest
. The demand he describes would seem to have much in common with the procedure called ‘choosing by lot’.

When describing ‘the last days’ – that is, the last days of the Temple in the 66–70 CE events, but particularly as these accelerated after 68 and the elimination of all the Herodian-appointed High Priests
–
Josephus describes the election by ‘the Innovators’ of a ‘last’ High Priest before the Romans invest the city, one ‘Phannius’ or ‘Phineas’, a simple
Stone-Cutter
.
16
Josephus constantly refers to ‘the Innovators’ in this period – the political and religious reformers and/or Revolutionaries who have all been lumped, somewhat imprecisely, under the general heading of ‘Zealots’, even though it is not clear what the currency of this term actually was or whether it was being used in any consistent way to describe them. Nor does the choice of someone by the name of ‘Phannius’ seem accidental in view of its symbolic importance to Zealotry in general, making one wonder just how fortuitous or random such a process ‘of lots’ could have been even in theory.

The archetypical episode in the life of Phineas, evoked in support of Maccabean claims to the High Priesthood, as we saw, was when Phineas, out of ‘zeal for God’, deflected pollution from the camp of the Israelites
in the wilderness
by killing backsliders marrying Gentiles. As a result, he won ‘the Covenant of an Everlasting Priesthood’ and the right ‘to make atonement on behalf of the Sons of Israel’ for himself and ‘his seed’ in perpetuity (Num. 25:13). This Covenant is evoked in 1 Maccabees 2:27 on behalf of Judas Maccabee’s father, Mattathias or Matthias, the reputed progenitor of the whole family. This is also the name – perhaps not coincidentally – of the winning candidate in Acts’ rather fictionalized presentation of the ‘election by lot’ to fill
Judas Iscariot’s
now vacant ‘Office’.

Therefore, when Paul, in characterizing his community as ‘Abraham’s seed’, claims they are all now ‘Sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus’, in whom ‘there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither bondman nor free, neither male nor female, but all one in Christ Jesus’ (Gal. 3:28–29), it is the direct opposite of the events described above. This more cosmopolitan Pauline Mission ‘to the Gentiles’ is the mirror reversal, as it were, and the negation of some two hundred and fifty years of Palestinian history spent fighting foreigners, Hellenization, and – rightly or wrongly – perceived pollution incurred by mixing with overseas peoples. That Paul is misunderstood by contemporaries such as these should not be surprising.

That they should wish to kill him, as Acts describes (23:12), should also not be surprising. It all depends on one’s point of view, and from the Palestinian point of view, Paul was a cosmopolitanizing ‘
Traitor
’, giving victory to the forces they and their ancestors had fought against incessantly, ever since Matthias had raised the banner of revolt, assuming the purified High Priesthood some two centuries before. Whereas Matthias kills backsliders on the altar at Modein, Phineas deflected pollution from the camp – and God’s Wrath consonant upon it – by killing Jews who had
mixed with Gentiles
.

Nothing could illustrate the conflict of these times more vividly, nor the mentality enshrined in the Dead Sea Scrolls. This is
the ethos
of the Qumran documents. In the writer’s view, it will also be the ethos of the Movement led by James, the better part of whose followers are distinctly called – even in Acts – ‘
Zealots for the Law
’ (21:20). Paul also uses the term ‘zeal’ consistently in his letters but, once again, it is clear that he is aware of the use of this term by those opposing him. In every case he reverses their use of the term denoting ‘the zeal of the Ancestors’, ‘zeal for their customs’, ‘zeal for the traditions and the Law’, to indicate rather,
zeal in his mission or zeal for his new-found Faith in Christ Jesus
, by whose ‘Grace’ Paul had been deputized to preach to the Gentiles. He has also been deputized to found a community based not on the Law, but ‘Faith in Christ Jesus’, where there are, as Ephesians 2:19 puts it, ‘no more aliens or foreign visitors’.

Phineas wins the High Priesthood for his descendants in perpetuity because of the
zealous
behaviour he displayed in
killing backsliders
and warding
off pollution from the camp of Israel
. For those of this ‘Zealot’ persuasion, killing backsliders – including Paul – was no sin at all. It was a virtue. Priests of the Phineas stripe condoned killing as long as this killing was in the interests of Righteousness and purification or, if one prefers, warding off pollution. This is the ethos of ‘the Zealot’/’Messianic Movement’ – one is not recommending it, simply illustrating it – and this ethos was totally at odds with the Pauline Mission. They are on a collision course. It only remains to insert James into the picture to understand what was taking place from the 40’s to the 60s CE, both in Jerusalem and around the Mediterranean in the world at large among those interested in such matters.

Peter’s Citation of Psalms 69 and 109 in Acts

The author of the Book of Acts at this point represents this election of Judas’ successor as being of such importance that two scriptural passages from Psalms 69 and 109 are applied to it, that is, we are to think the events have either been presaged in Scripture or explained by it. As Acts puts it in a speech attributed to Peter: The Scripture had to be fulfilled in which the Holy Spirit spoke before by the mouth of David concerning Judas, who became a guide to those who took Jesus (1:16).’

The passages from these Psalms are, as usual, taken completely out of context. Neither really fits the situation of Judas in this episode, nor his successor, at all. What has clearly been done was to search Scripture and just so long as a word or phrase fitted or was close to the plotline or event being described, this was seen as sufficient. A similar method is followed in the Dead Sea Scrolls, particularly in the
pesher
s
– but in the latter not quite so blatantly. The similarity is important here, as it makes one think that these kinds of materials may have been taken from what might have been extant
pesher
s
of the Qumran type.

Eusebius, quoting Hegesippus, will insist that important cognomens of James, like ‘the Just One’ or ‘
Oblias
’ (‘Protection of the People’) could be found just as at Qumran by searching Scripture, most notably Prophets and Psalms. Quoting his second-century source Hegesippus, Eusebius even goes so far as to apply a passage from Scripture to James’ fate – this from the Prophets, however, not Psalms – exactly as Acts does the above passages to events connected to its story of Judas’ fate. In fact, he develops the circumstances of James’ death – just as the Gospels do Jesus’ – on the basis of another ‘
Zaddik
’ text, Isaiah 3:10.