James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls I (26 page)

There can be very little doubt that this basically repeats the ‘Commandment’ the sons of the Rechabites receive from ‘Jonadab their Father’ in Jeremiah 35:6, 8, and 14, to ‘drink no wine’. Even the words ‘wine’, ‘vineyard’, ‘Father’, and ‘to the day’ are to be found in the above passages from Jeremiah. In particular, one should note how: ‘Jonadab the son of Rechab, who commanded his sons not to drink wine … and they did not drink to this day, but rather obeyed the Commandments of their Father’ (35:14). We have seen how this ‘obeying the command of their Father’ reappears in Matthew 27:10’s citation of Zechariah 11:13 as ‘the Lord commanded me’. This is even more in evidence in the sections of 1 Corinthians 10–13 evoking ‘the Cup of … Communion with the blood of Christ’ and ‘drinking this Cup’. Here it is stated: ‘So that whoever should eat this bread or should
drink the Cup of the Lord unworthily
shall
be guilty
of the body and blood of the Lord … for
he who eats and drinks unworthily, eats and drinks
Judgement to himself
…’ (1 Cor. 11:27–29).

Personal pique on Paul’s part aside, this is the ‘vengeance’ imagery we shall find associated with this ‘Cup’ in the Habakkuk
Pesher
– but, importantly, also in Revelation. It is also Pontius Pilate’s disclaimer at the end of this string of references to ‘the Cup’ and the ‘blood’ in Matthew – including Pilate now ‘washing his hands’ (not ‘the Jews’ as in the Gospels and Paul) – of ‘not being guilty of the blood of this Righteous One’ and the Jewish crowd, like the descendants of Jonadab the son of Rechab above, taking the ‘blood’ on themselves and their ‘children’ (Mt 27:24–25). We shall encounter all of this language in the Habakkuk
Pesher
’s picture of the destruction of the Righteous Teacher – paralleling the death ‘of the Lord’ above – including
cup/Cup of the Lord
wordplays, allusion to ‘the body’, the specific command to ‘drink’, and ‘being eaten’ or ‘swallowed’, in this instance by ‘the Cup of the Wrath of God’.

This ‘drinking the Cup of the Lord’ symbolism is now combined by Paul in 1 Corinthians 10–11 with repeated evocation of ‘eating everything sold in the marketplace’ or ‘eating all set before you and not raising questions of conscience’ (10:25-27), finally even including what James bans in his directives to overseas communities in Acts, ‘things sacrificed to idols’ (10:28). But, one should also note, James in these categories is specifically portrayed as also banning ‘blood’, which must be taken both symbolically and profanely.

All this is another classic case of New Testament reversal – though on a much vaster scale – an absolutely astonishing reversal of the sense of the Prophet Jeremiah’s description of the Rechabites, who
keep the command of their Father to drink no wine
,
own no field
,
and live only in tents
, so that they ‘may live many days on the face of the land on which (they) live’. Just as this bowdlerized or somewhat refurbished description introduces the election to fill the Office of the Overseer or
Mebakker
(‘Bishop’) in this first chapter of Acts, so too it will serve as a good introduction to James’ Naziritism – Naziritism being a basically analogous term to this Rechabitism – this, not to mention the ‘priestly’ connotations we shall see go along with both.

It also relates to the more distant parallel in the Damascus Document’s ‘New Covenant in the Land of Damascus’, in regard to which the
Mebakker
’s mastery of ‘all the Tongues of men’ is evoked, and where presumably there was some
living in tents in the wilderness camps
. We shall now encounter all of these traits which Jeremiah ascribes to his ‘Rechabites’ again in early Church descriptions of James, not to mention a tradition in Eusebius, attributed to Hegesippus and recapitulated by Epiphanius, that identifies the witness to the stoning and death of James – his so-called first ‘cousin’ (or brother) Simeon bar Cleophas – as ‘
one of the Priests of the Sons of Rechab
,
one of the Rechabites
’!
10

James as
Zaddik
– His Righteousness

We shall reproduce Eusebius’ famous testimony to James in detail, augmenting it and correcting it, when necessary, with the sometimes more precise materials from Epiphanius and Jerome. We shall also enlarge on it with materials from Origen, the Pseudoclementines, and to some extent the two Apocalypses of James from Nag Hammadi. Origen’s source, by his own testimony, is Josephus, a Josephus attested to as well by Eusebius and Jerome, which all may have seen in Caesarea, a version that sadly no longer exists. Jerome may be dependent on the previous two whom, interestingly enough, he seems to view as
heretics
.
11
The source for the Pseudoclementines, particularly the sequence of events in the
Recognitions
– deleted from the
Homilies
– regarding James and the early history of the Church in Jerusalem, is unknown.

The first thing to observe in relation to all these accounts is the coupling of the attribute of pre-eminent Righteousness (
Zedek
in Hebrew;
Dikaios
in Greek) with the person of James and, therefore, the sobriquet ‘the Righteous’ or ‘Just One’ attached permanently to his name – sometimes used in place of his name itself. To avoid problems in Greek, Latin, or English, it is often useful to employ the Hebrew original, ‘
the
Zaddik
’.

This attribute is encountered even in the testimony to James which Origen, Eusebius, and Jerome saw in the copy of Josephus available to them. Though nowhere to be found in the extant Josephus, it is quoted by Eusebius – who implies it is from the
War
– in the following manner: ‘And these things happened to the Jews to avenge James the Just, who was the brother of Jesus, the so-called Christ, for the Jews put him to death, notwithstanding his pre-eminent Righteousness’.
12
Here it is not immediately clear whether ‘the Jews’ put James to death, notwithstanding his pre-eminent Righteousness, or Jesus, so close is this last to traditional notions of the import of Jesus’ death. But on closer analysis, it is clear Eusebius or the Josephus he saw means James.

Origen reproduces something of the same idea, though he claims Josephus referred to it in the
Antiquities
. Since Josephus’
Antiquities
does not encompass a discussion of the fall of the Temple
per se
as the War does, it is more likely that Eusebius is more correct in this matter. Origen gives the tradition as follows:

So great a reputation among the people for Righteousness did this James enjoy
, that Flavius Josephus, who wrote the
Antiquities of the Jews
in Twenty Books, when wishing to show the cause of what the people suffered,
so great were their misfortunes that even the Temple was razed to the ground, said that these things happened to them
in accordance with the
Wrath of God
in consequence of t
he things which they had dared to do against James the brother of Jesus who is called the Christ
.

Then he adds: ‘
The wonderful thing is, that though he did not accept Jesus as Christ, he yet gave testimony
that
the Righteousness of James was so great
; and he says that the people thought that they had suffered these things
because of
(
what had been done to
)
James’
.
13
This is extremely interesting testimony and hardly something either Origen or Eusebius would or could have dreamed up entirely by themselves, because it contradicts authoritative Church doctrine, which rather ascribed the fall of Jerusalem, as Origen himself contends, to Jesus’ death not James’.

Jerome, too, gives us a version of this tradition about James: ‘This same Josephus records the tradition that this James was of
such great Holiness and repute
among the people that the downfall of Jerusalem was believed to be on account of his death’.
14
It is not clear from this, however, whether he has actually seen Josephus for himself or is simply repeating these words of his two predecessors.

Eusebius has also reproduced various early Church traditions relating to the death of James. Two features of these descriptions should be noted. These argue strongly for the authenticity of Hegesippus’ very detailed description of James and the existence of a much longer exegetical work on the death of James in the manner of the
pesharim
at Qumran, upon which this was based. The first is the allusion to a key scriptural passage, Isaiah 3:10–11. Not only is this ‘
Zaddik
’ passage exactly parallel to ones like those in the Habakkuk and Psalm 37
Pesher
s
applied to the death of the Righteous Teacher at Qumran but, as we shall see, its vocabulary was actually absorbed into the former of these.

The second feature is the application to James of this important conceptuality of ‘the
Zaddik
’. This is also applied to Jesus in the Gospels, which even go so far as to put this precious Palestinian ideology into the mouths of both Pontius Pilate and his wife (Mt 27:14 and 19)! The same concept was also clearly being applied in Qumran exegetical texts to the Righteous Teacher or
Moreh ha-Zedek
, the pre-eminent leader of that Community. Leaving the Teacher of Righteousness at Qumran aside, one might properly say that the ideology applies even more pointedly to James’ person than to Jesus’ and a certain retrospective appropriation of traditions may have occurred where its application to the highly mythologized figure of Jesus is concerned. Certainly the tradition ascribing the fall of Jerusalem to
the death of James
is more logical where chronology or ideology are concerned.

Eusebius begins his crucial testimony by describing James as having been: ‘universally esteemed to be the most Righteous of men, on account of the elevated Philosophy and Piety (literally ‘Devotedness to God’) he exhibited during his life’. He no doubt means by these last what we have been calling the Righteousness and Piety dichotomy, consisting of the two virtues that will become very much associated with James’ person, as they are in Josephus’ presentation of John the Baptist and Jesus, as Scripture presents him. These two attributes are also very much associated by Josephus with Essenes in his descriptions of them and very much in evidence in the documents at Qumran.
15

In his famous description of Essenes in the
War
, as well as that of John the Baptist in the
Antiquities
, Josephus makes it very clear what was implied by this dichotomy. Righteousness is ‘Righteousness towards men’, that is, the sum total of one’s social obligations in this world towards one’s fellow man. This is very often summed up in a single commandment, first alluded to in Lev. 19:18 and often presented as the essence of Jesus’ teaching in Scripture, ‘love your neighbour as yourself’. This, therefore, can best be termed the
Righteousness Commandment
.

This included an economic dimension as well. One could not
love one’s neighbour as oneself
if one made economic distinctions between oneself and one’s neighbour or, to put it simply, if one were
Richer than one’s neighbour
– therefore, not only the extreme antagonism towards ‘the Rich’, but the pivotal emphasis on ‘the Poor’ in all traditions associated with James as well as those associated with the Righteous Teacher.
16

The second of these virtues, ‘Piety’ or ‘Piety towards God’, summed up the totality of one’s obligations
towards God
. This was also expressed in terms of ‘love’, and still is – that is, ‘you should love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your might’. It too is part and parcel of Josephus’ descriptions of both Essenes and John the Baptist.

Justin Martyr (
c.
100–165 CE) designated these two Commandments as the essence of Jesus’ teaching.
17
Simply put, they are the basis of all theorizing of those opposing Roman/Herodian hegemony in this period. Both permeate all traditions associated with James and the Letter under his name in the New Testament. They also permeate the documents at Qumran, most notably the Damascus Document. Their use here in Eusebius – at least by implication – is further testimony of the authenticity of these descriptions emanating from the period of such concern to us in the first century, which Eusebius is recapitulating.

This testimony is echoed in the passage from the Fifth Book of Hegesippus’
Commentaries
quoted verbatim by Eusebius: ‘He was called
the Just by all men
from the Lord’s time to ours’, a period of perhaps a hundred years. Hegesippus repeats this attestation to James’ ‘pre-eminent Righteousness’ two more times, even as conserved in Eusebius. There can be little doubt that James’ renown in the Palestinian milieu familiar to Hegesippus was widespread or acknowledged ‘
by all
’.