James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls I (34 page)

Since the meaning of the Greek term ‘strangled things’ can also be looked upon as having to do with homicide and since the priestly author of this aspect of the Noah narrative does consider the taking of animal life to be a form of homicide, then we have in James’ directives to overseas Communities, even as refracted in Acts, a reflection of three of the principal Noahic proscriptions: idolatry, manslaughter, and fornication. If the episode as Acts records it, or something somewhat approximating it, is true, then it should not be surprising that ‘the
Zaddik
’ James applied the terms of the Noahic Covenant to the salvationary status of persons who had not yet come into the Mosaic Covenant. Often such persons are referred to as ‘God-Fearers’. A ‘God-Fearer’ would appear to be someone who has attached himself to the Jewish Community or ‘Synagogue’, but has not yet come in completely or taken the whole of the Mosaic Law upon himself.

We can detect such a status in the usage ‘
ger-nilveh
’, resident alien, or the allied terminology, ‘
Nilvim
’ or ‘Joiners’, evoked in the Damascus Document’s eschatological exposition of the ‘Zadokite Covenant’ from Ezekiel. In the Book of Esther, the term ‘Joiner’ specifically denotes non-Jews ‘attaching themselves to’ the Jewish Community in some kind of associated status (9:27). In important contexts in the Damascus Document, for instance, the one referring to ‘
seeing Salvation
’ and the Temple Scroll on
barring classes of unclean persons from the Temple
noted above, there is conspicuous reference to this idea of ‘fearing God’ as well.
22
That in these directives, depicted in Acts, James would apply the categories of the Noahic Covenant to the salvationary state of such God-Fearers, ‘
ger-nilveh
’s, or ‘
Nilvim
’ is, not only not surprising, but eminently reasonable.

The Rechabites as
Keepers
,
Doers
and Potters Once Again

This wilderness life-style based on ‘
separation from the Sons of the Pit
’ so as not to
incur their pollution
or
mix with
them or those having contact with them,
23
either parallels or to some extent is actually based on the
Rechabite
life-style. It is difficult to know whether there were any actual ‘
Rechabites
’ as such left in the Second Temple Period, but, as we shall see, Eusebius’ source Hegesippus is certainly using this expression in the Second Century to apply to successors or supporters of James.

The expression is curious – one shrouded in mystery. The fullest presentation of Rechabites, as we have seen, comes in Jeremiah 35 where Jonadab the son of Rechab is pictured as giving instructions to his descendants that
they would neither ‘drink wine … plant vineyards, build houses, sow seed, nor own property’, but rather live only in tents ‘so that you enjoy long life on the land which you sojourn upon’
. This takes us back to the 800s BCE, when Jonadab is pictured as an associate of the Israelite King Jehu, a king chosen by the Prophet Elisha.

Jeremiah emphasized in his panegyric to Jonadab’s descendants both the themes ‘keeping’ and ‘doing’, that is, they ‘
kept
the Commandment their ancestor gave them’ or ‘observed all his rules and
did
all that he commanded’. The ‘
Rechabites
’, therefore, are one of the first groups of so-called ‘
Keepers
’, the basis of the definition of ‘
the Sons of Zadok
’ in the Community Rule at Qumran. The behaviour of these Rechabites – to whom the Prophet Jeremiah himself seems to have been connected – is contrasted sharply with the other Israelites in Jeremiah’s own time (
c.
605 BCE), who are about to be destroyed by God for just the opposite kind of behaviour, i.e., ‘
lack of Faithfulness
’.

In 2 Kings 10, Jonadab is presented as a colleague of Jehu. His ‘heart’ and Jehu’s are ‘True’ to each other. Together they destroy the family of Ahab and Jezebel and wipe out the remnants of ‘Baal’ worship or idolatry. Importantly, aside from the episode in Numbers about Phineas’ ‘
zeal
’ and Elijah’s ‘
burning zeal
’ in 2 Kings, this is the only other episode in the Old Testament where ‘
zeal for the Lord
’ is specifically evoked (2 Kings 10:16). Therefore Jonadab son of Rechab is also ‘zealous for God’ or a prototypical ‘Zealot’. In addition, like James and other Nazirites,
he does not drink wine or strong drink
. Whether or not Rechabites as such still existed some 700–800 years later can be debated, but the connection of this picture with the life-style attributed to James should be patent.

The life-style of the Rechabites, as we have implied, also has something in common with that of ‘Nazirites’, the classical account of whom occurs in Numbers 6:1–21. There the two characteristics that are emphasized are: ‘
separation from wine and strong drink, and neither drinking the juice of grapes, nor eating grapes, fresh or dried … no razor shall touch his head until the time of his consecration (or ‘separation’) to the Lord is complete
’ (6:3–5). Obviously both of these themes bear on the description of James via Hegesippus in all early Church sources: ‘
He was Holy from his mother’s womb; he drank no wine or strong drink, nor did he eat meat; no razor touched his head, nor did he anoint himself with oil …
’.
24
Epiphanius adds,
he ‘died a virgin at the age of ninety–six’
, which relates to the Rechabite ‘
long life on the land
’ in Jeremiah above.

But the strong emphasis on ‘abstention from wine’ or ‘strong drink’ and neither ‘drinking the juice of nor eating grapes fresh or dried’ in Numbers’ description of the Nazirites also bears on the life-style of Jonadab’s descendants, who seem to have made this the very basis of their unsettled or sojourning life-style embodying non-attachment to material or settled produce.

Where James is concerned, both the themes of
abstention from wine and ‘a razor not touching his head’
reappear in connection with the idea of his either being ‘
consecrated
’ or ‘
separated
’. This is also a
priestly
theme, even evoked in Ezekiel’s ‘Zadokite Statement’ (44:20–21). For the Rechabites, the ‘
abstention from wine
’ theme, if not the ‘long hair’ one, is central – though the themes of ‘the unpruned vine’ and ‘unshorn hair’ (not to mention that of ‘the
Nezer
’ or ‘
Crown
’ of the High Priests as we shave seen) are related in Hebrew.

Eusebius is well aware of the connection of the ‘
Rechabite
’ theme to James and/or the members of his immediate family. In the account of the death of James, which follows the account of his life-style and epithets in Hegesippus, the Rechabite ideal very prominently comes into play. Hegesippus also knows that these are the ‘
Rechabites spoken of by Jeremiah the Prophet’
. In this account, ‘one of the Priests of the sons of Rechab’ calls out to those who are stoning James, to cease what they are doing, saying ‘the Just One is praying for you’. Now it is James ‘on his knees’ who repeats the cry attributed to Jesus in Luke 23:34: ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do’.

In Epiphanius’ parallel account, where he actually says that James ‘
was a Nazirite and therefore connected to the Priesthood
’, this ‘
Rechabite Priest
’ is named and now becomes Simeon bar Cleophas.
25
That is, in Epiphanius’ view, the cousin of and successor to James as Head of the Jerusalem Community, was ‘a Rechabite Priest’. In the writer’s view, much can be made of this, particularly when one reviews the evidence and data from the Scrolls in conjunction with these early Church accounts of the Jewish Christians or so-called ‘
Ebionites
’. If we take full note of the contexts in which the term emerges, which ancient exegetes also did, then both ‘
keeping
’ and ‘
zeal
’ are associated in some manner with either the Rechabites or their progenitor.

In the letter ascribed to James, too, the ‘
keeping
’ terminology is prominent throughout, not to mention the ‘
doing
’. It is also the essence of the definition of ‘
the Sons of Zadok’
at Qumran, that is, ‘
the Keepers of the Covenant
’. In the first adumbration of this in the Community Rule, the Priests are associated with this as well, not to mention the command ‘
to separate
from all the men of Unrighteousness, who walk in the Way of Evil’.
26
Therefore, one can conceive of all of these terminologies, ‘
Nazoraeans
’, ‘
Sons of Zadok’
, ‘
Rechabites
’, and the like, as being in a sense parallel or variations on a theme.

For the Letter of James and the Scrolls, there is an additional one, that is, the ‘doing’ or ‘Doers’ just referred to. This finds repeated use in James and it and variations of it are found throughout the literature at Qumran – as it is in all literature from the works–Righteousness perspective – as, for instance, the Koran. ‘
Doers of the Torah
’ is a key terminology in the Habakkuk
Pesher
. This is particularly the case in exegesis of Habakkuk 2:3, the scriptural warrant in the
pesher
for what goes by the name of ‘
the Delay of the
Parousia
’ in Christianity, that is, the delay of the Last Days and the coming of Christ in Glory. It is also a precondition to the exegesis in this
Pesher
of Habakkuk 2:4, ‘
the Righteous shall live by his Faith
’ – the basis of Paul’s theological approach in Galatians and Romans – making it clear that we have to do with an approach opposite to him on just about all these things.
27

We are in the rarefied air of high theological debate here, one side marshalling its scriptural passages against the other, one side turning the scriptural passages evoked by the other back against it. For the Letter of James, these ‘Doers’ ‘
keeping the Royal Law according to the Scripture
’ are ranged against ‘the Breakers of the Law’ in exactly parallel fashion as at Qumran (2:8–9).

This term, ‘
Osei ha-Torah
(
Torah
-Doers), has been identified as one of the possible bases of the nomenclature ‘Essenes’. Another possible derivation of ‘Essenes’ is via the Aramaic for ‘
Pious Ones
’ (
Hassidim
in Hebrew), but this cannot be proved. Epiphanius thinks that the word actually denotes ‘Jesus’ or his father ‘Jesse’, that is, ‘Jesusians’ or ‘Jessaeans’.
28
But this, too, is laboured. ‘
‘Osei ha-Torah
’ or ‘
‘Osaeans
’ (in Epiphanius, ‘Ossaeans’ or ‘Ossenes’) works best, and has the additional benefit of not only being Hebrew, but an actual term used in the Qumran documents. If this is true and the basis of ‘Essenes’ is the word ‘Doers’ in Hebrew, then we have another additional parallel here not only to Nazirites, but Nazoraeans, Rechabites, and Sons of Zadok as well.

Another notice about Rechabites in 1 Chronicles 2:55 identifies them as ‘Kenites’. Their genealogy is traced back to Caleb the son of Hur from Ephratah (2:50). This last has significance regarding the location of Jesus’ birth, ‘Ephratah’ in Scripture being designated as equivalent to Bethlehem. Now ‘the Kenites’ were considered to be Jethro’s people from Sinai, with whom Moses resided, a daughter of whom he married – that is, Moses’ descendants were to some degree to be identified with ‘Kenites’. Subsequently, tradition pictures them as living among the Tribe of Judah.

Though these relationships are somewhat abstruse, what is most important in all this is that these ‘Kenites’ were considered to be metal-workers or smiths, that is, ‘Potters’ – the words are interchangeable in Hebrew, ‘
Yozrim
’, a term moving directly into the usage ‘
Nozrim
’ for Christians, itself underlying the ‘Nazoraean’/‘Nazarean’ terminology.

This brings us full circle. If we now return to the Rabbinic tradition about ‘
Potters being Rechabites who kept the oath of their father
’, a gloss on 1 Chronicles 4:23, we can see that these ‘Tinkers’ or ‘Potters’ are considered to be descendants of the Tribe of Judah as well. They are described as ‘sojourning in plantations and enclosures’ and employed ‘in the workshop of the King’, with whom they are said to have ‘dwelled’ as well. This brings us back to the workshop of ‘the Potter in the House of the Lord’ in Zechariah 11:13, alluded to in connection with Judas
Iscariot
’s suicide in Matthew 27:9.

It also follows a garbled note in 1 Chronicles 4:22 about a previous involvement of some kind with Moab across the Jordan – the ‘Perea’ of John the Baptist’s area of activity – and perhaps ‘Bethlehem’. The Catholic Vulgate has them, like David’s ancestor, taking wives from ‘Moab before returning to Bethlehem long ago’. These accounts also associate them with an area or town in this region known as ‘Chozeba’ (4:22). This may have been the original behind Bar Kochba’s name, the Jewish Messianic leader and revolutionary of the next generation.

Whatever the significance of these aspects of the
Rechabite/Potter
problem, those called ‘Rechabites’ had no fixed abode, lived in tents, and, in particular, were not attached to material things. Not only did Jonadab give them commandments and ordinances, which ‘
they kept
’ (
linzor
), he was also a ‘
Zealot for the Lord
’ involved in Jehu’s final destruction of idolatry. The reason, clearly, that his descendants were pictured as ‘
living in no fixed abode nor cultivating the grape
’ was to emphasize their nonattachment to material things and, therefore, their ‘zeal for God’.

Whether they still existed in James’ time is beside the point. James too, is pictured by Eusebius, Epiphanius, and Jerome as ‘
abstaining from wine and strong drink, no razor ever touching his head
’, and ‘
a Nazirite’
, in his case – since ‘he was consecrated from his mother’s womb’ –
a life-long Nazirite
. Further, as the term ‘Holy’ or ‘consecrated’ sometimes implies, a ‘Priest’. If we combine the accounts of Eusebius and Epiphanius, both obviously based on Hegesippus before them, then James also had a brother who was a ‘Rechabite’ priest.

What does this mean? All three, Eusebius, Epiphanius, and Jerome, will now go on to proclaim not only James’ claims to priestliness, but, also, the even more astonishing claim that he actually wore the mitre of a
High Priest
. This will be associated with another claim, that James ‘
wore no woollen garments and only wore linen
’, that is,
the linen the priests in the Temple wore
.

The Sons or Daughters of the Rechabites as High Priests

In the Qumran literature there are the ‘
Sons of Zadok
’ claims associated with ‘the Priests who were the Keepers of the Covenant’; there is the priestly behaviour of the ‘Essenes’; there is the note in Acts about a ‘multitude’ of Priests joining the Movement connected to James’ leadership in Jerusalem; there is ‘the Zealot Movement’ itself and its allied claim of ‘the zeal of Phineas’ first raised by Maccabeans to legitimatize their new Priesthood and reflected in the one notice we have about Jonadab son of Rechab; and finally, there are the High Priestly claims made on behalf of Jesus in the Letter to the Hebrews, that he was a ‘Priest after the order of Melchizedek’ (5.6, etc.), which even the unschooled will be able to recognize as a variation, when taken esoterically not literally, of ‘
the Sons of Zadok
’ claim.

There is also an earlier notice about a Rechab – the first one we have – that may or may not have something to do with our subject, namely, that ‘
Rechab
’ in the period of David and Saul was a Benjaminite, connected in some manner to ‘
Be‘orite
’s (2 Sam. 4:2). Though this is a negative notice, again we are cutting into familiar themes here. There is a hint in this notice, too, of being ‘
sojourners
’ or ‘
resident aliens
’ (4:3). This theme of ‘resident aliens’ is important
vis-à-vis
the ‘
God-Fearer
’ ideology we have been encountering and the language of ‘joining’ or ‘Joiners’ connected to it denoting Gentiles associating themselves in some fashion with the Jewish Community, but not necessarily taking the Law upon themselves in a permanent or thoroughgoing manner.

This theme of ‘resident alien’ (
ger-nilveh
) is very strong, too, in another Qumran Document, the Nahum
Pesher
. This is an important Qumran document, almost rivaling in significance the
Pesher
on Habakkuk. As usual, it is a ‘
Zaddik
’ text, that is, in the underlying biblical text, there is a reference to the Hebrew word ‘Zaddik’ or ‘Righteous One’, James’ cognomen. In this
Pesher
‘the resident aliens’ (
ger-nilvim
) are associated with two further esoteric usages. Firstly, the ‘City of Blood’ which, as we have already suggested, connects in some manner to Paul’s ‘erecting a Community’ – even if only symbolically – based ‘on blood’, that is to say,
drinking ‘the Cup of the blood of Christ
’. Symbolic or real, it would not matter to the purist at Qumran or ‘the Zealot’. The second is a usage which plays off another found in the Habakkuk
Pesher
, ‘the Simple of Judah
doing Torah
’. This allusion to ‘Simple’ not only is the parallel of ‘these Little Ones’ in the Gospels, but of ‘the Poor’ or ‘the Meek’. The last notice about Rechabites we have in the Old Testament is that one of their descendants, Malchijah son of Rechab, returned with the émigrés in the time of Ezra and Nehemiah (Neh. 3:14 –
c.
450 BCE). To him was given the responsibility of repairing one of the Jerusalem gates known as ‘the Dung Gate’, hardly distinguishable from ‘the Gate of the Essenes’. Malchijah is one of the twenty-four priestly courses listed in 1 Chronicles 24:9. If this is the same group as that of ‘Malchijah the son of Rechab’, then we have another notice of a further genealogical link of the Rechabites to the Priesthood functioning in Jesus’ and James’ day.

But in this idea of their ability ‘
to repair gates
’, one also has a hint of their craftsman-like skills, and we are back to our Potters, smiths, or tinkers again. This is not to mention the note of ‘carpentry’ associated with either Jesus in Mark 6:3 or his father in Matthew 13:55. In Nehemiah 3:31, this Malchijah is actually also called ‘
the metalsmith’s son
’!

This brings us back to Rabbinic literature once again and not only reinforces these notices about the
Rechabite
life-style, but once again connects them, however tenuously, to the High Priesthood and
doing service at the altar
. Let us assume that these wilderness ‘sojourners’ or ‘Potters’ – people, who with an eye towards extreme purity regulations and avoiding human entanglements, purposefully pursued a life-style with no permanent abode and abstained from wine or even cultivating vineyards – did somehow become involved in a genealogical manner with the High Priesthood, as these Rabbinic notices attest. Then these notices give the impression not only that this did occur, but how it happened.

In these Talmudic notices we hear in a
midrash
– a folkloric expansion – on Jeremiah 35, that ‘
the sons of Rechab were married to the daughters of the High Priests
’ and ‘
did service in the Temple
’ at least in the period just preceding the compilation of the materials in question. Another Talmudic tradition reverses this claiming ‘
the daughters of the Rechabites married the sons of the High Priests
’. This last brings us very close to the picture in the Gospel of Luke of John the Baptist’s origins, who ‘drank no wine’ and wore a kind of clothing typical of the wilderness-dwelling descendants of these ‘Potters’.
29
However these things may be, we have in these Rabbinic notices extremely important testimony to the fact of wilderness-dwelling types like such ‘Rechabites’ – whom in other descriptions might be called ‘
life-long Nazirites
’ or even possibly ‘
Nazoraeans
’ –
doing service in the Temple
.

In fact, around 1165 CE, the Spanish traveler Benjamin of Tudela claims to have encountered large numbers of just such
Jewish ‘Rechabites’
in Arabia north of Yemen –
who ‘ate no meat, abstained from wine’, ‘lived in caves’, and continually fasted, being ‘mourners for Jerusalem’ and ‘Zion’
.
30

Chapter 12

James’ Bathing and Clothing Habits

James Wearing Only Linen and His
Yom Kippur
Atonement

The next point in early Church testimonies, that James wore only linen and was in the habit of entering the Temple
alone
, now becomes more important than ever and is connected with Temple service and priestliness. The text from Hegesippus (quoted by Eusebius) reads:

He did not
anoint himself with oil
, nor did he
go to the baths
. He alone was allowed to
enter into the Place of Holiness
, for he did not wear wool, but linen, and he
used to enter the Temple alone
, and was often found upon his bended knees, interceding for the forgiveness of the people, so that
his knees became as callused as a camel’s
, because of the constant importuning he did and kneeling before God and asking forgiveness for the people.
1

The handling of this pivotal notice by our three principal sources illustrates how their minds were working and what they saw in the sources before them. Jerome echoes Eusebius’ version of Hegesippus in connecting James’ ‘wearing only linen and not wool’ with his ‘entering the Temple’. But, whereas Eusebius speaks of James entering ‘the Sanctuary’ or ‘Holy Place’, Jerome actually calls this ‘
the Holy of Holies
’, meaning the Inner Sanctum of the Temple.

Given the fact that the two usages, ‘Temple’ and ‘Holy Place’, which occur separately in Eusebius’ quotation, are different in Greek, I think we can be persuaded that Jerome, who knew Hebrew, is more accurate on this point. In addition, it is equally clear, when taking into consideration Jerome’s rendering, that what is being spoken of here is the atonement that the High Priest was permitted to make once a year in the Holy of Holies, supplicating God for forgiveness on behalf of the sins of the whole people.

The sins can be thought of either as communal or of omission, that is, sins that you were not conscious of or had no power over in their commission. Sins that you were aware of or had power over obviously could be expiated in the normal manner. This is the basis of the annual Jewish Day of Atonement or Festival of
Yom Kippur
to this day. That is, it is quite clear that what is being pictured here in these somewhat garbled accounts is a
Yom Kippur
atonement of some kind which James was reported to have made.

The Day of Atonement was commemorated on the Tenth Day of the Seventh Month (Exod. 12:3 and Lev. 27:32), the people already having been prepared for it by festivities at the beginning of this the Jewish holy month. These rose to a climax in the pilgrimage festivities at Tabernacles or the Feast of Booths in the Temple, thought to commemorate not only ‘wilderness’ sojourning, but also in some manner dedication to or receiving the
Torah
.

The purity arrangements regarding this atonement were stricter than normal and definitely involved ‘bathing’ (Lev. 16:4). Normally the High Priest wore eight garments of fine linen and wool. But on the Day of Atonement, he wore only four: linen coat, linen breeches, linen girdle, and linen head-dress or mitre. These were to be white and of coarse, not refined linen, in pursuance of Leviticus 16:4’s prescription that these also be ‘Holy’. These are clearly the clothes James is pictured as wearing on an ordinary basis in consequence of his extreme Holiness.

As Jerome puts it: ‘He alone had the
privilege of entering the Holy of Holies
, since indeed
he did not wear woollen garments only linen
, and
he went alone into the Temple
and prayed on behalf of the people, so much so that
his knees were reputed to have acquired the hardness of camels’ knees’
. Here Jerome reproduces all Eusebius’ points, but in a more convincing rendition, since he makes plain what was meant by ‘Holy Place’. Epiphanius reproduces these things somewhat differently again and, fanciful or not, he does have the merit of understanding their significance
vis-à-vis
the matter of a
Yom Kippur atonement
. As he puts it, having just noted that James was ‘a Nazirite’ and, therefore, ‘consecrated’ – once again Epiphanius, aside from his numerous
faux-pas
, shows himself adept at grasping the true thrust of many of these matters: ‘But we find further that he also exercised
the Priesthood according to the Ancient Priesthood
. For this reason he was permitted to enter the Holy of Holies once a year, as Scripture says the Law ordered the High Priests’. He rephrases this in his second version of these things as follows: ‘To James alone it was permitted to enter the Holy of Holies once a year,
because he was a Nazirite and connected to the priesthood
… James was a distinguished member of the priesthood … James also wore a diadem (the ‘
Nezer
’ or sacerdotal plate) on his head’.
2
In the first version, he reiterates this, saying: ‘Many before me have reported this of him – Eusebius, Clement and others. He was, also, allowed to wear the mitre on his head as the aforementioned trustworthy persons have testified in the same historical writings’.