James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls I (46 page)

The tirade against ‘the Rich’ in the Letter of James, including the assertion that
the Rich ‘put the Righteous One to death
’ (5:6),
rises to its climax with the apocalyptic proclamation of ‘the
coming of the Lord
’ (5:8). That this involves ‘the Lord of Hosts’ is made clear as well four lines before (5:4). It is this same ‘Lord of Hosts’ implicit in the War Scroll. This is also the implication of the episode from early Church literature about the proclamation by James of ‘the Son of Man sitting on the right hand of the Great Power’, to say nothing of its New Testament parallels.

As in these other contexts, in James we even have an allusion to the telltale Messianic ‘Gate’ or ‘Door’ usage again: ‘
Behold, the Judge is standing before the Door
’ (5:9). This also incorporates the ‘standing’ imagery again, amid that of the final apocalyptic Judgement, and even ends with the evocation of the coming of ‘spring’ and ‘autumn rain’ – the implication being that this is the equivalent of eschatological Judgement. Its spirit is vengeful, uncompromising, and completely parallel to the spirit one finds in the War Scroll. It reads as follows: ‘
Your gold and silver are corroding away, and the same corrosion will be like a testimony against you, and shall eat your flesh like Fire. It was a burning Fire that you stored up as treasure in the Last Days
’.

Not only do we have here the language, attributed to Jesus by Matthew 6:19–20’s ‘Sermon on the Mount’, of ‘moth and rust’ corroding stored-up earthly treasure, but also that of ‘eating’ or ‘devouring flesh with a sword’, used in the War Scroll and in Isaiah 31:8’s ‘no mere Adam’ Prophecy above. Linguistic parallels such as these should not be dismissed lightly. One should also note the language here of ‘the Last Days’ and ‘a burning Fire’, which fairly permeates the literature at Qumran, particularly the Habakkuk
Pesher
– as it does the Koran in Islam. These allusions pinpoint the Letter of James as being thoroughly apocalyptic and eschatological; and, as in the interpretation of Habakkuk 2:4 in the Habakkuk
Pesher
and the interpretation of ‘the Zadokite Covenant’ in the Damascus Document, once again we are in the world of ‘the Last Generation’ or ‘the End Time’.

It is here the letter ascribed to James evokes ‘the Lord of Hosts’:
‘Look, the hire of the workers who mowed your fields, which you kept back, cries out, and the cries of the reapers have reached the ears of the Lord of Hosts’
(5:4). Interestingly, the Hebrew word for ‘Hosts’, ‘
Sabaoth
’, is transliterated in this passage
directly into the Greek
. James continues:

It was you who condemned and put the Righteous One to death. He offered you no resistance. Therefore, be patient, brothers, until the coming of the Lord, just as the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, having patience until it receives the rain (either) earlier or later, you also must
be patient, fortifying your hearts
, because
the coming of the Lord
has drawn near. Do not
grumble against each other
, so that you will not be condemned.
See, the Judge stands before the Door
(James 5:4–10).

This is the whole scheme of the climactic end of the Habakkuk
Pesher
, which also deals with eschatological Judgement and counsels patience, presenting the scriptural warrant for what goes in Christian eschatological theory as ‘the Delay of the Parousia’. This exegesis is delivered in interpretation of Habakkuk 2:3,
‘if it tarries, wait for it’, and it asserts that ‘the Last Days’ would be ‘extended beyond anything the Prophets have foretold’
.
21

In the section evoking the Righteousness Commandment, ‘loving one’s neighbour’, and the Piety Commandment, ‘loving God’; James asserts that it is the Rich who oppress the Poor by ‘dragging them before tribunals’ (2:6). Again in the Damascus Document at Qumran, the penalty for having people condemned to death in the Courts of the Gentiles – which has not a little relevance to the portrait of the death of Jesus in the Gospels – is death.
22

This allusion to the coming of the Lord of Hosts in eventual final Judgement and the consonant condemnation of the Rich ‘for murdering the Righteous One’ in James also concludes with the efficacious ‘working prayer of the Just One’ citing, as we saw, Elijah as a man with the power to pray for it not to rain and, praying again, causing the ‘Heaven to send forth rain’ (5:16–18).

The Stoning of Stephen in Acts

We saw how James, placed upon ‘the Pinnacle’ or ‘steps of the Temple’ by the Jerusalem Leadership to quiet the Messianic expectation rampant among the people, instead proclaimed
the standing of the Messiah ‘on the right hand of Power’ and his imminent coming ‘with the Heavenly Host on the clouds of Heaven
’. There is one final point relating to this episode which again helps point the way to Acts’ historical method – in particular, helping to unravel the mystery of the attack upon someone Acts presents as being called ‘Stephen’.

In a significant parallel to the attack on James described in the first Book of the Pseudoclementine
Recognitions
, it is at this point also that Paul is introduced. To draw the parallel closer, ‘Stephen’ undergoes the same ultimate fate as James – stoning. In addition, just as the character in Acts who is the witness to this stoning afterwards emerges as
Paul
; in Eusebius’ version of the stoning of James, the witness turns out to be ‘one of the Priests of the Sons of Rechab, the
Rechabim
’ (Eusebius actually preserves the Hebrew plural here, transliterated into the Greek). In Epiphanius it is Simeon bar Cleophas, James’ close relative and direct successor in the Leadership of the Jerusalem Church. But whereas both Epiphanius’ Simeon and Eusebius’ ‘Rechabite Priest’ disapprove of the stoning and call upon those perpetrating it to stop, Paul ‘entirely approves’. As Acts puts this: ‘
And the witnesses laid their clothes at the feet of a young man called Saul … and Saul entirely approved of putting him to death
’ (7:58–8:1). ‘Saul’, of course, will metamorphose into ‘Paul’.

As presented in Acts, this speech, seemingly lifted almost bodily from Joshua’s farewell address (Josh. 24:2–24), makes a mistake in the location of Abraham’s burial site traceable to the speech attributed to Joshua in 24:32. Stephen is presented – however bizarre this may appear to be from the mouth of a seemingly Gentile convert – as
telling the Jews (now his tormentors) their own history
. The speech ends with a Pauline-style attack on all Jews, including presumably the Jerusalem Church Leadership, as ‘
always resisting the Holy Spirit
’ (7:51). Then, alluding to the Prophecy of ‘
the coming of the Just One
’ (language we have already seen tied to attacks on the Rich in the Letter of James), Stephen, too, accuses the Jews of killing the Prophets and of being Christ-killers. He says: ‘
Which one of the Prophets did your fathers not persecute, and they killed the ones who prophesied the coming of the Just One, of whom now, too, you have become betrayers and murderers
’ (7:52).

The importance of this passage from Acts, however, doesn’t end here: ‘Filled with the Holy Spirit and gazing intently up to Heaven, Stephen, James-like, now
sees the Glory of God and
‘
Jesus’ standing at the right hand of God
, and cries out, “
Behold, I see the Heavens opened, and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God”
’ (7:55–56). Here, of course, are almost the exact words and the same proclamation attributed to James at this critical juncture in early Church sources, including even the words, ‘
at the right hand of God
’ and ‘
the Son of Man
’ (this lasst, though missing from the War Scroll at Qumran, implied there as well) – not to mention these two reiterations of the ‘
standing
’ terminology.

But the resemblance does not stop there. The next words are also simply variations of those we encounter in the story of James’ death, including the note of being ‘
thrown
’ or ‘
cast
’ (
ballo
)
down
– here ‘
cast out
’ (
ekballo
) – and ‘
crying out
’, virtually the exact words attributed to James in these early Church accounts and Jesus, too, in Gospel accounts of his last words on the cross.

The episode closes as follows: ‘And crying out
with a loud voice
, they stopped their ears with their hands and rushed at him with one mind, and having
cast him
(
ekballo
)
out of the city
, they stoned … Stephen
as he prayed
… and
falling to his knees
, he cried out
in a loud voice
, “Lord lay not this sin on them”’ (Acts 7:57–60). Again, these are almost precisely the words attributed to James in Hegesippus’ account reproduced by Eusebius and, of course, those attributed to Jesus on the Cross in the Gospels. The parallels and overlaps between the various accounts of the stoning of James and the Book of Acts’ account of the stoning of the elusive and quite puzzling character known as ‘Stephen’ are unmistakable.

The constant themes of James’ ‘
praying
’ and his ‘
falling
’ reiterated here, but so are those of James
crying out with a ‘loud voice
’, twice repeated in dramatic style in the account in Hegesippus, not to mention the ever-present motif of ‘
his knees
’. Not only does ‘
Stephen
’ mean ‘
Crown
’ in Greek, it parallels the word in Hebrew used to designate the mitre worn by the High Priest – also a colloquialism, as we saw, for the
hair of the Nazirites
– both themes again connected
with James
.

Why these resemblances? What is behind these overlaps and reversals? We identified the election of ‘Judas
Iscariot
’ (not to mention the suspicious ‘
fall
’ he takes) as a substitute for James’ election – one meant to write James out of scripture; ‘James the brother of John’ may be a similar sort of stand-in, and quite a few others – including ‘Agabus’, the ‘eunuch’ of the Ethiopian Queen, ‘Cornelius’, and Peter – may be of the same species. Thus, this episode involving ‘Stephen’ takes the place of an extremely embarrassing, actual physical assault by Paul on James, which is now recorded only in the Pseudoclementine
Recognitions
.

We are now in a position to reassess the received narrative in light of some of these other curious survivals in early Church history and thus reconstruct the actual history of the Jerusalem Community of James the Just.

The Wicked ‘Encompassing’ or ‘Swallowing’ the Righteous in both Eusebius and
at Qumran

After James’ proclamation of ‘the Son of Man coming on the clouds of Heaven’, the account preserved by Eusebius presents the masses as ‘glorying’ in this testimony and crying out – as in Gospel accounts of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem – ‘Hosanna to the son of David’, meaning ‘
Save us, son of David
’ (Mt 21:9–15 and pars.). Understandably, ‘the same Scribes and Pharisees’ are pictured as having thought better of their action in giving James such a prominent forum at such a Feast Day, and conspiring with one another:

They said to each other, ‘We made a mistake in providing Jesus with such testimony, but let us go up and
cast him
(James)
down
(here ‘
kataballo’
), so they – the people – will be frightened and not believe in him.’ And they
cried out
, saying ‘Oh! Oh! Even the Just One has erred’ (or ‘is deceived’).

Not only do we have here the use of James’ title ‘
the Zaddik
’ in place of his very name and the language of ‘
casting
’, Acts is applying to the attack on Stephen; but also the words, ‘crying out’ (used twice in Hegesippus), to describe the manner in which Scribes and Pharisees addressed James. Acts also uses
these very words
, ‘
they cried out with a loud voice
’, to describe the manner in which ‘the Elders and the Scribes’ of the Sanhedrin ‘stopped their ears with their hands and rushed on Stephen with one mind,
casting him out
of the city’ (7:57).

In Hegesippus, the stoning of the Just One James fulfilled the Prophecy written in Isaiah, ‘
Let us take away the Just One, for he is abhorrent to us, wherefore they shall eat the fruit of their doings
.’ This version of Isaiah 3:10 differs from the received version which reads: ‘
Say to the Righteous, all is well, for they (the Evil) shall eat the fruit of their doings
.’ The important thing is that the vocabulary that so appealed to the sectaries at Qumran and early Christianity is present. In this case, it is the contrast of the Wicked doing something Evil to the Righteous – even including the additional tell-tale play on ‘
eating
’ – here implying punishment or vengeance.