James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls I (48 page)

The ‘fall’ James takes ‘down the Temple steps’ in the 40’s
does not result in his death, merely injury. He is taken down to Jericho (in the region of Qumran) by his followers since he is injured and lives to fight another day. It is this that becomes confused and for various linguistic reasons, which we shall come to understand, is played upon in all the early Church accounts of James’ death as they have come down to us. Even, as we have them, these accounts appreciate that James was not killed in this ‘fall’ – it took a stoning to do this – and even Acts’ replacement account seems to conserve some of the sense of these variations by having Stephen ‘
fall to his knees’
. Whatever one finally makes of this, at least it preserves the curious motif of the matter of James’ ‘
knees being as hard as a camel’s hide on account of all the praying he did
’.

As the
Recognitions
puts this attack on James by
the Enemy
Paul:

Our James began to show … that the two advents of him (Jesus) are foretold: one in humiliation, which he has accomplished;
the other in Glory
(cf. Acts 7:55’s Stephen ‘seeing
the Glory of God
’) … And when matters were at that point …
an Enemy
(a marginal note in one of the manuscripts identifies this ‘Enemy’ as Paul)
entered the Temple with a few others
and began to
cry out
… to excite the people and raise a tumult .… Therefore he began to drive all into confusion with shouting … and like a madman, excite everyone to murder (cf. Acts 8:3). Then ensued a tumult on either side of beating and the beaten. Much blood was shed and there was a confused flight, in the midst of which
the Enemy attacked James
and
threw him headlong from the top of the steps
, and supposing him to be dead (the Syriac adds, ‘since he fell’), did not care to inflict further violence upon him. But our friends lifted him up, for they were more numerous … and we returned to the house of James (the house in Jerusalem to which Peter goes to leave a message for ‘James and the brothers’ in Acts 12:20) and spent the night there in prayer. Then before daylight we went down to Jericho to the number of five thousand men.
27

This is then followed by the information that
‘the Enemy’ received letters from the Chief Priests to go to Damascus ‘to arrest all who believed in Jesus
and, with the help of Unbelievers,
throw the Faithful into confusion
’ (compare with Acts 9:22’s account of how Paul ‘
confounded the Jews who dwelt in Damascus
’),
which makes it
unmistakable that it is Paul we have to do with in this account
.

This is the attack that is replaced by the stoning of Stephen in the orthodox story in Acts
. In the writer’s view, the ‘Stephen’ in Acts is a fictitious stand-in, as are quite a few other characters we have already called attention to in Acts (there will be more). It is a stand-in for the attack by Paul on James in the early 40’s, which was evidently considered so embarrassing by early Church writers that it was unmentionable – but not forgotten.
It is reconstituted with elements taken from
the stoning of James
, which early Church tradition considers to have occurred in the 60’s. This account in Acts, as to some extent the presentation of Jesus in the Gospels, was manufactured with an anti-Semitic patina which, over the millennia, has not failed to have its effect.

One should finish the description of James’ stoning in the 60’s as Eusebius has conserved it. This is found in one form or another in a variety of sources, including Manichaean ones and now Nag Hammadi. It concludes in the following manner:

Thus they were stoning him, when
one of the Priests of the sons of Rechab, the son of those Rechabites, spoken of by
Jeremiah the Prophet
, cried out, saying, ‘Stop what you are doing, the Just One is praying for you.’ And one among them, who was a fuller, took the club with which he beat out clothes and struck the Just One on the head …. Thus, he suffered martyrdom, and
they buried him on the spot by the Temple and
his monument is still there by the Temple.
…
And immediately Vespasian began to besiege them
.

This then is the account of the martyrdom of James given by Eusebius, purportedly a word-for-word translation of Hegesippus. Except for mix-ups between whether James was in the Temple or Holy of Holies and regarding his bathing habits, this seems likely.

Eusebius adds the pious words, whether his own or Hegesippus’: ‘He became a true witness both to Jews and to Greeks that Jesus is the Christ’, and then moves on, giving the relevant materials from Josephus
connecting the siege of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple to James’ death
.

James’ Burial Marker, Judas
Iscariot’s Fall
, and
the Field of Blood
Again

The reference Eusebius preserves to a grave-marker or monument to James at the place ‘where he fell’ is interesting and not without relevance. Eusebius or his source – it is impossible to tell which – certainly considers it was still there at the time of writing. This would mean either the Second or the Fourth Century. Had Eusebius, who like Hegesippus came from Palestine, not seen it, one imagines he would have said so. Jerome does in his seemingly more precise variation on the tradition: ‘
His tombstone with its inscription was well known until the siege of Titus and the end of Hadrian’s reign (meaning Jerome did not see it)
.’
28

Regardless of chronology, there can be little doubt that
someone saw
James’ grave-marker or monument outside the Temple in the Kedron Valley at some point. This is directly beneath the Temple compound walls as one looks down from what is being called in these traditions ‘the Pinnacle of the Temple’. Somehow the tradition developed that James was pushed down from here – a place too from which ‘Jesus’ was purportedly tempted ‘by the Devil’ to jump in Gospel traditions.

Today there are still funerary monuments there from the Second Temple period – one identified as ‘the Tomb of St James’. The tradition identifying James’ tomb with this monument at the bottom of the Mount of Olives in the Kedron Valley beneath ‘the Pinnacle of the Temple’ is very old and Jerome seems to know something of it by his words, ‘Some of our writers think he was buried on the Mount of Olives, but they are mistaken.’ The significance of this monument for the stories that developed about James’ death is important. Even today, if one stands on the south-east corner of the Temple wall facing the Mount of Olives and the Kedron below, one readily sees the this monumental tomb.

From the still-legible Hebrew inscription carved on the stone within, it can be identified as the sepulchre of ‘the Priestly Course of the
Bnei-Hezir
’ – one of the priestly clans returning with either Ezra or Nehemiah from the Babylonian Captivity (Neh. 10:20). This in no way invalidates it as related to James’ family, since the relationship of James’ priestly ancestors to one priestly clan or another is impossible to determine.

Interestingly enough, the names listed in the dedicatory inscription, as it now stands, appear to be from the family known as ‘
the Boethusians
’, so either they were of ‘the
Bnei-Hezir
’ or they, too, appropriated it. This is the priestly clan Herod brought in from Egypt after he executed his Maccabean wife to marry their daughter – also called Mariamme.
29
In the next generation, one Joezer b. Boethus becomes the direct opponent of Josephus’ Judas and
Saddok
in the matter of the non-payment of the newly-imposed Roman tax at the time of ‘
the Census of Quirinius
’.

In fact, the takeover of this tomb, implied by its association with James’ burial, might be the root of another highly-prized but almost certainly mythological tradition about ‘Joseph of Arimathaea’ donating his richly-appointed tomb
for
the burial of Jesus
(Mt 27:57 and pars.). ‘Joseph of Arimathaea’ is another name without historical substance and the location ‘Arimathaea’ has never been identified.

However this may be, one can certainly envision a set of circumstances where someone conversant with the tradition about James’ ‘
fall
’, looking down on the Kedron Valley monumental tomb from the walls of the compound of the Temple, might have imagined the tomb – so clearly visible below – implied that James took this fabulous ‘
fall
’ from ‘
the Pinnacle of the Temple
’, when in reality he only ‘
fell headlong down the Temple steps
’
during the attack by ‘the Enemy’ Paul
. A ‘
fall
’ from the Pinnacle, of course, few could have survived, which is the thrust of its transmogrification into the story of ‘Jesus’’ Temptation by the Devil in Matthew and Luke.

The element about James’ ‘
headlong fall
’ also reappears, as already remarked, in the story about the ‘
headlong fall
’ that Judas
Iscariot
– another largely mythological character with a curious surname – supposedly takes in the Book of Acts, accompanied by its own suitably bloodthirsty details. This, too, was connected with some kind of burial ground. Called ‘the Field of Blood’ in Acts and Matthew, the latter also identifies it as ‘the Potter’s Field’, a field supposedly ‘for the burial of strangers’ or possibly even ‘the Poor’. Interestingly enough, as we saw, it is connected to ‘Rechabite’ priestly traditions, and by extrapolation, ‘the Essenes’.

It will be recalled that the story was told at the beginning of Acts as part of the ‘election’ scenario to explain why it was necessary to fill the ‘Episcopate’ of Judas and the defeated candidate was called ‘Justus’ even in Greek (1:23). Having ‘bought a field out of the reward for Unrighteousness, he
fell headlong
and
bursting open
,
all his bowels gushed out
.’ Not only is the parallel with the ‘
head-long fall
’
, James took,
down the Temple steps
when attacked
by ‘the Enemy’ Paul
in the Pseudoclementines clear, but the one he took
from the Pinnacle of the Temple
, where his head
burst open
from the blow of the fuller’s club, should be too.

Once again, we are in the area of fictional refurbishment. Even though these are some of our most cherished cultural heirlooms, the overwritten original elements do, on careful inspection, shine through. What originally was in the underlying material is impossible to say with precision, only
something about the election of James as successor in the Leadership of the Community combined with intimations of what was later to befall him
. As already stressed, all materials having a bearing on the family of Jesus, the brothers, or namesakes of anyone connected family-wise to the Messianic Leader, must be treated with the utmost circumspection.

For instance, in this tradition, instead of the curious material about ‘a fuller’ with his club, we now have an interesting parallel allusion to ‘Potters’, even though ‘the Potter’s Field’, as such, nowhere appears in the original Prophecy being cited in Matthew – whether from Jeremiah or Zechariah. Both this ‘fuller’ and this ‘Field’ are connected in some manner either to death or a burial place. This is not to mention the whole matter of ‘the Rechabites’, to whom both traditions in some sense also relate.

Then there is the notice, also supposed to relate to this ‘Prophecy’, about coins both being ‘thrown’ into the Temple Treasury and rejected from it. The last is one of the principal themes of this period, and something we shall have occasion to identify with James’ name as well, that is,
the rejection of gifts and sacrifices on behalf of foreigners in the Temple
, the issue that finally started the
War against Rome
.

Those who reject moneys and gifts such as this are the more ‘
Zealot
’
lower priesthood
, the same individuals who want to
ban Gentiles – including Herodians – from the Temple as polluting it
. Not only does this become a principal theme leading up to the Uprising, but we have identified it as being at the root of one of the ‘Three Nets of Belial’ accusations in the Fifth Column of the Damascus Document. Even the specific charge of ‘polluting the Temple Treasury’ occurs in the exposition of this ‘pollution of the Temple’ charge in the Sixth Column. Parallels of this kind, if not finally decisive, are none the less extremely persuasive.

Furthermore, if James can be identified as more than simply parallel to ‘the Teacher of Righteousness’ at Qumran, but
actually identical with him
, then the ‘Three Nets’ of ‘Riches’, ‘fornication’ – both paralleled in known materials about James – and ‘pollution of the Temple’ become prototypically his. In fact, his prohibition of ‘things sacrificed to idols’ or ‘the pollutions of the idols’ in Acts 15:20–29’s formulation of the results of ‘the Jerusalem Council’ – which we shall also show to be at the root of the
MMT
correspondence – can be seen as being but one important aspect of the more over-arching ‘
pollution of the Temple
’ charge.