James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls I (53 page)

The idea that James was stoned with ‘several colleagues’ also agrees with the way the various attacks on the Righteous Teacher and his colleagues is delineated at Qumran. These last, too, are often presented in the plural.
21
In our view, James was the Leader of these ‘
Poorer sort of Priests
’. As we have seen, this is supported by Acts 6:7’s notice of ‘a great multitude of Priests being
obedient
to the Faith’ – the word ‘obedient’ here linking up with the repeated allusions to ‘
obeying the Just One
’ in Hegesippus’ account. These might be termed ‘
Nazirite
’ or ‘
Essene Priests’
. In any event they were, in the words of Acts 21:20, ‘
all Zealots for the Law
’. As such, James was ‘
the Zaddik of the Opposition Alliance
’ – the centre, about whom all these disturbances and/or confrontations in the Temple turned, whose removal in 62 CE made ‘the Messianic Uprising’ that followed inevitable.

The Conspiracy to Remove James

Josephus’ account definitely points to a conspiracy between Ananus and Agrippa II to take advantage of the anarchy, consequent upon the interregnum in Roman Governors, to remove James. Their friendship was solidified in Rome in the early 50s during the course of previous disturbances of this kind and appeals to Caesar, which resulted in Felix, the Emperor’s freedman, being sent out to Palestine as Governor.
22
Felix’s brother, Pallas, was Nero’s lover, and Nero took power almost directly after this event, after having his kinsman Claudius assassinated, which may have contributed to the downward spiral of events in Palestine.

‘Conspiracy’ is definitely the language the Dead Sea Scrolls use, too, with regard to the destruction of the Righteous Teacher by the Wicked Priest – the word in Hebrew there is
zemam
/
zammu
, ‘
he conspired
’ and ‘
they conspired
’.
23
But why was this and what could this ‘conspiracy’ have been? Josephus complains bitterly about Agrippa II’s role in saving his enemy, Justus of Tiberius, who, following recent Messianic disturbances in Libya or ‘Cyrene’, came forward with new accusations of sedition against Josephus, which may ultimately have led to Josephus’ demise.
24

Agrippa had almost as much cause to seek James’ removal as the High Priest Ananus did. If we place James at the centre of agitation over whether to allow Herodian Kings into the Temple, to accept their gifts or appointment of High Priests, and the acceptance of gifts and sacrifices from foreigners generally – including on behalf of the Roman Emperor – then these individuals had ample reason to blame James for a good many things, not least of which, his continued attacks on their ‘Riches’. In fact, the way the James episode is interposed between several other important bits of information at the very end of the
Antiquities
– most of which are missing from the
War
– makes it clear that more emphasis should be placed on it than might otherwise be the case. Again, it is important to look at the sequencing of the events covered in the all-important, last book of the
Antiquities
(Book Twenty).

Immediately following James’ death, Albinus co-operated with the High Priests in launching a campaign to rid the country of the
Sicarii
– whom Josephus also calls ‘
Robbers
’.
25
In fact, Josephus uses the term ‘
Sicarii
’ to designate those following the Fourth Philosophy even before he uses the term ‘
Zealots
’ at a later point in the
Jewish War
, and, in the
Antiquities
, the designation ‘
Zealot
’ doesn’t even occur. Rather, Josephus first uses the term ‘
Zealots
’ to describe (in the War) those who slaughter the Establishment High Priests responsible for the death of James, burning all their palaces as the Uprising moves into its more virulent or ‘Jacobite’ phase. In our view, this is vengeance for what these Establishment ‘Sadducees’ did to James.

As for ‘the
Sicarii
’ – those allegedly carrying curved, Arab-style daggers under their garments – they are first introduced in 55 CE, when they are responsible for the assassination of Ananus’ brother Jonathan, the then High Priest.
26
No doubt they did not call themselves by this appellation, but Josephus makes it clear that, extreme ‘Zealots’ as they were, they were the heirs to the Movement founded by Judas the Galilean and
Saddok
. They finally end with their families at Masada where they commit mass suicide rather than surrender to the Romans even after the fall of the Temple. In this sequence, the judicial murder of James in the early 60’s by Ananus is retribution for the murder of his brother in the 50s by ‘the
Sicarii
’.

In discussing this assassination of Ananus’ brother, Jonathan, by ‘the
Sicarii
’ in the 50s in the
Antiquities
, Josephus makes the same accusation against extremist groups he does in discussing the butchering of Ananus in the
War
in the 60’s. In the latter, it will be recalled, he stated: ‘I cannot but think it was because God had condemned this city to destruction as a
polluted
city that He
cut off
these its greatest defenders and benefactors (meaning Ananus ben Ananus and Josephus’ own friend, Jesus ben Gamala).’
27
In the former, he goes further, falling back on the
mea culpa
admission of guilt, which so punctuates his assessment of the lawlessness of the Zealots. This is certainly one of the prototypes for the more famous cry, ‘his blood be upon us and our children’, in Christian Scripture and theology thereafter.  In both instances, these accusations have been enlarged from an accusation against a particular extremist group to one against
a whole people
. Regarding Jonathan, this reads as follows:

And this seems to me to have been the reason why God, out of his hatred for these men’s Wickedness (the
Sicarii
’s), rejected our city. As for the Temple, He no longer considered it sufficiently pure for Him to inhabit therein, but brought the Romans upon us and threw fire upon the city to cleanse it, and brought upon us, our wives and children, slavery, that he might teach us wisdom.
28

This is, of course, exactly the accusation in Christian Scripture and Christian theology, slightly transmuted and transferred, as it has come down to us. But Josephus is saying that it is because of terrorist murders of Establishment High Priests like Jonathan and Ananus, not because of the Jews’ murder of Christ, that the Jews suffered. Still, the common thread of the motif of the ‘
Sicarii
’ – if ‘
Iscariot
’ and ‘
Sicarios
’ are related usages – occurs in both. Of course, Josephus is displaying the groveling sycophantism and subservience of the typical captive, but even the theme of ‘pollution of the Temple’, so fundamental to the Qumran position remarkably is present in the above extract and reversed. For Josephus, it is now the fanatical, purity-minded extremists who are
polluting the Temple
, not the
collaborating High Priests
.

One can, however, take a further step and state with some certainty that it was because the Jews
were so Messianic
that they lost everything, not
vice versa
as in the New Testament and Phariseeizing Rabbinic Orthodoxy too, the mirror reversal of Christian Orthodoxy. The last step in this is simple. One need only identify these ‘lawless’ bands of ‘
Sicarii
’ and ‘Zealots’ as enthusiasts for ‘the Star Prophecy’ and part and parcel, therefore, of the Messianic Movement. And Josephus does just this, as we have seen, in a much overlooked key section at the end of the
War
dealing with omens and oracles of the destruction of the Temple.

He concludes these by saying that ‘what most encouraged’ the Jews to revolt against Rome ‘was an ambiguous oracle found in their Sacred Writings, that at that time, one from their country would become Ruler of the whole inhabited world’, ‘ambiguous’ because Josephus, as Rabbinic Judaism thereafter, then goes on to apply it to
Vespasian their conqueror
. In the parallel to the New Testament ‘Little Apocalypse’s above, he had observed in the
Antiquities
that the spread of the Movement he calls ‘a disease’, started by ‘Judas and
Saddok
’ ‘
among our young men, who were zealous for it, brought our country to destruction
’.
29
In other words, it was
because the Jews were so
‘
zealous
’ for the World-Ruler Prophecy, and that Messianism consequent upon it, that they lost everything – not the opposite way round.

The New Testament has by implication rather reversed this, making it seem as if – because of the accusation of
killing Christ
– the Jews as a whole were
anti-Messianic
. But this is patently untrue as we can see. The Establishment Classes were, including the Pharisee progenitors of Rabbinic Judaism. But, by making it seem as if
the Jews as a whole
killed or collaborated with the Romans in the killing of Christ – the point of the Gospels and the Pauline corpus – they make it appear as if the mass of the Jews were not Messianic and opposed Messianism, when, in fact, just the opposite was true. It was because the mass of the Jews
were
so Messianic, as Josephus amply illustrates, not because they supported the Establishment and/or the
Pax Romana
, however one interprets this, as the Gospels would have us believe – that God brought these calamities and political disasters upon them. Thus Josephus.

In his description of the significance of the World-Ruler Prophecy at the end of the
Jewish War
, Josephus also describes the signs and portents connected to how God, disgusted with the Temple, departed from it – things that, no doubt, much impressed the superstitious Romans. These included the appearance of ‘
armed chariots and armies marching across the clouds at sunset
’, certainly a play on the coming of the Heavenly Host on the clouds in James’ proclamation and the War Scroll. There is also ‘
a Star, which stood like a great dagger
’, not over the birthplace of ‘Jesus’ in Bethlehem
portending the Salvation of Mankind
, as in the Gospel of Matthew
but, now rather, over Jerusalem portending its doom
.
30

In these descriptions, Josephus repeatedly reverses the charges of ‘
Impiety towards God
’ and ‘
pollution of the Temple
’ on the part of the Authorities into ‘
Impiety towards God
’ and ‘
pollution of the Temple
’ because of the blood shed by these
Sicarii
and Zealot bands. So intent is Josephus on these charges against the
Sicarii
that he even follows them down into Egypt and Libya after the War is over with the same charges.
31

In the Damascus Document and to some extent in the document called
MMT
, the charge of ‘
pollution of the Temple
’ is directed against the Establishment Parties and probably included this matter of accepting gifts and sacrifices on behalf of foreigners. But, according to Josephus, it is ‘the Chief Priests and principal Pharisees’ – the same groups the New Testament blames for the condemnation of ‘Jesus Christ’ – who try to dissuade the people from rejecting such ‘gifts and sacrifices’, claiming it would lay the city open ‘to the charge of Impiety’.

As Josephus avers, the last-named claim is ‘an innovation in their religion’, since their forefathers had always accepted gifts from foreigners and forbidden no one from offering sacrifices, even adorning the Temple with them and raising dedicatory plaques to them.
32
But by saying this, Josephus neglects to mention the view of Ezekiel 44:1–15 above, so dear to the Damascus Document and the prophet perhaps held in highest repute by such extremist partisans and these ‘zealous’ Lower Priests who wish to reject such sacrifices.

This is the problem with Josephus, who rarely gives the entire picture where insurgent groups are at issue. His account shifts according to what his sources say and what seems most expedient. Like Paul, who follows a similar
modus operandi
regarding doctrinal matters, Josephus is an apologist, who is completely unaware of his own disingenuousness.

Revolutionary Disturbances in Josephus and Acts

In this period, it is useful to group parties together according to who their common enemies were. On this basis, the ‘Christians’ in Jerusalem (whatever one might wish to say about their ideology or whatever name to apply), the ‘Zealots’, ‘
Sicarii
’, and the ‘Messianists’ responsible for the literature at Qumran, can all be said to have the
same
enemies, namely the Pharisees, ‘Establishment Sadducees’ or the High Priests, and the Herodians. In addition to this, when one examines the sequence of events before and after James’ judicial murder in the
Antiquities
, one first encounters the disturbances of the late 40’s and early 50s involving hostilities between Samaritans and Jews as well and their apparent respective Messianic expectations.