James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls I (57 page)

Adding selected materials from the Book of Acts just lends further credence to this picture. For instance, just prior to the
stoning of Stephen
, Acts describes a large number of Priests coming over to so-called ‘Christianity’ in Judea. Furthermore, as already remarked, it describes the larger part of James’ ‘Jerusalem Assembly’ followers – in the midst of James’ final verbal encounter with Paul and just prior to Paul’s subsequent mobbing in the Temple – as ‘zealous’ or ‘Zealots for the Law’ (21:20).

In the follow-up to this book,
James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls 
II:
The Cup of the Lord, the Damascus Covenant, and the Blood of Christ,
I will treat in more detail Paul’s final confrontation with James over the issues of ‘
teaching all the Jews among the Gentiles to break away (literally, ‘apostatize’) from Moses and not to circumcise their children, nor walk in the customs (of the Forefathers
– 21:21)’. To this, the Jewish mob then adds the charges of ‘
teaching everywhere against the People, against the Law, and against this Place
’,
meaning the Temple
, which it claims he (Paul) has ‘
polluted
’
by introducing foreigners into it
– that is, ‘Greeks’ (Acts 21:28).

Chapter 16

The Attack by Paul on James and the Attack on Stephen

The Violence in Jerusalem and the Riot Led by Saul in Josephus

Following the stoning of James, Josephus describes how Ananias and the other High Priests, who ‘joined themselves to the most brutal kind of people’, sent their servants to the threshing floors to steal the tithes of ‘the Priests of the Poorer sort’, beating those who resisted, so that ‘those of old’ – possibly our purist Nazirite-style ‘Priests’ – who used to be maintained by tithes, died of want.

Reference to this brutality is made twice in the
Antiquities
approximately four years apart – once at the end of Felix’s tenure just before the Temple Wall Affair and James’ death that followed and once in Albinus’ just after it. This is interspersed with notices about how the ‘
Sicarii
’ now struggle daily with the ‘Rich’ High Priests (particularly Ananias), kidnapping each other’s partisans and the attempts by the latter in conjunction with the new Roman Governor Albinus to suppress them. Though this same Ananias is pictured as making complaints against Paul in Acts – which may or may not have substance – it is impossible to think these matters are not somehow connected with the death of James.
1

Josephus immediately goes on to describe how Agrippa II now beautifies two largely Gentile cities, Beirut and Caesarea Philippi, which he renames – temporarily one assumes – ‘Neronias’ to honour Nero! Making it clear that this included erecting pagan statues, as his ancestors Agrippa I and Herod had done before him, Josephus, in another of his turnarounds, now directly admits for the first time that: ‘
The hatred of his subjects for him increased accordingly, because he took their posterity to adorn a foreign city
.’ This is as we would expect, that these Rulers were hated by the people but now Josephus, not only admits it, but provides one of the reasons for it –
their cosmopolitan involvement with foreign powers and interaction with foreigners generally including beautifying their shrines and cities
.
2

Josephus, not only describes these ‘
Sicarii
’ as per usual as ‘
Robbers
’ (
Lestai
), but also how they try to force the Roman Governor Albinus through Ananias ‘
to release prisoners
’! Here, again, we have a prominent theme connected with the presentation of Jesus’ death in the Gospels, only now involving ‘
Sicarii
’. This is coupled with the reiteration of another omnipresent Gospel theme,
bribery
– so much so that when Albinus finally leaves Jerusalem two years later ‘
he brought out all those prisoners who seemed to him most plainly worthy of death and … took money from them and dismissed them. Thus were the prisons emptied but the countryside filled with Robbers
(
Lestai
).’

The level of violence, priest against priest, now increases: ‘
They got together bodies of the people and frequently went, from throwing reproaches at each other, to throwing stone
s.’ Again, this atmosphere is familiar from the picture in early Church sources of confrontations and debates in the Temple centering around attacks on James and reports of riots that finally end up in his death – the only difference being the supposed subject matter behind these riots and debates.

In particular, Josephus follows the death of James with an extremely interesting note about one ‘Saulus and Costobarus’, the latter identified as Saulus’ brother in the
War
. In the
same work
he connects both to two other individuals Antipas, another of their ‘
kinsmen
’ and Temple Treasurer-to-be, killed either by ‘Zealots’ or by ‘
Sicarii
’, and Philip, the Captain of Agrippa II’s guard. The namesake and ancestor of this ‘Costobarus’ was married to Herod’s sister Salome I. He was
the real ‘Idumaean’ in these Herodian genealogies
, the forebear too probably of this just-mentioned ‘Antipas’. He was also the grandfather or great-grandfather of one ‘Julius Archelaus’ whom Josephus was later to know, as he tells us in his
Autobiography
, fairly intimately
in Rome
.

In Josephus’ words, Saulus and Costobarus now ‘collected a band of thugs’, doubtlessly not unlike the violent bands of ruffians collected by the High Priests, he had just been describing two sentences earlier. In this regard, one should bear in mind Acts’ picture of the authorizations the young ‘Saul’/‘Paul’ obtains – also
from the High Priests
–
to pursue so-called ‘Christians’ to Damascus
(9:2). As Josephus describes them: ‘They were of the Royal Family and,
because of their kinship to Agrippa, found favour
– obviously with the Establishment –
but they used violence with the People and were ready to plunder anyone weaker than themselves
.’ Josephus adds as usual, but significantly in view of the context: ‘
And from that moment, particularly, great suffering fell upon our city and all things grew steadily worse and worse
.’
3

This theme of
‘Violence’ done to People or land
is very strong in the Dead Sea Scrolls, where it is linked to the expression ‘
the Violent Ones
’. This violence is described in great detail, including extended reference to ‘
the Poor
’ (
Ebionim
), the situation of how
‘the Last Priests of Jerusalem’ and the Wicked Priest ‘gather Riches’ and ‘spoils’ in the run-up to the destruction of the Temple and the fall of Jerusalem
.

In the course of these presentations, we hear about ‘
the Violent Ones
’, not only in the Habakkuk
Pesher
, but also in the Psalm 37
Pesher
, where they are called, significantly, ‘
the Violent Ones of the Gentiles
’. In the Habakkuk
Pesher
, the expression occurs in particularly crucial sections relating to the destruction of ‘the Righteous Teacher’ and a number of individuals with him, referred to as ‘
the Poor
’. The text runs:

The Wicked Priest … became proud and he deserted God and betrayed the Laws
because of Riches
.
He plundered and collected the Riches of the Men of Violence
– themselves rebels against God – and
took (in the sense of, ‘profiteered from’) the Riches of the Peoples
(in our view, Herodians who, it should be appreciated, were at this time Roman tax collectors or, even more accurately, tax-farmers in Palestine)
multiplying upon himself sinful guilt
.
4

This is broken by the reference in the next column to ‘
the Last Priests of Jerusalem
’ – this plural usage, too, would seem to place this firmly in the Herodian Period,
not the Maccabean
. Our writers certainly knew whereof they spoke, when they further described these ‘
Last Priests’ as ‘profiteering from the spoils of the Peoples. But in the Last Days their Riches together with their booty would be given over to the hand of the Army of the
Kittim’
.

Moving back to the subject of ‘the Wicked Priest’, our text now goes into the passages, we have treated above, about the ‘Vengeance’ God would visit on him ‘
because he conspired to destroy the Poor
’ (the name, of course, of James’ Community):

And as to what is written, ‘Because of the blood of the township and the Violence of the land,’ its interpretation is (
peshero
): ‘the township’ is Jerusalem
where the Wicked Priest committed his works of Abominations
(to be contrasted with the Righteous Teacher’s ‘
works of Righteousness
’)
polluting the Temple of God
; and ‘the Violence of the land’ relates to the cities of Judah
where he plundered the sustenance
(‘
Riches
’)
of the Poor
(
Ebionim
).
5

Josephus’ Saulus and Paul’s Herodian Connections

The notice in Josephus about Saulus ‘
using violence with the People
’ has a bearing, not only on
the attack by the Enemy Paul on James
as described in the Pseudoclementines, but also the real events lying behind the ‘
Stephen
’ episode in Acts. Paul himself writes in his Letter to the Romans in a passage not generally disputed that the bearer should send his regards to someone, he calls,
his ‘kinsman Herodion’
(i.e., ‘
the littlest Herod’
– 16:11). In the same breath, he sends regards, as well, to those he refers to as ‘
of Aristobulus
’, i.e., either ‘
relatives of
’ or ‘
of the household of Aristobulus
’ (16:10).

Agrippa I’s brother and successor Herod of Chalcis (44–49 CE), originally married to Agrippa I’s daughter Bernice, had a son by the name of ‘
Aristobulus
’ who was married to
the Salome connected in the Gospels to the death of John the Baptist
. No doubt, they spent much of their time in Rome, but when Nero enlarged Agrippa II’s Kingdom at the expense of Herod of Chalcis’s domains, he compensated Aristobulus and Salome by giving them the Kingdom of Lower Armenia in Northern Syria and Asia Minor not far from Paul’s own base of operations there.

But Paul, as did ‘Herodians’ generally, also held Roman Citizenship – a rarity in Palestine at this time. Acts makes much of this, for instance, in the jovial banter between Paul and the Roman Chief Captain on the Temple steps following Paul’s ejection from the Temple by the crowd (Acts 22:26–29). Josephus, too, acquired Roman Citizenship – obviously going through much to obtain it – and was
adopted into the Roman Imperial family itself
.

However Roman Citizenship had already been bestowed in the previous century upon all the offspring of Antipater and his son Herod
for conspicuous service to Rome
– in fact, the Roman takeover of Palestine itself was due in no small part to their efforts. Where Paul is concerned, his citizenship clearly enabled him to wield inordinate importance in Jerusalem at a comparatively young age in the employ of the High Priests. Moreover, it repeatedly saved him, by Acts’ own reckoning, from imminent punishment and even death. It is hard to picture ‘Jesus’ in similar circumstances pulling out a Roman Citizenship to escape the same kind of punishment or death.

Be this as it may, one of the most curious and, as it turns out revealing, examples of such an escape comes when a nephew of Paul, whom Acts declines to name – but living in Jerusalem with an entrée into Roman official circles – discovers ‘a conspiracy’ on the part of the Jews ‘to kill Paul’ (23:16). This is on the part of those who have all the characteristics of ‘
Sicarii
’, except for taking a suspiciously-familiar
Nazirite
-style oath – ‘
cursing themselves not to drink or eat till they had killed Paul
’. This ‘oath’-taking is
repeated three times in this episode
, the language varying to ‘
with a curse, we have cursed ourselves to taste nothing until we have killed Paul
’ (Acts 23:14; in 23:21, this is ‘
not to eat or drink’
).

Paul’s nephew (still unnamed), then, informs the Roman Chief Captain of the Temple Guard in ‘the Fortress’ (probably Antonia) of same who,
with ‘seventy horsemen, two hundred soldiers, and two hundred spearmen
’,
sends Paul to Felix in Caesarea to be ‘kept in Herod’s Palace’
. One should note the apparently historically precise detail at this point in Acts which even includes the contents of the letter, the Captain sends to Felix. This contrasts markedly with the general mythologizing of Acts in earlier chapters.