James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls I (66 page)

Strictly speaking, John is correct in one sense, since a ‘Feast Day’ was treated in Jewish Law systematically with ‘
the Sabbath
’, even if it did not fall on the Sabbath. But the point he is exploiting here –
‘breaking the bones’
of those crucified – has nothing whatever to do with either the ‘Sabbath’
or any ‘Feast Day’, but simply the scrupulousness the Jews showed in their care for the dead. That the point about a ‘
hanged one being a curse of God’
occupied the attention of Christian exegetes to no small degree is made clear in both the presentation of Peter’s attacks on ‘the Jews’ before the Sanhedrin and before Cornelius’ household in Acts 5:30 and 10:39 and Paul’s theological exploitation of it in Galatians 3:12–13.

What is even more striking is that it can be seen that even here we have an echo of the kinds of vocabulary being used in the Habakkuk
Pesher
from Qumran in its presentation of the death of the Righteous Teacher and several of his followers whom it calls ‘
the Poor
’. It will be recalled that in referring to difficulties over
Yom Kippur
, the very point being made here in John about a Feast Day being a Sabbath is also found there, when it speaks about ‘
Yom Kippur
’ being a ‘
Fast Day, the Sabbath of their rest
’ (Lev. 16:31) – and this in regard to such crucial materials regarding both the destruction of ‘the Righteous Teacher’ and ‘the Poor’ as well. Again, the parallels are startling.

It is to the account of the attack on James by ‘the Enemy’ (Paul) in the Pseudoclementine
Recognitions
that we now must turn in order to make final sense of this welter of data. Even without this tell-tale note of ‘
his legs broken’
in Jerome’s account of James’ fall and his subsequent beating and stoning, it would have been possible to sort out the various traditions which have been conflated to form a single unified story; but this note from Jerome simply clinches the matter.

What early Church accounts are confusing – and this as early as Clement and Hegesippus in the mid-Second Century – is that
there were two attacks on James
, one in the mid-40’s, for which Acts substitutes the attack on Stephen. The other attack on James, which results in his death, is the one in the 60’s having to do with his
Sanhedrin
trial, which ends with his stoning.

These two attacks have been conflated in early Church accounts like Jerome’s
into
one single attack
occurring in the 60’s and resulting in his death. All of these accounts contain the elements of James being ‘
cast down
’ or the ‘
fall
’ he takes, his stoning, and his brains being beaten out with a laundryman’s club. To the fall from the Pinnacle of the Temple, which James supposedly took according to all these accounts, Jerome – meticulous to a fault – adds the specific element of ‘
his legs being broken
’.

We have already noted how this ‘fall’ or being ‘cast down’ or ‘cast out’ is incorporated into the accounts of Stephen’s stoning and Judas
Iscariot
’s suicide, where it is Judas’ stomach, not his brain, that ‘bursts open’. The
real fall
James takes, however, is the one down the Temple stairs in the 40’s, after the attack on him by Paul, in which it is made crystal clear, James
broke either one or both of his legs
.
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Otherwise, all the elements of
both
attacks on James are present in conflated form in these accounts – the ‘headlong fall’, the beating or clubbing, the bizarre stoning, and, finally in Jerome, ‘his broken legs’.

If we now turn to this Pseudoclementine account of Paul’s attack on James in the Temple, resulting in his fall from ‘
the Temple steps
’,
not
‘
the Temple Pinnacle
’ and
not
in his death, we are finally in a position to solve all these puzzles. It is this that Luke’s Acts, embarrassed as ever, is at such pains to cover up – turning it into its very opposite, namely,
an attack by the Jews against the archetypal Gentile believer Stephen
. All the same, Acts uses it as the springboard to introduce the ‘Enemy’ Paul who, then, becomes the hero of its whole ensuing narrative!

Paul’s Physical Assault on James in the Temple

In the
Recognitions
, Peter, in Caesarea to engage in his own debates with Simon
Magus
, tells Clement the story of the debates on the Temple steps between James and the High Priests or Temple Establishment, ending in the riot led by Paul – in which Paul picked up the ‘faggot’ – that resulted in James being injured and left for dead. The fact of such interesting material delivered in such precise detail is not easily gainsaid, nor does it suffer from the often miraculous signs and wonders that mar parallel accounts in the New Testament.

Peter tells Clement that the High Priest sent priests to ask the leaders of the Assembly in Jerusalem, led by James, whether they would enter into debates on the Temple steps with the Orthodox Priesthood. They accept and preliminary debates between the Apostles, on the one hand, and Caiaphas and the other High Priests, on the other, ensue (1.65–1.67). As in parallel material in Acts 5:34–39, the Pharisee Gamaliel speaks in support of the early Christians.

In the midst of this, James ‘
the Bishop
– ‘
Bishop of Bishops
’ in 1.68 –
went up to the Temple … with the whole Church’
(1:66). Though the subject of these speeches is not particularly enlightening and, like the Book of Acts, largely retrospective – including discourses on ‘the True Prophet’ and the nature of ‘the Christ’, both identified with each other and then with ‘the Primal Adam’, John the Baptist’s differences with Simon
Magus
(along with Dositheus, formerly among his Disciples), and the like – some of the historical detail is compelling. In fact, in the author’s view, we have a truer picture of these clashes in the Temple than Acts presents.

For instance, when ‘James the Bishop’ went up to the Temple, there was ‘a great multitude who had been waiting
since the middle of the night
’ to see him. This kind of non-fantastic detail is impressive. ‘Therefore, standing on an elevation so that he might be seen by all the People’ – this can be nothing other than the picture of James standing on the Pinnacle of the Temple in early Church accounts – James takes his stand, as the other Apostles had done before him, ‘on the steps of the Temple’. From this location, James begins his discourse which supposedly lasts over seven days – shades of the
Anabathmoi Jacobou
.

One immediately recognizes that one is in the same milieu as that reflected in Hegesippus via Eusebius, of James placed by the ‘Scribes and Pharisees’ on ‘the Pinnacle of the Temple’, so that he could be seen by all the People. However the physical setting in the
Recognitions
is more convincing. Just as in the mix-ups in Jerome over James’ ‘legs being broken’, the
Recognitions
’ account is in the 40’s while the early Church ones are in the 60’s. We are also in the world of Josephus’ narrative of arguments between rival groups of Priests, the Establishment and those supported by ‘the Poor’, once again, even ending in rioting or stone-throwing as the accounts begin to converge.

At the point when James is about to win over ‘all the People’ including the Priests (compare this, with Acts 6:7’s notice about a large group of ‘Priests’ making their conversion), an ‘Enemy’ entered the Temple with a few other men and started arguing with him (1:70). A marginal note in one manuscript states that this ‘Enemy’ was Saul. This is confirmed in the next section, as we have seen, since after getting letters from the Chief Priests , as in Acts, ‘the Enemy’ pursues the Community – which has fled to Jericho –
all the way to Damascus
.

By his loud shouts, abuse, and vilification, this ‘Enemy’ raised such a clamour in the Temple that the people could no longer hear what James was saying. Behaving ‘
like one insane, he excited everyone to murder
’ and ‘
setting an example himself, he seized a strong stick from the altar
’, at which point there ‘
ensued a riot of beating and beaten on either side
’.

One should note the intimate and precise detail here – often a sign of authenticity. According to the
Recognitions
, ‘much blood was shed’, followed by ‘a confused flight, in the midst of which the Enemy attacked James, and threw him
headlong from the top of the steps
’. This, of course, is James’ ‘
headlong
’ fall from the Temple Pinnacle in Jerome,
etc
.

The version we have before us is from Rufinus’ Latin. There is no Greek version, which is not surprising, but there is a Syriac one – again, not surprisingly. In it, this passage reads as follows: ‘A certain man, who was an Enemy, with a few others came into the Temple near the altar. He cried out, saying: “What are you doing, O Children of Israel? Are you so easily carried away by these miserable men, who stray after a magician (this, of course, a reference to Jesus)?”’
29
Argumentation then followed, and just at the point, when he was about to

be overcome (in debate) by James the Bishop, he began to create a great commotion, so that matters that were being correctly and calmly explained could not be either properly examined, nor understood and believed. At that point, he raised an outcry over the weakness and foolishness of the Priests, reproaching them and crying out, ‘Why do you delay? Why do you not immediately seize all those who are with him?’ Then he rose and was first to seize a firebrand from the altar (that is, ‘the faggot’ in the Talmudic accounts of the young men among the Priests seizing clubs and beating someone – even a High Priest – serving at the altar in a state of uncleanness) and began beating (people) with it. The rest of the Priests, when they saw him, then followed his example. In the panic-stricken flight that ensued, some fell over others and others were beaten.

Here, then, is the parallel to the young men of ‘the bolder sort’ allied to the High Priests, beating the Poorer Priests on the threshing floors that immediately precedes Josephus’ introduction of the Herodian he is calling ‘Saulus’ and the picture in Book Twenty of the
Antiquities
of the various brawls on the Temple Mount between ‘Zealots’ and the High Priests.

One should also note in these Pseudoclementine accounts the allusion to an escape or ‘flight’. In both Latin and Syriac recensions, this ‘flight’ continues down to Jericho. This idea of a flight is in turn picked up in Flight traditions of the early Church, specifically related to the Jerusalem Church of James the Just. This later ‘Flight’, which is supposed to have occurred some time prior to the fall of the Temple, is known as the ‘Pella Flight’ tradition. The one in
Recognitions
occurs in the early 40’s. It is directly paralleled by the notice in the Book of Acts of a similar ‘flight’ after the stoning of Stephen and the riot Paul leads after that (8:1). In Acts’ rather telescoped and somewhat inverted historical chronology, this ‘flight’ purportedly included everyone in the Church ‘except the Apostles’ and leads directly to the confrontation between Peter and Simon
Magus
in ‘Samaria’ (8:9–25).

The reason ‘the Apostles’ were not included in this flight is obvious. Immediately thereafter, according to the logic of Acts’ rather topsy-turvy or collapsed narrative, they are, once again, in Jerusalem as if nothing had happened. The flight in the Pseudoclementines is also on the part of the whole Community, now estimated at some ‘five thousand’ souls, but this is to
the Jericho area
. This number for the members of the Community is paralleled in Acts 4:4 (‘and the number of the men became about five thousand’), also amid confrontations between the Apostles and the rulers of the people in the Temple and probably on the Temple stairs!

To continue in the language of the Syriac: ‘Much blood poured from those that had been killed. Now the Enemy
cast James down from the top of the stairs
(both Latin and Syriac use the word ‘top’ here), but since he fell as if he were dead, he did not (venture) to hit him a second time.’ Not only does ‘the top of the stairs’ metamorphose, as these accounts are conflated with James’ stoning, into ‘the Pinnacle of the Temple’, but the telltale allusion to ‘casting down’ is central to both groups of sources.

The Latin version of Rufinus expressed this as follows: ‘The Enemy
attacked James
and
threw him headlong from the top of the stairs
and, thinking him dead, cared not to inflict further violence on him.’

The account of this bloody mêlée is then followed by the Disciples going to ‘
James’ house
’ in Jerusalem with his seemingly ‘lifeless body’. Here they ‘spent the night
in prayer
’. This is, of course, paralleled by the notice in Acts about Peter going to ‘Mary the mother of
John Mark’s house
’ to leave a message for ‘James and the brothers’, where in Acts’ picture too, ‘many are gathered
and praying
’ (12:12–17). Anyone should be able to appreciate not only that both accounts are integrally related, but the kind of purposeful obfuscation that is going on in Acts.