James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls I (67 page)

The Enemy, then, in front of the Priests, promised the High Priest Caiaphas that he would kill (the Latin uses the word ‘arrest’ here, as does Acts) all those believing in Jesus. He set out for Damascus to go as one carrying letters from them, so that wherever he went, those who did not believe would help him destroy those who did. He wanted to go there first, because he thought that Peter had gone there.

Where this application of the ‘Enemy’ terminology to Paul is concerned, one should remark that in his prefatory Letter to James, Peter describes how: ‘Some from among the Gentiles have rejected my legal preaching and rather attached themselves to the lawless and trifling preaching of the man who is my Enemy.’
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The note in the
Recognitions
above about James either being ‘taken for dead’ or being ‘half dead’ is picked up in Jerome’s later account of the attack on James in the 60’s, culminating in his
stoning
. As we have seen, it combines Josephus and other early Church sources, but also includes the important notice about ‘his legs being broken’ based on the point in the
Recognitions
that follows – Peter speaking to Zacchaeus about a month later in Caesarea – that James was ‘still lame on one foot’ (1.73). That is, Jerome, obviously operating off additional interesting data, has conflated all three sources into a single whole.

This brings us back to the account in the Gospel of John above about how, after giving Jesus vinegar to drink, the soldiers ‘when they saw he was already dead … did not
break his legs
’. Rather they ‘
broke the legs
’ of the two that were crucified with him, after ‘the Jews asked Pilate that
their legs might be broken
’ (19:31–34). Not only is this repetition of the ‘legs being broken’ theme too insistent to believe that John does not know something more, but immediately preceding this, directly after the notice of the soldiers who crucify Jesus supposedly ‘dividing up his clothes’ to ‘fulfill’ Psalm 22:18 (19:24), John also refers to a ‘house’. But this ‘house’ turns out to be the ‘house’ of ‘the Disciple Jesus loved’, in connection with which John now evokes Jesus’ mother as well and, in another total absurdity which we shall address further below, ‘
his mother’s sister
Mary the wife of Clopas’ (19:25).

In Matthew 27:56, this woman is called ‘Mary the mother of James and Joses and the mother of the sons of Zebedee’; in Mark 15:40, ‘Mary the Mother of James the Less and Joses, and Salome’. As John 19:25–27 pictures the exchange at this point, Jesus in some of his last words upon the cross, seeing ‘the Disciple whom he loved
standing by
’, says to his
mother
, ‘(This is) your son’, and to the Disciple, in words almost proverbial, ‘“(This is) your mother”, and from that hour the Disciple took her into
his own home
’. This ‘house’ is clearly none other than ‘the house of James’, just encountered in the Pseudoclementine
Recognitions
account of the flight of those carrying James to his house above – refracted too in Acts 12:12’s account of
Peter’s flight
and going to leave a message for ‘James and the brothers’ at ‘the house of Mary
the mother of John Mark
’!

Not only do we have the key motif in the first two of these notices of taking someone ‘to’ or ‘into’ a ‘home’ in Jerusalem, connected in some manner to personages belonging to
the family of Jesus
, but the Mary involved in the last of these has a son called ‘John Mark’. In the first, she is instructed by ‘the Disciple Jesus loved’, usually taken to be another ‘John’, the so-called ‘
brother of James
’, ‘the son of Zebedee’. But most telling of all, in addition to the motif about a
house
he owns in Jerusalem, this Disciple is now
adopted as Mary’s own son
and by extension, therefore, James’ and Jesus’ brother! All of this is just too incredible to be believed. Nor, we can be sure, are all these coincidences and overlaps accidental. The Pseudoclementine account of a house owned by James in Jerusalem is the authentic or more straightforward one. All the others, including ‘the upper room’ where ‘Mary the mother of Jesus and his brothers’ ‘steadfastly continued in one accord with prayer and supplication’ and to which all the Apostles – including ‘Judas (the brother) of James’ – retreat in Acts 1:13–14, are either variations on this or obfuscations of it.

The Flight of James’ Community to Jericho

To return to the language of Rufinus’ Latin version of the Pseudoclementine
Recognitions
, not only is James not dead, but
only injured
, his associates carry him ‘after evening came and the Priests shut up the Temple … to
the house of James
’.
Then ‘before daylight’, with some five thousand others
– the number of the early Community in Acts and those called ‘Essenes’ in Josephus –
they ‘went down to Jericho
’. There,
three days later
, they receive word ‘
that the Enemy had received a commission from Caiaphas, the Chief Priest, that he should arrest all who believed in Jesus, and should go to Damascus with his letters and that there also, employing the help of the unbelievers, he should raise havoc among the Faithful
’ (1:71).

For the Book of Acts, Paul, ‘having come to bring those bound to the Chief Priests, ever increasing in power, threw the Jews who were dwelling in Damascus into confusion (by the manner in which) he proved this is the Christ’ (9:21–22).
As usual then, ‘the Jews plotted to kill him
’.

However, for its part in the
Recognitions
, when James is ‘thrown down headlong’ from the ‘top of the Temple stairs’ by the Enemy Paul and ‘left for dead’, he only broke  one or both his legs (that is, rather than be killed). This is made clear in what subsequently follows in both recensions – Rufinus’ Latin and the Syriac – because ‘thirty days’ later, when the Enemy Paul ‘passed through Jericho on the way to Damascus’; James, ‘
still limping on one foot’
from his fall, sends out Peter from somewhere outside Jericho – where the Community had gone –
on his first missionary journey with orders to confront Simon Magus in Caesarea
.

Not only do we have the incredible detail of his ‘
still limping on one foot
’ here, but also that of the entire Community having fled to a location somewhere outside of Jericho echoes. This, not only resonates with the site where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, but also the references in thoof the Community’s own ‘flights’ or exoduses to ‘the Land of Damascus’. Again the precision in geographical detail of the
Recognitions
in such matters is far superior to Acts. In the
Clementines
, we only have to wrestle with whether James fell from the top of the Temple steps or the Pinnacle of the Temple; whereas in Acts we have to do with
disembodied spirits, tablecloths from Heaven, individuals supposed to be on their way to Gaza but ending up in Caesarea instead, ‘Ethiopian’ eunuchs, ‘a prophet called Agabus’
, and similar flights-of-fancy.

In Acts’ portrait of parallel events: after ‘Saul agreed to Stephen’s death’, ‘a great persecution broke out that day against the Assembly which was in Jerusalem and all were scattered throughout the countries of Judea and Samaria
except the Apostles
’ (8:1). First then ‘Philip went down to a city in Samaria (unnamed) and proclaimed the Christ to them’ (8:5). There, he cast out evil spirits, healed the blind and the lame, and encountered Simon
Magus
, who, ‘amazed at the signs and great works of Power (our Ebionite/Elchasaite ‘
Power
’ language again) being done’, was baptized (8:13). ‘And when the Apostles in Jerusalem heard that Samaria had received the word of God, they sent Peter and John to them’ (8:14). There follow confrontations over ‘the laying on of the hands’, pictured in the Letter of Clement to James, at the beginning of the Pseudoclementine
Homilies
, as the ceremony Peter used to make Clement his successor as Bishop of Rome. Following this in
Homilies
1:6, Jesus is pictured as ‘receiving
Power from God
… to make the deaf hear, the blind see … and to cast out every demon’.

Here in Acts, this ‘
laying on of the hands
’ is connected with the receipt of the Pauline ‘Holy Spirit’, for which Simon
Magus
, pictured as full of ‘the gall of bitterness and the chains of Unrighteousness’, first wishes – as we saw – to offer the Apostles ‘Riches’ (8:19–23). Then he ‘repents’ and the episode closes with the three of them together ‘
preaching the Gospel in many villages of the Samaritans
’ (8:18 and 8:25 – nothing about ‘Caesarea’ at this point, soon however).

Of the utmost importance in Acts, before Paul, ‘
still breathing out threats and manslaughter against the Lord’s Disciples
’, gets his letters from the High Priest on his way to Damascus (9:1–30), there interposes the curious episode about Philip and the Treasurer of the Ethiopian Queen Kandakes, whom Acts also designates, equally importantly, as a
‘
eunuch’ and who agrees to ‘
go into the water’ and be baptized
(8:26–39). We shall see below how this episode relates to the conversion, described in Josephus, of Queen Helen of Adiabene in Northern Mesopotamia. A favourite character in the
Talmud
too, she sends her purchase agents – possibly including Paul – to Palestine and further afield,
to buy grain because of
the Famine
. It is, in connection with this, that Acts’ method of historical transformation and retrospective obliteration and will be totally revealed.
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Paralleling these events for the
Recognitions
James, ‘
still limping on one foot
’
from the injury he received in his ‘headlong’ fall down the Temple steps
– it is important to note, once again, this incredible but down-to-earth and not fantastic detail, having missed Paul when he passed through Jericho on his way ‘to Damascus’, received word from someone called ‘Zacchaeus’ in Caesarea ‘
that one Simon, a Samaritan magician was leading many of our people astray and creating factional strife
’. Again, it is worth repeating the description of him in the
Recognitions
: ‘He claimed to be
the Standing One
, or in other words,
the Christ
and
the Great Power
(literally the meaning given the denotation ‘
Elchasai
’ in Epiphanius)
in Heaven, which is superior to the Creator of the world
, while at the same time working many miracles’ (1.72 – the Syriac adds ‘by magic’).

James then sends out Peter on what amounts to the first missionary journey, adjuring him to ‘
send me in writing every year an account of your sayings and doings, and especially at the end of every seven years
’. Not only does this first missionary journey by Peter seem to arise somewhere in the neighbourhood of Jericho, that is, not far as just noted from present-day Qumran; but the Pseudoclementine
Recognitions
, yet again, evinces by this commission no doubt that James is the Supreme Ruler of the early Church even above Peter. At this point in Acts, the same character ‘James’
hasn’t even put in an appearance
– only the other ‘James’.

Peter then goes to Caesarea and ‘
Zacchaeus’ house
’, where he is to stay. It is at this point, when Zacchaeus asks after James that Peter tells him he was ‘
still limping on one foot
’, because when he ‘
was called by the Priests and Caiaphas the High Priest to the Temple, James, the Archbishop, stood on the top of the steps
’, when ‘
an Enemy did everything I have already mentioned and need not repeat
’ (1.73).

Curiously, so deeply has the author of the Pseudoclementines imbibed the fact and so deeply is it embedded in his narrative that James broke either one or both his legs in his fall, that he does not even say it
per se
, rather only giving us the effects of this fall thirty days later, when according to Peter James is ‘still limping on one foot’. It is Jerome, also the heir of Palestinian tradition, who first tells us two or more centuries later that
James’ ‘legs were broken’
in the fall, now assimilated into the narrative of James’ stoning and final demise. Nothing could better show us the authenticity and intimate detail of this First Book of the
Recognitions
– deleted from the
Homilies
– than this.

Curiously, too, this episode has its counterpart in the Gospels in chapters 18–19 of the Gospel of Luke – the author also credited with Acts. In this episode (18:35), not James nor even Peter, but now rather Jesus ‘
drew near to Jericho
’ just as Paul in Acts (9:3) on his way to his fateful vision ‘drew near to Damascus’ (Acts 9:3 – unrecorded in the
Recognitions
). Still, like Paul in the Pseudoclementines, Jesus, ‘
having entered, passed through Jericho
’ – only the itinerary is just the reverse. ‘Jesus’ is not on his way to Damascus or Caesarea, but to his fateful demise in Jerusalem (Luke 19:1).