James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls I (74 page)

In 2 Corinthians 3:1, again employing the imagery of spiritualized Temple and sacrifice and the allegorizing approach, he so loves, Paul pointedly picks up this issue of ‘
written
credentials’ – these obviously, as per Pseudoclementine tradition, from James. Paul asks rhetorically, though none-the-less bitingly:

Do we start again to recommend ourselves?
Unlike some who need either letters to you or from you to recommend themselves
(here his use of ‘
some
’ again, usually reserved for contemptuous reference to those of the ‘Jamesian’ orientation),
you are our letter
,
having been inscribed
in our hearts
, being known and read by all men, showing that
you are Christ’s Letter served by us
, not being written with ink, not on
tablets of stone
, but with the Spirit of the Living God
on the fleshly tablets of the heart
.

In his riposte here, Paul achieves several things. Not only do we have incredible figurative language here, but he makes it clear that the people with whom he is arguing
care about written things, particularly ‘stone tablets’, by which he clearly means the Ten Commandments
. Moreover, these persons
are inside not outside the Church
; and,
heaping scorn on those who require ‘written appointments’ and documentary ‘recommendations’ to serve as Apostles
, he uses his favourite rhetorical device of ‘
teaching spiritual things by the Spirit
’ to do so (1 Cor. 2:13 and Rom. 2:29).

He goes on in 2 Corinthians 3:6 to use this kind of
spiritualized imagery
or
allegorization
to attack
the written letter of the Law
: ‘
for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life
’. Here is the ‘
Holy Spirit
’ language, upon which his own legitimacy and ministry so rest; but, as in the Letter to the Romans, now tied to the ‘
spiritualizing
’ process generally. The chasm here is that Paul is using
poetic
rhetorical devices to reply to interlocutors who are basically using
legal
concepts. It is an unbridgeable one.

Warming to this imagery, Paul now attacks both ‘the Law’ and ‘Moses’, the foundation pieces of the people opposing him, obviously meant to include James and the rest of the
Jewish
Apostles and ‘Jerusalem Church’ Leadership – and the standpoint of the Qumran literature as well – referring to all of these in one of the most biting aspersions conceivable, as ‘
the Service of death cut in letters into stone
’ (2 Cor. 3:7). At the same time and always mindful of this issue of ‘letters of recommendation’, he evokes his idea of ‘the New Covenant’, which will now be ‘not of the letter but of Spirit’ (2 Cor. 3:6). Here the ‘New Covenant’ in the body and blood of Jesus Christ is presented as being opposed to
physical
letters – whether those sent out to certify its Apostles or those on stone – and totally allegorized.

Picking up, then, the imagery of ‘Glory’ and ‘splendour’ – in this instance, ‘the splendour on Moses’ face’, which he says ‘was bound to cease’ – Paul now contrasts it with his own ‘Service’ or ‘the Ministry of the Spirit in Glory’ (2 Cor. 3:8). Not only are we playing once again on ‘the Son of Man coming in Glory’, already encountered with regard to James’ proclamation in the Temple above; but one should compare the use here of this word ‘serve’ or ‘Service’, namely ‘the Service of the Spirit’, with how the ‘Service’ of the Spouter of Lying is characterized in the Habakkuk
Pesher
: as the ‘Service of Vanity’ or ‘a Worthless Service’.
1

Paul’s use in this context too of phrases like ‘the Servants of the New Covenant’ and ‘the Service of Righteousness in Glory’ (2 Cor. 3:9) will be played on later in 2 Corinthians by the use of the phrase ‘the Servants of Righteousness’ to attack those he will call ‘Super Apostles’ and even ‘Pseudo-Apostles’ (2 Cor. 11:13 and 11:15).

At this point, carried away by his enthusiasm for the spiritualizing imagery he is employing, Paul makes one of the most outrageous accusations ever made by one religion against another. He evokes an episode from Exodus in the Old Testament. When emerging from the Tent of Meeting, after speaking with God face to face, Moses veils himself so that the Children of Israel will not be irradiated from his brilliance or ‘splendour’ at having been in the Presence of God (Exod. 34:33). Paul rather asserts that Moses ‘put a veil over his face, so that the Children of Israel would not notice the end of what had to fade’ (3:13)! In other words, Moses was a deceiver and a charlatan, who veiled himself because he did not want the Children of Israel to see there was no ‘splendour’ associated with his relationship with God and the revelation of the Law consonant upon it. Regardless of the thrust of the various imageries being used or the rightness or wrongness of the polemics involved, no more scurrilous accusation has ever been recorded by the founder of one major world religion against that of another.

The relationship of these imageries to Jewish Mysticism of the Middle Ages makes it fair to ask whether this kind of thinking was actually already functioning in Paul’s time. The very ‘splendour’ used to describe the brilliance on Moses’ face as a result of his encounter with God becomes the title of the most representative and well-known document of this underground Jewish mystical religious tradition, popularly known as
Kabbalah
, ‘The
Zohar
’ or ‘
Book of Splendour
’.

Paul’s Attacks on the ‘Apostles of the Highest Degree’

At the end of 2 Corinthians, Paul responds to the charge that, though he writes strong and powerful letters at a distance, in person his body is feeble, his speech even feebler. He does so by attacking ‘some’ who ‘write their own recommendations, who, measuring themselves by themselves and comparing themselves to themselves, lack all understanding’ (10:10–12).

Unctuous and self-deprecating, yet biting in the extreme, Paul refers now to the ‘Authority which
the Lord
gave’ him – meaning
not
that which the Apostles or James gave him. He does so in terms of ‘building up and not tearing down’ (2 Cor. 10:8), while at the same time starting to employ his language of ‘boasting’, which for him will serve as a substitute for
written credentials
. In 1 Corinthians 8:1–13, attacking those with ‘weak consciences’, who make ‘stumbling blocks’ over ‘things sacrificed to idols’, and evoking the Piety Commandment of ‘loving God’ – evoked to exactly opposite effect in the Letter of James 2:5–14 – it is rather ‘Love’ that ‘builds up’, as opposed to ‘Knowledge’ which ‘puffs up’.

In fact, this same ‘puffing up’ language will be used in the Habakkuk
Pesher
, in the prelude to its interpretation of the all-important Habakkuk 2:4 – ‘the Righteous shall live by his Faith’, to attack those disagreeing with its interpretation (as well as that of Habakkuk 2:3 on ‘the Delay of the
Parousia
’ preceding it), who ‘will not be pleased with their Judgement’. Not only is this ‘puffed up’ allusion based on the language of Habakkuk 2:4, but the
Pesher
actually refers to the Righteous Teacher as the person ‘in whose heart God put
the Knowledge
to interpret all of the words of His Servants the Prophets’.
2

In both these passages, Paul is using the same ‘building’ metaphor with which he began 1 Corinthians, where he referred to himself as the ‘architect’ of God’s Community and the ‘building’ which was Christ (1 Cor. 3:9–14). This is important for determining the historical provenance of Qumran aspersions on ‘
the Spouter of Lying
’ in the Habakkuk
Pesher
, which as part of its attack on his
‘Vain’ or ‘Worthless Service’, refers to ‘the Liar’ as ‘misleading Many to build’ a Congregation (‘Church’) on ‘Lying’ and ‘blood’ ‘for the sake of his Glory’
.

Again, warming to his subject and the motifs of ‘
boasting
’ and his own ‘
foolishness
’, Paul protests that he ‘
does not lie
’ and turns his opponents’ accusations against them,
attacking ‘those people’ he bitterly describes as ‘Pseudo-Apostles
,
Lying workmen disguising themselves as Apostles of Christ
’ (2 Cor. 11:13). The assurance that he is ‘
not Lying
’ encountered here is repeated not only in Galatians, but throughout Romans. In vituperative language such as ‘
Lying workmen disguising themselves as Apostles of Christ’ and ‘Pseudo’ or ‘Counterfeit Apostles
’, one sees again the typical inversions of key themes in the Scrolls which by now are becoming so familiar.

Paul asks rhetorically: ‘And no wonder, for
even Satan disguises himself as an Angel of Light
; it is no great thing that his servants disguise themselves as
Servants of Righteousness
, whose
End shall be according to their works
’ (2 Cor. 11:14–15). Of course, not only does Paul identify the individuals he has in mind by the linguistic inversions he uses and the pun he makes on their principal doctrine –
their ‘End shall be according to’ the ‘works’ they so extolled
– but the allusion to ‘
the Servants of Righteousness
’ exactly parallels the kind of emphases one encounters at Qumran and in all traditions relating to James – including the Letter in his name.

Losing control of his ‘
Tongue
’ almost completely now – as even he acknowledges – Paul makes it unmistakably clear that his opponents in the Church actually are ‘
Hebrews
’ not others. In passing, one should also note the relation of this loss of control to
the aspersion on ‘the Tongue’ being ‘an uncontrollable Evil, full of death-bringing poison
’ in the Letter of James (3:5–12) and the derogations on ‘
the Pourer out of Lying’/‘Spouter of Lying
’ or ‘
Comedian
’ at Qumran.

But if anyone wants brazenness –
I am still talking as fool
– then I can be just as brazen.
Hebrews are they?
So am I.
Israelites are they?
So am I.
Of the seed of Abraham are they?
So am I.
Servants of Christ are they?
I must be insane to have to say this, but
so am I,
and
more than they, more because I have worked harder
. (2 Cor. 11:21–23)

It is also significant that when speaking of himself, as in Philippians, Paul never calls himself ‘
a Jew
’ – a term that even the Dead Sea Scrolls attest was current in this period – only
a ‘Hebrew’, an ‘Israelite’, and ‘of the seed of Abraham’
. Whether Paul means by these allusions simply his affiliation to ‘
Benjamin
’ – ‘
Benjamin’ not being ‘Jewish’ per se
(meaning,
of ‘the Tribe’ or ‘House of Judah’
) only
Israelite
– or a further manipulation through the common ancestor, ‘
Bela‘
’ or ‘
Belah
’, shared in the Bible by Benjaminites and Edomites (or Idumaeans) which would then include Herodians as well, is impossible to say.

Given his emphasis on being of ‘
the seed of Abraham
’ and his theological concentration on the same individual – a claim, which will have particular relevance for those in the area of Edessa (or Haran in Northern Syria, Abraham’s city of origin) and probably Adiabene (and presaging the later one on behalf of all ‘Arabs’ by Muhammad in Islam and which Herodians as ‘Edomites’ also probably claimed) – I would be disposed to respond in the affirmative – that Paul was alluding to wider, so-called ‘
Benjaminite
’ affiliations, whatever he meant by these.

Again Paul goes on to make it very clear with whom he is arguing and who his opponents are in the matter of Apostleship and the necessary letters of recommendation accompanying it – high-minded and poetic assaults on the superfluousness of such ‘unspiritual’ letters notwithstanding – when he goes on to refer to ‘danger from
pseudo-brothers
’ (2 Cor. 11:26), which parallels the reference to ‘
Pseudo-Apostles as Lying workmen disguising themselves as Apostles of Christ
’ preceding it (2 Cor. 11:13). It is, therefore, ‘brothers’ of some kind, to whom he is replying.

Ending his response to his lack of credentials, he contends that he has been forced to ‘become a fool’ because, instead of ‘commending’ him – again the play on letters of recommendation here – his communities have forced him to boast of his achievements and, as the Letter of James and even the Dead Sea Scrolls would put it,
lose control over his Tongue
.