James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls I (8 page)

Not only does Antipater successfully ingratiate himself with Pompey and his adjutants – the most well known of whom was Mark Anthony – but he ends up as the first Roman Procurator in Palestine and the ultimate arbiter of political events there. Mark Anthony, who distinguished himself in Palestinian campaigning, ultimately abets Antipater’s son Herod in obtaining the Jewish Crown. Herod finishes the job of obliterating the Maccabean family. Those he doesn’t execute he marries but, even these, he eventually butchers including his favourite wife Mariamme, the last Maccabean Princess, in the aftermath of his trip to Rome to get Octavius to reconfirm the crown Anthony had conferred on him (29 BCE). In the end, Herod even had his two sons by her – who had been brought up in Rome – put to death, presumably because he was jealous of their Maccabean blood and because the crowd preferred them to him. Here Herod really did
kill all the
Jewish children
who sought to replace him, as Matthew 2:17 would have it, but these were rather his own children with Maccabean blood! This behaviour shocked even his Roman sponsors, particularly Augustus, who upheld family values and was by all reports very displeased with it.
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But Herod survived all, got away with everything, including obliterating the Maccabean family and grafting his own family on whatever remained of it. This mostly-Idumaean, Greco-Arab line continued for three more generations until Titus, the man responsible for burning Jerusalem, made
off with Bernice, a descendant of this line, as Caesar and Anthony had
made off with Cleopatra – one of the last descendants of Alexander’s ruling élite – before him. Nor does this give any more pleasure to the people of Rome – who do not appear to have wished to see an Herodian Princess as their Empress, than Caesar’s and Anthony’s actions had done previously. Bernice’s fate is uncertain, but Titus seems to have put her away at some point prior to succeeding his father in 79 CE.

Herod also had the last Maccabean High Priest, Mariamme’s younger brother Jonathan, put to death in 36 BCE when he reached the age of majority. Herod’s marriage with the last Maccabean Princess, Mariamme, would appear to have been contracted by her mother, Hyrcanus II’s daughter, on the basis that Jonathan would become the High Priest on reaching majority.

Josephus records the pathetic scene of how, when the boy at thirteen years of age donned the High Priestly vestments, the Jewish crowd wept when he appeared in the Temple (
War
1.437/
Ant
. 14.50-56).
For those who would still cling to the contention that the people considered the Maccabean family usurpers, this should
provide vivid testimony to the contrary. Wild with jealousy, Herod then
had the boy taken down to his winter palace in Jericho and drowned while he was frolicking in the swimming pool with some of his attendants. He was
the
last Maccabean High Priest
.

After this, Herod is careful to maintain personal control over the High Priestly garments and appoints men, as Josephus himself observes, ‘who were not of eminent families, some hardly priests at all’ (
Ant
. 20.247).
Once instituted, this was the policy followed by procurators such as Pontius Pilate after him (26–37 CE;
Ant.
20.6–16)
and kings such as Agrippa I, his brother Herod of Chalcis, and his son, Bernice’s brother Agrippa II, until the Uprising against Rome. At this time ‘the Zealots’ elected their own High Priest, a lowly stone-cutter of the humblest origins whom Josephus calls ‘Phannius’, that is,
Phineas
. Such were the bloody origins of the Herodian High Priest class, tendentiously portrayed in the New Testament as the legitimate ‘Chief Priests’ and Sadducee party of the Jews!

At Herod’s death, after he had indulged in all the cruelty and brutalities enumerated above and the total destruction of the national independence of the Jews and their previous royal priest line, revolutionary unrest began in earnest and continued for the next seventy years. This was possibly understood by exegetes like those at Qumran as the seventy-year period of ‘Wrath’ mentioned in Daniel 9:2. It continued until the outbreak of the War against Rome.

Actually, it continued for the next hundred and forty years until Hadrian crushed the Second Jewish Revolt in 132–6 CE and renamed Jerusalem Aelia Capitolina. He forbade Jews to enter Jerusalem or even to come within eyesight of it, except once a year to mourn its past glories. During this period, too, descendants of the family of Jesus and his brothers were involved in ongoing Messianic agitation and were martyred in their turn. This was the end of the earthbound Messianic hopes among the Jews, hopes that gradually turned more other-worldly, ethereal, or ‘Gnostic’. This is what the imposition of Roman control really meant – destruction.

Chapter 4

First Century Sources Mentioning James

The New Testament and the We Document
in Acts

The two most authentic testimonies to James’ approach and role in the Jerusalem Church of his day are to be found in Paul’s letters and in the second half of the Book of Acts, primarily in the document scholars refer to as ‘the We Document’. Intruding variously after line 16:10, it seems to be a diary or travel document of some kind. For some, it is the only authentic material in Acts, though it is neither without problems nor continuous.

Had we to rely simply on Acts’ presentation without Paul’s definitive identifications, we would be in grave doubt as to just who this very powerful and popular James, described so reticently by Luke – the putative author of Acts – really was. James just appears out of nowhere in Acts 12, the same chapter that the more widely known other James, ‘
James the brother of
John’
, ‘
the son of Zebedee
’, is conveniently disposed of. Later we shall see how this execution relates to a parallel and more convincing one Josephus mentions at this time, the beheading of someone he calls ‘
Theudas
’.
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James’ identity and ideology are as solid as Paul’s, because it is Paul who confirms them. What is more, Paul
never
mentions any
other
James. But Paul knows next to nothing about the person, ideology, and life of Jesus except as an individual in Heaven he considers himself to be in direct communication with via a mechanism he and Acts both – not to mention the Dead Sea Scrolls’ Community Rule – refer to as the ‘Holy Spirit’. This being, whom Paul calls ‘Christ Jesus’, often appears to be a carbon copy of Paul himself. So dubious did his claims regarding him appear to his opponents – and this
within the Church
, not outside it – that Paul was even mocked in his own lifetime as either a man of dreams or a ‘Liar’.
Aside from James, the only identifiable Apostle who emerges in any substantial manner from Paul’s letters is ‘
Cephas
’. The portrait that emerges in these letters, not surprisingly, does not mesh with the one in Acts, to say nothing of the one in the Gospels.

Though there is continuing discussion among scholars about aspects of the Pauline corpus, there is general agreement on the authenticity of the main, particularly those letters of principal concern to us in this book like Galatians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Romans, and Philippians. These give us insight of the most intimate kind into the mind of Paul and historical insight into this period, which no defender of the integrity of the early Church and its doctrines would have had the slightest interest in forging or, for that matter, even preserving.

Here, it is perhaps edifying to cite a general rule: one should treat very cautiously any material reflecting the known or dominant theological position of the final redactors of a given document. Where authenticity is concerned, one is often on safer ground settling on traditions that seem
surprising or incongruous in some manner,
or on traditions that would have a damaging effect on the theological consistency of that document. This is precisely the kind of material one would have expected to have been edited out or refurbished if it could have been, that is, had not the tradition behind its authenticity been widely disseminated, persistent, or very strong.

This is the case with the Letter of James. It is also the case with some of the severe character deficiencies that emerge where Paul is concerned, not only in his own letters, but also in the Book of Acts, accurate or not. These include his insubordination, jealousy, incessant bragging and vindictiveness. As an example of a tradition surprising in its content, one could cite Paul’s attestation that Jesus not only had brothers, but that they
traveled with women (1 Cor. 9:5).

In the Gospels, to cite an obvious example, there is the presentation of Jesus’ Apostles as being
armed
at the time of his arrest (Mt 26:54). Jarring anecdotes such as these are just the kind of material that would have been remembered in contradistinction to lengthy speeches or parables. The treatment of Jesus’ close family, including his mother and his brothers in the early parts of the Gospels – not to mention Jewish Apostles like Peter – verges on the slanderous. The material relating to James in Acts is of this kind as well. Were it not authentic and strongly supported, it is probable someone would have wished to delete it at some point. The downplaying of James in Christian tradition is important, not only where doctrine is concerned, but also because it is clear that James, as head of the Jerusalem Church and all that could be considered Christianity at the time, was superior to both Peter and Paul.

Paul, of course, repeatedly points out his personal disagreement with the rulings James makes and the instructions he receives from him. He even denigrates the authority of those he calls ‘leaders’, ‘Pillars’, ‘Archapostles’, ‘who consider themselves important’, or ‘write their own references’, and often displays his unwillingness to follow their views.
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He never, however, contests James’ legitimate right to exercise the position he occupies, nor the fact of his authority. In Galatians he makes it clear, too, that the character he calls either Peter or Cephas was subservient to James and not only obliged, but willing, to defer to James’ leadership (Gal. 2:11–12).

Luke’s reticence with regard to James in Acts contrasts markedly with the attitude of other groups relegated to sectarian status after the rise of Overseas Gentile Christianity to dominance. For these groups, James is the undisputed successor to Jesus and certainly the principal leader of all early Christianity. A particularly impressive example of this is to be found in the Gospel of Thomas. Here, in answer to the question by the Disciples, ‘After you have gone who will be great over us?’, Jesus replies, ‘In the place where you are to go, go to James the Just for whose sake Heaven and Earth came into existence’ (
Gos Th
12).

This statement is at odds with the orthodox tradition of the succession of
Peter
; it represents nothing less than the lost tradition of the direct appointment of James as successor to his brother. It is upheld by everything we know about groups that were expelled from orthodox Christianity in the years prior to and following Constantine’s adoption of it as the official religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century. Many of these groups dispersed into a variety of sectarian groupings in the Syrian and Iraqi deserts, leading to a plethora of theological movements in the areas of Northern Mesopotamia and Syria. Some disappeared into Arabia only to re-emerge as Islam, in particular, as time went on, in its Shi‘ite embodiment.

Pauline Christianity versus Jamesian:
Anti-Semitism in the Gospels

In using the letters of Paul as our primary source material, we are on the firmest ground conceivable, for these are indisputably the earliest reliable documents of Christianity. They are patently earlier than the Gospels or the Book of Acts, which are themselves in large part doctrinally dependent upon Paul. Acts to some extent is dependent on Paul’s letters for historical information as well.

The interrelationships between the four Gospels, particularly the three Synoptics (so called because of their use of a common source or sources), are probably far more complex than most conceive. Take, for example, the Synoptic most people consider to be the most Jewish, the Gospel of Matthew. It is considered the most ‘Jewish’ because of the amount of Law-oriented material it contains, particularly in the Sermon on the Mount (5:1–7:29), and because of its extensive evocation of biblical proof texts. Yet Matthew also contains a stratum of anti-Semitic material sometimes even more extreme than that found in the other Gospels – for example, the cry of the assembled Jewish masses, when Pilate hesitates to condemn Jesus, ‘his blood be on us and our children’ (27:25). This has echoed down the ages, the famous – or infamous – ‘blood libel’ in Christian history.

Who could conceive of a crowd
en masse
uttering such an absurd statement? The answer is simple. No crowd ever did; it is based on a retrospective presentation of subsequent theology that certainly became concretized in the wake of the perspective exhibited by Paul and which by the time of Eusebius had grown to rich fruition, as the latter demonstrates over and over again in the viciousness of his invective.
3

There are many examples of this kind in the Gospels, the relationships between which are so complex that no one will probably ever be able to sort them out to everyone’s satisfaction. From internal textual considerations alone, however, it is possible to show that all the Gospels probably made their appearance after the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE. This date, as has been explained, turns out to be a watershed for almost all the literary developments and movements that need to be discussed.