James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls I (9 page)

In reality, a far-reaching consensus has emerged among scholars on this issue – we are speaking here of the date of the actual documents themselves, not the various traditions many contend underlie them. This is no mean circumstance, for it explains many things about them, not the least of which being the paucity of sound historical material and in some cases the outright historical dissimulation and disinformation they contain.

The only serious remaining debate on this issue centers around the Gospel of Mark. From the same internal textual considerations already noted, it is possible to show that Mark, too, was written after the fall of the Temple in 70 CE. The whole nature of its anti-Jewish polemic and opposition to the family and brothers of Jesus, on the one hand, and its pro-Peter orientation, on the other, distinguish it as having appeared
after the
destruction of the Jerusalem centre
– in particular,
after the attempt by the
Roman Community
to represent itself as the legitimate heir to Jesus and ‘the Messianic Movement’ he represented, however absurd this might have seemed to any objective observer at the time.

What could be more suitable, heralded as it was by the massive triumphal procession through the streets of Rome to mark the glorious triumphs of Vespasian and his son Titus, commemorated in the works of Josephus and the Arch of Titus that still stands next to the Roman Forum today? Here, the surrender of the Jews to the
Imperium Romanum
was taken, as it were, in perpetuity.

There are, in fact, several veiled references to events of this kind in the Gospel of Mark, for instance, in the introduction to the Little Apocalypse, where Jesus is made to predict the utter destruction of the Temple (13:1–2) and in the Apocalypse itself, when the Pauline Mission is anticipated (13:9–10) – but, even more importantly, in the depiction of the rending of the Temple veil at his death (Mk 15:38 and pars.). This veil was more than likely damaged in the final Roman assault on the Temple or in the various altercations and the turmoil preceding this. Josephus specifically refers to it, along with its replacement materials, as having been delivered over to the Romans after the assault on the Temple. It was doubtless on display in
Rome, damaged or otherwise, along with the rest of the booty Josephus
describes as having been paraded in Titus’ Triumph (
War
7.121–62).

For his part, Jesus’ meanderings about the peaceful Galilean countryside – at a time when Galilee was a hotbed of revolutionary fervour and internecine strife – doing miraculous exorcisms, cures, raisings and the like, while Scribes, Pharisees and synagogue officials murmur against him, resemble nothing so much as the incipient Paul traveling around the Mediterranean. In fact, Galilee, as referred to in the Gospel of Matthew, is a leitmotif for Gentiles – ‘Galilee of the Nations’/‘Galilee of the Gentiles’ (4:15). It was also the seedbed of the Zealot Movement whose adherents were called by some ‘Galileans’. These kinds of material, in particular, point to Mark as having been written, like the other Gospels, after the fall of the Temple and the destruction of Jerusalem.

It should suffice for the moment to say that when dealing with the authentic core of the Pauline corpus, we are dealing with the
oldest and most reliable documents of Christianity, which have not failed
to make their influence felt in the rest of the New Testament, despite the accident of their placement.

But a scholarly consensus of sorts has emerged even concerning the Gospels, which concedes that later religious history has made its influence felt, the only question being to what extent. Despite the last-ditch efforts by conservative scholars and fundamentalists to defend their historicity, based in part on a prior belief in the authority of Scripture, much material in the Gospels, even allowing for hyperbole, patently borders on the fantastic.

Even conceding the fact that the Gospel titles were not added until the second century, they are still representative of a genre of literature characteristic of the Second Temple Period and the Hellenistic world generally, called Pseudepigrapha – meaning books written under a false pen-name. For his part, ‘Luke’ admits from the start he is working from sources (1:1–4), but there still are questions about whether it is Luke or someone else doing the final redacting. These questions are too complex to be explored here, but they do not affect the nature of the conclusions we shall arrive at in this book.

Where the Book of Acts is concerned, the authorship by Luke is again taken as a given. Where Acts switches to the first-person-plural narrative of the ‘We Document’, it may be conceded that it is probably based on the travel notebooks or diary of a traveling companion of Paul named Luke (13:1).
Here, as implied, we probably do have a genuine historical core, and fantastic raconteuring really does recede in favour of more matter-of-fact reportage and straightforward narrative. But what are we to make of much of what comes before in the first sixteen chapters of Acts, romantic legend and fantastic storytelling of the clearest sort?

The same considerations no doubt hold true, though in nothing like as clear a manner, for the records redacted under the names of Matthew, Mark and John as well. In fact, we will be able to show the kernels of real
historical events beneath the surface of what can only, on occasion, be
described as mythologization. Much information in the Gospels has been assimilated from other sources, including information, as we shall argue, about James, but also material from Josephus, Old Testament stories about heroes and prophets, and even episodes from the life of Paul.

Something that cannot help but strike the modern reader is the general flavour of Hellenistic anti-Semitism in the Gospels, in particular, when associated with the name of ostensibly
Jewish
witnesses such as Matthew, Mark and John. It is perhaps this attitude more than any other single characteristic that
marks them as having been composed by non-Jews
or makes it highly unlikely that in their present form they could have been redacted in a Jewish framework or been written by originally Jewish authors.

But what might strike the reader as more surprising still, the anti-Semitism of Gentile or Pauline Christianity is directed as much or even more towards the Jewish Apostles or the Jerusalem Church, particularly James, as it is towards Jews outside it. Paul is not so much concerned with Jews outside the Church, who are for him largely an irrelevant nuisance. It is against his Jewish opponents within the Church that Paul directs his bitterest attacks, most notably against those he calls ‘some from James’ or James’ Jerusalem Church colleagues (Gal. 2:12).

It should be categorically stated that a Jewish document can be sectarian, that is, anti-Pharisee or even anti-Sadducee, as the Dead Sea Scrolls most certainly are and the Gospels at their most authentic sometimes are, but it cannot be anti-Semitic. This would be a contradiction in terms. It is possible to oppose persons of a different party or sectarian persuasion, nationalist or anti-nationalist, cosmopolitan or xenophobic, as Josephus does; but one cannot be against one’s self – except abnormally. Paul sometimes exhibits this baffling characteristic, but, as we shall show, Paul is perhaps not really Jewish in the manner he thinks or advertises himself to be.

In Gospel criticism, therefore, we must set aside all such materials as incorporating a retrospective view of history and the anti-Semitism of Pauline or Overseas Christianity. These will include a large portion of the most familiar and beloved passages in the Bible, as, for instance, most of the parables, which are rarely very hard to decipher in this regard.
They would also include the most oft-quoted and highly prized sayings of Jesus, many now commonplaces of Western historical parlance.

All of these are almost always directed against the people of Palestine, and are, therefore, anti-Jewish and pro the Pauline Gentile Mission – for instance: ‘the First shall be last and the Last shall be first’,
4
‘a Prophet is never accepted in his own land and in his own house’,
5
‘who are my brothers and mother to me?’,
6
‘Woe unto you Choraizin and Bethseida, had the miracles that were done here been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have converted long ago and put on sackcloth and ashes’,
7
sayings on behalf of ‘publicans’ (tax collectors), ‘prostitutes’, ‘Sinners’ (often meaning Gentiles),
‘wine-bibbers’, ‘the good Samaritan’, ‘these Little Ones’, ‘the one lost sheep’,
‘gluttons’ (people who do not keep dietary regulations), ‘the Phoenician woman’, etc. – all more or less connected to the priority of the Gentile Mission, the admission of Gentiles into the early Church, and related matters.

At this point, another shibboleth of latter-day scholarship will have to be jettisoned, that of the ‘
Judaization
’ of early Christianity, which is the point of view propagated by Acts too (15:5). In line with its polemic, for Acts and modern scholarship thereafter, the original doctrines of Jesus and the Apostles, who supported Gentiles and the Gentile Mission, have been undermined by the ‘Jamesian’ Jerusalem Church. This is an absurdity and it must be stated categorically: there never was a ‘
Judaization of early Christianity
’, only a progressively more rapid
Gentilization
.

This gathered momentum with the elimination of the Jerusalem center by the hand of Roman power after the Uprising of 66–70 CE. Only when principles of this kind are properly grasped and many favourite platitudes and historical clichés jettisoned, will it be possible to make any progress towards a resolution of the quest for the Historical Jesus.

To make an honest attempt to get at the truth of this period, therefore, one must be willing to part with the popular idea of the Gospels, for instance, as ‘eyewitness’ accounts. The only ‘eyewitness’ we have in this sorry spectacle – apart from the Dead Sea Scrolls – is Josephus himself, and we have already covered his flaws. This is not to say, however, that one must part with one’s faith. The Gospel portrait is sacred history, and as such recommends itself, in particular, to one’s faith, if not necessarily to one’s sense of historical accuracy. In this kind of history, events are often represented retrospectively and entwined with the dominant religious point of view of the time.

Josephus’
Testimonies to James and the ‘Star Prophesy’

It is through the person of James, who is mentioned in a straightforward manner by his younger contemporary Josephus, that we have the most compelling testimony to the existence of his brother Jesus, whether one
takes the name ‘Jesus’ symbolically or literally. Some consider even the
reference to James found in the Twentieth Book of Josephus’
Antiquities
interpolated; but, aside from the fact that little could be gained by such an insertion, the reference is convincing enough and fits in with what we know about James ideologically and historically from other sources.

In addition, it provides previously unknown and seemingly reliable data about the circumstances of James’ arrest and execution. It is consistent, too, with the pattern of other such notices in Josephus’
Antiquities
about persons not mentioned in the
Jewish War
. Though it is always possible that the notice is not complete in the form we have it, James does appear to have been mentioned at this point by Josephus.

Origen, the third-century Church theologian, and Eusebius, his successor in Caesarea in the next century, both claim to have seen a copy of Josephus different from the one we presently possess. This copy included a passage ascribing the fall of Jerusalem to the death of James
not to the death of Jesus
– a significant addition. This passage does not exist in the notice about James in the
Antiquities
available to us at the present time and there really is no place it could reasonably have been inserted in that document, except for the 62 CE notice of the circumstances surrounding James’ death. Origen was outraged by what he saw and hastened to correct Josephus’ version of the facts, insisting that he should have said Jerusalem fell on account of the death of Jesus. This in itself would probably explain the ultimate disappearance of this passage from all extant versions of Josephus’ works – even the Arabic
Yusufus
.

Overtly anyhow, Josephus considers himself a Pharisee and, where Roman power was at issue, the behaviour of two other self-professed Pharisees in this period, Paul and R. Yohanan ben Zacchai – the founder of Rabbinic Judaism – parallel his. Nor do the constraints under which he operated differ very much from theirs, especially when he tells those stories about popular Messianic leaders who had been crucified by Roman administrators.

Josephus’ general view of the ‘religious frauds’ or ‘magicians’ he refers to in this period was that their influence over the people was more pernicious even than that of the ‘robbers and assassins’, and more dangerous. This was primarily because, as he puts it, they were scheming to bring about
both
religious reform
and
change in government, that is, they had a dual religious and political programme (
War
2.258–9 & 264–5).
Therefore, by necessity if not inclination – in Josephus the two are often identical – the presentation of such ‘impostors’ or ‘deceivers’ was fashioned in an extremely negative manner, at least in versions of his work prepared for Roman circulation. As the censorship
powers of the Church became absolute after Constantine, negative
presentations of early Christian leaders, where recognizable, undoubtedly would have been replaced by more sympathetic testimonies or deleted altogether.