James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls I (93 page)

Matthew and Mark list Jesus’ brothers quite straightforwardly as ‘James and Joses and Simon and Judas’ (13:55–56 and 6:3–5). The same goes for Jesus’ mother Mary and ‘his sisters’, one of whom Mark identifies in his version of the witnesses to the Crucifixion as ‘Salome’ (15:40). At the Crucifixion, she is explicitly identified as the sister of ‘James the Less and Joses’; at the empty tomb, simply ‘(the sister) of James’ (16:1). In this ‘Less’ sobriquet, as already observed, one can see the pejoration at work.

In Matthew 13:55, for instance, when Jesus’ mother, brothers and sisters are mentioned at the conclusion of the Parables about ‘the Tares’ and ‘the Dragnet’ unique to it, Jesus’ father is straightforwardly identified as ‘the carpenter’ – ‘is this not the
son of the carpenter
?’ In Mark, the same statement turns into: ‘is not this
the carpenter the son of Mary
?’ (Mk 6:2), so that Jesus now becomes the proverbial ‘Galilean’
carpenter
just as his principal Apostles became ‘Galilean’
fishermen
. Luke and John wisely simplify this into ‘Joseph’s son’ (Lk 4:22). Interestingly, Mark’s version already shows traces of doctrinal deformation and this has gone, via St Augustine, directly into the Koran, where Jesus is always designated as ‘the Messiah
son of Mary
’ and nothing else.
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In John, the depiction of Jesus as ‘the son of Joseph’ also occurs by the Sea of Galilee – called now, quite incisively, ‘of Tiberias’ – and even more importantly, introduces his version of Jesus calling himself ‘the living bread, which came from Heaven’, and the concomitant conclusion, ‘he
who eats my flesh and drinks my blood
shall have Eternal life’ (Jn 6:42–58). Even more to the point, in John, when Jesus makes the statement ‘unless you have eaten the flesh of the Son of Man and drunk his blood, you shall not have life in yourselves’ (6:53), this ends with the extremely prescient: ‘from that time Many of his Disciples fell back and did not walk with him any more’ (6:66).

Jesus is also pictured in this extremely pregnant passage here in John as wondering aloud whether ‘the Twelve’ would ‘turn aside as well’. It is here that Simon Peter is quoted as applying the pivotal identification of Jesus, ‘You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God’ ( John 6:67–69), also applied to him by the voice from the cloud ‘on the mountain’ at his Transfiguration or, even more significantly, by Peter just preceding this in all the Synoptics (Mt 16:16–17:5 and pars.).

In John, Jesus is described as ‘knowing from the beginning who they were
who did not believe and who would deliver him up
’ (6:64). In the Synoptics, all these enumerations are accompanied by attacks on Jesus’ family and countrymen, aimed in the typical Pauline manner at distinguishing Jesus from both. These generally circulate about the formula, ‘A Prophet is not without honour, except in his own country and in his own house’ (Lk 4:25 and pars.). In case we didn’t get the polemical thrust of its meaning, Mark adds: ‘and
among his own kin
’ (6:4). These are paralleled, as well, in the episodes preceding these, when Jesus or his Disciples are ‘casting out demons’ and his mother and brothers come to see him and are described as ‘
standing outside
’
calling to him
(Mt 12:46–50 and Mk 3:31–35).

In Matthew 12:24–28 (paralleled in Mk 3:22–30), preceding this episode, this ‘standing’ language we have just highlighted in relation to it occurs
two
more times in two verses in the context of five more allusions in five verses to another weird circumlocution, ‘Beelzebul Prince of the demons’, ‘casting out the demons’ (
ekballei
again). This leads directly into the episode, basically disparaging Jesus’ ‘mother and his brothers’, who were, as Luke puts it, ‘unable to get to him
because of the crowd
’ (Lk 8:19–21) – ‘the crowd’, patently symbolizing Paul’s new Gentile Christian converts in the retrospective polemic this kind of invective represents.

When Jesus is told that his mother and brothers ‘are standing outside’, he responds in good Pauline style: ‘Who is my mother and who are my brothers?’ (Mt 12:48), this obviously being before the Mary cult gathered momentum in the second and third centuries. In all the Synoptics, Jesus is then pictured as adding, gesturing towards his Disciples, ‘Behold
my mother and my brothers
, for whoever shall
do
the will of God
is my brother and sister and mother
’ (Mk 3:35). The purpose of all this sectarian repartee is to divorce Jesus from his family – and by extension his own people – and attach him to all the people of the world.

The Jamesian emphasis on ‘doing’ in these parallels is interesting too. Just so that we should make no mistake about its more cosmopolitan aspects and that the doctrine of Jesus as ‘Son of God’ should be attached to whatever is meant by this word ‘doing’, Matthew formulates the proposition as ‘whosoever shall
do the will of my Father who is in Heaven
, he is my brother and sister and mother’ (12:50). Luke, pointing to the crowd, makes the Jamesian thrust of all this even clearer: ‘My mother and my brothers are these which
hear
the word of God, and
do it
’ (Lk 8:21).

It is also interesting that the context in the Synoptics here is one of ‘doing mighty works and wonders’, normally presented as including
raisings
,
healings
,
casting out demons
, and the like. In the War Scroll from Qumran, however, where these same ‘mighty works and wonders’ of God are referred to, these are the battles God has fought and the wonders He has done on behalf of his people as, for instance, overthrowing the chariots of the army of Pharaoh in the Red Sea and the like.
5
One is not making any value judgements here, as
healings
,
exorcisms
,
raisings
, and the like might be superior to military victories, depending on one’s point of view, only showing how these terms were being used in Palestine in this period.

The Doctrine of the Perpetual Virginity of Mary (and James)

The embarrassment over the existence of Jesus’ brothers, along with that about his paternity, develops later than these materials. For instance, in the Gospels we see little or no embarrassment over the matter of their actual
physical
relationship to Jesus – or to ‘the Lord’ as Paul would have it – only theological ones, in line with the aims and aspirations of the Pauline Mission to the Gentiles overseas, to downplay the perception of family members’ proper doctrine – their ‘Belief’, as the Gospels succinctly term it – and the familial and national traditions upon which their status as successors was based.

But this is the case as well for attacks on Jesus’ most intimate Apostles, particularly Peter, because of his role in the confrontation at Antioch – as Paul presents it in Galatians. These, like Jesus’ family members and by extrapolation Jews generally, are described as ‘weak in Faith’ – ‘weak’ being a favourite aspersion Paul uses to attack his antagonists within the Movement who are supporting ‘circumcision’, ‘the Law’, and restrictive dietary practices and opposing ‘table fellowship’ with Gentiles, and those whose ‘consciences are so weak’, they eat only vegetables.

Paul, in 1 and 2 Corinthians, even goes so far in his histrionics as to attack these ‘Hebrew’ Archapostles as ‘disguising themselves as Servants of Righteousness’ – a term widespread too in the Scrolls. Not only are these ‘Super Apostles’ for him – like ‘Judas the son of Simon
Iscariot
’ in John 6:71 above – really ‘Servants of the Devil’ (also, ‘the
Diabolos
’), he ends by proclaiming in one and the same breath, ‘eat everything sold in the marketplace’ and that grandiloquently, he ‘will never eat meat again forever’ so as not to ‘cause his brother to stumble’ or ‘scandalize’ him (1 Cor. 8:13 and 10:25).

Even at the end of the Second Century, Tertullian (
c.
160–221 CE) is still assuming that ‘the brothers of the Lord’ are his true brothers and their mother is Mary, who generated them through normal conjugal intercourse.
2
It is Origen (185–254 CE), in the next century, who is the first really to gainsay this in line with the growing reverence being accorded Mary, citing a book he and his predecessor, Clement of Alexandria both saw. He does so, not surprisingly, in commenting on the passages from Mark 6 and Matthew 13 we just have been discussing above.

Origen calls this book ‘
The Book of James
’ (but we have been referring to it as the ‘Protevangelium of James’) and states that though the Gospels imply his contemporaries considered Jesus to be
a man
, ‘the son of Joseph and Mary’, he ‘was not a man, but something Divine’. Even more informative, he reveals the idea that ‘the brothers of Jesus were the sons of Joseph by a former wife whom he married before Mary’ was circulated by those ‘who wish to preserve the honour of
Mary in virginity to the end
’.
3

This idea of perpetual virginity – even after the birth of Jesus – was already circulating in two apocryphal works – one on the Old Testament, called the Ascension of Isaiah (11:9), and the other, as we have seen, called the Protevangelium of James. In the latter, which seems to have been written to glorify Mary and which was ascribed to James – hence its title, Joseph is an
elderly widower
(9.2)! The idea of such ‘virginity’ seems first to have been emphasized in the correspondence of Ignatius of Antioch at the end of the First Century.
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Also Justin Martyr, in the middle of the second, was one of the first to accord Mary special prominence. He saw Mary as the good side of Eve, both of whom he considered virgins, giving rise to the idea that Mary brought life, but Eve, disobedience and death.

The idea of Mary’s perpetual virginity also gained momentum with the growing vogue virginity was beginning to enjoy in ascetic circles, not to mention its possible tie-in with James’ paradigmatic
lifelong virginity
. Still Jesus’ rebukes in the Synoptics not only of Mary, but the ‘brothers’ and all the
Jewish
Apostles troubled early commentators. These grappled with the idea of Mary’s sinfulness and, in particular, whether she – unlike her son – was subject to the Pauline concept of ‘original sin’.
5
Many cited the words Luke attributes to Mary, ‘all generations will henceforth count me blessed’ (1:48), not to mention the very ambiguous prophecy – attributed to one Simeon in the next chapter – about a ‘sword piercing her soul too’ (Lk 2:35 – here the Qumran ‘soul’ and ‘sword’ language again).

This ‘prophecy’ is attributed to ‘the Righteous and Pious Simeon’ in Luke’s infancy narrative, to whom ‘the Holy Spirit’ revealed that ‘he would not see death until he had seen
the Christ
of the Lord’ (Lk 2:25–26). Again these words echo the traditions about James’ ‘seeing the Lord’ and, very possibly, his kinsman and successor, Simeon bar Cleophas, too.

Here in Luke, this is expressed in terms of ‘seeing Your Salvation’ (Lk 2:30), the very words used at the end of the exhortative section of the Damascus Document. Once again, just as this notice is accompanied in Luke by allusion to preparing for ‘all Nations’ a light ‘to the Gentiles’, the sense is completely the opposite of the concluding line of this section of the Damascus Document, which ends with the words: ‘they will be victorious over all the Sons of the Earth … and see His Salvation, because they took refuge in His Holy Name’.
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Epiphanius in the late 300s is still resisting this cult and holding on to the idea that Jesus was born by natural means, that is, that Mary’s virginity had been interrupted at least by a natural birth, if not natural generation. Having said this, however, he completely accepts Origen’s idea that ‘James was Joseph’s son by his first wife’, whoever this wife may have been. Still for him, it was James and the rest of ‘Joseph’s sons who
revered virginity and followed the Nazirite life-style
’ – the very important reversal of Mary’s alleged status.
7

It is Jerome, prescient as ever and often responding to the true implications of the data before us, who sets the pattern for the modern, doctrinaire or at least ‘Catholic’, approach to the ‘brothers’: that Jesus’ brothers were not ‘brothers’ at all, but rather ‘cousins’. He is, of course, taking off in this, without perhaps realizing it, from the fact that Cleophas was ‘the brother of Joseph’ and his son Simeon, therefore, the
cousin of Jesus
. However, it never seems to have dawned on him that this would make ‘Simeon’ the
brother of James
and, as we shall presently see below,
Jesus
as well!

Jerome arrives at this conclusion by a comparison of the Apostle lists and correctly appreciating that ‘James the son of Alphaeus’ (Mt 10:3 and pars.) – not to mention ‘Judas (the brother) of James’ (Lk 6:15–16) – had to be the son of that woman designated as Mary ‘the sister of’ Mary and ‘the wife of Clopas’ in John 19:15 (‘Mary the mother of James and Joses and the mother of the two sons of Zebedee’ in Mt 27:56, ‘Mary the mother of James the Less and Joses and Salome’ in Mk 15:40, and ‘Mary the mother of James’ in Lk 24:10).
13

This would make ‘Alphaeus’ and ‘Clopas’ the same person, as they most certainly were, the mix-up here simply being the difference between a Greek letter
kappa
and an
alpha
.
9
Interestingly enough Levi, later identified as Matthew and depicted as ‘sitting at the tax office’ (Mt 9:9), is also designated as ‘the son of Alphaeus’ (Mk 2:14). This may provide the basis of Luke’s later tie-in of ‘Matthias’ and the so-called ‘Joseph Barsabas surnamed Justus’ in the spurious election to replace Judas ‘the
Iscariot
’ (i.e., ‘the
Sicarios
’), at the beginning of Acts.

It is left to Augustine, who corresponded with Jerome on the worrisome conflict between Peter and Paul in Galatians, to have the last word on the subject: ‘The Lord was indeed born of woman, but he was conceived in her without man’s co-operation’:

Begotten by the Father, He was not conceived by the Father. He was made
Man
in the mother, whom He himself had made, so that he might exist here for a while, sprung from her who could never and nowhere have existed except through His
Power
… She in whose footsteps you are following had no human intercourse when she conceived. She remained a virgin when she brought forth her child. (Sermon 191)