James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls I (97 page)

These are the problems and issues one must weigh in attempting to determine who might have been responsible for turning Palestinian Messianism on its ear and reversing its most precious and fundamental concepts and ethos into their mirror opposite.

The Traditions of the ‘Pella Flight’

In the course of his discussion of the earlier ‘calamities which at that time overwhelmed the whole nation in every part of the world’ and estimating that by both famine and sword over ‘one million one hundred thousand persons perished’ in Judea alone as ‘vengeance for
the guilt and Impiety of the Jews against the Christ of God
’ (our tell-tale ‘Piety’ inversion again),
29
Eusebius makes one of his last references to James.

In doing so, he also delineates his sense of sequence in these matters, noting that:

After the ascension of our Saviour, the Jews had followed up
their crimes against him
by devising
plot after plot
against his Disciples. First
they stoned Stephen to death
, then
James the son of Zebedee and the brother of John
was beheaded, and
finally James
, the first after our Saviour’s Ascension to be raised to the Bishop’s Throne there (in Jerusalem), lost his life in the way described, while the remaining Apostles in constant danger from
murderous plots
, were driven out of Judea … to teach their message of
the Power of Christ
in every land.

His lurid description of ‘the calamities’ that then befell the Jews which follows is lifted almost bodily from Josephus’
Jewish War
, which describes how the Jews during the siege of Jerusalem even ended up
eating their own children
. All of this is foreseen, as far as Eusebius is concerned, by Jesus ‘weeping over’ Jerusalem in Luke and his prediction that it shall be ‘leveled to the ground, both you and your children, not a stone upon a stone’ (19:41–44).

It is at the close of this sequence that Eusebius makes his first reference to the famous ‘Pella Flight’. Pella he describes as ‘one of the cities of Perea’ – the area beyond Jordan we have already specified as being where John the Baptist was executed – to which ‘the people of the Jerusalem Church removed before the War began, on account of
an oracle given by revelation to men considered worthy
there’. We shall have more to say about this oracle later, but connected as it is to the fall of Jerusalem, at this point it cannot be totally divorced from the counter-oracle Jesus was just pictured as making with more or less detail about the destruction of Jerusalem, ‘stone upon stone’ by Roman armies and the suffering of its inhabitants.

As Eusebius pictures this oracle, here and hereafter,

Those who believed in Christ removed from Jerusalem, and when these Holy Men had utterly abandoned the Royal metropolis of the Jews and the whole Land of Judea, the
Judgement of God
finally overtook them for their
abominable crimes against the Christ and his Apostles
, entirely blotting out that Generation of Evil-Doers from among men.
30

Eusebius appears almost gleeful here.

The Martyrdom of Simeon bar Cleophas and ‘Drinking the Cup’ Imagery in the Gospels and at Qumran

It should be appreciate that ‘the Pella Flight’, if credible, must have occurred under the stewardship of James’ successor and putative ‘cousin’ or ‘brother’, Simeon bar Cleophas, concerning whom it would be well to look at a later statement of Eusebius that ‘
James the Just suffered martyrdom for the same reason as the Lord
’. In this, Eusebius is again dependent on Hegesippus and mentions
the universal demand that Simeon bar Cleophas be elected Bishop and ‘be second, because he was a
cousin of the Lord
’ (
thus
!). Moreover, this parallels a statement he made earlier, again dependent on Hegesippus, about how ‘Simeon
the son of Clopas
,
the second to have been appointed Bishop of the Church at Jerusalem … ended his life in martyrdom … suffering an end like that of the Lord … when Trajan was Emperor
and Atticus Consul’.
31

Allied material in the Synoptics following allusion to ‘the Son of Man sitting upon the Throne of his Glory’ and allusion to his Apostles as ‘sitting on Twelve Thrones, judging the Twelve Tribes of Israel’ (Mt 19:28), have James and John the sons of Zebedee come to Jesus and ask to sit on Jesus’ right and left hand in ‘Glory’ (Mk 10:35–38). In Matthew 20:20, however, it is rather ‘the mother of the sons of Zebedee’ (later at the Crucifixion, she is ‘Mary the mother of James and Joses and the mother of the sons of Zebedee’ – 27:56) who makes this request. Interestingly, this request is also preceded by the pat anti-family instruction ‘to the Disciples’ to leave ‘house or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands for the sake of the Kingdom of God’ (Lk 18:29 and pars.).

Luke places these notices right before Jesus, ‘drawing near Jericho’, visits the house of the Rich Chief Tax Collector and midget Zacchaeus and, directly thereafter, ‘drawing near’ Jerusalem, weeps over it, predicting its coming demolition stone by stone (18:13–19:44). Mark and Matthew picture Jesus as quoting, in relation to his promise to those forsaking brothers, sisters, mothers, lands, etc., the clearly pro-Pauline, anti-Jerusalem Church, ‘Many that are First shall be Last and the Last First’ (Mk 10:31 and Mt 19:30). Both ‘the First’ and ‘the Many’ are favourite usages at Qumran, the latter the preferred nomenclature for the rank and file; the former, the beneficiaries of ‘the First Covenant’. Where ‘the Last’ is concerned, one should bear in mind Paul’s similar characterization of himself at the end of his list of post-resurrection appearances by Jesus in 1 Corinthians 15:8 above.

In these two episodes about
two
brothers, asking ‘to sit’, as James elsewhere proclaims it, ‘on the right hand’ in ‘Glory’, Jesus responds: ‘Are you able to drink the Cup which I drink?’ When they answer in the affirmative, Jesus is then pictured as responding, ‘My Cup indeed you shall drink’, at which point, ‘the ten’ are pictured as being ‘offended concerning the
two brothers
’ (Mt 20:20–24; Mk 10:35–41 adds their names, ‘James and John’).

But aside from the artificial designation ‘sons of Zebedee’, one must ask who these ‘two brothers’ really were. One should also note the same kind of imagery reappears in John, when Peter strikes off the ear of ‘the High Priest’s Servant’ – the same ‘High Priest’s Servant’ that seems to be the recipient of the linen ‘grave clothes’ in the Gospel of the Hebrews episode cited above – and Jesus tells him to put away his sword (Jn 18:10). Here Jesus is pictured as saying, ‘Should I not
drink the Cup
which the Father has given me?’ (18:11), thus making it unmistakably clear that this kind of ‘drinking the Cup’ imagery is being applied to martyrdom and death – not to mention God’s retribution for these things in the Book of Revelation and the Scrolls.

This ‘Cup’ imagery for death and God’s Vengeance is crucial in key passages in the Habakkuk
Pesher
dealing with the destruction of the Righteous Teacher and ‘the Cup of God’s Wrath’. Here too it is expressed in terms of ‘the Cup of the right hand of the Lord’ (Hab. 2:16), which the individual responsible for the ‘destruction’ or death of the Righteous Teacher and, as it were, ‘the Poor’ – would be forced to ‘drink’ or ‘swallow’ as well, and connected to the imagery of
ba-la-‘a
or ‘swallowing’, which at Qumran is being employed to express both the ideas of being given this ‘Cup to drink’ and being ‘destroyed’.

It should also be clear that it is inextricably tied up with ‘the Cup of the Lord’ allusion we have been discussing with regard to the Gospel of the Hebrews – uniquely reverberating too in Paul’s version of what he reports Jesus said in his version of the ‘Last Supper’. This shows that Paul, too, was well aware that this ‘Cup of the Lord’ symbolism was circulating among early Christian groups, but he was using it in a more esoteric way. It is this which is picked up in Gospel representations of this scenario, coupled with the betrayal by the archetypal ‘Traitor’, ‘Judas
the Iscariot
’ – only now minus the allusion ‘of the Lord’.

This same imagery of ‘
the Cup of God’s Vengeance
’ and ‘
the Cup of God’s Anger
’ or ‘
Wrath
’ (partially based on Hab. 2:16 above, but also on that of ‘
the Cup of Trembling
’ in Isa. 51:17–22) is present as well in Revelation. This is the same imagery we have just encountered in Luke’s version of Jesus’ speech, which refers to this ‘Anger’ or ‘Wrath’ and ‘
the Days of Vengeance
’ (in the Qumran Community Rule, the more ‘
Zealot
’-like ‘
Day of Vengeance
’) in relation to Jerusalem being trodden underfoot and ‘not even suckling mothers or babes being spared’.

As Revelation expresses this, more in the style of the Scrolls than Jesus in the Gospels, ‘He also shall
drink of the wine of the Fury of God
, which is
poured full strength
(‘
undiluted
’ – the exact expression occurs in the Habakkuk
Pesher
as we have seen and, of course, Isa. 51:22) into
the Cup of His Wrath
’ (14:10).
32
Here, plainly, is the more militant variation of the words Luke uses to characterize Jesus’ speech at ‘the Last Supper’, phrased in terms of the Pauline ‘
Cup of the New Covenant in my blood, which is poured out
for you’ (Lk 22:20) – but, of course, these do not mean the same thing at all.

But ‘John and James the two sons of Zebedee’
do not drink this ‘Cup’
. Perhaps this ‘James’ does, but he is conveniently removed as Acts unfolds to make room for the introduction of the other and, in our view, the
real
James. On the basis of the data, John – whoever he was –
does not
. This is true whether he is identified with the John of Patmos, who purportedly wrote the Book of Revelation, or John, the alleged author of the Fourth Gospel and ‘Disciple Jesus loved’, who in Eusebius was supposedly buried in Ephesus and, like James,
‘wore the mitre’ of the High Priest
.
33
So here we have a problem with the overt meaning of this episode.

But ‘James his brother’ – Jesus’ brother not John’s – and his ‘cousin’ Simeon bar Cleophas, or, as we shall presently demonstrate, his putative
second brother
, the successor to James in Jerusalem,
do
‘drink the Cup’ that Jesus drank. Here, once again, our overlaps develop. Presumably too, a
third brother
, known variously as Judas, Judas of James, Judas
Thomas
, and, as we shall see below, even ‘Judas the Zealot’ and, perhaps, ‘Judas
Iscariot
’ ‘the son’ or ‘brother of Simon
Iscariot
’, does as well. He would also seem to have been known as ‘Lebbaeus who was surnamed Thaddaeus’ (Mt 10:3).

So does the character Josephus calls ‘Theudas’, who may have been ‘Thaddaeus’ or ‘Judas
the brother of James
’, beheaded according to Josephus at about the same time as the so-called ‘James
the brother of John
’, who in Acts turns out to present such a problem where the true succession to Jesus is concerned. So do ‘the grandsons’ of this ‘Judas’ under Trajan according to Hegesippus. So much for ‘drinking the Cup of the Lord’ and who drank it.

Eusebius reiterates these things several times in no uncertain terms, repeatedly quoting Hegesippus on all these round-ups and martyrdoms, which, as he puts it, occurred at a time when the Church was still ‘a virgin, not yet corrupted by vain discourse’!
34
For his part, Paul cynically contrasts ‘
the Cup of the Lord
’ with ‘
the Cup of demons
’, by which he at first seems to imply ‘the cup’ Gentiles drink in their religious rites, but finally identifying it, as it appears in another disparaging aside, as that which ‘Israel according to the flesh partakes of at the altar’ (1 Cor. 10:18). This also parallels ‘the Lord’s table’/‘table of demons’ turnabout in 1 Cor. 10:14 – identified in the
Homilies
as James’ ‘food sacrificed to idols’.
35
As we saw, too, for him this ‘
Cup of the Lord
’ now becomes the Cup ‘
of the New Covenant in (Christ’s) blood
’ – language, not surprisingly, faithfully echoed in Luke 22:20’s picture of the Last Supper.

The Apostle Lists in the Synoptic Gospels and Acts

In order finally to answer this question about Jesus’ brothers as Apostles, we must look at the Apostle lists in the Gospels and Acts, and compare them with the descriptions of Mary’s descendants at the Crucifixion and in post-resurrection appearances. To take Mark first, which in this instance actually does appear the most primitive, Jesus ‘went up into the mountain’ and ‘appointed Twelve that they might be with him’ (Mk 3:13–14).