James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls II (120 page)

What it and its counterpart
MMT
, however, cannot abide is
the receipt of such
‘
polluted Riches
’
into the Temple
and, therefore, their condemnation of this – along with ‘
fornication
’ and ‘
Riches
’ of ‘
pollution of the Temple
’ – is self-explanatory in these circumstances. The ‘
fornication
’ being repeatedly alluded to here has to be that of the
Herodians
because of the charge ‘
each man marries the daughter of his father or the daughter of his brother
’, and because there is no indication in our sources of widespread ‘
niece marriage
’, ‘
divorce
’, ‘
polygamy
’, and indiscriminate coupling with near kin, to say nothing of u
n
restrained and rampant enrichment, among Maccabeans. This is how to read texts – with one’s eyes open – but in order to do this,
one has to have a proper sense of history and literary genre and not just ignore them or set them aside on the basis of a set of some other somewhat
‘
artificial
’
parameters one might be following
. This is what we have been attempting to do in this book.

‘
Profiteering from the Spoils of the Peoples
’

But how were these ‘
Last Priests of Jerusalem
’ ‘
profiteering
’? The answer is:
by accepting gifts and sacrifices in the Temple from foreigners
. This specifically meant sacrifices on behalf of the Roman Emperor who had been paying from his own rev
e
nues for a daily sacrifice in the Temple.
1
But it also extended
to gifts and sacrifices from and on behalf of
Herodians regarded for these purposes as ‘
foreigners
’ – and, therefore, ‘
polluted
’ – by these various groups of ‘
Zealot
’-type extremists including the authors of the documents at Qumran. This was the issue and the thing which so infuriated the ‘
Zealot’-inspired
Lower Priesthood when it stopped sacrifice in August, 66
CE
on behalf of any and all such individuals, thus triggering the War against Rome.

This too is why these texts at Qumran fulminate about ‘
pollution
’, ‘
uncleanness
’, and ‘
Abominations
’ to such a degree. Properly appreciated, it is also the thrust, as we have been underscoring, of the ‘
Three Nets of
Belial
’ accusations in the midst of like-minded remonstrations about
not observing proper
‘
separation
’
in the Temple between
‘
clean and unclean
’ connected to the peculiar charge that ‘
they sleep with women in their periods
’. Of course, almost the whole of Columns Five to Eight of the Damascus Document inveigh against such things, including the use of the imagery of John the Baptist’s attacks on the Sadducees and Pharisees in the Gospels, as ‘
Offspring of Vipers
’, adding even ‘
their nets are Spiders
’
nets
’.

These complaints also include the charges of ‘
polluting the Temple Treasury
’ and incest.
2
Here the text even gives the mechanism of such ‘
pollution
’ as we have seen: ‘
every man who approaches them shares their uncleanness
,
unless he is forced
’. The Damascus Document does not actually think that all Jerusalem High Priests were ‘
sleeping with women in their periods
’, conduct forbidden in the
Torah
of Moses. Even the compromised and corrupt Herodian Jerusalem High-Priestly Clans would probably not have gone that far. As the several texts make abundantly clear, they were only guilty of ‘
profiteering
’ and ‘
gathering Riches
’ and consorting with and taking their appointment from people who probably did ‘
sleep with women during their periods
’ or were perceived of as so doing.

What the Damascus Document and
MMT
are trying to say is that by ‘
accepting gifts and sacrifices in the Temple
’ from the Roman Emperor, Roman Governors, Herodians, and their hangers-on – including ‘
Violent Gentiles
’ and ‘
Men-of-War
’ – the High Priests were
contracting their pollution
and, in the process and as a consequence, ‘
polluting the Temple
’. In partic
u
lar, this would include accepting appointment from such classes of persons to the very High Priesthood itself.

This is the thrust of all the various usages of the ‘
Belial
’ terminology, refracted along with ‘
Balaam
’ imagery in Paul, 2 Peter, Jude, and Revelation and the ‘
idolatry
’ charge associated with both – that is, this imagery relates to both the Herodian family itself and the Establishment they sponsored, not to mention to a certain extent, ‘
the Liar
’. If the latter is Paul, he probably also carries Herodian blood even if Paul is not identical with the ‘
Saulos
’ in Josephus – which we think he is.

The kind of ‘
swallowing
’ and ‘
casting down
’/‘
casting out
’ imagery one finds implicit in these charges has nothing whats
o
ever to do with the Maccabean Priesthood, which on the whole was considered legitimate and highly respected even by Jos
e
phus – who makes it plain that he is proud of his own Maccabean blood
3
– and even Herodians themselves. Concerning these, one should study the genealogies of Herodians to note how assiduous they were in arranging marriages to preserve every bit of Maccabean blood possible.
All this, the Dead Sea Scrolls help clarify.

An Historical Synopsis

Josephus himself becomes so upset at what those of a ‘
Zealot
’ frame of mind are doing in the Temple that he rails against them as ‘
Innovators
’ and their rejection of gifts and sacrifices on behalf of foreigners in the Temple as an ‘
Innovation
’. The latter accusation was more appropriate to Herod’s own changes ‘
to the disuse of the Jews
’
own ancestral traditions
’ than to anything the ‘
Zealots
’ were doing. For his part, Josephus does not decline to accept appointment as commander or commissar in Galilee – he perhaps exaggerates his role here – from the cabal in charge in Jerusalem, though these were hardly ‘
the Inn
o
vators
’.
4

Before the Revolution moved into its ‘
Zealot
’ or ‘
Idumaean
’ phase, those directing it were biding their time while they tried to negotiate for themselves a separate deal with the Romans. This is the clarity Josephus does provide. That the more extremist groups, which took over the Uprising with the wholesale destruction of these more accommodating High Priests, looked askance on Herodians is clear from their earlier treatment of Agrippa II and his sister (or ‘
consort
’) Bernice,
barring them from the Temple
(and, in time,
all Jerusalem as well
). This, some of them wished to do to their father before them – who Josephus already told us was of such refinement as to surpass all others of his generation in ‘
Chrestos
’/‘
Kindliness
’.
5

It is he that the ‘
Zealot
’ Simon who called an ‘
Assembly
’ in Jerusalem in the early Forties – wanted to have barred from the Temple as a foreigner.
6
For Pharisaic Judaism and Rabbinic Judaism succeeding it, this question of whether the Herodians were foreigners or not is a burning one – as illustrated by the episode in
Mishnah Sota
, where Agrippa (I or II, it is of no i
m
port) is portrayed reading the
Torah
in the Temple at Tabernacles.
7
It will be recalled that this is the third great Jewish pilgri
m
age Festival after Passover and Pentecost and the Festival at which the curious ‘
Prophet
’,
Jesus Ben Ananias
, appears directly following the death of James (probably around
Yom Kippur
) to proclaim the coming destruction of Jerusalem. Here Agrippa comes to the Deuteronomic King Law, ‘
You shall not put a foreigner over you who is not your brother
’ (17:15), and he begins to weep.
A
Jewish King was supposed to read the Law in the Temple on Tabernacles
,
the celebration of the wilderness exper
i
ence of the Jews
.
By contrast to what Simon might have thought, the
Talmud
pictures the assembled Pharisees as crying out, sycophantic to a fault, ‘
You are our brother
,
you are our brother
,
you are our brother
’. As for ‘
the
Zealots’ or ‘
Sicarii
’ and those causing the Uprising against Rome generally, they stopped sacrifice and refused to any longer accept gifts from or on behalf of foreigners in the Temple just as, prior to James’ death in what we have called ‘
the Temple Wall Affair
’, they had previously built an obstacle to stop ‘
Bela
‘
’ (
i.e
., the first Edomite King) or the Herodian King from
even seeing the sacrifices
. But, as a
l
ready explained, this too is the gist of the ‘
balla
‘
’/
Bela
‘
’ episode in the Temple Scroll, where such classes of persons were fo
r
bidden even from ‘
seeing the Temple
’.
8

It is a doleful twist-of-irony that the Romans, after two Uprisings and endless troubles over these issues, in effect turned the tables on the Jewish extremists, forbidding them even
to come within eyesight of the Temple
and Jerusalem after its final transformation by Hadrian (another Roman legionnaire from Italica in Spain) into Aelia Capitolina in the wake of the Bar Kochba Uprising. It is interesting, too, that during this time the Rabbis are alleged to have put a ban upon upon those taking Nazirite-style oaths not to ‘
eat or drink
’ until they had
seen the Temple rebuilt
– language clearly reflected in Acts 23:12–14’s picture of those wishing ‘
to kill Paul
’. The symbolism here, where Paul’s doctrine of Jesus as the ‘
Heavenly Temple
’ is co
n
cerned, is also so intrinsic as to be impossible to ignore.

Not only were foreign gifts and foreign sacrifices – seen as both ‘
polluting the Temple
’ and
corrupting the High Pries
t
hood
– banned by these religious ‘
Innovators
’ and ‘
Zealot
’-style extremists, but
foreign appointment of High Priests
was also abjured, including either by Herodians or Roman Governors in succession to them. This is the thrust of James’
opposition to the High Priests in the Temple
and his ‘
Opposition
’ High Priesthood, as pictured in early Church sources. It is also finally the basic thrust of a ‘
Jamesian
’ Letter(s) like
MMT
, not to mention Epiphanius’
Anabathmoi Jacobou
’s ‘
he complained against the Temple and the sacrifices
’. In this last text, too,
Paul is specifically pictured as a foreigner
.

James did complain about certain things, but not quite in the retrospective manner these early Church documents, through the prism of their ideology, suppose. As already suggested, he ‘
complained
’ about the way ‘
Temple service
’ was being carried out by these Herodian and Roman-appointed Establishment High Priests – as the Qumran documents do in their way – and he ‘
complained against
’ gifts and sacrifices from or on behalf of foreigners in the Temple – just as the ‘
Zealot
’ Lower Pries
t
hood and
MMT
do – when Acts 21:20 itself admits the majority of James’ ‘
Jerusalem Church
’ followers were ‘
Zealots for the Law
’. Even earlier, Acts 6:7 also admitted that ‘
a great multitude of the Priests had become obedient to the Faith
’ (
n.b.
, this same word, ‘
Faith
’ or ‘
Compact
’, used to describe ‘
the New Covenant which they erected in the Land of Damascus
’ above).

This is the essence of the controversy over the first of James’ directives to overseas communities, ‘
things sacrificed to idols
’. All of these things were seen as ‘
pollution of the idols
’ or ‘
idolatry
’, as both
MMT
and the Habakkuk
Pesher
so vividly illustrate. This is also the thrust of the election
to fill the ‘
Office
’/‘
Episcopate
’ of the Twelfth Apostle in Acts 2:20 – as we have argued, really the election of ‘
the
Mebakker
’ (as Qumran would have it) or ‘
the Bishop
’ James as ‘
High Priest of the O
p
position Alliance
’. It is to him all groups – ‘
Zealots
’, ‘
Sicarii
’, ‘
Nazrenes
’, ‘
Essenes
’, or ‘
Messian     ic Sadducees
’ (if there was any real difference between these except of degree) – paid homage.