James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls II (121 page)

After the elimination of the collaborating High Priests, gruesomely delineated by Josephus in his description of the demise of James’ nemesis Ananus, ‘
the Zealots
’ or ‘
Sicarii
’ proceeded to elect their own High Priest, a simple ‘
Stone-Cutter
’ named ‘
Phannius
’ or ‘
Phineas
’, the name, of course, of the archetypical purveyor of the ‘
Zealot
’ ideal and against whom, snob and collaborator that he is, Josephus rails because of the purported baseness or meanness of his origins.

But those of the more xenophobic and probably Jamesian ‘
Zealot
’ mindset had already barred Agrippa II and Bernice from the Temple and all Jerusalem as well. This was some twenty years after the attempt to bar their father Agrippa I from the Temple too and a decade after they had built a wall to block Agrippa II’s view of the sacrifices. It is no wonder that individuals such as these spared no pains to convince the Romans to destroy the Temple when it was put in their power in the aftermath of the Uprising finally to do so.
9

For example, at the beginning of the Uprising in 66
CE
, Josephus describes how those he calls ‘
Sicarii
’, together with members of the ‘
Poorer
’ classes, not only burned the palaces of ‘
Rich
’ High Priests like the
Ananias
presented to us in Acts 24:1, but also ‘
the Palaces of Agrippa II and Bernice
’. As Josephus goes on to describe this in his usual laconic manner, they then burned the public registrars to ‘
destroy the money-lenders
’
bonds
…
in order to cause the Poor to rise against the Rich
’.
10
I think we can safely say that we have, in the description of these events, a true depiction of the state of affairs in Jerusalem in these portentous times.

‘
They Took Vengeance upon the Flesh of his Corpse
’

Columns Eight to Nine of the Habakkuk
Pesher
contain an allusion to how the Wicked Priest would be ‘
delivered into the hand of the Violent Ones of the Gentiles for Judgement
’ and how these ‘
executed
(
the Judgements on Evil
)
upon him
’. The passage in the Habakkuk
Pesher
, which contains the phrase ‘
they inflicted upon him the Judgements on Evil
’
and
‘
took veng
e
ance upon the flesh of his corpse
’, has created not a little misunderstanding among commentators because of the arcane qual
i
ty of its vocabulary and the difficulty in translation.

It occurs directly following the material about how the Wicked Priest ‘
collected the Riches of the Men of Violence who rebelled against God
’ and preceding that about how in the Last Days the Riches and the booty of the Last Priests of Jerusalem ‘
would be delivered into the hand of the Army of the
Kittim
’. It comes at the bottom of Column Eight of the Habakkuk
Pesher
, which is frayed at this point, so after a slight break in the text it continues at the top of Column Nine which is complete: ‘
They inflicted the Judgements on Evil and committed the outrages of Evil pollutions upon him in taking vengeance upon the flesh of his corpse
.’
This passage has caused confusion because the word we are translating here as ‘
pollutions
’/‘
mahalim
’ in Hebrew has a primary meaning of ‘
diseases
’. But this cannot mean simply ‘
diseases
’, since it is
twice
explicitly stated that a person or persons ‘
inflicted these
(we prefer ‘
defilements
’)
upon him
’. Also the phrase ‘
flesh of his corpse
’ has been translated by some as ‘
his body of flesh
’, despite the fact that this is a redundancy and virtually meaningless in English.
11
It is clear that we have direct action and the
same plural ‘
they
’ who are ‘
committing the outrages of Evil pollutions
’ are also ‘
inflicting the Judgements on Evil on him
’; it is equally clear that these ‘
Judgements on Evil
’ or this ‘
Vengeance
’ is being inflicted in the sense of direct action by unspecified third-person plural parties on the ‘
flesh of his corpse
’ (
geviyah
).

But what is most interesting about this obscure allusion is that it can be made sensible by looking at the biography of James – in fact, more sense than we knew before. This is very powerful testimony that our analysis and the way we are pr
o
ceeding is correct. When a theory or paradigm can not only make sense out of given materials, but also elicit more from the text than one might have known previously, then this is very persuasive evidence that the theory we are propounding here about the identity of James and ‘
the Righteous Teacher
’
actually works
. Indeed, this is the very essence of what it means for a proof to be valid in scientific theory.

In the history of Qumran Studies, ‘
Establishment
’ or ‘
Consensus
’ Scholars, because of the obscurity of translations of this kind and a real paucity of historical insight, began speaking in terms of ‘
diseases of the flesh
’, from which some Maccabean High Priest might have been suffering in this period and identifications spinning off from this became legion.
12
But ‘
diseases
’ are not normally thought of as being ‘
inflicted
’ by third parties, which is very definitely the sense of the passage here. Furthe
r
more, we are very definitely talking about the word ‘
corpse
’ here.

If we look at the combination of these usages with reference to the biography of James and his opposite number, Ananus ben Ananus, the man along with Agrippa II who was responsible for his death, these things are clarified. Since the second problematic word in the above translation, ‘
geviyah
’, means ‘
dead body
’, ‘
carcass
’, or ‘
corpse
’ in Hebrew, the redundancy impli
c
it in most English translations of this passage disappears. Now we really can identify a situation with regard to James’ destroyer Ananus where ‘
they took vengeance upon the flesh of his corpse
’ just as we have translated it and we can now see this is exac
t
ly what the
Pesher
is talking about with regard to the fate of ‘
the Wicked Priest
’. Here material from the biography of James can elicit further meaning from the text than we would previously have been aware of had we not known it.

The High Priest Ananus ben Ananus’ death is recorded in Josephus, who in fact does make a good deal of it. As Josephus describes Ananus ben Ananus’ death, ‘
the Idumaeans
’ had been allowed surreptitiously into the city by those he has only just started to call ‘
Zealots
’. As already underscored, previously he had not been using this terminology to any extent, if at all, but was calling such individuals ‘
Innovators
’, ‘
Revolutionaries
’, ‘
Brigands
’, or ‘
Sicarii
’, but not ‘
Zealots
’
per se
– cryptically referring to ‘
the Movement
’ they represented as ‘
the Fourth Philosophy
’, nothing more. Josephus’ first real use of this pivotal termino
l
ogy, then, comes in relation to
those
‘
who take vengeance
’
on Ananus
(reason unspecified), who are his mortal enemies. Therefore, James and the Zealots are distinguished by their common opposition to or abhorrence of this Ananus.
13

As Josephus describes it in detail, these ‘
Zealots
’, ‘
taking some of the Temple saws
,
sawed open the bars of the gates nea
r
est the Idumaeans
,
who were shivering outside the city in a violent thunderstorm
’! These so-called ‘
Idumaeans
’, thereupon, rushed through the city ‘
sparing no one
’. ‘
Considering it pointless to waste their energies on the common people
,
they went in search of the High Priests
,
focusing their greatest zeal against them
’.
14
Josephus now concentrates specifically on the fate of Ananus, saying, ‘
As soon as they caught them
(meaning Ananus and Jesus ben Gamala),
they slew them
.
Then standing upon their dead bodies
,
they mockingly upbraided Ananus for his caring attitude towards the People
.’
This last is a little far-fetched, since in his later
Vita
, Josephus accuses this Ananus of having been involved in an olive oil scam and other illicit activities.
15
Nothing loath, in the
War
, he now goes on to see all this as ‘
sacrilege
’, explaining, ‘
So far did they go in their Impiety that they threw their bodies outside
(
the city
)
without burial
,
although Jews were so scrupulous in the burial of men that they even took down malefactors who had been condemned and crucified and buried them before the setting of the sun
.’
16

Josephus does reiterate the point about ‘
violating dead corpses
’ when, in continuing this description about what happened to Ananus and his friend
Jesus ben Gamala
, he describes even more graphically how ‘
they were
cast out naked and seen to be the food of dogs and beasts of prey
’. It is hard to imagine he could have described Ananus’ death in terms of any greater outrage or ‘
d
e
filement
’ than this. So here we actually do have the gist of the meaning of the above passage in the Habakkuk
Pesher
about ‘
i
n
flicting the outrages of Evil pollutions and taking vengeance on the flesh of his corpse
’. Without consulting the events of James’ life and those involved in his demise we could never have suspected it. On the other hand, with such data, otherwise obscure usages are immediately clarified.

In the long panegyric to Ananus, which he now interrupts his narrative to deliver, curiously Josephus says the very same things about Ananus that early Church sources say about James – including calling him ‘
a man revered on every ground and of the Highest Righteousness
’. The obsequiousness of these words rather takes one’s breath away, especially when one is aware of what Josephus said about this Ananus in the
Vita
. But he even goes on to attribute the eventual fall of Jerusalem and the ruin of its affairs to ‘
the death of Ananus
’: ‘
I should not be mistaken in saying that the death of Ananus was the beginning of the destruction of the city
,
and that the very overthrow of her wall
(
s
)
and the downfall of their State began on the day on which the Jews saw their High Priest
,
the Procurer of their Salvation
,
slain in the midst of the City
.’
17

It is difficult to consider all these parallels and overlaps accidental and there seems to be more going on beneath the su
r
face of these events than is apparent. This is especially true when early Church accounts are saying almost the very same things about James as Josephus here is saying about Ananus. And when Origen, Eusebius, and Jerome all say that in the copy of J
o
sephus’ works they saw (presumably in Caesarea –
and this in the
War
not the
Antiquities
), Josephus
attributed the fall of Jerusalem to the removal and death of James
!