James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls II (2 page)

In the parallel source represented by 1 Corinthians 16:15, another
Stephen
, that is, he or a namesake of his, is referred to by Paul as ‘
the first-fruit in Achaia
’ – meaning presumably Paul’s first convert on the Greek mainland, probably in Corinth – ‘
the members of whose house appointed themselves to the service
(
diakonia
)
of the Saints’
. Of course, to the perspicacious reader, the telltale employment of the usages
diakonia
/
diakonein
, upon which the modern English word ‘
deacon
’ is based, seals the philological overlap. Not only does Paul allude to the excellence of this ‘
service
’ including, one would assume, ‘
table se
r
vice
’ (
diakonian
– 16:17–18); but I think it can safely be said that this passage is the basis for Acts 6’s multiple references to
ministering
(
diakonia
– 6:1),
service
(
diakonein
– 6:2), or
Ministry
(
diakonia
– 6:4) above which form the backbone of its intr
o
duction to
Stephen
–
diakonia
or its variants being repeated three times in four lines in case we missed the point!

Of course, all this sometimes playful and always purposeful obfuscation typifies Acts’ bizarre and often malevolent sense of humor or word-play. In Josephus – if one acknowledges the parallel of identical names cropping up in chronologically-parallel narratives however dissimilar or unfamiliar the context or circumstances may superficially appear –
Stephen
is ‘
the Emperor’s servant
’ with dispatches and monetary tender from abroad (presumably from Corinth too), who is beaten and robbed by rampaging Jewish Revolutionaries almost within eyeshot of the walls of Jerusalem in the aftermath of the Passover stampede in the Temple of 49 CE.
12

This stampede, in which Josephus estimates – depending on which source one is following, the
War
or the
Antiquities
– some 300 or 3000 people were trampled to death (extra zeroes not being terribly germane in ancient numeration), was occ
a
sioned by a Roman Centurion on guard on the roof of the Temple arcade who lifted up his tunic and derisively exposed hi
m
self to the crowd, presumably to show at one and the same time both his uncircumcision and his contempt.

From this perspective, the ‘
Stephen
’ in Josephus and the ‘
Stephen
’ Paul refers to as his ‘
firstfruit of Achaia
’ are not two separate individuals. Nor is the character whose demise Acts refurbishes into a vicious attack by horrid Jewish agitators
to r
e
place the attack by Paul on the fabled Leader of
‘
the Jerusalem Church
’ James the Just ‘
the brother of the Lord’
. All the el
e
ments are there as conserved in that important counterweight to the presentation in the Book of Acts, the Pseudoclementine
Recognitions
.
13

There is one last ‘
Stephen
’ of note in this circle of relevant ‘
Stephen
’s at this time and that is the ‘
Stephen
’ responsible for the assassination of Domitian (81–96 CE). Domitian had wreaked singular destruction on the circle of influential early Chri
s
tians in Rome, beginning with Epaphroditus (seemingly Paul’s colleague in Philippians 2:25 and 4:18 and, in a previous e
m
bodiment, Nero’s secretary for Greek letters – not to mention the influential person Josephus pays homage to in his
Vita
as encouraging all his works
14
) and ending with Flavius Clemens, probably the very ‘
Clement
’ featured in Pseudoclementine na
r
rative just mentioned above.
Nor, seemingly, was Josephus exempt from Domitian’s wrath, not surprisingly in view of Jos
e
phus’ own connection probably with this same
Epaphroditus
, towards whom Domitian seems to have had a more than ord
i
nate animus since he ultimately had him executed as well – probably along with Flavius Clemens and possibly even Josephus in the events leading up to Domitian’s own assassination in 96 CE.
15

This
Stephen
is the servant or slave of Flavia Domitilla, for whom one of the earliest and largest Christian catacombs in Rome –
the Domitilla Catacomb
– is named. She was a relative of the Emperor and either the wife or niece of this very dame Flavius Clemens.
16
In regard to this name ‘
Flavia
’, one should remember Josephus’ own adopted patronym, ‘
Flavius Josephus’
. There can be little doubt that Stephen’s assassination of Domitian was revenge for the execution of Flavius Clemens and probably encouraged by Flavia Domitilla herself.

If the character Josephus presents us with in the late Forties was identical to Acts’ and Paul’s ‘
deaconizing
’ and ‘
table-waiting
’ Stephen above, how much fun it would have been for the author of Acts to transform an attack on James in the Temple at Passover in the hated Pseudoclementine
Recognitions
by Acts’ own narrative hero Paul (clearly dubbed in the
Recogn
i
tions
as
‘
the Man who is our Enemy
’
17
) into an episode delineating an attack ‘
by the Jews
’ – and invested with
the substance and circumstances of the two attacks on James
as reported in all early Church sources and Josephus – on the archetypical Gentile believer ‘
Stephen’
. The Czar’s minions in
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
could not have imagined a better scenario. Unfortunately it just did not happen.

Paul’s attack on James,
Hellenists
at Antioch, and
Elymas Magus
on
Cyprus

Not only does Acts randomly mix into its account materials from James’
fall
from the Pinnacle of the Temple as set forth by Hegesippus – material delightfully parodied in the Synoptics’ picture of the ‘
temptation of Christ by the Devil
’ on the Pi
n
nacle of the Temple
18
or James’ ‘
headlong
’ fall from the Temple steps in the Pseudoclementine
Recognitions
, but in all these a
c
counts, the several descriptions of how
Stephen
/
James
‘
cries out with a loud voice
’ (Acts 7:60) or the Jewish crowd ‘
cried out
’ (Acts 7:57) are exactly the same.
So basically are the final words attributed to Stephen who, ‘
seeing the Heavens open
,
falls to his knees
’ and, Christlike, both utter the words, ‘
Lord
,
do not lay this Sin to them
’ (Acts 7:60).

This is to say nothing of the long speech Stephen is portrayed as making
to the High Priest and Sanhedrin
prior to his stoning, telling them their whole history up to the building of the Temple by Solomon (Acts 7:2–53) – as if a
Jewish
Sanhedrin would need such a review! – but which rather ends with the ‘
killing all the Prophets
’ accusation (or rather ‘
libel
’) and contains elements from the Letter of James about ‘
keeping the Law
’ and an actual phrase based on Ezekiel 44:7 used in the Habakkuk
Pesher
from the Dead Sea Scrolls, the ‘
uncircumcised heart’
.
19

Not only is this speech clearly lifted from Joshua’s ‘
Farewell Address
’ to the assembled Tribes on Mounts Ebal and Ge
r
izim in Joshua 24:2–15, but Joshua 24:32 actually points the way to the source of the glaring error
Stephen
makes in Acts 7:16, where he identifies Abraham’s burial site as ‘
the tomb which Abraham bought for a certain sum of money from the Sons of Hamor in Schechem
’ and not the one
a hundred miles or so further South which Abraham bought from Ephron the Hittite at Mamre in Hebron
. This mistake would have caused eruptions of laughter. Moreover, the mistake is easily comprehensible as a too-hasty reading of Joshua 24:32 where the burial place of Joshua’s ancestor Joseph, ‘
the plot of ground Jacob bought for a hundred pieces of silver from the sons of Hamor the father of Shechem
’ is specifically evoked.

To further point up the artificiality of this episode, Acts has Stephen (
in whose face one could
‘
see the face of an Angel
’) now predicting – like Jesus in the Gospels – that ‘
Jesus the Nazoraean would destroy this Place
’ (
the Temple
) and ‘
change the customs delivered by Moses
’ (6:14–15). This is certainly written after the fall of the Temple in 70 CE, only here it is not God or the Romans who will be coming to ‘
destroy this place
’ but now ‘
Jesus the Nazoraean
’ and the metamorphosis is complete. Of course, not only does
Stephen
(in place, one must suppose, of the Leader of ‘
the Party of the Circumcision
’, James) almost become a ‘Jesus’ himself; his suffering and torment at the hands (importantly,
of
‘
the Jews
’) almost replicates that of his Bibl
i
cal prototype Jesus as well.

Figuratively, the name ‘
Stephen
’ means ‘
Crown
’ in Greek, an image, for instance, which Eusebius makes much of two ce
n
turies later in characterizing him as ‘
the first after our Lord … to receive the Crown answering to his Name of the Victorious Martyrs of Christ
’.
20
But, as both H.-J. Schoeps and myself have shown, the execution by stoning carried out by Eusebius’ ‘
murderers of the Lord
’ and Stephen’s reaction to it (to say nothing of the crowd’s) have as much or more to do with James’ fate and martyrdom than any archetypical Gentile convert by the name of ‘
Stephen
’ at this moment in early Church history in Palestine. In fact, the very
Crown
we are speaking about here was also often used to describe the hair of unshorn
Nazirites
like James.
21

‘
Hellenists’
may be
Gentiles
or ‘
Hellenizers
’ but, in the writer’s view, sometimes they may even represent ‘
Zealots’
. If the parallels with contemporary episodes in Josephus delineating the attack on ‘
the Emperor
’
s Servant Stephen
’ not very far from the walls of Jerusalem itself by crazed Revolutionaries, as well as those with the disputes running through Books XIX–XX of the
Antiquities
between
Greeks
and
Jews
in Caesarea (
Hellenists
and
Hebrews
in Acts) or ‘
Zealots
’ and toadying Jewish tur
n
coats, are recognized as the real historical templates underlying these chapters in Acts – transmogrified here
via
the magic of art in the interests of retrospective theology – then this is certainly the case.
22
There is a precedent for this, namely the use of ‘
Canaanites
’ or ‘
Cananaeans
’ in Mark and Matthew based on the Hebrew word
Kanna
’
im
or ‘
Zealots
’.
23
This is easily recognized in the shift from ‘
Simon the Cananaean
’ or ‘
Canaanite
’ in Apostle lists in Matthew 10:4 and Mark 3:18 to ‘
Simon
Zelotes
’ in Luke 6:15 and Acts 1:13. This, in turn, parallels the shift already called attention to above from ‘
Thaddaeus
’ to ‘
Lebbaeus su
r
named Thaddaeus
’ in Mark and Matthew to ‘
Judas
(
the brother
)
of James
’ in Luke (no doubt, too, ‘
Jude the brother of James
’ in the Letter ascribed to his name
24
).