James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls I (94 page)

While impressive for its rhetorical skill, this certainly is arcane. Augustine as well, while not denying that Mary was born subject to ‘Original Sin’, also championed the cause that she had been delivered of its effects ‘by the Grace of rebirth’.
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Trajan’s Executions of Simeon bar Cleophas and the Descendants of Jesus’ Brother Judas

This brings us back to the question of Simeon bar Cleophas and Cephas. In both Eusebius and Epiphanius, ‘Cleophas’ is of course the father of Simeon bar Cleophas and the uncle of Jesus. Both are clearly dependent on Hegesippus. In two separate places Eusebius, in writing about Simeon bar Cleophas, the next to succeed among ‘the Desposyni’ (the family of Jesus), informs us that ‘Hegesippus tells us that Cleophas was Joseph’s brother’. This he tells us in the same breath as the fact that:

After the martyrdom of James and the capture of Jerusalem which
immediately followed
, there is a
firm tradition
that those of the Apostles and Disciples of the Lord who were still alive, together with those who were related to the Lord according to the flesh,
assembled
from all parts … to choose a fit person as
successor to James
. They
unanimously elected Simeon the son of Clopas, mentioned in the Gospel narratives
, to occupy the Episcopal Throne there, who was, so they say,
a cousin of the Saviour
.
11

Not only does Eusebius in this testimony, taken from Hegesippus, display no embarrassment whatsoever at the kinship of these ‘
Desposyni
’ to Jesus, once again we have another of these tell-tale ‘elections’. Nor is it clear whether it is this ‘Simeon’ or his father, ‘Clopas’, the husband of Mary’s sister Mary in the Gospel of John, who is the one ‘mentioned in the Gospel narratives’. If Simeon, then we have already described where.

In referring to these ‘
Desposyni
’ (literally, ‘of the Lord’), Eusebius records – also on the basis of Hegesippus – how first of all Vespasian, after the capture of Jerusalem, issued an order to ensure that no one who was of royal stock should be left among the Jews, that all descendants of David should be ferreted out and for this reason a further widespread persecution was again
inflicted upon the Jews
(note, this ‘persecution’ is not ‘inflicted upon’ the Christians).
12
If this order can be confirmed, then it shows that Vespasian properly appreciated that the root cause of the Uprising against Rome from 66 to 70 CE and the unrest continuing thereafter was Messianic. This is the writer’s view and we have already shown it to be the implication of Josephus’ data.

It is also the implication of the data in the Dead Sea Scrolls, which are thoroughly Messianic. It also gainsays the view of early Church fathers like Eusebius, who, encouraged by the picture in the Gospels, repeatedly averred that the Jews suffered all these things, because they r
ejected the Messiah
.
13
On the contrary, the Jews suffered the things they suffered, because they
were so Messianic
– a point the authors of the Gospels are at great pains to disguise – and, as things transpired, rejected the view of the Messianism disseminated by people like Eusebius! In addition, it again demonstrates the root cause of the problems that continued to plague Palestine and most of the Eastern region of the Roman Empire as well – even as far as Rome itself.

Eusebius gives no further information on this point, instead going on to document the attempts by Domitian (81–96 CE), Vespasian’s second son, to do the very same thing he pictures Vespasian as doing – as remarked above, in the questioning of the descendants of Jesus’ third brother ‘Judas’ he supposedly and, no doubt, apocryphally indulged in. Eusebius, in describing this new ‘persecution’, again prefaces it by the notice that ‘Domitian issued an order
for the execution of all those who were of David’s line
’ – this may have indeed been the case – while at the same time claiming Domitian’s ‘father Vespasian planned no Evil against us’.
14
It is hard to reconcile the two accounts, and either the order to execute all Messianic claimants of David’s line originated under Domitian or he simply renewed an order his father made a decade or so before at the conclusion of the First Jewish Revolt against Rome.

Whatever the truth here, Eusebius goes on then to quote Hegesippus’ account of the arrest and examination of Jesus’ brother Jude’s
two
descendants – some versions even claiming to know their names: ‘
Zoker
’ and ‘
James
’ – on a charge of being ‘
of the family of David
’.
15
When Domitian discovered them to be common labourers and the Kingdom they professed, Heavenly and Angelic not temporal, he is pictured by Hegesippus as ‘dismissing them as simpletons’ and
rescinding
the decree – the reason being that an ‘other-worldly’ or spiritual Kingdom was clearly considered no threat to the power of Rome.

But the language used by Hegesippus here to describe this Kingdom ‘at the End of the World, when he would come in Glory to judge the quick and the dead and
reward each according to his works
’, recalls nothing so much as James’ vision in the Temple of the Son of Man ‘coming on the clouds of Heaven’ with the Angelic Host, so vividly echoed as well in the picture in the War Scroll of the ‘multitude of Heavenly Holy Ones mighty in battle’, not to mention the Letter of James’ picture of the ‘cries of the reapers reaching the ears of the Lord of Hosts’ and the ‘coming of the Lord’ – and the ‘Jamesian’ emphasis generally on ‘works’.

Regardless of the truth or falseness of these reports, after discussing ‘the Ebionites’ – whom we have identified as holding James’ name in such high regard – Eusebius then goes on to recount the martyrdom of Simeon bar Cleophas in the reign of Trajan (98–117 CE).
16
As will be recalled, these ‘Ebionites’, who reject the notion of the Supernatural Christ, ‘still cling tenaciously to the Law’, notions that Eusebius, playing on the meaning of their name in Hebrew (which he understands), dismisses as ‘
poverty-stricken
’.

Once again, he gives us the same story about Simeon being accused of being a ‘descendant of David and a Christian’ – whatever might be meant by this term at this time – and a search being made for those ‘of the family of David’ we just encountered twice before under Vespasian and his son Domitian. He notes that Simeon was ‘the son of Mary the wife of Clopas’, this time directly quoting Hegesippus to the effect that he was ‘the son of the Lord’s uncle’.
17
If nothing else, this demonstrates something very disconcerting to the Romans was going on in the Palestine region at this time.

It is this information Jerome also uses – this and the Gospel accounts of ‘Mary the wife of Clopas’ being ‘the mother of James, Joses, and Salome’ – to conclude that ‘the brothers of Jesus’ were actually his
cousins
. At the same time he neglects to point out that this would make Simeon bar Cleophas, the next in the line of these alleged ‘
Desposyni
’, Jesus’
second brother
(‘Clopas’ and ‘Cleophas’ being identical) – probably the one called ‘Simon’ in the Gospels. Of course, this would make what was developing in Palestine, as we have already suggested, something of a family ‘Caliphate’ – ‘Caliph’ meaning ‘Successor’ in Arabic.

Eusebius claims there were fifteen in the line of these so-called ‘
Desposyni
’ down to the time of Simeon or Shim‘on Bar Kochba and the Second Jewish Revolt from 132 to 136 CE. This sounds suspiciously similar to the number of the Community Council at Qumran, composed of – so it appears – ‘Twelve Israelites’ and ‘three Priests’, and not a list at all. Realistically speaking, fifteen ‘Bishops’ or ‘Archbishops’ – as the case may be – in some sixty–seventy years, sounds not a little hypothetical.

The first successor to Simeon bar Cleophas in these fictionalized lists of
Desposyni
is also someone Eusebius again portentously refers to as ‘Justus’, recalling the defeated candidate in the election to succeed ‘Judas’ in Acts. For his part, Epiphanius calls the individual who succeeds Simeon by the equally auspicious name of ‘Judas’. Indeed, he may very well have been a descendant of Jesus’ third brother ‘Judas’ or ‘Judas of James’ in Apostle lists and the Letter of Jude. For Eusebius, interestingly enough, ‘Judas’ is the name of the last or fifteenth on this list and we are back to where we started again.
18

Regardless of the believability of Simeon bar Cleophas, ‘the son of the Lord’s uncle’, being crucified at Moses’ age of ‘one hundred and twenty’, again ‘the witnesses’ marvel that ‘he could bear such tortures’. On top of this, Eusebius then describes how at the same time ‘the descendants of one of those considered
brothers of the Lord
,
named Judas
’ were re-arrested under Trajan – it will be recalled they had previously so been arrested under Domitian – and
executed in similar fashion
.

As to the descendants of Jesus’
third brother
Judas generally – again quoting Hegesippus – Eusebius says ‘they came forward and presided over every Church
as witnesses
and
members of the Lord’s family
’. Again this point is totally missing from Acts. Also characterizing Simeon as being ‘
among the witnesses who bore testimony to what had both been heard and seen of the Lord
’ (again, not even a word about this in the orthodox Gospels or Acts, unless we take the story of the ‘two’ witnesses on the road to Emmaus, so equivocally identified in Luke, to relate to either Simeon or James, or both – which we do) and ‘
dying a martyr’s death
’, he concludes, still following Hegesippus:

Until then, the Church remained as
pure and uncorrupt as a virgin
… but when the sacred band of Apostles and the generation of those who had been
privileged to hear with their own ears
the Divine wisdom, reached the ends of their lives and passed on, then impious error took shape through the
Lying and deceit of false teachers
who, seeing that none of the Apostles were left, shame-facedly
preached, against the proclamation of the Truth, their false Knowledge
.
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Epaphroditus and the Sequence of Events Leading to the Martyrdom of James

To go back to the interesting sequence in these events where James’ martyrdom is concerned, which helps illumine some of the factors behind his removal. In the first place, there is the
confrontation between Simon and Agrippa I over barring foreigners
– including Herodians –
from the Temple
which has as its counterpart, in the next generation,
the erection of the Temple Wall which triggered the stoning of James
. The purpose of this wall, as we have explained, was not simply to bar Agrippa I’s son Agrippa II from the Temple, but to bar his view of the sacrifices in the Temple as he reclined dining on the terrace of his palace. This is indicative of the real atmosphere in Palestine in this period – Gospel portraiture of the pastoral ‘Galilean’ countryside notwithstanding – and overseas it would have been perceived, no doubt, as the epitome of recalcitrant malevolence.

This kind of intolerant ‘zeal’ is reversed, for instance, in the Pauline Letter to the Ephesians, which not only contains the doctrine of ‘Jesus as Temple’ – enunciated by Paul as well in 1 Corinthians 3:10 and 12:27 – but also the opposite position, that there should ‘no longer be strangers or foreign visitors’ (Eph. 2:19). For it and for Paul, all are ‘fellow citizens in the Household’ or ‘Temple of God’, of which ‘Jesus Christ is the Cornerstone’ (2:20–22). This is also the picture in the Gospels. These are noble sentiments, to be sure, with wide appeal; but, in a Palestinian framework, they are historically inaccurate as the Dead Sea Scrolls now clearly testify – as did the Temple warning blocks threatening death for strangers or foreigners entering the central area around the Temple even inadvertently.

After this confrontation in Caesarea and those that follow between Greeks and Jews throughout the next decade there, comes the assassination of the High Priest Jonathan, accompanied by Josephus’ introduction of ‘the
Sicarii
’ responsible for it. Josephus rails against the assassination of this Jonathan and the bloodshed that followed as ‘polluting’ both city and Temple. As Josephus puts it, once again reversing the ‘Piety’ language of ‘loving God’:

This is the reason why, in my opinion, even God himself, out of
hatred for their Impiety, turned away from our city
and, because He deemed the Temple to be no longer a
clean dwelling place for Him
, brought the Romans upon us and
purified our city by fire
, while inflicting
slavery
upon us together with our wives and children, for He wished to
chasten us
by these calamities.
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This is a different kind of ‘
mea culpa
’ confession from those one gets in the New Testament generally, which are, nevertheless, but a variation of it.