Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (32 page)

What both men mean by “works of the law” is the application of Jewish law in the daily
life of the believer. Put simply, Paul views such “works” as irrelevant to salvation,
while James views them as a requirement for belief in Jesus as Christ. To prove his
point,
James offers a telling example, one that demonstrates he was specifically refuting
Paul in his epistle. “Was not Abraham our father justified by works when he offered
up his son Isaac upon the altar?” James says, alluding to the story of Abraham’s near
sacrifice of Isaac at the behest of the Lord (Genesis 22:9–14). “You see how faith
went hand-in-hand with [Abraham’s] works, how it was through his works that his faith
was made complete? Thus what the scripture says was fulfilled: ‘Abraham believed God,
and it was reckoned to him as righteousness,’ and he was called the friend of God”
(James 2:23).

What makes this example so telling is that it is the same one Paul often uses in his
letters when making the exact opposite argument. “What then are we to say about Abraham,
our father according to the flesh?” Paul writes. “For if Abraham was justified by
works, he has something to boast about, though not before God. Rather, what does the
scripture say? ‘Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness’ ”
(Romans 4:1–3; see also Galatians 3:6–9).

James may not have been able to read any of Paul’s letters but he was obviously familiar
with Paul’s teachings about Jesus. The last years of his life were spent dispatching
his own missionaries to Paul’s congregations in order to correct what he viewed as
Paul’s mistakes. The sermon that became his epistle was just another attempt by James
to curb Paul’s influence. Judging by Paul’s own epistles, James’s efforts were successful,
as many among Paul’s congregations seem to have turned their backs on him in favor
of the teachers from Jerusalem.

The anger and bitterness that Paul feels toward these “false apostles [and] deceitful
workers,” these “servants of Satan” sent to infiltrate his congregations by a man
he angrily dismisses as one of the “supposedly acknowledged leaders” of the church—a
man he claims “contributed nothing” to him—seeps like poison through the pages of
his later epistles (2 Corinthians 11:13; Galatians 2:6). Yet Paul’s attempts to convince
his congregations not to abandon
him would ultimately prove futile. There was never any doubt about where the loyalty
of the community would lie in a dispute between a former Pharisee and the flesh and
blood of the living Christ. No matter how Hellenistic the Diaspora Jews may have become,
their allegiance to the leaders of the mother assembly did not waver. James, Peter,
John—these were the pillars of the church. They were the principal characters in all
the stories people told about Jesus. They were the men who walked and talked with
Jesus. They were among the first to see him rise from the dead; they would be the
first to witness him return with the clouds of heaven. The authority James and the
apostles maintained over the community during their lifetimes was unbreakable. Not
even Paul could escape it, as he discovered in 57
C.E
., when he was forced by James to publicly repent of his beliefs by taking part in
that strict purification ritual in the Temple of Jerusalem.

As with his account of the Apostolic Council some years earlier, Luke’s rendering
of this final meeting between James and Paul in the book of Acts tries to brush aside
any hint of conflict or animosity by presenting Paul as silently acquiescing to the
Temple rite demanded of him. But not even Luke can hide the tension that so obviously
exists in this scene. In Luke’s account, before James sends Paul to the Temple to
prove to the Jerusalem assembly that he “observes and guards the law,” he first draws
a sharp distinction between “the things that God had done among the gentiles in [Paul’s]
ministry,” and the “many thousands of believers … among the Jews [who] are all
zealous for the law
” (Acts 21:20). James then gives Paul “four men who are under a vow” and instructs
him to “go through the rite of purification with them, and pay for the shaving of
their heads” (Acts 21:24).

What Luke is describing in this passage is called a “Nazirite vow” (Numbers 6:2).
Nazirites were strict devotees of the Law of Moses who pledged to abstain from wine
and refused to shave their hair or come near a corpse for a set period of time, either
as
an act of piety or in return for the fulfillment of a wish, such as a healthy child
or a safe journey (James himself may have been a Nazirite, as the description of those
who take the vow perfectly matches the descriptions of him in the ancient chronicles).
Considering Paul’s views on the Law of Moses and the Temple of Jerusalem, his forced
participation in such a ritual would have been hugely embarrassing for him. The entire
purpose of the rite was to demonstrate to the Jerusalem assembly that he no longer
believed what he had been preaching for nearly a decade. There is no other way to
read Paul’s participation in the Nazirite vow except as a solemn renunciation of his
ministry and a public declaration of James’s authority over him—all the more reason
to doubt Luke’s depiction of Paul as simply going along with the ritual without comment
or complaint.

Interestingly, Luke’s may not be the only account of this pivotal moment. An eerily
similar story is recounted in the compilation of writings known collectively as the
Pseudo-Clementines
. Although compiled sometime around 300
C.E
. (nearly a century before the New Testament was officially canonized), the
Pseudo-Clementines
contain within them two separate sets of traditions that can be dated much earlier.
The first is known as the
Homilies
, and comprises two epistles: one by the apostle Peter, the other by Peter’s successor
in Rome, Clement. The second set of traditions is called the
Recognitions
, which is itself founded upon an older document titled
Ascent of James
that most scholars date to the middle of the second century
C.E
., perhaps two or three decades after the gospel of John was written.

The
Recognitions
contains an incredible story about a violent altercation that James the brother of
Jesus has with someone simply called “the enemy.” In the text, James and the enemy
are engaged in a shouting match inside the Temple when, all of a sudden, the enemy
attacks James in a fit of rage and throws him down the Temple stairs. James is badly
hurt by the fall but his supporters
quickly come to his rescue and carry him to safety. Remarkably, the enemy who attacked
James is later identified as none other than Saul of Tarsus (
Recognitions
1:70–71).

As with the Lukan version, the story of the altercation between James and Paul in
the
Recognitions
has its flaws. The fact that Paul is referred to as Saul in the text suggests that
the author believes the event took place before Paul’s conversion (though the
Recognitions
never actually refers to that conversion). Yet regardless of the historicity of the
story itself, Paul’s identity as “the enemy” of the church is repeatedly affirmed,
not only in the
Recognitions
, but also in the other texts of the
Pseudo-Clementines
. In the
Epistle of Peter
, for example, the chief apostle complains that “some from among the gentiles have
rejected my lawful preaching, attaching themselves to certain lawless and trifling
preaching of the man who is my enemy” (Epistle of Peter 2:3). Elsewhere, Peter flatly
identifies this “false prophet” who teaches “the dissolution of the law” as Paul,
cautioning his followers to “believe no teacher, unless he brings from Jerusalem the
testimonial of James the Lord’s brother, or whosoever may come after him” (
Recognitions
4:34–35).

What the
Pseudo-Clementine
documents indicate, and the New Testament clearly confirms, is that James, Peter,
John, and the rest of the apostles viewed Paul with wariness and suspicion, if not
open derision, which is why they went to such lengths to counteract Paul’s teachings,
censuring him for his words, warning others not to follow him, even sending their
own missionaries to his congregations. No wonder Paul was so keen to flee to Rome
after the incident at the Temple in 57
C.E
. He was surely not eager to be judged by the emperor for his alleged crimes, as Luke
seems to suggest. Paul went to Rome because he hoped he could escape James’s authority.
But as he discovered when he arrived in the Imperial City and saw Peter already established
there, one could not so easily escape the reach of James and Jerusalem.

While Paul spent the last years of his life in Rome, frustrated by the lack of enthusiasm
he received for his message (perhaps because
the Jews were heeding Peter’s call to “believe no teacher, unless he brings from Jerusalem
the testimonial of James the Lord’s brother”), the Jerusalem assembly under James’s
leadership thrived. The Hebrews in Jerusalem were certainly not immune to persecution
by the religious authorities. They were often arrested and sometimes killed for their
preaching. James the son of Zebedee, one of the original Twelve, was even beheaded
(Acts 12:3). But these periodic bouts of persecution were rare and seem not to have
been the result of a rejection of the law on the part of the Hebrews, as was the case
with the Hellenists who were expelled from the city. Obviously, the Hebrews had figured
out a way to accommodate themselves to the Jewish priestly authorities, or else they
could not have remained in Jerusalem. These were by all accounts law-abiding Jews
who kept the customs and traditions of their forefathers but who happened also to
believe that the simple Jewish peasant from Galilee named Jesus of Nazareth was the
promised messiah.

That is not to say that James and the apostles were uninterested in reaching out to
gentiles, or that they believed gentiles could not join their movement. As indicated
by his decision at the Apostolic Council, James was willing to forgo the practice
of circumcision and other “burdens of the law” for gentile converts. James did not
want to force gentiles to first become Jews before they were allowed to become Christians.
He merely insisted that they not divorce themselves entirely from Judaism, that they
maintain a measure of fidelity to the beliefs and practices of the very man they claimed
to be following (Acts 15:12–21). Otherwise, the movement risked becoming a wholly
new religion, and that is something neither James nor his brother Jesus would have
imagined.

James’s steady leadership over the Jerusalem assembly came to an end in 62
C.E
., when he was executed by the high priest Ananus, not just because he was a follower
of Jesus and certainly not because he transgressed the law (or else “the most fair-minded
and … strict in the observance of the law” would not have been up in
arms about his unjust execution). James was likely killed because he was doing what
he did best: defending the poor and weak against the wealthy and powerful. Ananus’s
schemes to impoverish the lower-class priests by stealing their tithes would not have
sat well with James the Just. And so, Ananus took advantage of the brief absence of
Roman authority in Jerusalem to get rid of a man who had become a thorn in his side.

One cannot know how Paul felt in Rome when he heard about James’s death. But if he
assumed the passing of Jesus’s brother would relax the grip of Jerusalem over the
community, he was mistaken. The leadership of the Jerusalem assembly passed swiftly
to another of Jesus’s family members, his cousin Simeon son of Clopas, and the community
continued unabated until four years after James’s death, when the Jews suddenly rose
up in revolt against Rome.

Some among the Hebrews seem to have fled Jerusalem for Pella when the uprising began.
But there is no evidence to suggest that the core leadership of the mother assembly
abandoned Jerusalem. Rather, they maintained their presence in the city of Jesus’s
death and resurrection, eagerly awaiting his return, right up to the moment that Titus’s
army arrived and wiped the holy city and its inhabitants—both Christians and Jews—off
the face of the earth. With the destruction of Jerusalem, the connection between the
assemblies scattered across the Diaspora and the mother assembly rooted in the city
of God was permanently severed, and with it the last physical link between the Christian
community and Jesus the Jew. Jesus the zealot.

Jesus of Nazareth.

True God from True God

The balding, gray-bearded old men who fixed the faith and practice of Christianity
met for the first time in the Byzantine city of Nicaea, on the eastern shore of Lake
Izmit in present-day Turkey. It was the summer of 325
C.E
. The men had been brought together by the emperor Constantine and commanded to come
to a consensus on the doctrine of the religion he had recently adopted as his own.
Bedecked in robes of purple and gold, an aureate laurel resting on his head, Rome’s
first Christian emperor called the council to order as though it were a Roman Senate,
which is understandable, considering that every one of the nearly two thousand bishops
he had gathered in Nicaea to permanently define Christianity was a Roman.