James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls II (128 page)

But this is precisely the picture of James in early Church accounts – particularly in Epiphanius and Jerome – going into the Holy of Holies, there to
render atonement before God
‘
until the flesh on his knees turned as calloused as a camel
’
s for all the supplicating before God he did
’, meaning,
before the Judgement Seat
. One way of construing this is to see it as nothing other than an early Church attempt to provide a picture of James making at least one such
Yom Kippur
atonement – if not many – in his role as ‘
Opposition High Priest
’ or the incarnation of all ‘
Perfection
’, ‘
the Righteous One
’ or ‘
Zaddik
’ of his Generation, acknowledged across the board by all groups, as early Church documents so vividly testify.
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But who was James that he had the right to go into the Holy of Holies in this manner, whether once or often, to make such an atonement? As we have been trying to suggest, he was ‘
the People
’
s Priest’
or ‘
the High Priest of the Opposition Alliance
’
,
and it is the ‘
Zadokite
’ ideology at Qumran – which,
inter alia
,
was applied to ‘
the Righteous Teacher
’ there, that provides us the wherewithal to understand this.

Before the Qumran documents appeared, we could not have predicted this which is what is so startling about them, though the approach was hinted at in Hebrews with its emphasis on a ‘
High Priesthood after the Order of Melchizedek
’ (a variation on the ‘
Zadokite
’ one at Qumran) and its insistence on a ‘
Perfect High Priest of greater purity
’ or ‘
higher Righteou
s
ness
’ – Hebrews 7:26–8:1). This was much of what the ‘
Zealots
’, too, were demanding from the first stirring of their
Mov
e
ment
in the 4
BCE
–7
CE
events, following Herod’s death, to the fall of the Temple in 70
CE
and beyond.
54
It was also being fairly clearly enunciated in the Damascus Document, first discovered among the materials in the Cairo
Genizah
in 1896.

With these materials, blurred by arcane scholarly discussions about the differences between Qumran and Phar
i
see/Rabbinic calendrical reckonings and misunderstandings over the true thrust of references like the one here to ‘
his Exiled House
’ – ‘
Exiled
’ because it was
no longer sitting in the Chamber of Hewn Stone on the Temple Mount
– we do, now, have the instrumentality for approaching this notice about James in the Temple performing something resembling ‘
a Yom Kippur atonement
’, to say nothing of the one in the Habakkuk
Pesher
above, about difficulties between ‘
the Wicked Priest
’ and ‘
the Community
’ of ‘
the Righteous Teacher
’/‘
Zaddik
’ relating to events circulating around ‘
Yom Kippur
’ or its aftermath. Even from the paucity of materials that have survived about James, we also have something of the same kind regarding him.

Regardless of what may or may not have happened between ‘
the Righteous Teacher
’ and ‘
the Wicked Priest
’ on ‘
the Day of Atonements
’ or between ‘
the Wicked Priest
’ and ‘
the Poor
’/‘
the Simple of Judah doing the
Torah
’, who made up ‘
the Cou
n
cil of the Community
’ and who were, seemingly, led by ‘
the Righteous Teacher
’, one
can surmise that it was because of
James
’
atonement in
‘
the Inner Sanctum
’
of the Temple on behalf of the whole People on Yom Kippur
– attested to in sources stemming from the Second-Century early Church writers Hegesippus and Clement of Alexandria – that his arrest took place, probably in 62
CE
, the year of his ‘
Sanhedrin Trial
’ on charges of ‘
blasphemy
’. Here too, of course, is the substance of the ‘
blasphemy
’ charge –
pronouncing the forbidden name of God
which the High Priest did on
Yom Kippur
and
in the Inner Sanctum of the Temple
.
Put in another way, we also have materials in these sources, as sketchy as these are, which specifically imply activities connecting James to the Temple and centering about a
Yom Kippur
-atonement of some kind. Again, that we should have such notices and such a link-up, even in the scanty materials before us, is of the greatest significance.

Jesus ben Ananias appeared during the Feast of Tabernacles, 62
CE
, which occurs immediately following
Yom Kippur
in the same month and as a culmination of the Festivities initiated by this atonement. He, in turn, is said to have reiterated
for seven and a half straight years
: ‘
Woe to Jerusalem..., Woe to the City
,
and the People
,
and the Temple
’, until he was killed by a stray Roman projectile shortly before the fall of the Temple in 70
CE
. In some manner, as already suggested, this was connec
t
ed to the removal and recent death of James, ‘
the
Oblias
’/‘
Bulwark
’/‘
Protection of the People
’ or ‘
Perfectly Righteous
’
High Priest
.

Therefore, one can say with some certainty that Jesus ben Ananias, the ‘
Prophet
’ bowdlerized in Agabus’ warning to Paul in Acts 21:7, began his mournful prophesying immediately following
Yom Kippur
62
CE
and the events culminating in the death of James. We have also described how this ‘
oracle
’ seems to have been the basis of the Early Christian ‘
Pella Flight
’ Tr
a
dition connected to the death of James. It is even possible to conceive that in some manner the three and a half years in Daniel 12:7 – ‘
a time
,
two times
,
and a half’
, the period of the interruption of sacrifice in the Temple during which ‘
the Abomination of the Desolation
’ held sway in Jerusalem – may have been interpreted to relate to the period between James’ death and the suspension of sacrifice on behalf of Romans in the Temple leading to the outbreak of the War.

This is also something of the implication of additional obscure numerology in Daniel 12:11–12 of ‘
1290
–
1335
days
’. This is connected to another section of Daniel with slightly differing numerology
relating to the daily sacrifice
and
the cleansing of the Temple
, which uses the language of ‘
casting down
’ – namely, ‘
casting down the Truth
’/‘
casting down the Temple
’ and a variation of both of these, ‘
casting the Heavenly Host and the stars to the ground and stamping upon them
’ (Daniel 8:10–14). The ‘
causing them to stumble
’ or ‘
casting down
’ verb, used along with ‘
swallowing them
’ in this obscure passage from 1QpHab XI.2–XII.12 about tragic events connected to
Yom Kippur
, is somewhat parallel to these. Neither of these – the all
u
sion to ‘
swallowing them
’ and the allusion to ‘
causing them to stumble
’ or ‘
casting them down
’ – is to be found in the underl
y
ing text from Habakkuk 2:15. At this point this only contains the allusions to ‘
pouring out His Venom
’ or ‘
pouring out His Wrath
’, ‘
causing his neighbors to drink
’ (this is the same ‘
mashkeh
’ or ‘
give to drink
’ we shall encounter in the esoteric analysis we shall do at the end of this book on ‘
Damascus
’ or ‘
Dammashek
’ in Hebrew as ‘
Dam-mashkeh
– ‘
give Blood to drink
’), and ‘
to the dregs
’ or ‘
unto drunkenness in order to gaze on their Festivals
’/‘
privy parts
’, as we have seen. Both of these phrases are deliberately added in the
Pesher
. But it should be appreciated that this ‘
casting down
’ or ‘
being thrown down
’ language is the basis of all early Church accounts relating to ‘
the Enemy
’ Paul’s attack on or the death of the look-alike of ‘
the Righteous Teacher
’, James.

The Isaiah 3:10–11
Pesher
in Early Church Literature

This is also the thrust of the material preceding Isaiah 3:10–11, the Scriptural passage applied to James’ death in Eusebius’ long extract from Hegesippus’ now-lost account in the manner that ‘
Zaddik
’-texts were applied to the death of the Righteous Teacher at Qumran. Hegesippus also attests that James’ name was to be found by searching Scripture, clearly meaning either his name ‘
Jacob
’ or ‘
the
Zaddik
’ (probably the latter), just as in these texts at Qumran, like Psalm 37:32 and Habakkuk 1:4, to say nothing of Isaiah 53:11. But this text from Isaiah 3:10–11 actually fulfills both of these qualifications being, first of all, a ‘
Zaddik
’-text about ‘
the Wicked overwhelming the Righteous
’ and those involved in such activity ‘
being paid the reward of their doings
’ and, second of all, no less significantly, it was addressed to the ‘
House of Jacob
’ (Isaiah 2:5).

Furthermore, not only is it surrounded by references to ‘
robbing the Poor
’, ‘
swallowing the Way
’, ‘
standing up to Judge the Peoples
’, and ‘
the reward of the Wicked
’, but it is also a ‘
cedars of Lebanon
’-text referring to ‘
the fall of the Lofty Ones
’ and that ‘
the Lord of Hosts is taking away from Jerusalem and Judah the Stay and the Staff
’ (2:5–3:15). Whether there was a
c
tually a
Pesher
concerning it in the manner of the Habakkuk and Psalm 37
Pesher
s at Qumran is a matter of opinion but what the exegetes at Qumran would have made of these passages is crystal clear.

It is worth remarking, in the Greek version of this passage from Isaiah 3:10–11, the note of ‘
conspiring
’ or ‘
plotting
’ that one finds as well in the Habakkuk
Pesher
, in which the Wicked Priest ‘
plotted to destroy the Poor
’. Here it is expressed in terms of ‘
conspiring an Evil counsel against themselves
’, translated in the Greek by the words ‘
bebouleuntai boulen
’. Again one reco
g
nizes the bare outlines of our ‘
bale
’/‘
ballo
’ symbolism permeating all these parallel Greek texts relating to the death of James. As we shall presently see, the allusion here will not be unrelated to the ‘
Babylon
’ usage one finds in Revelation 14:8 and 16:19 as well.

But these words nowhere appear in the Hebrew version of Isaiah 3:10–11 nor, for instance, in the version of Isaiah found at Qumran, nor the Vulgate. Here the words are, ‘
Woe to the Wicked
’ ‘
for they have rewarded
(‘
paid
’)
themselves Evil
’. Ther
e
fore these surprisingly different words in Greek seem to have at some point found their way into the
Septuagint
. Accordingly, it then goes on to read: ‘
Let us bind the Just One
,
for he is an annoyance to us
.
Therefore shall they eat the fruit of their works
.’
This is the version of the text that is reproduced in the early Church testimony as applied to James with the repercu
s
sions we have been explaining above.
55
For their part, however, the Hebrew and other received versions of this text preserve almost the opposite sense and give the passage a more positive cast that does not fit the exegesis developed in Hegesippus and his dependents: ‘
Say to the Righteous
(
Zaddik
)
that it will be well
,
for they shall eat the fruit of their actions
. W
oe the Wicked
(
Rasha
‘
), (
to him
) Evil (
Ra
‘
ah
),
for the reward
(
gemul
)
of his hands shall be done to him
(Isaiah 3:10–11).’
56