Gospel (138 page)

4
.
Numbers
19:11 declares a person unclean for a week if he touches or prepares a corpse; a task usually left to the women.
   If Jesus' “Nazirene” followers were indeed associated with the “Nazirite” movement, they were forbidden by the Law (
Leviticus
21:11 and
Numbers
6:6) to attend his funeral or execution (or for that matter, the funerals of their own mothers or fathers), explaining a near-total absence of his disciples from Calvary and the anointing ceremonies of the crypt.

5
. Yavneh was the escape of the Sanhedrin while Jerusalem was under siege. Under the great rabbis Yochanan ben-Zakkai and Gamaliel II, Yavneh flourished as a peaceable intellectual community, and would have remained peaceful except for Hadrian's unfortunate decision to outlaw the Torah in 132
C.E.
, which plunged the obliterated region into another war.
   The Nazirene/Christian community fled to Pella.

6
. What follows is the classic Ebionite argument against Saul/Paul one finds in the late Second-Century
Kerygmata Petrou
(
The Preachings of Peter;
trans. R. L. Wilson, Hennecke's
NTA,
Philadelphia, 1965). In the “Homily,” there is a fictionalized letter from Peter to James.
Jesus,
Peter recalls,
explained to us how the Evil One, having disputed with [Christ] for forty days, promised to send apostles in his retinue for the purpose of deception
(11:35).
   There were anti-Paul numerological arguments as well, arguing that twelve apostles were perfect, and Paul as number thirteen was evil; see 4:23–24 below when the author considers this as well.

7
.
I commend to you our sister Phoebe, a deaconness of the church at Senkrae so that you may welcome her in the Lord as is fitting for the saints.…
(
Romans
16:1–2).
Give my greetings to the brothers and sisters in Laodicea and to Nympha and the church in her house.
(
Colossians
4:15). In the earliest and undisputed Pauline letters, there are no prohibitions about women in leadership roles in the Church. Remember, the concept of “priest” was anathema to Early Christians, who wished to escape the theocracy of the Temple. In the Early Church deacons and elders, apostles and evangelists, and those with the gifts of prophecy (men as well as women, apparently) were the sole authorities—no priests.

8
. The author, with untypical aptness, compares Paul to Typhon (both were Cilician, from Tarsus), one of the Titans who fought with Jove.

9
. Nathanael (found in
John
) has traditionally been associated with Bartholomew (
Matthew, Mark, Luke
). Eusebius has an account that places Bartholomew in India, like Thomas, but tradition has his martyrdom, by flaying, take place in Armenia.

10
. This evangelist seems to have been an enthusiast for many of the cult obsessions of the day—Crowns, Diadems, the Chariot (the all-important
merkavah
of Ezekiel, source of much Jewish mysticism), and the Throne of God, traditionally the residing place of the human soul (female, and willful), either under or within YHWH's throne. The
Sefer Yetsirah
may be as old as the 200s, and is a culmination of these ancient preoccupations. Here is a particularly descriptive example of this literature from the 4th-Century “Heikhalot Rabbati” (see the brilliant Shafer trans., Leiden, 1981):
[Rabbi Nehunyah] at once revealed the secret of the world, the measure that appears to one who is worthy of gazing on the King, on his Throne … on the swift lightning, on the terrible Hasmal, on the River of Fire which surrounds his Throne, on the bridges, on the fiery flames that blaze up between one bridge and the next, on the dense smoke, on the bright wind that raises up from the burning coals the pall of smoke which covers and conceals all the chambers of the palace [the heikhal] of Aravot [the Seventh Heaven]
 … Etc. These mystical objects enthralled Jewish esotericists through the Middle Ages and to the age of Kabbalah.

11
. In the Jewish martyrdom cult of the period, as through the Christian Middle Ages, a special Crown was awarded to the martyrs.
Στ
φανος,
the name “Stephen,” means crown. This convenient coincidence would seem to cast suspicion on whether a historical Stephen existed, or whether the Protomartyr was a composite Greek creation, invented to deliver the polished speech in
Acts
7, and be awarded the martyr's prize.

12
. Jesus joins the centuries of holy men to predict the destruction of Jerusalem (notably,
Mark
13:1–9,
Luke
23:28).

13
. Like the Marys, there is a profusion of Jameses. By this gospel, it is confirmed that there are three main Jameses: 1) The James bar-Zebedee who was the brother of John, the first disciple to be martyred in 44
C.E.
2) The James of the pastoral letter in the New Testament, and brother of Jesus, first bishop of Jerusalem, clubbed to death under the Procurator Albinus in 62
C.E.
   There is no reliable account of 3) James “the Less,” and for convenience the Church has grouped him with Jesus' brother James, though it is clear from
Luke
that James the Less is the son of Alphaeus. (For an array of iconography, see the complete R. P. Bedford,
St. James the Less.
) However, this document suggests that James bar-Alphaeus may well be the source of the
Protoevangelium of James
with surviving copies in Armenian, Coptic, Greek, and the oldest, Syriac.
James
was the most popular apocryphon in the Middle Ages, in which a birth narrative, legends of Mary, Hannah, and Joachim appear.

14
. Mary, the mother of James bar-Alphaeus, according to
Luke
and
Mark
attended the funeral preparations of Jesus and went to the tomb on the day of the Resurrection.

15
. Here we see an evidence of the pervasive obsession with the Tree from which the Cross was made. One of the oldest churches of Jerusalem, the Georgian Church of the Holy Cross (from the 400s), contends it marks the spot of the tree. In cultures as diverse as Anglo-Saxon-Germanic (see “The Dream of the Rood”) and Ethiopian, Cross and Tree-of-the-Cross fetishism thrived. After the 80-year-old Empress Helena returned from Jerusalem in 326 convinced she had the True Cross, it was thought that a Piece of the True Cross upon touching a normal piece of wood made the normal wood holy as well (hence the proliferation of the True Cross all over Europe).

16
. Josephus,
Life,
par. 3:
[I] became known to Poppaea, [Nero] Caesar's wife, and took care as soon as possible to entreat her to procure that the [Jewish] priests might be set at liberty; and when, besides this favor, I had obtained many presents from Poppaea, I returned home again.

17
. Metilius, a Roman commander in the region, mentioned by Josephus (
War
II.xvii.10).

18
. To be “unwound” was perhaps the most unimaginable torture the Romans devised, in which the abdomen was cut into, the colon was located and then nailed to a spool. By winch all one's intestines were wound out of one slowly.

19
. Martyrs and their cults abounded in the Graeco-Roman persecutions of Judea.
   Simon the High Priest, last of the Maccabees, was killed (with two of his sons) by his own son-in-law for the Ptolemies in 134
B.C.E.
Under the despotic King Alexander Jannaeus (reigned 103–76
B.C.E.
) some 800 Pharisees and detractors were crucified while he feasted with his concubines and looked on. As a final gesture, the Jewish King commanded that the pietists, while dying on the crosses, observe the throat-slitting of their own wives and children. He may be the model for the Wicked Priest of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
   Onias the Just is perhaps the model for the Teacher of Righteousness of the Dead Sea Scrolls, inspiration to John the Baptist and perhaps Jesus himself. He was a miracle worker who delivered a tirade against the corrupt establishment and was stoned during Passover, 63
B.C.E.
(Josephus,
Antiquities
XV.ii.1).

20
. Josephus indulged in martyrology himself.
Racked and twisted, burned and broken, and made to pass through every instrument of torture in order to induce [the Essenes] to blaspheme their Lawgiver or to eat some forbidden thing, refused to yield to either demand, nor ever once did they cringe to their persecutors or shed a tear. Smiling in their agonies and mildly deriding their tormentors, they cheerfully resigned their souls, confident that they would receive them back again.
(
War,
II. vii. 3)
   The early martyrdom of James, then Symenon, most of the Apostles, then Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, Polycarp, Justin, and the persecutions in Lyons and Scilli firmly established martyrdom as the currency of the newly emerging Christian faith. Forty years after Matthias writes, Ignatius embodied the desire for martyrdom in this letter written before he was killed in the arena:
Suffer me to belong to the wild beasts, through whom I may attain to God. I am God's grain and I am ground by the teeth of wild beasts, that I may be found pure bread. Rather entice the wild beasts to become my tomb, and to leave naught of my body, that I may not, when I have fallen asleep prove a burden to any man.
(“Epistle to Polycarp,” 115
C.E.
)

21
. The
perushim,
Piestists (root of Pharisee), were persecuted under Syrian tyrant Antiochus IV beginning in 175
B.C.E.
   The “sinful sprout” reference reflects
First Book of the Maccabees
1:10. In an age where the merest slight could result in civil war, the five-year persecution (90–85
B.C.E.
) of would-be priest-king Alexander Jannaeus was extraordinary, with some 50,000 pious Jews martyred for yet another Sukkot-based incident, in which the monarch was pelted with lemons after having botched the Pharisees' libation ritual.

22
. The
Infancy Gospel,
attributed to James sometimes, Thomas other places, are popular fantasies of the 100s, and in some Oriental Monophysite congregations are still given great credence.
   Jesus raises His fallen playmates from the dead (
Infancy
7:1), Jesus rescues a bewitched man turned into a mule and converts him back into a man, only to have him marry a leprous woman He has also cured (7:12–35), Jesus cures a man of impotence with his wife by sleeping in his house overnight (7:1–3). Jesus as a boy meets nearly all the Disciples He will teach later, healing them and saving them as boys. Judas Iscariot comes over to play and hits Jesus and makes Him cry.
   No tale seems to have had a life of its own quite like the birds, and other animals, being made out of clay (15:6) just as Adam was formed from clay (
Job
33:6). This Jewish showstopper lived on in the Jewish
Sefer Yetsirah
(ca. 200s?), where animals from clay could be given life, the Ebionite Christian
Pseudo-Clementines
(ca. 300s), where Simon the Magus's recipe for creating life is found, to Paracelsus's
homunculus,
Judeo-Arabic alchemy, and Jewish kabbalistic mysticism for 1500 years, even up to Meyrinck's
The Golem
and Grimm's Fairy Tales. Jew and Moslem alike credit Jesus with this, oddly enough: Jesus makes clay birds in the medieval anti-Christian Jewish tract
Toledoth Yeshu,
and the Prophet Mohammed mentions the episode in the Quran; Jesus says,
Now I have come … to you with a sign from your Lord: out of clay will I make for you, as it were, the figure of a bird. And I will breathe into it and it shall become, by Allah's leave, a bird
(Surah 3:44).

23
. Compare the similar legend in
Matthew
14:22–33.

24
. The Three Wise Men are found solely in
Matthew,
its absence is suspicious in
Luke,
the most detailed of the canonical birth narratives.

25
. In the
Infancy Gospel
(ca. 100s) the Wise Men and the diapers of Christ are again associated (3:1–10). Mary gives them a piece of swaddling cloth, they return to Persia and
according to the custom of their country
[Zoroastrianism]
they made a fire and worshipped it. And casting the swaddling cloth into the fire, the fire took it and kept it. And when the fire was out they took forth the swaddling cloth unsinged, as much as if the fire had not touched it. Then they began to kiss it, and put it upon their heads and eyes saying, This is certainly an undoubted truth.
Later, more of this inexhaustible diaper is hanging upon a washing line (4:15–16) when it touches the head of a demonic child, who is relieved as crows and serpents fly out of his mouth. This precious relic found its way to Charlemagne's court where every seven years the Holy Roman Empire's mother church, Aix-la-Chapelle, displays the diaper to pilgrims, along with the loincloth from the Crucifixion and Mary's veil.