James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls II (107 page)

A possible explanation for these kinds of discrepancies between Acts and Josephus on some of this chronology is that J
o
sephus specifically tells us in the
Vita
that he was in Rome at the time James was killed.
7
There he visited Nero’s wife, the E
m
press Poppea, whom he characterizes as
sympathetic to
‘
religious
’
causes
, in particular it would appear, ‘
Jewish
’
ones
.
At the time, Josephus was only about twenty-four years old and already on an extremely important
mission
.
As depicted in the
Vita
, the reason he was in Rome was the curious mission he was on to rescue some Priests who had been arrested, as he puts it, ‘
on some slight and trifling charge
’ and had been sent to Rome, there to render account to Nero.

As a consequence, Josephus only knew secondhand events taking place in Palestine in the year 62
CE
at the time of James’ death. He even may have learned of it and other matters through the file of letters he claims King Agrippa II later shared with him when both were in exile in Rome sometime in between his writing the
Jewish War
and the
Antiquities
.
8
There can be little doubt that the Priests on whose account he goes to Rome had been sent there
in the wake of the disturbances in the Temple over the Wall erected to block Agrippa II
’
s view of the sacrifices
. As suggested, this in our view was the immediate antecedent to the death of James concerning which, we suspect, Paul may have played a part, just as he may have done in circumstances surrounding the War against Rome that followed some three and a half years later.

Nor in Paul’s own description of his experiences in Galatians 1:15–24 is there any ‘
vision on the Damascus road
’, only a sojourn in ‘
Arabia
’. As already signaled, Paul’s relations with
Herodians
– particularly John’s executioner
Herod the Tetrarch
– might explain what he may have been doing at the time and the reason he ran afoul of ‘
Arab
’ Authorities – not as Acts so te
n
dentiously transforms it, the ‘
Jewish
’ Ones. The ‘
plotting
’ language Acts 9:22–23 uses in relation to the stratagems these last allegedly employ to try ‘
to kill Paul
’ is the same as that which the Gospels use to portray what ‘
Judas Iscariot
’ and ‘
the Jews
’ generally do to Jesus, to say nothing of the portrait in John’s Gospel of their attempts
to kill
Lazarus
as well.
9
Actually, Acts pictures Paul as admitting at several points that he ‘
persecuted this Way unto death
,
arresting and imprisoning men and wo
m
en
’ (22:4) or he ‘
imprisoned the Saints
...
, v
oting against them for execution
,
punishing them
,
compelling them to blaspheme in all the synagogues and persecuting them in a mad frenzy even unto foreign cities’
(26:10–12).
Paul himself reiterates this in Galatians 1:23, admitting that ‘
the Assemblies in Judea
’ only knew him as someone who ‘
persecuted
’ or ‘
ravaged
’ them in times past, a portrait which appears to turn into the words Jesus is pictured as uttering in Acts 9:4’s famous depiction of Paul’s vision on ‘
the Way to Damascus
’, ‘
Paul
,
Paul
,
why persecutest thou me
?’

After this vision, according to Acts 9:26, Paul ‘
joined himself to the Disciples
’ three years later in Jerusalem (
n.b
.
, the ‘
joi
n
ing
’ language). There he ran afoul of the same ubiquitous ‘
Hellenists
’, whose
complaints
against ‘
the Hebrews
’, it will be recalled, triggered
the stoning of Stephen
three chapters before. Here, it is now ‘
the Hellenists
’, just as ‘
the Jews
’ in Damascus earlier (9:23), who want to ‘
get hold of
’ Paul and ‘
kill him
’ (9:29). Of course, none of this makes any sense whatsoever, since it is Paul who must be considered the real or chief
Hellenizer
or
Hellenist
not
vice versa
. Nor is it reasonable to think any ‘
Hellenists
’ wanted either
to kill
‘
Stephen
’ or
bother with Paul
– the opposite. Later in Acts 11:20, these same ‘
Hellenists
’ are portrayed as
the first to receive the Gospel
‘
of the Lord Jesus
’
in
Antioch – meaning, of course,
Paul
’
s
‘
Gospel
’
not James
’.

The reader will appreciate there is clearly a ‘code’ of sorts going on here. If this ‘
code
’ was aimed at evasion and disinfo
r
mation, it certainly has achieved its end over the last nineteen hundred years. Just as Luke was finally forced to attach the real cognomen ‘
Zealot
’ to the Apostle Matthew and Mark are misleadingly calling ‘
Simon the Canaanite
’ or ‘
Cananaean
’, one would probably ultimately have to read, as already explained, ‘
extreme Zealots
’ or ‘
Sicarii
’ for at least this first cluster of so-called ‘
Hellenists
’
intent on killing Paul
. The meaning of ‘
Hellenists
’, then, in such a context – as we have also made clear – would probably have to be ‘
Zealots
’ or ‘
Sicarii
’, in the sense that they were willing to make no compromises where issues of
Gentiles
or
Gentile gifts in the Temple
,
foreign rule
, and
foreign appointment of High Priests
–
including those appointed by Herodians
– were concerned. In fact, even Acts 23:12 implies as much when it later goes on to describe those
Nazirite
-style ‘
Jews
’ who
make a
plot
,
putting themselves under an oath not to eat or drink until they had killed Paul
(repeated in Acts 23:14 and 23:21 – in the manner of vegetarians like James abstaining from ‘
strong drink
’ or of later ‘
Mourners for Zion
’, who take precisely such an oath
in regard to their steadfastness in
‘
waiting
’
to
‘
see the Temple rebuilt
’).

In Galatians 1:18–21, after describing how he first met James and spent fifteen days with Peter, Paul matter-of-factly notes how he ‘
then came into the regions of Syria and Cilicia
’, while insisting he ‘
does not lie
’. Not a word about
anyone persecuting him at this point
.
He
is the persecutor
noting how ‘
the Assemblies in Judea
’ (who did not know him by sight) had only heard that ‘
their former persecutor was now preaching the Faith he had previously tried to destroy
’!

Whatever else one might wish to say about these purposeful mix-ups between so-called ‘
Hellenists
’ and ‘
Hebrews
’ in Acts, ‘
Stephen
’ certainly does seem to personify the archetypical Gentile believer who is persecuted and ultimately stoned by Jews – the stoning being a throwback to and drawn from the James story. In fact the charges against him:
‘
This man does not cease speaking blasphemous words against this Holy Place and the Law
,
for we have heard him saying that Jesus the Nazoraean will destroy this place and will change the customs handed down to us by Moses’
(Acts 6:13–14),
are more or less repeated in Acts 21:28 in the charges against Paul made by the Jewish crowd who,
seeing him in the Temple with Greeks
, think
he has intr
o
duced foreigners into it
, thereby ‘
defiling’
or ‘
polluting it
’. The addition of ‘
blasphemy
’ to the charge sheet against ‘
Stephen
’ here is probably yet another holdover from the original one against James.
10
Concomitantly, the charge of ‘
destroying this place and changing the customs of Moses
’ – doubtlessly, too, the general implication of Pauline doctrine on these issues as well – reflects the ‘
blasphemy
’ aspect of the charges against Jesus before ‘
the High Priests
,
the Elders
,
and the whole Sanhe
d
rin
’ as depicted in the Synoptics (Matthew 26:59–65 and
pars
.).

More Gentilization at Corinth – Sequencing in Acts and Josephus

With regard to the ‘
Gentilization
’ of these kinds of persecutions and sufferings, one should pay particular attention to Acts’ picture of Paul’s activities in Corinth. Here, as usual, Paul goes straight to the Jewish Synagogue, where he ‘
won over Jews and Greeks and ... earnestly testified to the Jews that Jesus was the Christ’
(Acts 18:4–5).
But Paul was not supposed to do this. According to his own testimony in Galatians 2:9, after going up to Jerusalem as a result of a private ‘
revelation
’ he says he has received and putting the Gospel as he ‘
taught it among the Gentiles
’ before the Central Trio of ‘
James
,
Cephas
,
and John
’, these ‘
Pillars
’, as he puts it, shook hands with him to show, seemingly, their agreement that he ‘
should go to the Ge
n
tiles
,
while they to the Circumcision
’ (Galatians 2:2–2:6).

But according to Acts, Paul does precisely the opposite and the first thing he does in almost every city he visits is to go d
i
rectly to the synagogue there. In Corinth, for example, when the Jews ‘
set themselves in opposition and were blaspheming
’ (18:6), Paul ‘
shook out his garments
’. In the Gospels, Jesus expresses a similar idea when he councils his followers to ‘
shake the dust from off their feet
’ (Matthew 10:14 and
pars
.). Now Paul is actually even pictured as saying, ‘
Your blood be on your own heads
.
I am innocent
.
From now on I will go to the Gentiles’
(Acts 18:6),
as if slights or rejections of this kind were suff
i
cient cause to permit such a new direction. Actually, its anti-Semitism is directed as much against Jews within the early ‘
Chri
s
tian
’ Movement of principal concern to Paul (we should probably call it the ‘
Messianic
’ Movement) as those outside it, since they were, in fact, its principal Leaders – perhaps even more. Just as the presentation of Pilate ‘
washing his hands
’ of any r
e
sponsibility for the condemnation and death of Jesus, one must see this episode as the total validation of Paul’s mission and his position where Jews were concerned – at least this would be true in the eyes of the Roman reader or devotees.

But the problem with the episode, as we’ve seen, is that ‘
the Ruler of the Synagogue
’ is apparently the same ‘
Sosthenes
’ Paul greets in the first line of 1 Corinthians, designating him there as
a
‘
brother
’ and
a close collaborator in all his work
. In fact, in Acts 18:8, this same ‘
Ruler of the Synagogue
’ is rather identified as ‘
Crispus
’. Again here we would appear to be in the midst of another of Acts’ manifold reversals of either real historical persons and/or the real historical situation or both.