James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls II (12 page)

Terminologies such as ‘
Kings of the Peoples
’ and ‘
Arab
’ should also probably extend to families like the one Josephus, the
Talmud
, and Eusebius himself refer to as ‘
the Royal House of Adiabene
’ on the borders of this ‘
Abgar
’ or ‘
Agbar
’’s Kingdom ‘
beyond the Euphrates
’ – basically today’s Kurdistan. Neighboring the Parthian or Persian Empire further East, it is an area which would include the now familiar cities of Mosul, Arbil, and Kirkuk.
Nor is it really clear whether these two dynasties, the Edessene and that of Adiabene, contiguous as they were can be distinguished in any real way from one another. Some Arm
e
nian and Syriac sources suggest they cannot.
40
Whether they can or not, all had strong political and marital connections with each other.

Eusebius claims to have personally found and translated the account of Agbarus’ conversion to what he considers to be ‘Christianity’ from a document in the Royal Archive at Edessa. For Strabo and Pliny this is originally ‘
Antioch Orrhoe
’ (mea
n
ing ‘
Assyrian Antioch
’) or ‘
Antioch-by-Callirhoe
’ (a tributary of the Euphrates) as opposed to ‘
Antioch-on-the-Orontes
’ fu
r
ther West (the former capital of the Seleucid Kingdom and the Antioch everyone thinks they are talking about when speaking of Antioch) or ‘
Antioch in Pisidia
’ in Asia Minor (Acts 13:14). Eusebius dates Agbarus’ conversion to 29 CE, extremely early by any reckoning and about the same time, not incuriously, that Josephus provides the parallel story of the conversion of Queen Helen of Adiabene and her family (presumably including her husband).
41
The story is to be found at the beginning of the all-important Book Twenty of the
Antiquities
, climaxing with the account of the death of James in 62 CE and ending with an enumeration of all the High Priests in the Temple up to the time of its destruction.

The ‘
‘Ad
’/‘
Ed
’ in ‘
Adiabene
’ and ‘
Edessa’
links up with the eponymous teacher in these areas variously referred to in Apocryphal, Syriac, and Arabic sources as ‘
‘Ad’
, ‘
‘Ad
i’
, ‘
Addai’
, and even ‘
Thaddaeus’
, not to mention another name having a certain phonetic equivalence to this last, ‘
Judas Thomas’
.
42
Some Armenian sources, based probably on earlier Syriac ones, a
c
tually consider Queen Helen both King Agbar’s wife and half-sister.
43
All these monarchs had multiple wives and large nu
m
bers of concubines and sister and half-sister marriage was, seemingly, one of the characteristic practices of the area, just as it appears to have been in the biblical story of Abraham and Sarah – also pictured as originating in Northern Syria/Iraq.

In fact, if one takes the chapter headings in Eusebius’ narrative seriously, whether late additions or otherwise, the implic
a
tion is that ‘
Agbarus
’ or ‘
Abgarus
,
the King of the Osrhoeans
’ (‘
the Assyrians
’) and ‘
the Great King of the Peoples beyond the Euphrates
’ (
Adiabene
being precisely one of those areas ‘
beyond the Euphrates
’) and Helen, designated in such headings as ‘
the Queen of the Osrhoeans’
, are linked by marriage as well. In addition, Eusebius identifies Agbar as ‘
Abgar
Uchama
’ or ‘
Abgar the Black
’ – in Syriac sources seemingly Abgar III who died around 45–50 CE.
44

Even this designation, however recondite, has real bearing on the parallels – even, in fact, the parodies – of these 29–30 CE timeframe conversions in the peculiar stories Acts provides: the first of these, as already signaled, being Paul’s conversion in Acts 9:9–20
at Damascus
‘
on a Street called the Straight
’ – tellingly, ‘
neither eating or drinking
’ – at ‘
the house of one Judas
’. It is here Paul is pictured as meeting ‘
a certain Disciple by the name of
Ananias
’
, as we saw, also prominent in Eusebius’ story of the conversion of King Abgar as well as Josephus’ description of the conversion of Queen Helen and her sons.
45

The second of these stories is the one Acts 8:26–40 provides of the conversion of the ‘
Ethiopian Queen
’
s eunuch
’
on the road to Gaza
. As I have already argued, there was no ‘
Ethiopian Queen
’ at this time except in the annals of Strabo’s
Geography
some seventy-five years before. There she is designated rather as the Nubian ‘
Queen of Meroe
’ up the Nile in today’s Sudan or Nubia. This is a notice, not only picked up by Pliny in his
Natural History
in the 70s of the Common Era, but undoubtedly also the source of Acts’ somewhat misleading co-option of the appellative ‘
Kandakes
’ to describe her.
46
Nor would or did such a ‘
Queen
’ send her ‘
Treasury Agents
’ some thousand miles north up to Jerusalem laden with coin, as Acts 8:27 would have it, and certainly not in approximately 25 BCE.

Not only would such a trip have been impossible for anyone from Nubia carrying such ‘
treasure
’ – to say nothing of
Eth
i
opia
– but there is no record that the principal court officials of such
Queens
(or for that matter
Kings
) were
eunuchs
, there being no harems there to protect. This was rather a custom of states dominated culturally by and on the border of Persia, such as Helen’s or her husband’s where there
actually were
eunuchs
. In fact, it was Queen Helen, probably part of a huge harem of her putative brother and greater
King
who did, in fact, send her treasury agents to Jerusalem.

This is the picture one gets in Josephus, the
Talmud
, and Eusebius dependent upon them, all of whom make it clear that from there (either Palestine or Jerusalem), she and her sons Izates and Monobazus –
both of whom circumcised themselves!
47
– sent these agents down to Egypt and out to Cyprus to buy grain to relieve ‘
the Great Famine
’ that, as Acts paraphrasing J
o
sephus puts it, ‘
was then over the whole world
’ (11:28). It is because of these famine relief efforts that in all these sources (i
n
cluding later Armenian ones) Helen and/or her sons win undying fame. It is also possible to conclude that it is for this reason Acts 8:26–27 refers to this
Queen
’s agent as
being
‘
on the road to Gaza’
, the traditional gateway to Egypt.
48

Acts 11:27–30, of course, puts Paul among those who brought
famine relief
up from
Antioch
to Jerusalem
. Philip, too, in 8:26 received his command to ‘
go down from Jerusalem to Gaza
’ from a mysterious
Angel
of some kind – upon which way he then encounters this curious
eunuch
of the Ethiopian Queen
– in response to a mysterious oracle by an unknown
prophet
pointedly named ‘
Agabus
’ – an obvious garbling, as we shall argue below, of
Agbarus
/
Abgarus
, clearly indicating the source from which Acts lifted the narrative. For his part, Paul never mentions such a visit in his version of these events in Galatians 1:17–20 and denies, on pain of an oath that he was ‘
not lying
’, that he had ever been to Jerusalem in the ‘
fourteen years
’ since the visit when he saw ‘
none save Peter
’ and ‘
James the brother of the Lord
’ and his return – again ‘
as a result of a revelation
’
– taking Barnabas and Titus with him, to lay before ‘
those considered something
’ the gospel
as he proclaimed it
‘
among the Peoples
’ (2:1–2 – as usual, the pivotal reference to ‘
Peoples
’).
49

Acts 12:1–24 not only conspicuously fails to delineate this ‘
famine relief
’ mission ‘
to the brothers dwelling in Judea
’ e
x
cept, curiously, to announce its conclusion in 12:25 and somewhat backhandedly allude to James in 12:17, but it is doubled by another trip Paul and Barnabas make ‘
up to Jerusalem
’ which Acts describes in some detail, starting in 15:1–2 when introdu
c
ing the storied ‘
Jerusalem Council’
. Of course, if Paul and Barnabas did actually make such a trip, as Acts seems to think they did, with ‘
famine relief funds
’ from ‘
the Disciples
’ in Antioch up to the ‘
the Elders
’ in Jerusalem, this would probably, in e
f
fect, put both him and Barnabas among the representatives of either Queen Helen, her husband, and/or her sons Izates and Monobazus, at the conversion of whom Josephus has already placed (
along
,
curiously
,
with
an unnamed other
) a namesake of Paul’s companion
in Damascus
, ‘
Ananias’
.
50

It should also be appreciated that, first of all, the trip by Paul and Barnabas up ‘
to the Elders in Jerusalem
’ described in Acts 15:2 is begun, not as in Acts 11:27 by Agabus ‘
coming down from Jerusalem to Antioch
’ but by ‘
some
coming down from Judea
’ and ‘
teaching the brothers that unless you were circumcised according to the tradition of Moses
,
you could not be saved
’ (15:1). Second of all, it is in fact rather the conversion of Helen’s favorite son Izates – according to later Syriac sources, ‘
King Ezad
’
51
– and his brother Monobazus who, after reading the passage about
Abraham circumcising all his household
in Genesis 17:9–14, insist on
being circumcised
as opposed to Ananias and his unnamed companion’s teaching.

This would also appear to be the butt of Acts’ somewhat disingenuous and even rather malicious description of its Queen’s ‘
treasury agent
’ as a
eunuch
. Nor is this to mention the perceived relative ‘
blackness
’ of these Northern Syrian, Mes
o
potamian
Kings
or
Queens
– possibly reflected in Agbarus’ cognomen in Eusebius as
Uchama
– meaning
Black
– and the pe
r
ception, in Roman texts of all of them anyhow as ‘
Arabs
’!

Elchasaite Bathing Groups and
the
Subba
‘
of the Marshes

One of the groups which seems to have flourished in both Palestine, and across Jordan, and further East in these times were
the ‘Elchasaites’
. Though the sources regarding them are unclear, they first come to the fore about 100 CE, and are co
n
sidered to have taken their name from their leader, one
Elchasai
. The precise meaning of this term, probably a title, is debated. Some, preferring to consider its Aramaic root, define it as ‘
Hidden Power
’; others, ‘
the Righteous
’ or ‘
Perfect One’
.
52
If the latter, then the connection in this period with James-type leaders or other
Zaddikim
(‘
Righteous Ones’
) is patent.