James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls II (15 page)

But, of course, not only is this exactly what Column Sixteen of the Damascus Document above specifies, but it is exactly what Izates and Monobazus do when ‘
Eleazar from Galilee
’ points this out in the text they are reading. Just as in Acts 8:38’s depiction of the
Ethiopian Queen’s eunuch
immediately jumping down from
his chariot
, the emphasis is on the instantan
e
ousness of the response.

Not only does the Damascus Document – like the Letter of James and the Koran following it – designate Abraham as ‘
a Friend of God’
, it does so in the same breath that it describes Abraham as ‘
a Keeper of the Commandments of God’
. This last is also, as we shall see, basically the esoteric definition of ‘
the Sons of Zadok
’ (possibly too ‘
the Sons of Righteousness
’ or ‘
of the Righteous One
’) in the Community Rule at Qumran.
90
In fact, in the Koran, just as in James 2:21–23, the parallel is to the new terminology in Arabic ‘
Muslim
’ or ‘
one who has surrendered
’
to God
’
s will
. Of course,
being
‘
a Keeper not a Breaker
’ is repeatedly emphasized throughout the Dead Sea Scrolls and is a fundamental ideology of James 2:8–12 as well, particularly in the background to its statement of both ‘
the Royal Law according to the Scripture
’ to ‘
love your neighbor as yourself
’ and ‘
keeping the whole Law
,
but stumbling on one small point
’
bringing upon one the
‘
guilt of (breaking) it all’
.

To bring us full circle: one could conclude, therefore, that
being
‘
a Keeper’
, ‘
a Friend of God’
, and even ‘
a
Muslim
’ are b
a
sically all parallel denotations and that, in all contexts, Abraham is so designated because he
responds positively to God
’
s
‘
tes
t
ing
’
and is prepared to carry out God
’
s Commandments
. In James 2:21 and in Hebrews 11:17, in particular, this ‘
surrendering to God
’
s will’
, as it is put in the Koran, is deemed a kind of ‘
test’
. It is also worth remarking and certainly not insignificant that in Hebrews the term ‘
only begotten
’ is applied to Isaac just as in Josephus it is to ‘
Izates
’ and in the Synoptic Gospels to J
e
sus.
91

Sabaeans, Masbuthaeans, and
the
Subba
‘
of the Marshes

To go back to
Elchasai
, Hippolytus tells us that he was supposed to have ‘
preached unto men a new remission of sins in the second year of Hadrian’s reign
’ (119 CE). In addition he calls him ‘
a certain Just Man’
, meaning
Elchasai
too was
a
Righ
t
eous One
– again, the manner of how all early Church sources refer to James and the Dead Sea Scrolls refer to
the Teacher of Righteousness
/
Righteous Teacher
.
1
Hippolytus reports as well that
Elchasai
insisted (like the ‘
some from James
’ above) that ‘
believers ought to be circumcised and live according to the Law’
.
2

Importantly, in Arabic ‘
Elchasai
’ can mean ‘
Hidden’
. We have already touched upon how the ‘
Hidden
’ terminology can r
e
late to stories about the birth of John the Baptist and Jesus in the Infancy Narrative of Luke and the
Protevangelium of James
, to say nothing about Edessan stories about Abraham. Nor is this to mention the whole tradition of ‘
the Hidden
Imam
’ in Shi‘ite Islam. In Jewish mystical traditions as incorporated in the
Zohar
, a parallel allusion occurs in the description of how
Noah
‘
was hidden in the ark
’
to escape
‘
the Enemy
’
who wanted to kill him
.
3
Though an odd story, to say the least, to be found in an a
l
legedly ‘medieval’ document like the
Zohar
, it does bring us back, however circuitously, to how the ark was related by Hippol
y
tus and Josephus to Queen Helen’s and Izates’ homeland and, not surprisingly, in the Koran to the story of the destruction of the Tribe of ‘
Ad
and the messenger sent to it, Hud (that is ‘
Judas
’ – in Hebrew,
Yehudah
; in Arabic,
Yehud
).
4

In Arabic too, the root of
Subba
‘
, a term related to those Hippolytus calls
Sobiai
whom he identifies with
the Elchasaites
,
5
is ‘
to plunge
’ or ‘
immerse’
, which is the same for Aramaic and Syriac. In fact, John the Baptist is actually known in Arabic as – and this not just by Mandaeans who take him as their paradigmatic teacher –
as-Sabi
‘
, meaning ‘
the Baptizer
’ or ‘
Immerser’
.
6
This leads directly into the issue of what can be understood by those called ‘
Sabaeans
’ in the Koran,
7
who must be seen as b
a
sically the same group as
the
Subba
‘
or Hippolytus’
Sobiai
(and, as we shall see, Epiphanius’ ‘
Masbuthaeans
’) despite slight var
i
ations in spelling and later Islamic ideological attempts to obscure it.

As Muhammad uses the term in the Koran – often within the context of
discussions about Abraham
8
– he does so to de
s
ignate a group intermediate between Jews and Christians, about whom he appears to have personal knowledge. All three he describes as ‘
believing in
Allah
and the Last Day and doing good works
’ (2:62). The perspicacious reader will immediately re
c
ognize these as the exact parameters of the debate between Paul and James, particularly as set forth in the Letter of James with its insistence on ‘
Faith
(that is, ‘
Belief
’)
and works working together
’, while
at the same time citing Abraham
’
s willingness to sacrifice Isaac
.
9

Muhammad uses almost the precise words to describe one particular community among those he labels ‘
Peoples of the Book
’, with whom he seems particularly familiar and of whom, unusually fond. The people of this community, as he puts it, ‘
recite the revelations of
Allah
in the night season
’ – which is certainly paralleled by those Josephus is calling ‘
Essenes
’ and in the literature found at Qumran
10
– and: ‘
believe in
Allah
and the Last Day and enjoin Right conduct and forbid indecency
,
and vie with each other in good works
,
for they are of the Righteous
(
Salihin
).
11
Salihin
in Arabic is the same root as and the plural of that ‘
S
alih
’, who with ‘
Hud
’ (a contraction of
Yehudah
– Judas as we have seen), is a messenger to
‘Ad
and a ‘
brother
’ to the Tribe Muhammad calls ‘
Thamud
’ – a corruption, in our view, of ‘
Thomas
’ or, if one prefers, ‘
Judas Thomas
’,
the same
‘
Judas Thomas who taught the truth to the Edessenes
’ in early Christian literature previously.
12

Essenes, Ebionites, and Peter as
a Daily Bather

Epiphanius refers to
Essenes
not only as ‘
Ossaeans
’, but also ‘
Esseneans
’ or ‘
Jessaeans
’ – the last, he claims, after David’s father and Jesus’ forbear ‘
Jesse
’ or, for that matter,
Jesus
’ very name itself.
13
However, he also seems to appreciate that ‘
Essene
’ can derive from the Hebrew root, ‘
to do
’, that is, ‘
Doers
’ (Hebrew, ‘
Osim
) or
the Doers
/
Doers of the
Torah
we shall meet in due course in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the thrust of the language of ‘
doing
’ or ‘
works
’ in all doctrines associated with James or ascribed to him. The Letter of James also actually uses ‘
Doers
’, meaning ‘
to do the Law
’, three different times.
14
In another important overlap, the same usage appears in the Habakkuk
Pesher
, surrounding the exposition of ‘
the Righteous shall live by his Faith
’ so dear to Pauline exposition.
15

Whatever one might think of the validity of Epiphanius’ derivations and though his ‘
Essenes
’ are hardly distinguishable from those he is also calling ‘
Ebionites
’; as he sees it, before Christians were called ‘
Christians
’ in Antioch in Acts – that is, around the time of Paul’s and Helen’s Famine relief efforts in the mid-Forties – in Palestine they were known as ‘
Essenes
’ and, after that, ‘
Nazoraeans
’.
16
From our perspective, this is about right with the reservation that Epiphanius and other early Chri
s
tian writers have little or no idea what these denotations actually signified.

In fact, for the group called ‘
Galileans
’ among ‘
the Seven Sects of the Circumcision
’ comprising Judaism of this period a
c
cording to Hegesippus (c. 150 CE) as conserved in Eusebius (c. 320 CE) – including ‘
Pharisees
’, ‘
Sadducees
’, ‘
Essenes
’, ‘
S
a
maritans
’, ‘
Baptists
’, etc. – Epiphanius substitutes the term ‘Nazoraeans’.
17
In doing so, he provides testimony, however ind
i
rect, that the group most instinctively refer to as ‘
Zealots
’ were from their perspective all but indistinguishable from ‘
Nazoraeans
’, the same group most consider coextensive with ‘
Christians
’. Once again, this brings home the point that the li
t
erature concerning these matters in this period is, depending on the perspective of the writer, filled with and confused by
many names for the same basic movement.

Though these ‘
sects
’, as Eusebius and Epiphanius like to call them, also include another group both refer to as ‘
Hemerobaptists
’ or ‘
Daily Bathers
’, Eusebius – again dependent on Hegesippus – in effect, repeats himself by including in the same list yet another group he calls ‘
Masbuthaeans
’. Once again, this terminology represents a Greek attempt to transliterate groups like Hippolytus’
Sobiai
and the Aramaic/Syriac term for ‘
wash’
/‘
immersed’
, that is, ‘
Baptizers
’. This not only moves into the Arabic
Subba
‘
, but also the same Arabic/Islamic ‘Sabaeans’, some incarnations of whom seem certainly to have been based in the neighborhood of Abraham’s Haran in Northern Syria.

Epiphanius for his part multiplies these basically parallel or synonymous groups by introducing others in the course of his narrative like ‘
the Sampsaeans
’, yet another attempt to approximate the Arabic/Syriac ‘
Sabaeans
’ in Greek. In this context, one should appreciate the epigraphical mix-ups between ‘
P
’ and ‘
B
’ in Arabic (there being no ‘
P
’ as such in Arabic) and juxtapos
i
tions of letters that occur when names move from one language to another, as for example ‘
Abgarus
’ to ‘
Agbarus
’ from Semi
t
ic to Western languages. Once more we have come full circle, because Epiphanius not only locates these ‘
Sampsaeans
’ around the Dead Sea and further east across the Jordan and in Northern Iraq, but proceeds to observe that they are not to be disti
n
guished from ‘
the Elchasaites
’, which should have been obvious in the first place.
18

What Epiphanius, who actually was someone of Jewish Christian or ‘
Ebionite
’ background from Palestine – though he later removed to mainland Greece – has apparently done is confuse the terms ‘
Sabaeans
’, ‘
Sobiai
’, or ‘
Masbuthaeans
’ reflecting more Semitic usage, with the linguistic approximation in Greek ‘
Sampsaean
’. Nor does he, yet again, distinguish their doctrines to any extent from the ‘
Nasarenes
’ or ‘
Nazoraeans
’, whom he definitely identifies as doctrinally following James, and chron
o
logically, following ‘
the Ebionites
’ whom we know followed James.
19

Since all such ‘
Essene
’ or ‘
Sabaean
’ groups were ‘
Daily Bathers
’ of one kind or another, it would appear that James was one as well.
20
This is also the way Peter is portrayed both in the Pseudoclementines and by Epiphanius, the one probably d
e
pendent on the other.
21
So was James’ contemporary, the teacher Josephus cryptically denotes as ‘
Banus
’, the transliteration of whose name has not yet been solved (though via the Latin, it probably points to his ‘
bathing
’ activities), and with whom Jos
e
phus seems to have spent a quasi-
Essene
-style novitiate ‘
in the wilderness
’ – the reason probably he knows so much about
Essenes
.
Nor is it without relevance, when considering these things, that in the Pseudoclementines as well,
Peter is also po
r
trayed as a definitive
‘
Jamesian
’.
22