James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls II (18 page)

This amazing transformation of ‘
the
Taheb
’ and/or ‘
Tirathaba
’ into ‘
Tabitha
’ – most likely we have a progression here and all three are related – is perhaps a more vivid indication of the New Testament’s working method than even the transfo
r
mation of the circumcised convert Izates, reading Genesis 17 on God’s instructions to Abraham, into
the Ethiopian Queen’s eunuch
reading Isaiah 53:7 – interpreted for him by Philip as ‘
the Gospel of Jesus
’
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– immediately going down into the water and being baptized.

But unfortunately one must go further – just as Josephus characterizes the Samaritan Messiah as ‘
considering Lying of li
t
tle import
’, there are historical lies here, lies – however benignly-intentioned – meant to undermine, belittle, and deceive, which unhappily have done their work all too well over the last two thousand years and are still, sad to have to say, so doing.

Joseph Barsabas Justus and the Sabaeans

In Mandaean tradition, John’s father is called ‘
Abba Saba Zachariah
’. The Mandaean tradition too, dating the exodus of John the Baptist’s followers from across Jordan to the year 37–38 CE (around the time, as well, of Pontius Pilate’s destruction of the Samaritan ‘
Restorer
’ and his followers), more or less agrees with the date Josephus gives for John the Baptist’s exec
u
tion across Jordan in Perea. Josephus puts this, as we have seen, at the end of both Pontius Pilate’s Governorship and Herod Antipas’ Tetrarchy, well past the normal date for Jesus’ execution given in the Gospels of between 30–33 CE.
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It is interesting that for Josephus, John the Baptist taught ‘
Piety towards God and Righteousness towards one
’
s fellow man
’ – the
Righteousness
/
Piety
dichotomy clearly recognizable throughout the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Letter of James, and considered the essence of Jesus’ teaching in both the Gospels and by the early Church polemicist Justin Martyr.
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For Jos
e
phus, John the Baptist was executed by Herod the Tetrarch because he feared that John was so popular that the people would do anything he might suggest. In other words, the execution of John was a preventative one, because Herod feared John might lead an Uprising.
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In fact, Josephus portrays John as being so popular that he says the people considered Herod’s defeat by King Aretas as punishment for what he had done to John. This is to say that John the Baptist
was a popular leader
and his death resulted from this, and not from some ‘
seductive dance
’ performed by Herodias’ daughter (unnamed in the Gospels, but Josephus tells us she was ‘
Salome
’), the subject of popular imagination every since.
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But this mini-war between King Aretas and Herod does not seem to have occurred until approximately 37 CE.
58
Therefore, John could not have been executed much before that time since the divorce by Herod of Aretas’ daughter was ostensibly driving the hostilities.
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Christian sources are extremely insistent (particularly Hippolytus, but also Epiphanius two centuries later) that
Elchasai
had ‘
a book
’, that is, the one Hippolytus says was given to
Sobiai
(‘
Sobiai
’ of course, apparently relating to ‘
Masbuthaeans
’ or ‘
Sabaeans
’). Hippolytus actually gives the name of the ‘
Syrian
’ follower who brought this book to Rome as ‘
Alcibiades
’ – a
n
other of these seeming corruptions as expressions moved from Aramaic or other Semitic languages into Greek, this time, p
a
tently, of the name ‘
Elchasai
’ as it was transliterated from Aramaic or Syriac. Hippolytus’ younger contemporary, Origen, also claims to have seen this ‘
book
’ while residing in Caesarea on the Palestine coast.
60

Modern scholars have been attempting to reconstruct this ‘
book
’ attributed to
Elchasai
. All acknowledge it to have been ‘
Jewish Christian’
or
Ebionite
and related to a book that also has only recently come to light,
The Mani Codex
.
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Among the previously inaccessible manuscripts from the Dead Sea Scrolls, another book,
The Book of Giants
, which has recently come to light, was also known to Manichaean sources.
62
That Muhammad seems to know about this ‘
book
’ or ‘
books
’ seems clear from his insistent designation of the group he is calling ‘
Sabaeans
’, together with Jews and Christians as one of the three ‘
Peoples of the Book
’ or ‘
Protected Persons
’/‘
Dhimmi
s
’.
63
Curiously enough, he is not perceived as having included Mani’s followers in this category and, therefore, they were later persecuted by Muslims. Nevertheless, in so far as they were not distinguishable from ‘
Elchasaites
’, they too were probably also originally subsumed under this notation ‘
Peoples of the Book
’.

Nor does Muhammad mention Mani any more than he does Paul. Neither do any of these other groups, presumably b
e
cause Paul and Mani were, ideologically speaking, so close, and because all, including ‘
the Ebionites
’ or so-called ‘
Jewish Chri
s
tians
’ – the Mandaeans do not mention Paul either except to speak mysteriously about an ‘
Enemy
’
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–
were so violently o
p
posed to Paul
. It is, however, not without interest as we have seen that, even in the Book of Acts, Paul has a companion with the Mani-like name, ‘
a certain Mnason
’ (21:16 – if this is not just another garbling of someone like ‘
Ananias
’ again), called there ‘
an early Disciple
’ and ‘
a Cypriot
’ – this last, as already underscored,
often a stand-in for Samaritan
.
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As we saw, Josephus calls the stand-in he knows for Simon
Magus
in Caesarea – the ‘
Magician
’ also designated in some manuscripts as ‘
Atomus
’ – as
coming from
‘
Cyprus
’. On the hand, Acts 13:6 calls the ‘
certain magician and Jewish false Prophet
’ – again the inversion of the ‘
True Prophet
’ ideology – it pictures Paul as encountering on ‘
Cyprus
’, ‘
Bar Jesus
’, a name it admits is equivalent to ‘
Elymas
Magus
’. Not only does Acts depict this ‘
magician
’ standing side-by-side with Paul’s namesake, ‘
the Proconsul Sergius Paulus
’, just as Josephus does the ‘
Magician
’ he knows as ‘
Simon
’ with the Roman Prefect Felix; but it also pictures Paul as addressing him as follows: ‘
O Son of the Devil
,
full of guile and all cunning
,
the
Enemy
of all Righteousness
,
will you stop perverting the
Straight Ways
of the Lord?’
(13:10).
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Then, too, in the Book of Acts, Paul has another colleague called ‘
Manaen
’ described as one of the original founders of the ‘
Church at Antioch
’ (whichever Antioch may be intended by this) and ‘
a foster brother of Herod the Tetrarch
’ (13:1). This is the same
Herod
involved with matters relating to John the Baptist’s death, in connection with which Paul’s curious escape ‘
down the walls of Damascus in a basket
’ from the representative of
King Aretas
in 2 Corinthians 11:32–33 may have o
c
curred.

But, as we have already suggested, this denotation ‘
Manaen
’ for a founding member of
‘the Church at Antioch
’ probably points to a garbling of the name of Paul’s other, more well-known, companion, ‘
Ananias
’, missing from this enumeration. As for the ‘
foster brother
’ part of the designation or ‘
the man brought up with
’ this same
Herod
responsible for the death of John the Baptist, this most probably (via a deft bit of editorial displacement)
represents Paul himself not Ananias
.

Except for a few historians like al-Biruni and
The Fihrist
, Muslims generally think that the
Sabaeans
, about whom the Prophet speaks so familiarly and approvingly in the Koran,
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were from Southern Arabia and an area called ‘Saba’ (today’s Yemen) from which they probably disappeared as an identifiable group almost a thousand years previously – that is, in the era not long after Solomon’s time. Like the Christians before them, they ‘forget’ or, simply, just do not know that there were ‘
Sabaeans
’ of the kind we have delineated above (namely ‘
Elchasaites
’ or ‘
Masbuthaean
Baptizers’), making the same anachr
o
nistic genre of mistake Acts makes in its evocation of ‘
the eunuch of the Ethiopian
Queen’ it calls ‘
Kandakes
’.

If Acts is genuinely simply confused in styling the monarch the Greeks and Romans at this time knew as ‘
Queen Helen of Adiabene
’ as ‘
Queen of the Ethiopians
’ – mistaking ‘
Sabaean
’ for ‘
Shebaean
’ (as in ‘Queen of Sheba’) – then it is also provi
d
ing just the slightest hint that this Helen may have espoused the kind of Judaism represented by such ‘
Sobiai
’ or ‘
Masbuthaean
s’ in Northern Syria or Mesopotamia, Talmudic claims of her adoption of mainstream Judaism notwithstanding.
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The reader should remember that the Medieval Jewish traveler, Benjamin of Tudela, was still listing the ‘
Elchasaite Synagogue
’ he encou
n
tered in this area as ‘
Jewish
’
as late as the Eleventh Century
.
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If Acts likewise is mistaking ‘
Shebaean
’ for ‘
Sabaean
’, then it would provide proof that the appellation ‘
Sabaean
’ was already in use among ‘
bathing
’ groups in Northern Mesopotamia and Syria at the time Acts was being put into its final form.

This is possibly the implication behind names like ‘
Judas Barsabas
’ and ‘
Joseph Barsabas Justus
’, also to be found in Acts but nowhere else and themselves both confusing and hard to distinguish from each other.
‘
Judas Barsabas
’ (whom, as should be clear by now, we do not distinguish from ‘
Judas the brother of James
’, ‘
Judas Thomas
’, ‘
Judas
Zelotes
’, ‘
Lebbaeus who was surnamed Thaddaeus
’, and even, perhaps ‘
Judas Iscariot
’), like ‘
Agabus
’ before him in Acts 11:27, ‘
goes down from Jerusalem to Antioch
’ with Barnabas, Paul, and Silas, not to predict
the Famine
but to deliver James’ letter. With Silas and also like ‘
Agabus
’, he is also called
a Prophet
in Acts 15:32 – so too, according to Josephus, was ‘
Theudas
!’
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‘
Joseph Barsabas Justus’
, it will be recalled, is the defeated candidate in the election to fill the ‘
Office
’ (
Episkopon
) of anot
h
er ‘
Judas
’ –
Judas Iscariot
, even though this
Iscariot
was
never presented as holding such an
‘
Office
’
/
‘
Bishopric
’
or title in the first place
.
Not only are these ‘
Barsabas
’ names (to say nothing of quasi-related ‘
Barabbas
’ ones) tied to the known names a
s
sociated with Jesus’ family members, but we would say that this ‘
Joseph Barsabas Justus
’ (the ‘
Justus
’ part of which in Acts 1:23 is actually retained in the Latin and not in its Greek equivalent – the ‘
Joseph
’ part of which once again being, in our view, the alleged patrimony) relates to the missing introduction and election of James in Acts to succeed Jesus in the ‘
Office
’ of ‘
Bishop of the Jerusalem Assembly
’.
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