James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls II (50 page)

The interchanges between ‘
the lord
’
s servant
’ and ‘
his master
’
s debtors
’ in Luke 16:5–6 also include the
pro forma
element of
haggling over numbers
– now ‘
fifty
’, ‘
eighty
’, and ‘
a hundred
’. In the Nakdimon stories, it is the haggling over the number of wells and who owes whom and what amount. It is this ‘
haggling
’ that Luke uses as a springboard to produce his version of the famous aphorism, ‘
no one can serve two lords
’ (‘
God and Mammon
’), better known in Matthew’s
Sermon on the Mount
. In Luke 16:13, in keeping with the business nature of the parable and playing on the ‘
lord
’ theme, this reads: ‘
No servant can serve two lords
,
for either he will hate the one and love the other or he will hold to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and Mammon
.’
It is at this point that these preliminaries give way in Luke to its version of Matthew 5:18 – taking off from the allusion to ‘
not coming to abolish the Law and the Prophets but to fulfill them
’ in 5:17: ‘
Verily I say unto you, that until Heaven and Earth pass away
,
not one jot or tittle shall pass away from the Law until all these things are acco
m
plished
.’ Or as Luke 16:17 puts it: ‘
Easier would it be for Heaven and Earth to pass away than for one tittle of the Law to fail
.’

In 16:18 this is immediately followed by the ban on ‘
divorce
’ which, as in the Damascus Document and in Matthew 5:32 and 19:9, is linked to the issue of ‘
fornication
’.
6
Here too Jesus’ attack on ‘
the Pharisees
’ must be seen as equivalent to similar ones on the everpresent ‘
some
’. It is also reflected in Jesus’ like-minded attack on the Pharisees as ‘
Blind Guides
’ in Matthew 15:1–20 and Mark 7:1–23, in the context of declaring ‘
all foods clean
’ and ‘
eating with unwashed hands does not defile the man
’ leading up in both to the ‘
not taking the children
’
s bread and casting it to the dogs
’ episodes in 15:21–28 and 7:24–30, which we shall analyze further below.

We have already seen too how the ‘
Poor
’ motif is echoed in the complaints at ‘
Simon the Leper
’
s house
’ in Matthew and Mark and those of ‘
Judas of Simon Iscariot
’ at Lazarus’
house
in John and Jesus’ rather vainglorious response in all three, ‘
the Poor you have with you always
,
but you do not always have me
’. However, this exchange cannot be completely differentiated from the one in Rabbinic literature concerning the extreme ‘
poverty
’ of the key Rabbinic hero, Rabbi Akiba, when he was young. In fact at one point, to illustrate Rabbi Akiba’s ‘
poverty
’, at the time he married
Ben Kalba Sabu
‘
a
’s daughter before her father became reconciled to their marriage, his wife Rachel is portrayed as
having to
‘
sleep on straw
’ and
picking it
‘
from his (Rabbi Akiba
’
s) hair
’.

One should pay particular attention here to the ‘
hair
’ motif once more, but this time it is now
Rabbi Akiba
’
s hair
and not either Lazarus’
sister Mary
’
s hair
nor that of
the unidentified female
‘
Sinner
’ in Luke,
anointing
Jesus
’
feet
and ‘
wiping them with her hair
’!
7
One should also note here the theme of ‘
straw
’, so important in the picture in both Josephus and the
Talmud
– should one again choose to regard it – of ‘
the Zealots
’ (‘
the
Barjonim
’/‘
Biryonim
’ in the
Talmud
) burning Ben Kalba
Sabu
‘
a
’s/Nakdimon’s and/or
Ben Zizzit
’s ‘
grain
’ stores or mixing, in their desperation, such ‘
grain
’ or ‘
straw
’ with the bricks they used to shore up Jerusalem’s defences.
8
Nor is this to say anything about the portraits of the ‘
feet
’ of these various
Rich
Men
’
s daughters
we have been highlighting and will highlight further below, both during and after the War against Rome, amid ‘
the straw
’ and ‘
mud
’ of various Palestinian cities as, for instance, Jerusalem, Lydda, or Acre.
9

It is at this point that Tractate
Nedarim
(on the bride’s dowry) depicts Rabbi Akiba as promising his wife ‘
a golden Jerus
a
lem
’ – apparently the tiara in vogue among the ladies of the day depicting the city of Jerusalem and manifestly an ‘
irredentist
’ statement of some kind. But it also depicts the Prophet Elijah as coming to Akiba
in the guise of a mortal
(the ‘
Elijah
redivivu
s
’ theme and an essential element of Gospel portraiture at least in the Synoptics) and
crying out at the door
, ‘
Give me some straw for my wife is in confinement and I have nothing for her to lie on
’ (the root perhaps of the ‘
no room at the inn
’ scenario in Luke 2:5–17). Not only is this ‘
crying at the door’
a theme both present in the Letter of James 5:9 and the proclamation in the Temple at Passover attributed to James in all early Church literature,
10
but the tradition as a whole is, in some manner and in the characteristically ‘
earthy
’ Talmudic style, both comparing and connecting Rabbi Akiba with the Prophet Elijah. At this point, in typical Rabbinic style, Rabbi Akiba is pictured as wryly observing to his wife, ‘
You see there is a man who lacks even straw
’!

These things as they may be, following allusion to Rabbi Akiba’s teacher, ‘
Rabbi Eliezer b. Hyrcanus
’ (Lazarus?), and pi
v
otal usages such as ‘
uprooting
’, ‘
casting
’, and ‘
hidden
’ – all of which we shall encounter again, as we proceed, in the run-up in Matthew 15 and Mark 7 to the exorcism of the ‘
Canaanite
’/‘
Greek Syrophoenician woman
’
s daughter
’
–
ARN
notes how Rabbi Akiba’s example
will condemn all the Poor for
,
when they will be accused
(
Judas Iscariot
’s or
the Disciples
’ accusation against either Lazarus’ sister
Mary
or ‘
the woman with the alabaster flask
’ about
anointing
Jesus
’
head
or
his feet
?), ‘
Why did you not study
Torah
?’ (the content of these stories or traditions are, as should by now be fully appreciated, almost always one hundred and eighty degrees inverted) and they plead, ‘
Because we were
too Poor
’ (‘
the Poor you have with you always
’ paradigm in the above episodes?); the response will be, ‘
Was not Rabbi Akiba very Poor and in straitened circumstances
?’
11

However dramatic this may be, the allusion to ‘
uprooting
’ connected to this notice in the
ARN
, which – at least in Ma
t
thew – precedes Jesus’ exchange over ‘
not taking the children
’
s bread and casting it to the little dogs
’, will be a particularly i
m
portant one. Here in Matthew it will be found in another rebuke Jesus makes in a polemical exchange about ‘
the Pharisees
’
as
‘
Blind Guides
’ – in this instance, not to the
Canaanite woman
, but to his own
Disciples
again: ‘
Every plant which my Heavenly Father has not planted shall be rooted up’
(Matthew 15:13).
The inverted parallel to this – which, as at Qumran and as we shall show further below, will also involve a ‘
Guide
’ or ‘
Maschil
’
12
– will be present in the Damascus Document’s dramatic opening imprecation about how God caused ‘
a
Root of Planting to grow
(the parallel is here!)
from Israel and from Aaron to inherit His land and to prosper on the good things of His Earth’
.
13
The linguistic interdependence of this and much else in the depi
c
tion of Jesus’ arguments in Matthew 15:1–20 and Mark 7:1–23 with the ‘
scribes and Pharisees from Jerusalem
’ should be clear to all but the most stubbornly obdurate reader. This is Matthew 15:1, but in Mark 7:1 this changes into the even more pre
g
nant ‘the Pharisees’
and
the telltale ‘
some
of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem
’, a euphemism evocative of Paul’s inte
r
locutors from
James
’ Jerusalem
Assembly
.

‘Suffer the Little Children to Come unto me and Do not Hinder them’

In
ARN
, this exchange concerning Rabbi Akiba’s
incredible application to
‘
studying
Torah
’, as opposed to
those claiming to be
‘
too Poor
’
to do so
, is directly followed by yet another, equally striking allusion – this time to ‘
little children
’ and/or Rabbi Akiba’s
own
‘
little children
’. It reads: ‘
If they plead
, “
we could not study
Torah
”
because of our little children
(that is, instead of ‘
because we were too Poor
’),
the response should be
, “
Did not Rabbi Akiba have little children too
?”’
Not only should it be clear that this bears on Jesus’ admonition to ‘
Let the children first be filled
’ and ‘
it is not good to take the chi
l
dren
’
s bread and cast it to the little dogs
’ in both Matthew and Mark (all allusions for the moment to ‘being
filled
’ aside) – but also to the several references to ‘
little children
’ throughout the Gospels.
14
Perhaps the most striking and well-known example of these is the one that comes just following the imaginative presentation concerning
fornication
and
adultery
in Matthew 19:12 (itself clearly playing off Column Four of the Damascus Document on the same subject
15
) about ‘
eunuchs from the mother
’
s womb
’ and ‘
those making themselves eunuchs for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven
’, just preceding allusions, too, to ‘
keeping the Commandments
’ in 19:17 and ‘
a Rich Man not entering into the Kingdom of Heaven
’ in 19:24.