James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls II (58 page)

Neither is this to say anything about the allusions to ‘
the Men of Perfect Holiness
’ or ‘
the Perfection of Holiness
’ leading into the two evocations of ‘
the House of the
Torah
’ in the last Column of this exhortative (Column Twenty of the Cairo
Genizah
version) or ‘
those fearing God
’ (‘
the God-Fearers
’) or the ‘
Hesed
’ (‘
Grace
’ or ‘
Piety
’) God would show ‘
to the tho
u
sands of them that love Him
’, following it.
45
Not only is this last easily recognizable as the first part of the
Hesed
/
Zedek
dicho
t
omy, the two ‘
Love
’ Commandments we have alluded to above, but it is once more exactly equivalent to what Paul enunciated in 1 Corinthians 2:9 – phrasing this as ‘
the things which God has prepared for those that love Him
’ – and the variation of both one finds in James 2:5 concerning how ‘
God chose the Poor
’ to be ‘
Heirs to the Kingdom which He promised to those who love Him
’.

The very next line in Matthew 15:14 continues the borrowing: ‘
They are Blind Guides leading the Blind and
,
if the Blind lead the Blind
,
both will fall into the Pit
.’
Here one has in both subject and predicate, the image of
the
Maschil
just as in several of the passages quoted from the Community Rule above. Nor is this to say anything of yet another adumbration of the la
n
guage of ‘
falling
’ we have already encountered throughout the numerous Gospel passages we have analyzed above.

But more importantly and combined with this is the language and imagery of ‘
the Pit’,
in particular, that of ‘
the Sons of the Pit
’ used to attack all the enemies of the Community including, presumably,
persons of the mindset of Paul
.
Even more to the point, we are again in the process of
one reversing the other
, that is,
someone using the very language of another person
and
turning it back on that other person to undermine him.
Here, note that in Matthew 15:14 it is both ‘
the Blind Guides
’ and ‘
the Blind
’
they lead
who, metaphorically,
will fall into
‘
the Pit
’!

Can anything be more cynical and derisive than this and can any of it be accidental? The author seriously doubts it. This is the reason for the extensive detail employed in trying to elucidate all these usages. Indeed, this whole allusion at this point in Matthew, which seems innocuous enough, actually plays on yet another seemingly completely unrelated passage. This concerns regulations governing the Sabbath in the Damascus Document as well, most of which are generally counterindicated in the Gospels. In the process, Matthew 15:12-14 makes fun of and shows Jesus’ contempt for it too, namely,
if a man
’
s
‘
beast
falls into a pit
on the Sabbath
,
he shall not lift it out
’.
46

But even here, the borrowing does not stop. In the very next lines from this First Column of the Damascus Document, one comes upon the final linchpin of all this borrowing. This comes in the very introduction of the renowned ‘
Righteous Teacher
’ himself – ‘
the Guide of all Guides
’, as it were. It reads: ‘
And they were
like blind men groping for the Way for twenty years
.
And God considered their works
,
because they sought him with a whole heart and He raised up for them a Teacher of Righteousness to guide them in the Way of His heart
.’
47
Of course, nothing could show the interconnectedness of all these imageries better than the appearance of this allusion to ‘
being like blind men
’ and how they were to be ‘
guided by the Teacher of Righteousness
’
in
‘
the Way
’
of God
’
s
‘
heart
’, following directly upon the one to ‘
planting
’ the all-important Messianic ‘
Root
’, which God then ‘
caused to grow
’ and preceding the equally pivotal introduction of the proverbial ‘
Teacher of Righ
t
eousness
’ here in the Damascus Document as well.

The reason for all this borrowing, parody, and derogation has to have been that so original and impressive were these new ideas and usages we now know from the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and so well versed were some of the original cre
a
tors of much of the above-material from the Gospels, to say nothing of the material in Paul, that they were unable to resist repeatedly playing off them and, as I have been at pains to point out,
reversing
or
inverting
the actual original sense or meaning. This was not only intentional and, in my view, political – but it also resulted from a kind of playful malevolence; that is, it gave the people who were originally responsible for creating the traditions upon which many of these documents are based – pe
o
ple, mostly probably in Rome, who had lost everything because of many of the ideas excerpted from the Scrolls above – a good deal of pleasure and they had a lot of fun doing so. That is to say, they really derived a lot of pleasure from shoving this version of ‘
the Messiah
’ or ‘
the Saviour
’ down the throats of the People who had originally created him.

‘
Casting Unclean Spirits out
’ of Daughters and ‘
Toilet Bowl
’ Issues again: the Themes Migrate

At this point, it would be well to review the sequencing of these important passages from Matthew 14–16 and Mark 6–8 dealing with ‘
making all foods clean
’, the permissibility of activities in predominantly Gentile areas, and the several ‘
signs
’-miracle performances, in particular ones bearing on
famine relief
, evidently a major historical event in the period from the 40s to the 60s
CE
which left, judging by reports about it in Josephus, Acts, and Talmudic literature – and their reflection in early Church accounts – a deep impression upon all considering it.

There are also, in the portrayal of these things, the reverberations of the ‘
casting
’ vocabulary sometimes used with regard to ‘
casting out
(
ekballe
)
unclean spirits
’ or ‘
evil demons
’, and sometimes in the polemics surrounding Paul’s contention in 1 C
o
rinthians 6:13 of ‘
food being for the belly and the belly for food
’, or, as Matthew 15:17 will ultimately portray Jesus as so graphically expressing this: ‘
Everything that enters the mouth
,
goes into the belly
,
and
is cast out (
ekballetai
) down the toilet bowl
.’

As these episodes progress, starting in Matthew 14:13–23 and Mark 6:30–46 with Jesus’ first
multiplication of the loaves
/
feeding the five thousand
, they move from ‘
the Pharisees and some of the scribes from Jerusalem
’ holding to ‘
the Tr
a
dition of the Elders
’ and objecting to ‘
his Disciples eating with unwashed hands
’ (a euphemism for complaints against
Paul
’
s Gentile Mission
) into the arguments over ‘
teaching the doctrines of men
’ as opposed
to ‘
the Commandments of God
’ (Ma
t
thew 15:1–9 and Mark 7:1–14).

In Matthew 15:10, these give way to the attacks on ‘
the Pharisees
’ as ‘
Blind Guides
’ (i.e., the Leadership of ‘
the Jerusalem Church
’ of James and/or the Leadership of the Community at Qumran, should one choose to regard it) and the contention that ‘
the Plant
’ which they made claims – in the Damascus Document –
to have
‘
planted
’, would ‘
be uprooted
’. The characte
r
ization of this ‘
Plant
’ included the immediate further assertion that
both
the followers whom they ‘
led
’ (‘
the Blind
’) and the
m
selves, ‘
the Blind Guides
’ or ‘
the Leaders
’, would then ‘
fall into
’ the same ‘
Pit
’ to which they so graphically consigned others (again in the Damascus Document).
This is about as near to a definitive proof that the authors of these passages in the Gospel of Matthew knew the Damascus Document as one could provide.

These attacks culminate in both Matthew and Mark in attacks on
Peter
or
the Disciples
, or both – attacks continuing the ‘
toilet bowl
’ analogy but adding a new one, as per Paul’s ‘
all things to me are lawful
’ and ‘
I personally am free
’ protestations in 1 Corinthians 6:12 and 9:1 and the point ultimately of the whole exercise –
these things Jesus said
‘
making all foods clean
’ (Mark 7:19, of course, gets the point. Matthew, atypically here, is a little more reticent) which all
the Disciples
and
Peter
are unable
‘
to perceive
’
being
‘
yet
’ or ‘
also without understanding
’ (7:17/15:16).

To reinforce the matter of ‘
making all foods clean
’ and the permissibility of activities in predominantly non-Jewish areas, these episodes then move on to the curing of the
Canaanite
/
Syrophoenician woman
’
s daughter
in the ‘
border areas of Tyre and Phoenicia
’ and ultimately Jesus’
multiplication of the loaves
/
famine relief
miracles, all basically utilizing the parameters of Nakdimon’s
famine relief
efforts and his own great miracle of ‘
filling
’
the lord
’
s
‘
twelve cisterns to overflowing
’. In Matthew and Mark, this curing of the ‘
Syrophoenician woman
’
s daughter
’ in the ‘
Tyre and Sidon borderlands
’ is itself sandwiched b
e
tween their respective versions of either the ‘
feeding the four
’ to ‘
five thousand
’ scenario (according to Mark 7:37, ‘
in the bo
r
der areas of the Decapolis
’) and their presentation of Jesus’ polemics on ‘
unwashed hands
’, ‘
bodily purity
’, and the ritually ne
u
tral character of ‘
food going down the toilet bowl
’.

At the risk of some repetition, it would be well to go over this episode one final time, just to get it absolutely clear, since only then can one complete the picture of the strange dislocations and vocabulary transferences taking place from Gospel to Gospel and from Rabbinic tradition to New Testament. Once again, Mark 7:24 begins his version of ‘
casting out
’ of ‘
the u
n
clean spirit
’ with the
pro forma
notice about how Jesus
entered
‘
a house
’ – owner’s name unspecified. A few lines earlier in Mark 7:17 it was Jesus entering ‘
into the house
’ of another unnamed person, this time, ‘
away from the multitude
’/‘
the Many
’, both of which
entrance
s are missing from Matthew 15:15 and 15:22’s version of the same events.

In this ‘house’,
the Disciples
prod him (Jesus) – paralleling
Peter
’s similar prodding in Matthew 15:15 – to expound
the Parable
, but which ‘
parable
’ is intended is difficult to comprehend, since what follows is more in the nature of a simile or ho
m
ily and not
a parable
. Be this as it may, Jesus now provides the afore-referenced
Parable
, to wit, ‘
whatever goes into the man goes out into the toilet drain
’, the point of which according to Mark 7:19 was, as just underscored, ‘
making all foods clean
’. In 7:24, however, taking advantage of the issue of whose house Jesus was staying in when the ‘
Greek woman
,
a Syrophoenician by Race came and fell down at this feet
’, Mark once again alludes to the ‘
Hidden
’ ideology already called attention to above. He does so with the words – ‘
whose house
,
Jesus wanted no one to know
,
but he could not be hidden
’.

It is worth noting the evocation of another such ‘
parable’
in
ARN
tradition, alluded to above as well, which couples an a
l
lusion to being ‘
hidden
’ with
a parable
centering on Rabbi Akiba’s
Poverty
being a reproach to those
‘
claiming to be too Poor to study
Torah
’. This ‘
Parable
’ as well was surrounded by allusions to ‘
casting down
’, ‘
uprooting
’,
the
‘
hidden being brought to light
’, and the additional motif of those pleading
they
‘
could not study
Torah
on account of (their) little children
’, allusions not unsimilar to many we shall continue to encounter in this picture of Jesus ‘
casting the unclean spirit out of
’ the Syrophoenician woman’s daughter
.
1

Mark 7:25’s description of this ‘
certain woman
’, as he terms her, ‘
whose little daughter had an unclean spirit
’ is, once again, instructive too in view of the subject of ‘
cleanliness
’ or ‘
uncleanliness
’ – in
the Parable
that just preceded it – of what was or was not just ‘
cast
’ or ‘
gone down into the toilet bowl
’. So is the language
of ‘
casting out
’ with which Mark 7:26 begins its ve
r
sion of how the woman approached Jesus,
i.e.
, ‘
she besought him to cast (
ekballe
) the demon out of her daughter
’.

Though we have already gone over most of this before, it is not without profit to repeat these transferrals to show how such slight differences in vocabulary move from and are re-absorbed in one redaction or occurrence to another. In fact, the reason repetition of these motifs is helpful is that they show, curiously, that it is not so much the event itself that is so i
m
portant to the various narrators, redactors, or artificers, but rather the use of a given expression, wording, or phraseology and finding a convenient context in which to employ it. To the modern mind this is – as it was, most probably, earlier as well – a rather incomprehensible way to proceed, which is why so few over the years have either grasped or bothered making an issue of it.

Of course, to make the circle of all these usages complete, Mark’s ‘
let the children first be filled
’ and the
Talmud
’s ‘
going away full
’ are likewise now making their appearances in Luke’s ‘
a certain Rich man clothed in purple and fine linen
’ variation, but the connecting link between all of them should always be seen as the allusion to ‘
dogs
’. We have already pointed out the reason why Mark 7:26’s ‘
casting out
’ allusion is missing from Matthew 15:22’s initial version of the
Cananaean woman
’s r
e
quest to Jesus – despite the fact that its variation does finally come into play in both versions of Jesus’ proverbial response ultimately to both unnamed women’s requests: ‘
It is not good to take the children
’
s bread and cast (
balein
) it to the dogs
’ – and this should by now be clear. The reason is that Matthew 15:17 used the word ‘
ekballetai’
to characterize what Jesus had said a few lines earlier concerning what was ‘
cast out
down the toilet bowl
’ – and, therefore, of no legally-efficacious import – whereas Mark 7:19 had not, only noting a little more prosaically that it had ‘
gone out into the toilet drain
’!

Of course Mark 7:27’s otherwise fuller version of this all-important exchange with the Syrophoenician woman uses the more ideologically charged expression ‘
sated
’ or ‘
filled
’ to introduce its version of ‘
not casting the children
’
s bread to the dogs
’ – namely, ‘
Let the children first be filled
’. On the other hand, both Gospels use the omnipresent ‘
came
’ or ‘
come
’ (Matthew three times), that is, in Matthew 15:22, for instance, the unnamed woman, ‘
having
come
out of the border areas of Tyre and Sidon
,
cried out to him
’; whereas in Mark 7:25 she simply ‘
came and fell at his feet
’ which, even more importantly, evokes once again yet another favorite allusion, ‘
his feet
’! Of course, in Luke 16:21’s version of these materials this metamorphoses into ‘
even the dogs came and licked his feet
’ – meaning
Lazarus
’, not Jesus’! – and the circle of these allusions spreads ever wider.