Sweet Brother
of God
Odd Man Out
The
hoopla occasioned more than a year ago by the supposed discovery of the
ossuary of James, the brother of Jesus, has focused new popular
attention on this shadowy New Testament character. He is a thorn in the
side of both believers and nonbelievers. Roman Catholics, committed to
believing in the "perpetual virginity" of Mary, have trouble with
James's status as "the brother of the Lord," since Mary can have had no
other children under that condition. But partisans of the Christ Myth
theory find James something of an inconvenience, too, since his
fraternal connection would certainly seem to imply a flesh-and-blood
historical Jesus rather than the misty Jesus of legend and dogma only
later turned into pseudohistorical figure. What do we know, or, at
least, what can we surmise, about James the Just?
Mark 6:3 contains a
list of the "brothers" (adelfoi)
of Jesus: James, Joses, Judas, and Simon. Galatians 1:19 mentions a
"James, the Lord's brother," and 2:9 seems to include this James along
with John and Cephas as "pillars" of the church. The metaphor indicates
their fundamental role in church leadership, recalling the cosmic
pillars upon which the earth itself was believed to rest (cf. Gospel of
Thomas 12: "go to James the Righteous, for whose sake heaven and earth
came into being") as well as suggesting their mediatorial role between
heaven and Earth. Acts 15:13 21 and 21:17 25 depict James, apparently
the same one, as the patriarch of the Jerusalem church. Galatians 2:11
12 associate James with the circumcision party, a group of Jewish
Christian elders who insisted that Gentile converts to Judaism must
receive circumcision and embrace Jewish customs. James's representatives
are said to have intimidated Cephas (apparently Peter) and Barnabas in
Antioch and to have promoted a clash with Paul over the issue of
Jew-Gentile Christian table fellowship, an issue seemingly reflected in
the Gospel scenes of Jesus dining with unwashed sinners and toll
collectors (Mark 2:15 17; Luke 19:1 10; cf. Galatians 2:15). These
stories may well have originated in an attempt to vindicate the Pauline
position by retrojecting it onto Jesus and the outcasts of his day.
Pillar and Pontifex
Josephus (Jewish
Antiquities 20:9:1), Hegesippus (in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical
History 2:23), and “The (second) Apocalypse of James (61 63) all
report the martyrdom of James at the instigation of Ananas, the high
priest in 62 C.E., who had apparently first asked James, whom he seemed
not to know was a Christian, to quash the burgeoning Jewish enthusiasm
for Jesus in a public speech. When, however, James confessed his own
faith in Jesus ("Why do you ask me concerning the Son of Man? For he
sits in the heavens, at the right hand of the great Power, and he is
about to come with the clouds of heaven"), he was shoved from the top of
a flight of stairs to the floor, where someone bludgeoned him to death
with a laundry club. With his last breath, he prayed, "I entreat you, O
God and Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do!" The
story, if based on fact, implies that James was a faithful Torah zealot
and that this fact was better known of him than his Christian identity,
implying in turn that whatever sort of Torah-Christianity James and his
followers espoused did not yet make Jesus its figurehead or its defining
mark. Insofar as James would have viewed himself a faithful steward of
Jesus, he must have understood Jesus as a faithful Torah observer as
well. Otherwise, he may have been more of a colleague with Jesus in a "Nazorean"
(or Nazarene) movement that was already rather pluralistic, with Jesus
representing a more relaxed position, James a more formal one.
James's manifest
position as the leader of the Jerusalem Christians implies a structure
analogous to that of Shi'ite Islam and later movements arising from it.
James would appear to have been understood as the caliph, or vicar, of
Jesus, as the absentee messiah or messiah-elect, and thus his mouthpiece
on Earth, as the Sunni caliphs (Abu-Bekr, Umar, Uthman) were heads of
state and caretakers of the Muslim community after the death of the
prophet Muhammad. Ali and his descendants were deemed Imams, inspired
teachers and interpreters of scripture. When the last of them
disappeared without a successor, he was believed to have been hidden
away by God and to communicate henceforth through intermediaries called
Babs, "gates" or "doors." Hegesippus says James was asked, "What
is the door of Jesus?" perhaps implying that James held this very
position as the living link with Jesus. Thus it is entirely possible
that many of the sayings attributed to Jesus, but which scholars ascribe
to early Christian prophets instead, originated with James the Just.
That James was but the first in a chain of such Babs or caliphs is
hinted at by the note in Hegesippus that states that he himself was
succeeded by another "brother" of Jesus, namely Simon, or Simeon bar
Cleophas.
Epiphanius (Panarion
78:14:1) also remarks as to how James wore the high-priestly diadem. As
Robert Eisenman, Arthur Palumbo, and others have suggested, James may
have functioned as a rival sectarian high priest, operating on a
different ritual calendar, and he may have been seized by the
authorities while entering the Inner Sanctum upon the Day of Atonement
on behalf of his sect, the so-called Jewish Christians of Jerusalem, the
circumcision party. Eisenman, like Jacob L. Teicher, has suggested that
James's community was identical with the Dead Sea Scrolls sect. We are
told that James wore only priestly linen, like the Essenes, and that he
was given the epithet Oblias (“the bulwark”). It was apparently
believed that, as long as he lived to intercede, Israel’s safety was
guaranteed. Origen read some version of Josephus that blamed the Roman
destruction of Jerusalem on the execution of James (Against Celsus 1:47;
2:13; Commentary on Matthew 13:55). As Eisenman says, this
priestly act by James, as well as his subsequent fate, may reflect the
intention and fate of Jesus' own cleansing of the temple thirty years
earlier. Jesus, too, may have been protesting what he perceived as
corrupt or ritually defective worship conducted by the priestly
establishment.
Superstar Sibling
Was James literally,
physically the brother of Jesus of Nazareth? This point has always been
controversial for various reasons. Mark 6:3 seems to assume simply that
Jesus had blood brothers and sisters who were his physical kin in the
same way as his parents, Mary and "the carpenter" (according to some
manuscripts, as also in Matthew 13:55). But second-century ascetic
piety, which deemed sexual intercourse to be sinful even between husband
and wife, came to believe that Mary and Joseph can never have had
intercourse hence cannot have had children of their own. This implied
that, while Jesus was miraculously conceived with no human father, the
other children mentioned in Mark 6:3 must have been either his cousins
or his half-siblings. In the latter case, they were the children of the
elderly widower Joseph by his previous marriage. In the former case,
they were the children of Mary's sister Mary(!) and her husband Clopas
or Cleophas. This latter understanding seems already to have gained a
foothold in the New Testament in Mark 15:40 and 16:1 and John 19:25.
"James of Alphaeus" (Mark 3:18) represents this tradition, since
Alphaeus and Cleophas appear to be but variant versions of
the same name, both meaning "substitute." James, the son of Mary and
Cleophas is James of Alphaeus is James the Just, brother of the Lord.
Likewise, James bar-Zebedee, along with John, is traditionally held to
be the cousin of Jesus. All such cousin ascriptions are attempts to
distance Jesus from fleshly siblings and safeguard the perpetual
virginity of Mary. (Similarly, the martyrdom of James, as Hans-Joachim
Schoeps and Robert Eisenman have proposed, has been reworked in Acts 7
as the stoning of Stephen, a name that means "crown," and is thus an
ideal or symbolic name for one who has gained the martyr's crown.)
On the other hand, it
seems just as likely that "brother(s) of the Lord" referred originally
to a group or class of missionary itinerants, as in Matthew 25:40 and 3
John 1:3, 5 8, and that the epithet thus no more implied physical
relation to Jesus than Paul and Apollos, as "colleagues of the Lord" (1
Corinthians 3:9), would have had offices next to the Almighty's. It is
not unlikely that "brother(s) of the Lord" came later to be
historicized, misunderstood in literal fashion in order to satisfy the
same biographical curiosity that eventually filled the apocryphal
Infancy Gospels with details of the childhood and home life of Jesus
(though, as we have seen, all this would soon clash with the perpetual
virginity doctrine). In the same way, Jesus may have first been called
"the Nazorean," meaning "member of the Nazorean sect” (cf. Acts 24:5),
but that identifier was later interpreted as a reference to his having
lived in Nazareth. (He may first have been called a carpenter by way of
a proverbial metaphor for a skilled scripture exegete, later to be
counted as a literal woodworker.) “The (first) Apocalypse of James”
explicitly repudiates any physical connotation of "brother" ("For not
without reason have I called you my brother, although you are not my
brother materially"). We see the same tendency to historicize in the
case of Thomas, called Jesus' "twin" in “The Gospel of Thomas,” because
he, the ideal disciple, has attained spiritual equality/identity with
Jesus (in saying 13). Elsewhere he seems to be portrayed as the literal,
physical double of his Master. So "the brother of the Lord" need not
denote blood kinship. After all, the Taiping messiah Hong Xiuquan in
nineteenth-century China called himself the Younger Brother of Jesus,
but no one thought he was claiming to be eighteen hundred years old.
1 Corinthians 15:7
mentions a resurrection appearance to James, already understood as the
leader of the apostles. Mark 3:20-21, 31-35 and John 7:5 portray the
brothers of Jesus as skeptics toward his mission, by no means his
disciples. Many commentators infer that it was an appearance of the
risen Jesus that converted James; but this harmonization fails to
recognize, with Harnack, the role of the Petrine faction, which rejected
the authority claims of their rivals, the so-called heirs of Jesus. The
Petrinists would have denied that James and the others had supported
Jesus during his earthly life, casting James as a Johnny-come-lately who
tried to ride Jesus' coattails. The Petrine credo was "he appeared to
Cephas, then to the twelve." The James faction, on the other hand, told
the story we read in the Gospel according to the Hebrews, that James was
a disciple present at the Last Supper and swore to keep his fast till
Jesus returned from the grave, which he did and told his brother to eat
again. "Here, my brother, eat your bread; for the Son of Man is risen
from among those who sleep" (Jerome, De viris illustribus II). Both
versions are factional propaganda, and it is impossible to recover the
facts of the matter. Indeed, the historical James confronts us with much
the same enigma as the historical Jesus.
By
Robert M. Price