James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls II by Robert Eisenman Page A

from the High Priest and pursues the early Christian Community down to Jericho on his way to Damascus, the relationship of said events with the activities of Paul in Acts 9:1–25 is for all intents and purposes confirmed. In the author’s view, this is real ‘ Essene ’ history not that of what we call ‘ Christian i ty ’.
    ‘ Christianity ’ is to be found in the refurbished portraits one finds in the Gospels and Acts. We have to see the Pseudoclementines – romantic history or literary romance perhaps, but so is Acts – as history from the inside , from the perspe c tive of persons or personages in ‘ the Essene Movement ’ as it were. Identities which are only hinted at through circumlocutions and tantalizing nom-de-guerre s in the Dead Sea Scrolls, in the Pseudoclementines are spoken of overtly and by name. Through them we get, perhaps, a clearer picture of the divisions of ‘ Early Christianity ’ in Palestine in the First Century and a handle on persons only vaguely hinted at in the Scrolls or totally obliterated in Acts.
    As in Hegesippus, Jerome, the Recognitions , and Acts, we must carefully consider all these episodes involving the usages ‘ throwing down ’, ‘ casting down ’, ‘ headlong ’, or ‘ causing to stumble’ . 92 In the Habakkuk Pesher , for example, this last is exactly what is said to happen to the followers of the Righteous Teacher – there called, as already alluded to, ‘ the Poor ’ or ‘ the Perfect of the Way ’ (compare this with ‘ those of the Way ’ in Acts 9:22 whom Paul ‘ confounds ’) – when the Wicked Priest ‘ appeared to them at the completion of the Festival of their Rest ’ (thus – Yom Kippur ). 93 Not only is the Wicked Priest in this episode d e scribed as ‘ not circumcising the foreskin of his heart ’ and ‘ swallowing them’ , but also ‘ causing them to stumble ’ or, quite lite r ally, ‘ casting them down’ . According to the Habakkuk Pesher , he does this in the process of ‘ conspiring to destroy the Poor’ , the last being coeval with those ‘ Torah -Doers ’ referred to as ‘ the Simple of Judah doing Torah ’ in both Habakkuk and Psalm 37 Pesher s and to whom, Habakkuk 2:4’s ‘ the Righteous shall live by his Faith ’ is rightfully considered to apply. 94
    Unlike Peter in Acts 10:15, these ‘ Simple ’ Torah - Doers have not yet learned ‘ not to call any thing ’ or ‘ any man profane or unclean ’; but rather, in the manner of Josephus’ ‘ Zealots ’ and/or ‘ Essenes ’, they refuse ‘ to call any man Lord ’ or ‘ eat forbidden things ’. In the version of this testimony preserved in the Third-Century heresiology attributed in Rome to Hippolytus, this last becomes more specifically – and probably more accurately – ‘ things sacrificed to idols’ , a prohibition intrinsic not only to James’ directives to overseas communities in Acts but the document scholars call MMT . 95
    For Hippolytus, said ‘ Essenes ’ (actually he calls them ‘ Zealot Essenes ’ or ‘ Sicarii Essenes ’) are prepared to undergo any sort of bodily torture, even death, rather than ‘ eat things sacrificed to idols ’ or ‘ blaspheme the Law-giver ’ (meaning Moses). 96 They are also, as the Scrolls make plain, ‘ the Ebionites ’ or Ebionim ( the Poor ), in all early Church heresiologies the direct successors of ‘ the Essenes ’ and virtually indistinguishable from what these same heresiologists are calling Elchasaites , Masbuthaeans , Sampsaeans , or Sabaeans – the last-mentioned, in later Islamic lore, doubtlessly indicating ‘ Daily Bathers ’. We shall have more to say about all these terminologies presently when discussing the ‘ Nazoraean ’ or life-long ‘ Nazirite ’ language of ‘ abstention ’ or ‘ keeping away from ( lehinnazer ) things sacrificed to idols ’ or ‘ the pollutions of the idols ’ one finds both in the Scrolls and in Acts. These ‘ Ebionites ’ are also the