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

followers of James par excellence , himself considered (even in early Christian accounts) to be the Leader of ‘ the Poor ’ or these selfsame ‘ Ebionites’ . 97
    To go back to the attack by Paul on James: as already signaled, James did not die in this attack. He was only left for dead, breaking , as the Pseudoclementines and later Jerome make clear, one or both his legs . 98 James does not die for another twenty years, the two episodes being neatly telescoped or conflated into one in both the description of Stephen ’s stoning in Acts and early Church accounts of James’ death. James, rather, is carried out of the Temple to a house – not the house of ‘ the Disciple Jesus loved ’ as in the Gospel of John (19:26) but, rather, a house James possesses in Jerusalem. This is also the gist of Acts 12:12 when Peter, after his escape from prison, goes to the house of ‘ Mary the mother of John Mark ’ – another character ne v er heard of before or since (more Gentile Christian dissimulation?). No, Mary the mother of James ! There he, quite properly, leaves a message for ‘ James and the brothers ’ that he is going abroad . This constitutes the introduction of the real James in Acts, the other James having conveniently been removed just ten lines earlier in Acts 12:2.
    The next morning, the Disciples numbering some five thousand , carry James’ inert body down to Jericho. In the meantime the ‘ Enemy ’ (Paul) gets letters from the High Priest – in passing, it should be remarked that these ‘ letters ’ are the only ones Paul ever receives. They are not from James, the proper appointment procedure as set forth in the Pseudoclementine Homilies and endlessly and sarcastically belittled, as we shall delineate, in 2 Corinthians 3:1–16, 5:12, 9:1–3, 10:8–18, etc . 99
    Paul pursues the members of the Early Christian Community (should we rather at this point be saying ‘ Essenes ’?) through Jericho on the way to Damascus where he misses them because, in the meantime, James together with all his followers have gone outside of Jericho (Qumran?) to visit the tomb of two of the brothers ‘ who had fallen asleep ’ ( n.b ., the parallel language in Acts 7:60 above). The detail and geographical precision here, as in the matter of the assault in the Temple preceding it, is i m pressively convincing. The tombs of these brothers miraculously ‘ whitened of themselves every year because of which miracle the fury of the Many against us was restrained , because they perceived that our brothers were held in Remembrance before God ’ .
    This is the kind of startling originality one encounters in this first section of the Recognitions . Not only do we have the notice of an attack on James by the ‘ Enemy ’ Paul, from which James will still be limping a month later when it came to sending out Peter on his first missionary journey – from somewhere outside of Jericho – to Caesarea (and not to Samaria) where he does however, encounter Simon Magus ; but who would have thought to place the entire Early Christian Community to the number of some five thousand in these environs, that is, before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls some nineteen hundred years later just a few miles south of Jericho at Qumran?
    Yet here we have just such a testimony in these incomparable notices in the Pseudoclementines which do not simply, in the writer’s view, parallel but are rather based on the same source as Acts – to which they are the more faithful. This is certainly the case concerning the Recognitions , the First Book of which, as already observed, links up with Acts in a point-for-point ma n ner, albeit from a completely opposite ideological orientation. Then, of course, there is the common vocabulary, not only with Acts but also the Damascus Document from Qumran – as, for instance, the phraseology, ‘ remembered before God’ , in the Recognitions at the end of the last part of the historical exposition of the Damascus