Sons of Zadok

by Sid Green (Revised April 5, 2003)

The origin of Christian belief is a matter of interest not only to Christians. The Greek Church Fathers who largely shaped the belief insisted that it came from the apostles via ‘tradition,’ but to accept such a tradition must be a matter of faith, since it has no historical support. Whatever one accepts, however, any Christian of any denomination must concede that the belief is rooted in, and arose from, a context of Judaism. This should encourage us to seek the origins within historical Judaism rather than in ‘traditions.’ I want to show here that only some reasoned – and reasonable – conjecture need be added to available historical information in order to see how it all began.

If we trace Christianity back to its roots, we hit the problem of the Jewish attitude to history. They recorded it usually centuries after the events related, seeking to use it as a lesson and a guide to contemporary religious conduct, caring little for dates and facts. The message was the lesson that the story was being used to teach, while the story itself had to accommodate this purpose by whatever means the writer chose to use. I freely concede therefore that the good reliable history that we would wish to see is in short supply, which leaves ample ‘wiggle’ room for proponents of the Church’s view of matters. We do however have material that is basically historical but coloured and distorted by verbal transmission. Most Old Testament records are in this category, but the somewhat later history of the Hasmonaean and Herodian eras provides the secular records of Josephus and some lesser chroniclers, plus the Apocryphal books of the Maccabees. These do not always agree with each other but we can see how to make sense of them, discounting apocryphal tales of supernatural knights riding the skies to bring victory to Judas Maccabeus, and uncrossing wires for Josephus here and there. Although Christian scriptures exist only in a form recorded and transmitted by Christians, and suffer greatly from scribal ‘improvement,’ we can still find real history there if we look for it.

One possible scenario begins in the first book of Chronicles, where a single verse may indicate the tiny seed from which grew the mighty mustard plant of Christianity:

Here we have a simple fact that we can rely upon, inasmuch as Judaism relied on it and believed it, and allowed it to shape subsequent history. Two great Israelites, one king and one priest, were anointed at the same time, the Hebrew for ‘anointed’ being ‘Mashiach’ which gives us the word ‘Messiah.’ Their offices were hereditary, creating parallel dynasties, temporal and religious, not competing but complementary. Both survived the secession of the ten tribes and the Assyrian annihilation of the northern kingdom. The exile in Babylon however brought an end to the Davidic kings, whereafter began a long period of subjugation for the Jews. The Persians freed the Jews from Babylonian captivity, only to assume the role of overlords themselves. Many Jews stayed in Babylon where life seemed preferable, but those who returned from the alleged miseries of exile were conspicuously wealthy [1] – an important factor in the reconstruction of the temple.

After the exile there was no king – only the high priest, a blood descendant of Zadok. For a significant part of the second temple era the House of Zadok supplied high priests who were in effect kings. It also supplied the higher priesthood, those priests with specific duties within the temple. This continued into the era of Macedonian conquest of the area, when Judaea became a vassal state, subject to whichever was the stronger of the two Macedonian kingdoms of Egypt and Syria. These difficult times made Jews nostalgic for the glorious days of David, and the idea of the restoration of a Davidic king, a ‘Messiah,’ took hold.

We can be certain that those belonging to the House of Zadok were numerous and were the most powerful Jewish institution. High priests had to be physically perfect; a limp or a squint could disqualify, so fecundity was required. Large families assured the succession, protecting against infant mortality and death from disease, war and murder. Redundant male offspring naturally had families too, so the death of a high priest who had no son, or whose sons were too young, allowed the closest male relative to assume the sacred role. The system worked; there was an unbroken line of Zadokites ruling the people for several centuries.

The Syrian king Antiochus Epiphanes considered Judaism to be a primitive superstition, and hoping that it would soon die out he deposed Onias III, the high priest, installing in his place Onias’s brother Jesus, who was a Hellenist. Jesus even adopted the Greek name ‘Jason,’ but Antiochus was impatient and replaced him by another Hellenistic priest, Menelaus by name. This was a major shock to conservative Jewry because Menelaus was not a Zadokite. At this point the House of Zadok lost its ancient royal and high priestly prerogative.

A persecution of Judaism, even banning circumcision on pain of death, led to unprecedented discontent. Mattathias, a Levitical priest of the Hasmonaean family, began a rebellion, supported by his five sons, the Maccabee brothers, Judas, Jonathan, Simon, John and Eleazar. They were joined by a large company of religious Jews, the ‘Hasidim,’ sometimes called ‘Hasidaeans,’ described in 1 Maccabees 2:42 as ‘Assideans, who were mighty men of Israel.’

When Mattathias died Judas became leader, winning remarkable victories over the Syrians. At the end of Judas’s life, the Syrians imposed dire punishments on supporters of the Hasidim, but other conflicts distracted them, leaving Judaea unmolested within the Syrian empire.

It is a certainty that the Hasidim would include a large and powerful Zadokite faction within its ranks, and that because of its sacred role in Jewish culture and religion it would be a highly regarded component of the Jewish rebel forces. If this was not the case, an explanation as to why it was not the case is urgently required. Common sense will not allow that this powerful royal family, a central feature of Jewish society, simply surrendered its rights and faded into oblivion.

Second temple Judaism had apparently been homogeneous, with no obvious sectarian schisms until Hellenising began under Macedonian influence. Hellenisation had brought a wind of change, showing up cracks in Jewish society, and more cracks appeared when Jonathan became leader upon the death of Judas. King Antiochus had died in 164BCE, and shortly afterwards his son Antiochus V was killed by his own cousin, Demetrius, who was subsequently challenged by Alexander Balas, a usurper. Both parties sought an alliance with Jonathan, Alexander outbidding Demetrius by offering Jonathan the high priesthood, before securing the Seleucid throne for himself.

To the dismay of many Jonathan eagerly accepted the high priestly diadem. We can imagine the despair of the Zadokite family leaders who had been fighting to see their royal and priestly rights restored, only to see them usurped by Jonathan aided by the other usurper, Balas. The rightful high priest, Onias IV, had disqualified himself by fleeing to Egypt, where he unlawfully built his own temple so that he could be high priest in Leontopolis if not in Jerusalem. A close relative of his would have been the heir presumptive, and no doubt a leader in the ranks of the Hasidim. Literally hundreds of other Zadokites would have no chance of ever being high priest but they might remain in senior and privileged positions as the higher priests of the temple if they chose to serve Jonathan.

Josephus wrote that in his day religious Jews were divided into three main parties: Sadducees, Pharisees and Essenes. Historical references to these groups show that they all appeared at roughly the same time, in the aftermath of the Maccabaean rebellion, although the seeds of the various distinctions may be older. The word ‘Sadducee’ is derived from the name ‘Zadok’ and meant something like ‘the Zadokite Party,’ and we can probably assume that the Sadducees were the first ‘party’ to emerge, since they alone had powerful vested interests going beyond escape from Syrian oppression.

The Maccabaean rebellion introduced some radical compromises with regard to the law, such as the right to self-defence even if attacked on the Sabbath, bringing a realisation that the law could be qualified by reason. While upholding the law strictly, Pharisees considered that their verbal traditions and the books of the prophets lent valuable insight into how it should be interpreted. The Zadokites had long been the sole arbiters of the law however, seeing no need for interpretation by prophets or by verbal traditions. We may think that it would have been politically astute of Jonathan to favour Pharisaism, as an insurance against any claim the disaffected Sadducees might have to the high priesthood, and Pharisaism was in fact well regarded by the regime, as well as achieving widespread popular appeal.

The Hasmonaean era was the beginning of a golden age for the Jews, redolent of the times of King David. Many Jews of all persuasions might look on this change of fortunes as a sign from God that He approved of the new arrangements which seemed generally preferable to the status quo ante of Zadokite leadership under Syrian domination.

Almost certainly the sectarians of the Dead Sea Scrolls were a splinter group of the Sadducees. Among the Sadducean party there was a sharp dichotomy between those who would have no part in temple worship led by a false high priest, and their more pragmatic brothers who chose to stay loyal to Jonathan. Rebellion would have meant a bloodbath, with the loss of everything, not just the high priesthood, as the price of failure. The majority seem to have retained much of their privileged status by turning their backs on their family leaders and declaring their loyalty, possibly led by someone called ‘Absolom’ [2].

The senior Zadokites however chose to walk away into self-imposed exile, in fear of Jonathan’s wrath, probably soon after his assumption of the high priesthood. Joined later by a charismatic leader, who no doubt was heir apparent to the high priesthood following the hubristic self-exclusion of Onias IV, they gave up temple worship and left. We could not know that something like this had occurred until 1910 when Solomon Schechter published his translation of the document he had discovered in Cairo in 1896. It is called the ‘Cairo Damascus Document,’ or simply CD, or sometimes the ‘Zadokite document/fragments.’ Although much younger than the Dead Sea Scrolls, its origins are from the same sectarian community, and much earlier recensions of it were subsequently discovered among the Scrolls.

From the CD we learn that the leader was called ‘The Teacher of Righteousness’ who made a ‘New Testament’ for the ‘Sons of Zadok’ in the ‘Land of Damascus.’ An interesting aspect of the Scrolls is their use of code-names. Almost nothing is called simply by a recognisable name, and this has led some scholars to assume that the term ‘Sons of Zadok’ is a symbolic sobriquet for righteous fanatics. In fact I believe it to be a literal designation of the bloodline of Zadok, the senior members of the House of Zadok. The ‘New Testament,’ or ‘New Covenant,’ was made because the Teacher believed that the original Covenant had been defiled by the actions of the false high priest and his complaisant acolytes. The ‘Land of Damascus’ is the location to where the Sons of Zadok exiled themselves, but scholars are not all agreed as to where it was. There is an evident terror in some quarters that the location may have been Qumran, and this has led to some desperate scholarly trench-digging, setting up a line of defence against such a dangerous proposition. Space precludes discussion here, but there is a good case against Qumran being what is claimed for it.

The Teacher of Righteousness was eventually apprehended by ‘the Wicked Priest,’ and almost certainly put to death. In Jerusalem a new calendar was in use, probably the Macedonian calendar [3], so that there was now no annual drift of the seasons, but holy days came at the wrong times, invalidating their sacred meaning as seen by the sectarians. This allowed the ‘Wicked Priest’ to seize the Teacher on the Day of Atonement, which to the attackers was just an ordinary day. The obvious candidate for ‘Wicked Priest’ is Jonathan Maccabee, Geza Vermes having shown that only Jonathan fulfils all the facts given about him: his life, his achievements, the way he was regarded before and after his fall from grace, and the manner of his death [4].

For Jonathan, the death of the Teacher eliminated his greatest rival for the High Priesthood. The Scrolls may describe the manner of his death. One judicial ruling is as follows:

‘If a man is a traitor against his people, giving them up to a foreign power, you are to hang him from a tree until dead……’ Additionally, ‘If a man convicted of a capital offence flees into a foreign land, cursing his people and the children of Israel, again you must hang him on the tree until dead’ [5].

Could this be the prescription of the Teacher himself, implying perhaps that Jonathan ‘hoisted him with his own petard?’ This re-presentation of Deuteronomy 21:22-23 has the new feature of hanging a living person. The Deuteronomy procedure is for the corpses of those otherwise executed, or slain in battle. The modified punishment, much like crucifixion, later became a Hasmonaean feature, being used extensively by Alexander Jannaeus against his enemies, and it is most odd to see it first prescribed by sectarians hostile to the Hasmonaean priesthood. Elsewhere I have shown how there is a persistent view through the haze of New Testament redaction that this was the fate suffered by the ‘Lord’ of the pre-gospel writers [6].

The Teacher had indeed incited his Zadokite brethren in the Hasidim to desert the cause they had elected to serve. When he was captured he could justifiably be accused firstly of preaching treason and thus imperilling the state in time of war, and secondly of fleeing to a ‘foreign land’ after his rebellious position was known, and presumably condemned. And of course, he was a dangerous rival claimant to the priestly throne.

The exiled Zadokites had nothing good to say of the new Hasmonaean regime. Here we observe conformity with a paradigm that everyone will recognise. One political party loses power to another, then the frustrated opposition objects to everything its opponent does. To the Sons of Zadok the sacrifices made in the temple in the new manner were more offensive to God than if no sacrifices at all had been made. One of the later Cave 4 documents to be published is 4QMMT, which contains something resembling a letter, some say from the Teacher himself and perhaps addressed to the usurper in the temple, listing twenty-four points of practice that were being incorrectly observed and thereby blasphemous.

The book of Daniel was written only shortly before this time, showing that apocalyptic ideas were being contemplated in the circumstances leading to Hasmonaean ascendancy. The exiled Zadokites became acutely apocalyptic, and in this they differed from the rump Sadducean party. I attribute the doctrinal divergence to separate development and the death of the Teacher, who seems thereafter to have been incorporated into an apocalyptic agenda to mitigate the apparently disastrous defeat. The split could have been widened however by a shift in Sadducean doctrine to accommodate the exigencies of their own changed circumstances. Very soon after this, John Hyrcanus I, Jonathan’s nephew, would break with the Pharisees, adopting the Sadducean position as that of the royal household. The doctrine of pre-Hasmonaean Zadokites is not well understood, but should have conformed broadly with that of Judaism at large, but we know that the Hasmonaean Sadducees believed neither in bodily resurrection nor an immortal soul [7].

The Scrolls show that the ‘Sons of Zadok’ shared the general Jewish idea that a Davidic prince would assume the throne of David before defeating all Israel’s enemies. Yet they revered the House of Zadok no less than the House of Jesse, so it would not be surprising if they would yearn for a restoration of the Zadokite dynasty as well as that of David. When the Scrolls were discovered however, many scholars were surprised to find references to two Messiahs, the Davidic Messiah and the Messiah of Aaron, or priestly Messiah. Intelligent conjecture, based upon known history would suggest that two Messiahs were a possibility even if not inevitable.

The ‘Messianic Rule,’ 1Qsa, tells how the priestly Messiah will not be simply sent by God but will be ‘engendered’ or ‘fathered’ by Him, but the Messiah of Israel seems to be already in place, and is of lower rank than the Priest. If at some stage a supposed Davidic heir had been present in the community his anointing would have been by the putative high priest, but there is no other evidence to suggest that this ever occurred or that there was a Davidic heir resident in the community [8].

However, Zadokites had ruled Judaea for several centuries without Davidic kings. They could have installed a Davidic descendant on the Judaean throne if they had been so inclined yet there is no sign that this was ever contemplated. Just as the descendants of Zadok had previously combined the functions of king and priest, we might expect to see the option of a combined royal and priestly Messiah. We do find that the ‘Messiahs (plural) of Aaron and Israel’ become the ‘Messiah (singular) of Aaron and Israel’ in later texts, in the CD for example, although there is no clear path showing how this evolved.

‘Essenes’ were probably those of the general Judaean population who followed the beliefs and principles of the sectarian ascetics. The origin of the name is unclear, but Josephus first mentions them as existing in the days of Jonathan. He says also that king Aristobulus I murdered a servant who was an Essene, this being the first reference to a sect member in the general population. Observers such as Pliny, Philo and Josephus would have applied the term more generally, to include the source of the belief, the ‘Sons of Zadok’ in their ‘Damascus.’

Without the Teacher the Zadokite community held fast to his precepts, and they wrote of him that at the End of Days he would return to teach righteousness. Scholars argue about this interpretation, the wording being abstruse, but several agree that resurrection is what is implied [9]. Before the CD or the Scrolls, some scholars believed that the Essenes rejected bodily resurrection [10], although Hippolytus asserts that they expected it [11] as the Scrolls confirm. Belief in both is also a feature of Christianity as we see from Christian creeds.

If, as I suspect, the Teacher was heir apparent to the high priesthood, we know nothing of his successors, and later leaders go unremarked, but the leader was called the ‘Maskil’ (Master) or sometimes ‘Mebeqqer’ (Guardian). He would teach his charges and care for them "as a shepherd cares for his sheep…" [12], and if I am correct, he would also be the putative heir to the high priesthood. We do know from Josephus and the Scrolls that not all members of the community were ‘Sons of Zadok,’ ordinary members being admitted to the ‘New Covenant’ after undergoing a novitiate that lasted for three years [13]. The community would include numerous Zadokites, but these would become proportionally fewer as outsiders were admitted. Paul almost certainly entered the community in ‘Damascus’ as a novice, serving three years [14] before ‘graduating’ prior to becoming apostate over the issue of the law.

The Scrolls are peppered with references to the sectarians as ‘Guardians’ or ‘Keepers’ of the Law. The Hebrew word for this is ‘Shomerim,’ but in the spoken language, Aramaic, it is ‘Natsarraya,’ whence the Greek ‘Nazoraioi’ is a very close transliteration [15]. This allows us to see how the community which sheltered the Zadokite bloodline became known as the ‘Nazoraioi’ or ‘Nazoreans,’ bringing us to ‘Iesous Nazoraios,’ or ‘Jesus the Nazorean,’ the Jesus of the gospels.

I preface this section by asserting that beyond any doubt the early Nazorean believers, as well as the somewhat later Christian followers of the gospel Jesus, were Gnostics of the Adoptionist variety [16]. Their secret message of salvation was communicated through spiritual people – a favoured minority of the population – whose task was to pass on the message to those who had the capacity to accept it, without themselves being ‘spiritual.’ Paul, for example, declares himself to be non-spiritual [17], having been shown the way by a direct encounter with the Lord. It is worth taking the time to study Mark chapter 4 to see what this meant by the time the first gospel appeared. Jesus collected spiritual followers, and they alone were intended to understand his parables. ‘He who has ears to hear, let him hear.’ The disciples would later pass on the salvific Gnosis (knowledge) to a wider public. The Nazoreans were sworn never to divulge the secrets of the sectarian brotherhood, and so the evangelist knew much that he did not properly understand. He knew of Cephas and John, both real historical figures, and he included them as Jesuine disciples in his narrative. He had heard too that James was ‘brother of the Lord’ and this too is taken literally in the gospels.

Why should the Nazoreans be seen as identical with the ‘Essenes’ described by Josephus and Philo? The latter are clearly identical to the sectarians of the Scrolls, who refer to themselves with the same terminology that is seen for the Nazoreans in Acts. Additionally, a commune of between four and six thousand fanatics, selling everything they owned and giving the proceeds to administrators for the collective good, will pass unobserved only with great difficulty. We see a report of one case by Josephus, who was possibly influenced by Philo, and we see another very similar report in Acts, but neither observer reports both. Even some Christian commentators have come close to conceding that the two reports are of a single phenomenon, the sectarians persecuted by Paul being identified unambiguously as ‘Nazoraioi,’ in Acts 24:5. Noting that the Scrolls often refer to the sectarian community as ‘the Poor’ (‘Ebionim,’) [18], it seems that a member of either community was expected to "Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor….".

‘Acts of the Apostles’ reconciles the Pauline epistles with the gospels in a quasi-historical account. A source of genuine Nazorean history, unknown to us today, was the basis into which the other components were selectively interwoven to reconstruct the history of the era. The gospel component takes priority, so that the historical source is pushed into the background, yet the early chapters of Acts still reveal traces of this source and some unique historical facts [6]. When we look without gospel preconceptions we see from Acts the Nazoreans believing that the end of the age was fast approaching and abandoning their normal way of life to adopt a communal existence in preparation for ‘The End.’ They were clearly not mourning the departure of a Messiah; rather they believed that he had at last arrived and the end was imminent.

The Pauline epistles are historical, although because of their nature they give little historical information. With some exceptions however they are substantially uncorrupted, giving valuable clues to help interpret the overall story. In 1 Corinthians 15 Paul gives an account of the witnessing of the risen Lord. It takes less than a minute to confirm that what he says here – ‘first Cephas, then the twelve...’ – bears not the slightest resemblance to the post-resurrection sightings reported in any gospel. Yet, as I show below, even though the first gospel reports no post-resurrection witnessing at all, it does reflect the historical Pauline information. An important feature used to relate Paul’s writings to the gospels – and opportunities are exceedingly rare – is the reference here to ‘the twelve,’ but in the gospel accounts there were only eleven disciples at that stage. Doherty says that the identity of ‘the twelve’ must remain a mystery [19], but the Scrolls tell us that the ‘council’ of the sectarians consisted of twelve men. It is reasonable to assume that Cephas and John, who seem to have been tasked with overseeing Paul’s venture, were members of that council. James, however, as I shall discuss below, was either one of the three priests that were attached to the council, or he was the leader of the community, the ‘Maskil’ [20].

A restless population forming communes awaiting a Messiah to conquer the ruling power does not make for stability. Neither the Romans nor the high priest could have been very relaxed about what was happening. The high priest would certainly feel threatened by a Zadokite presence, with pretensions to the high priesthood, emerging from 150 years of exile to preach that the Teacher of Righteousness had returned to herald the start of a revolution. If the Romans were indifferent to the religious antics of Judaeans, a word of warning from the high priest that the Messiah would be a king, commanding loyalty superseding that due to Caesar, would soon open their eyes to the danger. If stoning were a suitable punishment for the fanatics of the communes, it was totally impracticable in view of their numbers. Expulsion of so many was also far beyond the capacity of the high priest’s resources, but those expelled by Roman force would know that this was done at his urging.

Acts 8:1 describes a great persecution with large-scale expulsions. Modern interpretation of the ‘Haran Gawaita’ of the Gnostic Mandaean sect of Mesopotamia suggests that their Nazorean forebears were expelled from Palestine at just this time [21]. Others, driven out by the Romans would carry the story into the Diaspora that the Teacher of Righteousness and the end of the age had arrived. The recipients of the information would teach the next generation, expecting dramatic events at any time, but nothing happened, and they grew old and died. Their children, Diaspora born and bred and speaking Greek, had facts but no direct grasp of the underlying history or even the geography. Just as their fathers had done they awaited the dramatic events that were now overdue, but they too were disappointed. Then came the Jewish revolt in 66CE, and in 70CE the temple was destroyed, Jerusalem sacked and second temple Judaism was gone forever. The Sadducees passed into history, and the Essenes were not heard of again as an organised movement although individuals survived, as did splinter groups of heretical believers, perhaps including the Ebionites.

In the Diaspora second and third generation Nazoreans were wondering what had gone wrong in what they had been taught to expect. Eventually, what little they knew about the Lord was committed to writing – the first gospel – not to make a chronicle, but probably for instructional purposes and to sustain the belief, a dramatic work punctuated by descriptions of the real events as understood by the evangelist. Later evangelists simply build on this, adding their own data, such as ‘Q,’ as well as legendary detail, and so their secondary gospels are of little help in revealing the source of the legend.

I list below seven samples of quasi-historical information known to the first evangelist. I would note here that the correct sequence would mean little to one who was totally ignorant of Palestinian history. He assembled his facts in a sequence that made sense to him, along the following lines:

There are just two events of whose place in history the evangelist could be reasonably sure, events reported to his community by refugees witnesses. The first was (7), and he thus correctly places it last. The resurrection, (6), was reported as having happened in the fourth decade of the century, where he allows it to remain in his gospel account, thus making it the final climax of his story. To him, all other events are assumed to be recent history, but he has no understanding of historical order. He therefore assembles them in a meaningful sequence, all before, rather than after, the resurrection event.

The correct sequence – incomprehensible to the evangelist – begins with (4) and (5) from around 150BCE, followed by (6), (1), (2), (3) and (7), all from the early decades of the first century. In choosing to arrange his facts as he does, he fails to understand that (6) and (1) are coincident. He thus transfers resurrection from the beginning of the story, where Paul understood it to be, to the end, so explaining the shift of Adoptionist doctrine from resurrection (see Paul, Romans 1:4) to baptism.

Older manuscripts of the Markan gospel, the earliest extant form of the original first gospel, had no witnessing of the risen Lord and no ascension into heaven. All such embroidery occurred long afterwards.

The evangelist knew that the Lord was executed in accordance with Jewish law, and that the body was taken down before nightfall. But he knew also that the high priest had no power to deliver or execute the sentence, and that Roman crucifixion had no such requirement, thus posing a dilemma. He therefore constructed a plausible context for the execution to explain why normal Roman practice was not followed and Jewish law was therefore applied, albeit fortuitously.

The relationship of James the Just to the gospel Jesus is of great interest in the ‘historical Jesus’ debate. Josephus tells how the high priest Ananus was deposed by Agrippa for having James murdered during the brief interregnum between governors Festus and Albinus [22]. Paul distinguishes James from the apostles, referring to him as ‘brother of the Lord’ [23]. This information, as with much else, is taken literally by the gentile first evangelist, who assumes that a blood relationship is meant. Matthew Black suggests that the sectarian priests, in the absence of a temple connection, were in effect Nazirites [24]. Indeed, Hegesippus, an early Jewish Christian historiographer, recorded the then current understanding that James was a Nazirite [25], and this indicates that he was possibly one of the three priests attached to the council of twelve, or possibly even the ‘Maskil’ or ‘Master’ of the community [26]. The latter conclusion would mean, if my other conjecture is sound, that he was the heir-apparent Zadokite high priest. But Hegesippus also states that James was permitted access to the holiest parts of the Temple, which must mean that he was not only a high ranking Zadokite but recognised as such by his Sadducean cousins [27]. It should cause no surprise that one ‘Son of Zadok’ is referred to as the ‘brother’ of another, and even less that a current ‘Maskil’ should be termed ‘brother’ of the historic ‘Maskil,’ founder of the Zadokite community. Until James’s rank is appreciated, Ananus is seen to have had opportunity to dispose of James but no motive worth the risk. When James is seen as a rival with impeccable credentials however, deliverance from this re-emerging threat seemed to Ananus to justify risking his own position, which is exactly what he did.

Josephus – Bellum Judaicum (BJ), Antiquities (Ant.)

The Dead Sea Scrolls (Cave and Scroll reference)

Black, Matthew
The Scrolls and Christian Origins
Scholars Press 1961 (Black)

Doherty, Earl
The Jesus Puzzle
Canadian Humanist Publications, 1999 (Doherty)

Ehrman, Bart D.
The Orthodox Corruption
of Scripture
OUP 1993 (Ehrman)

Michael Wise, Martin Abegg, Jr., Edward Cook
The Dead Sea Scrolls – a New Translation
HarperSanFrancisco, 1996 (Wise)

Robert Eisenman & Michael Wise
The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered
Element, 1992 (Eisenman)

Schuerer, Emil
The History of the Jewish People
in the Age of Jesus Christ
T&T Clark, 1973 (Schuerer)

Vermes, Geza
The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English
Penguin Books, 1998 (Vermes)

REFERENCES

[1] Ezra 1 & 2

[2] 1Qhab 5,9-12 – Vermes p. 63

[3] Schuerer, Volume 1, citing Josephus p 587

[4] Vermes p. 61

[5] 11QTemple 64:6-13 Wise/Abegg/Cooke p.490 (a somewhat clearer translation here than that of Vermes p 217)

[6] S Green, ‘Hidden History in Acts of the Apostles’ – (URL not yet available)

[7] BJ 2,8:14

[8] Anointing a Davidic Messiah would be understandable for those who believed that they were living in the End-Times. The Christian concept of Messiah is a distraction - to the Jews he would be like any other Davidic king, except for the fact that he would be the final one.

[9] CD 6:10 This interpretation by Schechter (1910), Dupont-Sommer (1961) M.Wise (1999)

[10] e.g. Lightfoot, 1875: "Throughout the notices in Josephus and Philo (re Essenes) we cannot trace the faintest indication of Messianic hopes...
... The Messianic idea was built on a belief in the resurrection of the body. The Essenes entirely denied this doctrine." This illustrates the contribution made to our understanding by the discovery of the CD and the Scrolls, notwithstanding Lightfoot’s indifference to the testimony of Hippolytus. (see next)

[11] Hippolytus ‘Refutatio Omnium Haeresium,’ 27

[12] CD 13:9-10 Vermes p 36

[13] BJ 2,8:7

[14] Galatians 1:17-18

[15] Black, p.69

[16] See Ehrman p 123 for an excellent summary view of what Gnostics believed.

[17] Ro 7:14

[18] The Scrolls are punctuated throughout with references to ‘the Poor.’ Eisenman p 233 says "it is important to see the extent to which the terminology Ebionim, and its synonyms, penetrated Qumran literature."

[19] Doherty p.42

[20] 1QS 8, 1-4 Vermes p. 29

[21] Black p. 68 attributes this finding to Rudolf Macuch.

[22] Ant. 20, 9:1

[23] Galatians 1:17 (Paul saw no apostles other than Peter, but he did see James, the brother of the Lord. NB The Catholic Encyclopaedia construes this to mean that James is an apostle)

[24] Black, p. 165

[25] See Numbers 6 for the rules of the Nazirate

[26] Note James’s evident authority over the apostles, Galatians 2:12.

[27] Eusebius, Church History 2,23