James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls I Read Online Free PDF

interpretation somewhat to include the Eastern sectarian tendency referred to in early Church literature as ‘ Ebionite ’ (a word deriving from an original Hebrew root meaning ‘the Poor’) and other parallel currents like the Essenes, Nazoraeans, Elchasaites, Manichaeans, and even Islam, we discover a different story. For its part, the Letter of James in its essence resembles nothing so much as the Dead Sea Scrolls.
    Origen (185–254) railed against traditions giving James more prominence than he was prepared to accord him, namely those connecting James’ death – not Jesus’ – to the fall of Jerusalem. The normal scriptural view and popular theology to this day connects Jesus’ death not James’ to the destruction of the Temple. Origen’s view of the tradition connecting the fall of Jerusalem to the death of James, which he credited to Josephus, is probably not a little connected with its disappearance from these materials as they have come down to us.
    Eusebius contemptuously alluded to the poverty-stricken spirituality of the Ebionites, who held James’ name in such high esteem. He did so in the form of a pun on the Hebrew meaning of their name, ‘the Poor’, thereby showing himself very knowledgeable about the meaning and consideration of James’ person. 2 ‘The Poor’ was already in use as an honourable form of self-designation by the community responsible for the Dead Sea Scrolls, as it was among those in contact with James’ Jerusalem Community, most notably Paul. The usage also figures prominently in both the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew and in the Letter attributed to James. 3
    The group or movement associated with James’ name and teachings in Jerusalem is usually referred to as ‘the Jerusalem Church’ or ‘Community’, an English approximation for the Greek word Ecclesia , which literally means ‘Assembly’. It is also possible to refer to it as Palestinian Christianity , which would indeed be appropriate. But an even more popular notation one finds in the literature is Jewish Christianity .
    Jewish and Christian Sectarianism
    Sects such as these were at a very early time pronounced anathema by the Rabbis – the heirs of the Pharisees pictured in the New Testament – who took over Judaism by default seven and a half years after James’ judicial murder. After the destruction of the Temple theirs was the only Jewish tradition the Romans were willing to tolerate in Palestine. The legal tradition they inherited has come to be known as Halachah , the sum total of religious law according to the traditions of the Pharisees. It is preserved in the literature of the Rabbis known as the Talmud . This includes what is also known as ‘the Oral Law’ and consists mainly of a document compiled in the third century called the Mishnah , a number of commentaries on it, and further traditional compilations, together known as either the ‘Babylonian’ or ‘Jerusalem Talmud ’, depending on whether they originated in Iraq or Palestine.
    The Movement headed by James from the 40’s to the 60s CE in Jerusalem was the principal one of a number of groups categorized in the Talmud by the pejorative terminology minim . This has now come to mean in Jewish tradition ‘sectarian’. With the gradual production of this rabbinical literature, a new form of Judaism was formulated no longer predicated on the Temple. This became dominant in Palestine only after the Romans imposed it by brute force.
    Because of its palpably more accommodating attitude towards foreign rule and, at least while the Temple was still standing, to High Priests appointed by foreigners or foreign-controlled rulers, it was really the only form of Jewish religious expression the Romans were willing to live with. The same was to hold true for the form of Christianity we can  refer to as ‘Pauline’, which was equally accommodating to Roman power. For his part, Paul proudly proclaimed his Pharisaic roots (Phil.