Chapter 49. James, Peter and the Jerusalem Community: Jewish Christians and the Ebionites

The first followers of Jesus after his death did not see themselves as founders of a new religion. They formed a group in Jerusalem that kept the Temple, the Torah and the hope of Israel’s restoration. Peter led it at first, then James, “the brother of the Lord”. Its history runs from Pentecost to the catastrophe of 66–70 CE. After that, its Torah-observant heirs, the Nazarenes and Ebionites, were pushed to the edges of a church that had become predominantly gentile. The library’s main reconstruction is James D. G. Dunn’s. Set against it is the Qumran-James thesis of Robert Eisenman, taken up by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, in which the Dead Sea Scrolls preserve the voice of James’s community and its quarrel with Paul.

A messianic sect in Jerusalem

Dunn opens Part Seven of Beginning from Jerusalem with the question “One Community or Several?” (§22.1). He then treats the period “Between Easter and Pentecost” and Pentecost itself (§§22.2–22.3), and the social and religious character, leadership and beliefs of the earliest community (§§23.1–23.5) [Dunn, Beginning from Jerusalem, #63287, Contents]. His summary (§23.6) is “a Messianic Sect”. It was a sect “in the sense used by Luke and Josephus (hairesis)”, which “like Pharisees and Sadducees … functioned within the parent body of Second Temple Judaism, within which Jesus had also functioned”. It was a faction “in disagreement with other factions, but not in denial of their status as also part of Judaism” [Dunn, Beginning from Jerusalem, #63287, §23.6]. He adds that it can also be described as “a renewal or revivalist movement within late Second Temple Judaism”. He notes that “most of the features, indeed, can be paralleled with the Qumran sect”, including a “Teacher of Righteousness” with “a quasi-messianic” role [Dunn, Beginning from Jerusalem, #63287, §23.6]. The broader puzzle he sets himself is “how a Jewish sect became a Gentile religion” [Dunn, Beginning from Jerusalem, #63287, §20.3].

Economic sharing marked the group. Acts reports that “all who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need” (Acts 2:44–45). It adds that “none of them ever claimed any possession as his own” (4:32). Roman Montero gathers the commentary on these verses, including the view that “Luke may well be idealizing the situation” and the Greek proverb “Among friends everything is common”. He follows the “informal communism” into later Christian precepts by which the Christian “should not consider his possessions to be his own” [Montero, All Things in Common, #74555, chs. 1 and 10]. Dunn connects the crisis in Acts 6 directly to this practice: “the seven chosen to deal with the crisis over distribution from the common fund may already have been their de facto leaders” [Dunn, Beginning from Jerusalem, #63287, §24.6].

Hellenists, Stephen and the first persecution

Luke introduces “a complaint from the Hellenists against the Hebrews, to the effect that their widows were being neglected in the daily (provision of) aid” (Acts 6.1). Dunn calls this “one of the most intriguing phases of earliest Christianity” [Dunn, Beginning from Jerusalem, #63287, §24.1]. His chapter 24 moves through “Who Were the Hellenists?”, “The Seven”, Stephen and his speech, then asks “The First Persecution — against Whom Was It Directed?”. It ends with the mission of Philip and “The Breakthrough at Antioch” [Dunn, Beginning from Jerusalem, #63287, Contents]. Luke says that after Stephen’s execution “everyone was scattered … except the apostles” (Acts 8.1). Dunn finds this implausible as it stands, and his reconstruction runs as follows. The Greek-speaking believers “presumably operated only in Greek”. Among them there was “a marked reaction against the Temple”, articulated “most forceably by Stephen”. The “Hebrews” did not share it, so “a marked divide, even gulf” opened. Hence “when the persecution followed, it was primarily directed against the Greek-speaking followers of Stephen and not against the new sect as a whole”. The apostles, “seen to live in continuing attachment to the Temple”, were not targeted. Jerusalem afterwards “became the bastion of conservative opinion and practice within the new sect (Gal. 2.12; Acts 21.20)” [Dunn, Beginning from Jerusalem, #63287, §24.6]. The scattered Hellenists became the first missionaries. Philip went to Samaria and baptised the first gentile convert, and others reached Antioch [Dunn, Beginning from Jerusalem, #63287, §§24.7–24.8].

Peter’s own mission is treated in chapter 26: “Mission to ‘the Circumcision'”, Caesarea, “The Conversion of Peter”, the acceptance of Cornelius, and “Anxious Times under Herod Agrippa I (Acts 12)”. Dunn reports the common deduction that Agrippa’s persecution “marked the end of the leadership of the twelve and the transition to James and the elders” (following Bauckham) [Dunn, Beginning from Jerusalem, #63287, ch. 26 and n. 205].

James the Just and the mother church

Eusebius presents James as the first bishop. Dunn’s third volume quotes Eusebius’ statement that James “had been ‘the first elected to the throne of the bishopric of the church in Jerusalem’ (HE 2.1.2)”. Dunn reads this as typical of the “triumphalist view of Christianity’s beginnings”, in which later church structures are projected back onto the first generation [Dunn, Neither Jew nor Greek, #64136, ch. 38]. In Acts, James speaks for the “myriads” of Jewish believers “all zealous for the law” (Acts 21.20). Dunn suggests that “many (?) Christians” in Jerusalem may at first have supported the revolt of 66, given that Luke has James call them “zealots of the law” [Dunn, Beginning from Jerusalem, #63287, §§29.1, 36.3].

Josephus records the death of James in 62. Ananus, the new high priest, used the gap between the procurators Festus and Albinus: “Ananus convened a sanhedrin of judges and brought before it the brother of Jesus, the so-called Christ, James by name, and certain others”, and had them stoned for transgressing the law [Dunn, Beginning from Jerusalem, #63287, §36.2, citing Ant. 20.197–203]. Those who protested were “strict in reference to the laws”, which Dunn reads as Pharisees. Ananus was deposed after three months. Dunn concludes that the action was “rooted in … a deeply felt factional dispute”, a “pre-emptive strike against a hated rival”. He finds this more plausible than a quarrel over Roman rule, and calls it “something of the ‘kangaroo court’ or ‘show trial'”. Hegesippus’ longer account (via Eusebius HE 2.23) has James thrown from the Temple pinnacle, stoned and clubbed by a fuller. In it James declares, “Why do you ask me concerning the Son of Man? He is sitting in heaven on the right hand of the great power”. Dunn notes the account is “crafted on the template of the Gospel tradition” but confirms the stoning and that “the cause … was his preaching of Jesus” [Dunn, Beginning from Jerusalem, #63287, §36.2]. One pseudo-Clementine version even has Paul throw James down the stairs (Recog. 1.70.7) [Dunn, Beginning from Jerusalem, #63287, §36.2 n. 69].

After James, Symeon, “another brother” or cousin of Jesus, is said to have succeeded him, the succession “passing horizontally (to brothers) rather than vertically, as in the caliphate tradition”. The only tradition about the war is the “flight to Pella”. It says the Jerusalem believers crossed the Jordan to that Decapolis city early in the revolt, and it survives in Eusebius HE 3.5.3 and three passages of Epiphanius. Lüdemann and Verheyden doubt the tradition, while Koester and Wehnert defend it [Dunn, Beginning from Jerusalem, #63287, §36.3].

Nazarenes and Ebionites

Later heresiologists describe the Torah-keeping heirs. Irenaeus (Against Heresies I.26) says the Ebionites “use the Gospel according to Matthew only, and repudiate the Apostle Paul, maintaining that he was an apostate from the law … they practise circumcision … and are so Judaic in their style of life, that they even adore Jerusalem as if it were the house of God”. The reference shelf summarises the patristic picture as an “adoptionist” Christology. In it Jesus was “a righteous human being who … was adopted by God at his baptism”, most Ebionites rejected the virgin birth, and the Nazarenes accepted it. The same article notes the scholarly debate over whether these beliefs “preserve … traditions resembling those of the early Jerusalem church under the leadership of James” [Wikipedia: Ebionites]. Dunn’s third volume collects the patristic notices, Irenaeus on the Ebionites’ sole use of Matthew and Eusebius on the “Gospel according to the Hebrews”, in its chapter on “Jewish Christianity” (“The Enigma of James”; “What Happened to the Jerusalem Church?”) [Dunn, Neither Jew nor Greek, #64136, chs. 40, 45]. Carl Jung adds a point from the history of ideas: “the doctrine of the two antithetical sons of God originated with the Jewish Christians living in Palestine” [Jung, Aion (CW 9.2), #59850].

Samuele Bacchiocchi argues that Sabbath practice persisted. He points to Matthew’s “Pray that your flight may not be in winter or on a Sabbath” (Matt. 24:20), which some read as reflecting a Jewish-Christian community that “had not yet abandoned its observance”. He argues that Sunday was not an apostolic Jerusalem institution, since the New Testament texts usually cited come from Greece and Asia Minor. In his view “the abandonment of the Sabbath and the adoption of Sunday … are the result of an interplay of Christian, Jewish and pagan religious factors” [Bacchiocchi, From Sabbath To Sunday, #63620, Preface, chs. 2, 5].

The Qumran-James thesis

Eisenman and Wise argue that the scrolls belong to a messianic, Torah-zealous movement they call “the Jerusalem Community of James the Just, called in sources ‘the brother of Jesus'”. They claim “it is impossible to distinguish ideas and terminology associated with the Jerusalem Community of James the Just from materials found in this corpus” [Eisenman & Wise, The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered, #74356]. The Oxford Handbook calls Eisenman’s James the Brother of Jesus (1997) “eccentric but remarkable”, a book that “provoked several more conventional accounts of this key figure” [Oxford Handbook of Biblical Studies, #363277]. Baigent and Leigh build their book on this reading. They say that “at the centre of the puzzle” lay “a hitherto unknown connection between the Dead Sea Scrolls and the elusive figure of St James, Jesus’ brother”, and they place his dispute with Paul at the heart of it. They read the Habakkuk Commentary story of members who, “under the iniquitous instigation of … ‘the Liar’, secede … and cease to adhere to the Law” against “the Teacher of Righteousness” as that dispute. They report that Edmund Wilson, John Allegro and Geza Vermes “condemned the international team for secrecy, for procrastination and delay in releasing Qumran material”. The consensus, in their account, dated the texts to Maccabean times, with the Wicked Priest identified as “Jonathan Maccabaeus” [Baigent & Leigh, The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception, #71853, Preface, chs. 4, 9, 10]. Dunn, by contrast, uses Qumran as a parallel sect, not as the Jerusalem church itself [Dunn, Beginning from Jerusalem, #63287, §23.6].

Keshe: one religious line

Keshe places the episode inside a longer continuity: “Let me explain something to what we call, line of religions in Middle East … with Judaism, Christianity, and being Muslim”. He says the “Middle East is one extension of how Moses received the message”, that “one has taken something from the other one, and extended it to suit. We see this in Islam clearly”, and that “the abuse came after the Prophet” [Keshe, Knowledge Seekers Workshop 433, #378145].

Key points

• Dunn defines the earliest Jerusalem believers as “a Messianic Sect”, a hairesis within Second Temple Judaism comparable to the Pharisees and to Qumran.
• In Dunn’s reconstruction the first persecution targeted Stephen’s anti-Temple Hellenists, not the Temple-loyal apostles. Jerusalem then became the conservative centre.
• Acts portrays a common purse; Montero follows the “informal communism” into later Christian ethics while noting Luke may idealise.
• Josephus dates James’ stoning by Ananus to 62. Dunn reads it as factional, and Hegesippus’ martyrdom account is modelled on Jesus’ passion.
• Ebionites, as the Fathers describe them, kept circumcision and Torah, used Matthew only, held an adoptionist Christology and rejected Paul as an apostate.
• Bacchiocchi treats Matt. 24:20 as evidence of continued Sabbath observance and attributes Sunday worship to a later mix of factors.
• Eisenman and Baigent & Leigh identify the scrolls’ Teacher and Liar with James and Paul. The Oxford Handbook calls Eisenman’s work “eccentric but remarkable”.