Essenic Piety and the Epistle of James

The Gospels, the book of Acts, and Paul’s letters tend to dominate our view of early Christianity. With the possible exception of Revelation, the books that appear after the Pauline corpus (i.e., Hebrews, James, 1-2 Peter, 1-3 John, Jude) are usually treated as little more than extraneous sweepings, even by those who would never intend to slight any part of the Bible. Among scholars, the older view is that most, if not all, of these writings are too late to serve as a window onto pre-Pauline Christianity. Recently, however, that view has come under fire, and with that development some now contend that these books contain invaluable clues to the earliest Christian movement.

Those scholars who have busied themselves with this back-of-the-Bible material have known all along that there was more to these books than others were willing to credit, but it is not so much the ongoing work of New Testament scholarship per se that now promises to give these writings a more prominent and natural light. Rather, this promise is largely due to developments in a neighboring field, Qumran studies, as well as the spillover from that field onto our understanding of popular Jewish piety beyond Qumran. If asked which stream(s) of first-century Judaism Christianity most resembled, many scholars today would confidently answer “the Essenes”. David Flusser anticipated this understanding long ago by calling attention to the Essenic quality of “pre-Pauline Christianity,” and Matthew Black (among others) added support to this view shortly thereafter.^[13] Neither Flusser nor Black, however, said much about the Epistle of James, which, in recent discussion, is probably the New Testament book that has done more than any other book to insinuate the Essene-like quality of early Christianity.

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• ^[1] See Peter H. Davids, “Palestinian Traditions in the Epistle of James,” in James the Just and Christian Origins, eds. Bruce Chilton and Craig A. Evans (NovTSup 98; Leiden: Brill, 1999) 35-57; Richard Bauckham, “James and Jesus,” in The Brother of Jesus: James the Just and His Mission, eds. Bruce Chilton and Jacob Neusner (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 2001) 100-37, esp. 101-105. ↩
• ^[2] As Richard Bauckham writes, “it is difficult to estimate how competent in Greek a Galilean Jew could have been” (Jude and the Relatives of Jesus in the Early Church [Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1990] 177). For a discussion of whether the historical James could have written in quality Greek, see J. N. Sevenster, Do You Know Greek? How Much Greek Could the First Jewish Christians have Known? (NovTSup 19; Leiden: Brill, 1968) 3-17. ↩
• ^[3] A number of earlier studies on wisdom at Qumran dichotomize wisdom and apocalyptic, concluding either that the Qumranites (being apocalyptists) did not write any true wisdom texts. Verseput notes the damage that this false dichotomy threatened to bring to the study of James (“Wisdom, 4Q185, and the Epistle of James,” JBL 117 [1998] 691-707, esp. 691-92). This defect has been corrected in more recent surveys: see Daniel J. Harrington, Wisdom Texts from Qumran (Literature of the Dead Sea Scrolls; London: Routledge, 1996); John. I. Kampen, “The Diverse Aspects of Wisdom at Qumran,” in The Dead Sea Scrolls after Fifty Years: A Comprehensive Assessment, eds. Peter W. Flint and James C. VanderKam (Leiden: Brill, 1998) 1:211-43; Daryl F. Jefferies, Wisdom at Qumran: A Form-Critical Analysis of the Admonitions in 4QInstruction (Gorgias Dissertations: Near Eastern Studies 3; Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias, 2002) 31-38. See Bauckham, “James and Jesus,” 105. ↩
• ^[4] Jude and the Relatives of Jesus in the Early Church, 54. ↩
• ^[5] See Wilhelm Pratscher, Der Herrenbruder Jakobus und die Jakobustradition (FRLANT 139; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1987) 108-09. On James as the first pope, see G. H. R. Horsley, New Documents Illustrating Early Christianity, vol. 4 (Macquarie University: Ancient History Documentary Research Centre, 1987) 266 (= no. 133); Martin Hengel, “Jacobus der Herrenbruder—der erste ‘Papst’?,” in Glaube und Eschatologie: Festschrift für W. G. Kümmel zum 80. Geburtstag, ed. E. Grässer and O. Merk (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1985) 71-104. ↩
• ^[6] See John Painter, Just James: The Brother of Jesus in History and Tradition (Studies on Personalities of the New Testament; Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997) 56; S. G. F. Brandon, Jesus and the Zealots: A Study of the Political Factor in Primitive Christianity (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1967) 161-66. ↩
• ^[7] Charles Kingsley Barrett judges this solution to the ending of Acts to be “unconvincing” (“The End of Acts,” in Geschichte–Tradition–Reflexion: Festschrift für Martin Hengel zum 70. Geburtstag, eds. Hubert Cancik, Hermann Lichtenberger, and Peter Schäfer [3 vols.; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1996] 3.545-55, esp. 549), but for “unconvincing” reasons: he simply asks, Would not Paul’s other churches have been interested in Paul’s fate, and would not the Christians in Rome have wanted the continuation of Paul’s ordeal in Rome (even if they knew it firsthand)? If these are the weightiest objections that Barrett can summon in justification of moving on to some other view, then I take that as support. ↩
• ^[8] Eisenman makes a number of valuable observations as well, as when he notes that the “Qumran perspective” on Hab. 2:4 (cf. the Habakkuk Pesher) “is Jamesian [cf. Jas. 2:23] rather than Pauline” (James the Brother of Jesus: The Key to Unlocking the Secrets of Early Christianity and the Dead Sea Scrolls [New York: Viking, 1997] 355). ↩
• ^[9] John Painter argues that James’s “poor” are the poor of the Jerusalem church, mentioned in Gal 2.10 (cf. 2 Corinthians 8-9; Rom. 15:22-29; Acts 11:29), which in turn may be related to a conflict (beginning in 59 CE) between the Sadducean high priestly party and poorer priests (see Jos. Ant. 20.180-1). He claims that James’s concern for the exploitation of the poor is one of the strongest indicators that the epistle “has its context in Judaea and Galilee before the Jewish war” (Just James: The Brother of Jesus in History and Tradition [Minneapolis: Fortress, 1999], 249). On “the poor” as a self-designation at Qumran, see CD 19.9; 1QH 10.34; 1QM 14.7 (“poor in spirit”); 1QpHab 12.4-5; 4Q434 1 ii 2. Brian J. Capper argues that poverty was a fact of life in the agrarian sector of Judean society from which the Essenes sprang (“The New Covenant in Southern Palestine at the Arrest of Jesus”, in James R. Davila (ed.), The Dead Sea Scrolls as Background to Postbiblical Judaism and Early Christianity: Papers from an International Conference at St. Andrews in 2001 [STDJ 46; Leiden: Brill, 2003] 90-116). Capper notes that care for the poor was especially important to extra-Qumranic Essenism (cf. CD 14.12-17), and Jefferies notes the prevalence of this theme in 4QInstruction and elsewhere (Wisdom at Qumran, 228-29). Cf. Jos.Bell. 2.134. ↩
• ^[10] There is little agreement at this point on the constitution of the governing body in 4QpIsa^d, but Yigael Yadin (“The Newly Published Pesharim of Isaiah,” IEJ 9 [1959] 39-42), Joseph M. Baumgarten (“The Duodecimal Courts of Qumran, Revelation, and the Sanhedrin,” JBL 95 [1976] 59-78), Maurya P. Horgan (Pesharim: Qumran Interpretations of Biblical Books [CBQMS 8; Washington DC: Catholic Biblical Association of America, 1979] 129-30), Jonathan A. Draper (“The Twelve Apostles as Foundation Stones of the Heavenly Jerusalem and the Foundation of the Qumran Community,” Neotestamentica 22 [1988] 41-63), David Flusser (Judaism and the Origins of Christianity [Jerusalem: Magnes, 1988]), and Crispin H. T. Fletcher-Louis (All the Glory of Adam: Liturgical Anthropology in the Dead Sea Scrolls [STDJ 42; Leiden: Brill, 2002]) have made a persuasive case that the text should be restored as referring to a twelve-member body. For a reconstruction of the traditions surrounding the James circle, see Roelof van den Broek, “Der Brief der Jakobus an Quadratus und das Problem der judenchristlichen Bischöfe von Jerusalem (Eusebius, HE IV, 5, 1-3),” in T. Baarda, A. Hilhorst, G. P. Luttikhuizen, & A. S. van der Woude (eds.), Text and Testimony: Essays on New Testament and Apocryphal Literature in Honour of A. F. J. Klijn (Kampen: J. H. Kok, 1988) 56-65; Bauckham, Jude and the Relatives of Jesus in the Early Church, 72-75, 233. ↩
• ^[11] On the priestly character of the traditions surrounding James the Just, see esp. Eusebius, Eccl. Hist. 2.23.4-18. ↩
• ^[12] This overreaching claim is found in James C. Russell, The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity: A Sociohistorical Approach to Religious Transformation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994) 77. ↩
• ^[13] See David Flusser, “The Dead Sea Sect and Pre-Pauline Christianity,” in Scripta Hierosolymitana, vol. 4: Aspects of the Dead Sea Scrolls, eds. Chaim Rabin and Yigael Yadin (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1958) 215-66; Matthew Black, “The Scrolls and Christian Origins: Studies in the Jewish Background of the New Testament (New York: Scribner, 1961) 75-88. ↩